Museology

‘Museums Are Contested Sites’: The Art Institute of Chicago’s James Rondeau on Why He Finds the Current Moment So Electrifying

http://www.artnews.com/2019/07/02/national-gallery-kaywin-feldman-bryan-equal-justice-initiative-stevenson-conversation/

Kaywin Feldman is director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. When she assumed her post this spring, as the first woman to lead the institution, she followed a nearly three-decade stint by Earl “Rusty” Powell III as the leader of a museum established in 1937 with a donation by financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon and subsequently supported by federal and private funds. Prior to the National Gallery, Feldman served as director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where she created a Center for Empathy and the Visual Arts and presented exhibitions such as “Art and Healing: In the Moment,” a group show in 2018 inspired by the police-shooting death of Philando Castile in Minnesota two years earlier. She is also a past president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and a past chair of the American Alliance of Museums.

Bryan Stevenson is a public interest lawyer and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a socially minded advocacy organization based in Montgomery, Alabama. Last year, he and EJI established the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery with a shared purpose to tell stories of slavery and racism in America. The memorial in a six-acre park includes 800 large steel monuments, one for every county in the U.S. where a historical racial terror lynching has been reported. The museum one block away is near a dock and rail station where tens of thousands of black people were trafficked during the 19th century. Stevenson is the author of several books, including the best-selling Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). He also gave a talk, at Feldman’s invitation, at the “Art and Healing” exhibition in Minneapolis, as well as the keynote speech at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

Feldman and Stevenson convened for a conversation at the ARTnews office in New York.

Museum Women: Why Are We Tolerating This?

Image: Most Frequent Forms of Gender Discrimination (in the museum workplace), from THE SURVEY: Gender Equity in the Museum Workplace, conducted by Anne W. Ackerson and Joan Baldwin, 2018.