Audio by Shanice Bailey
Transcript:
So yeah, I’m not really sure if I love art. It felt like something that was very inaccessible to me for a really long time. I didn’t go to my first art museum until I was already in college, like I might have been 19. And even at that time, I was at a community college, so the art history classes that we took were like, I don’t know, were very low-key, but at the same time not super accessible. I always felt like art was something I was trying to learn how to access, but it didn’t really feel like it was an achievable goal, I think especially as someone who is working-class and black and coming from an immigrant family. No one in my family went to museums when I growing up, like that wasn’t a place where we could go for fun. And, also, I don’t think it’s necessarily a place where my family would have felt welcome. Or not welcome, but just comfortable, because I guess there’s that assumption that to enjoy museums that you have to understand something about art or understand something about culture. And I think that’s especially different when you’re dealing with a culture that’s not your own, or hasn’t become your own yet. Like, my mom went to her first museum when she was in college and that’s when she was 40. And she had a really good time then, but I remember her telling me that she never felt like she could go by herself and the only reason she went was because she was going with a class.
So I think it’s really kind of funny to now be someone who is working in a museum. It was always something I kind of wanted as a goal for myself once I realized I was interested in art, but I always felt that, I don’t know, I wasn’t ready yet or I didn’t know enough yet. I think once I let go of feeling like I had to have some sort of all encompassing knowledge or authority about objects, it made it a lot easier to go to museums and enjoy what I was seeing there. But I still kind of feel like I don’t like museums. I really like this one, I like working here, but even in doing that work, I’m always reckoning with the colonial aspect of museums. And just understanding so many of them as places that are exhibiting objects from places that were colonized and stolen from and are still devastated by the effects of that. And also just thinking about the kind of works that are considered masterpieces or museum-worthy are not works that speak to anything about they way I see and understand the world.