By Rebecca Beit-Aharon
Public History student Rebecca Beit-Aharon offers the first of a series of three blog posts reflecting on her internship experience.
In Summer 2018, Historic New England’s Governor John Langdon House in Portsmouth, NH and the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail invited artist Richard Haynes Jr. to make an invisible man visible. Haynes served as Langdon’s artist-in-residence to create a portrait of Cyrus Bruce, a formerly enslaved Black man with a “gentlemanly appearance” who worked for Governor Langdon in the late 1700s. Haynes studied written sources, historical artifacts, and the Langdon House itself to bring Bruce to life.1
Before and after, the Langdon House has brought in other artists-in-residence. The success of Haynes’ residency showed just how powerful contemporary art at historic sites can be: the Langdon House found a community partner in the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail; a previously hidden history has been revealed; and bringing in a Black artist to showcase a Black historic figure increased its modern diversity as well. Ken Turino, Manager of Community Partnerships and Resource Development at Historic New England, was particularly impressed.
AIR programs at historic sites aren’t new or particularly uncommon, but there’s surprisingly little information available about actually running one. Different sites will naturally have different needs and capabilities, but the state of the field so far has generally been that each site ends up reinventing the wheel—with varying degrees of success.
I started working with Ken Turino in August 2020 as a Community Engagement Research Intern to research existing and former AIR programs at historic sites with the goal of creating a set of industry best practices. We’ll be presenting our findings at at least one industry conference (AASLH 2021, here we come! Our panel will be on Friday, September 24 from 11am–12:15pm); making our materials—sample contracts, e.g.—available to the public; and (hopefully) submitting our findings for publication.
My background reading began with Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, an arresting 1992–93 exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society. Mining the Museum swept the industry with its curatorial critique of the museum’s dominant narrative. Rather than maintain the veneer of separation in the regular collection, Wilson juxtaposed artifacts reflecting upper-class white history with their antecedent: artifacts of enslavement.2 His exhibit exemplifies what AIR programs can do: bring untold stories to light, incorporate diverse voices into historic sites and museums, and push historic institutions to rethink how they tell history.
Public historians today continue to echo Wilson’s message as we reframe history at sites like the Whitney Plantation and Slave Museum in Edgard, LA. Visitors’ introduction to the plantation and slave museum is through contemporary art in a historic building: sculptor Woodrow Nash’s “The Children of Whitney” grabs your attention when you enter the restored 1870 Antioch Baptist Church, built by emancipated African-Americans in nearby Paulina, LA after the Civil War.3 “The Children of Whitney” represent real Black children at the time of emancipation through the work of a Black artist, giving multiple generations voice.
Of course, not all AIR programs are equally successful: The Cut, a 2015 week-long public excavation at the site of the Warsaw ghetto run by Turkish artist-in-residence Aslı Çavuşoğlu at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, has had no lasting impact. In a 2020 review, Maria Magdalena Dembek argues that The Cut failed to evoke a shift in perspective among audience members or encourage an evaluation of its host museum’s narrative. POLIN actively leans away from interpreting the Holocaust, instead focusing on the life of Polish Jews—perhaps, as Dembek suggests, to “avoid critical discussion of the cultural mechanisms behind the Holocaust, mainly anti-Semitism in its local, Polish variant.”4 Despite the facts that Çavuşoğlu’s work was directly located in and conducted by the community and that he needed POLIN’s support to conduct his project at all, The Cut seems to have existed in a vacuum. Çavuşoğlu’s project was thoughtful and promising, but at the end of the day, a blip is a blip.
POLIN in Poland, MHS in Maryland—historic sites run AIR programs around the globe, but as English-speaking Americans, Ken and I have tended to focus on American historic sites. Of the fifty-five relevant programs that we initially identified, fifty-one are in the United States. One major source of AIR programs was the National Park Service, though the interactive map listing their AIR programs is woefully out-of-date. The map lists programs that current employees have never heard of, such as at Boston National Historic Park, and omits many current programs, including Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Apache County, AZ, which has run its AIR program on a limited basis since 2007.5 And I only looked at the historic sites on the map—never mind the non-historic ones!
The NPS’ unhelpful masterlist is illustrative of two larger issues for AIR programs at historic sites: public awareness and confusion. AIR programs are often under-advertised; sometimes, opportunities are only posted on the site’s website, meaning that only artists aware of an individual site (and AIR programs in general) have a chance of knowing where to look. Additionally, “artist-in-residence” means multiple things. Our research focuses on AIR programs where the artwork and the artistic process is engages with the site of the residency, but there are other similarly-named programs—historically called artist colonies, a term currently being retired throughout the industry—that serve as retreats for artists to create without engaging with the host site. Not only is this difference poorly explained in available literature, but I haven’t found anywhere that treats them as separate types of programs. Even within the NPS, both types of programs are advertised under the same name (artist-in-residence program) with no way to distinguish them beyond looking at each individual site webpage.6 The same holds true on the Alliance of Artists Communities website, the biggest online clearing house for AIR programs.7 Clarity, communication, and openness are important first steps for historic sites with AIR programs, a finding continuously reinforced in the next phase of research: interviews.
Check back for the next installment, where I’ll talk about interviewing artists and site administrators—and more lessons learned.
Footnotes
1. “Video: How Richard Haynes creates a portrait,” Historic New England, August 14, 2020, https://www.historicnewengland.org/how-richard-haynes-creates-a-portrait/
2. Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 151–72, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622; and Noralee Frankel, “Review: Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson,” The Public Historian 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 105–108, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3378741.
3. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Time, Space, and Memory at Whitney Plantation,” Black Perspectives (blog), African American Intellectual History Society, March 14, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/time-space-and-memory-at-the-whitney-plantation/; “The Children of the Whitney,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-children-of-the-whitney; “The Antioch Baptist Church,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-antioch-baptist-church.
4. Maria Magdalena Dembek, “Archaeological fever: situating participatory art in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto,” Holocaust Studies 26, no. 2 (2020): 202, accessed August 5, 2020, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/10.1080/17504902.2019.1578458.
5. “Be an Artist-in-Residence,” Arts in the Parks, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/arts/air.htm; “Artist in Residence,” Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hutr/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.
6. Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site’s Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program in Danville, CA is a performing arts residency where the works produced do not need to be related to the site; on the other hand, Harpers Ferry National Historic Park’s AIR program in Harpers Ferry, WV requires artists to create work relevant to the site. See “Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program & Travis Bogard Day-Use Program,” Eugene O’Neill Foundation, accessed April 11, 2021, http://www.eugeneoneill.org/artist-in-residence-program; “Artist in Residence,” Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hafe/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.
7. “Residencies,” Alliance of Artists Communities, accessed April 11, 2021, https://artistcommunities.org.
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