[Applause]
so we’re here to rock the boat today but
I gotta tell you when you find yourself
in dangerous waters it can seem really
foolhardy to rock the boat if you find
yourself as the great ship Britannia
here did in 1793 between the rock of
democracy and the world fooled of
arbitrary power any sort of movement
might threaten to take you off course to
your mission
and your goal your true path well Sarge
huh
I think museums like Britannia find
ourselves in this position today we’re
sort of caught between these two great
powers that both put wind in our sails
and threatened to pull us off course
from our true mission to serve our
communities so on the one hand we have
the bedrock if you will of public
funding which is critical for keeping so
many cultural institutions open and yet
is diminishing every year buffered by
the winds of political forces and then
on the other side we have the vortex if
you will of private funding for culture
which is also subject to commercial
interests not to mention the vagaries of
the egos and the whims of individual
private philanthropists and even as the
gap is growing between the rich and the
poor in our societies this these straits
feel increasingly narrow crowded with
more and more organizations competing
for fewer and fewer resources
unfortunately these are familiar waters
for museums Charles Wilson Peale founded
the very first art academy and museum in
the United States in Philadelphia and he
devoted his entire career to lobbying
Congress in the White House to provide
funding for the Arts and the culture and
the museums and the research that they
did
he argued that an informed and educated
population was essential for the health
and the sustainability of the democracy
unfortunately the founding fathers were
no more generous towards museums and
culture then than they are today and
perhaps it was understanding the
futility in some sense of going after
public funding for museums that led his
son Rembrandt Peale whom we see here in
a self-portrait when he decided to found
his own museum to decide to take the
other path towards private enterprise so
he came to Baltimore he raised private
investment he built this magnificent
building which opened its doors on
August 14th of 1814 the very first
purpose-built museum in the United
States its innovation was it had a real
modern art gallery on the back of the
otherwise federal-style rowhouses and he
depended on ticket admissions to sustain
the operations of the museum he needed
to get people paying to come through the
doors and he was aided in this by
another innovation he introduced at the
museum because Rembrandt Peale was not
just an artist and an entrepreneur he
was also an inventor and he started The
Gaslight Company of Baltimore he
manufactured gas in the back yard of the
museum and he used the galleries as a
showcase in a platform to demonstrate
this new energy technology we hear that
people used to gather outside the
building here drawn like moths to a
flame aghast at the brilliance of the
light streaming through the windows
they’d never seen anything that powerful
so when we hear reports of the huge
increase in ticket sales in the evenings
we wonder where people going to see the
exhibits the art the Natural History
objects and the spectacles inside or did
they really just want to get close to
this miracle of the new technology of
Gaslight
Rembrandt peels company has thrived
since then within three years he had
secured the contract to supply gas light
to the entire city of Baltimore its
street lamps and his company is now
called Baltimore Gas and Electric it
celebrated 200 years this year the
museum unfortunately didn’t have quite
such auspicious fortunes after 15 years
of struggling to make the museum really
a going concern Rembrandt and his
brother Rubens decided to sell the
building close up shop the city bought
the Peale museum and used it as its
first City Hall later in the 19th
century it became the home to the very
first public school in Baltimore for
people of color in the 20th century
threatened with demolition the citizens
of Baltimore came together and reopened
the building as a museum of city life
unfortunately that too eventually failed
and in 1997 the Peale museum closed its
doors once again and its collection was
dispersed the city of Baltimore has had
similarly mixed fortunes and today it’s
perhaps better known for images like
this one taken by local photographer
Devin Allen of the popular uprisings in
2015 against police brutality than it is
for the full breadth of the creativity
and the innovation among the communities
in Baltimore Baltimore needs to be known
for the full diversity of those
narratives and this is not just a
problem of branding and PR for the city
there’s so much that the city has to
give to the whole world I think the
world needs to hear these stories as
well and it’s an urgent problem as the
African proverb goes every time an elder
dies it’s like a library burning to the
ground we need to collect and save and
share these stories
so the peel is now being restored
renovated and plans to reopen in 2020 as
a center for Baltimore history and
architecture what can we do to help the
city be known for new stories and new
voices for the full diversity of its
talent and its creativity
we’re gonna have to find blue ocean
we’re going to have to find uncontested
waters and new markets to sustain it to
take us beyond the Scylla and the
Charybdis of public funding and I think
we also need to look back to the history
of the museum to learn from its past
both as a museum and as a platform for
innovation for new technologies to find
new ways of doing this
John Hendricks the founder of Discovery
Channel and Discovery Communications
wrote in his autobiography that so many
businesses fail simply because they have
failed to correctly define themselves
and he knew because in his day the TV
networks failed to recognize the power
and the potential of the new technology
the new platforms that cable TV were
offering as a result entrepreneurs like
Hendricks were able to come in and he is
now a billionaire what are the new
opportunities for museums in the
cultural sector that the new
technologies of the Internet age are
bringing to us how can we learn from the
past to create a new future well if we
start by thinking about what is the
definition of our core business and the
cultural sector what is the currency if
you will with which we trade in the
cultural markets it would be easy to say
that it’s the collections it’s the stuff
that museums collect be they objects and
artifacts or ideas as you might find in
a museum of conscience and this is
certainly true but what I’d like to do
today with this coin of Dolly Madison I
thought it was important to introduce a
woman from the period into my early into
the earlier part of my talk is to look
at the other side of this coin as well
on the other side of the coin of our
collections is all the content that
grows up around those objects that grows
up around the stuff so this is yes the
labels and the metadata but also the
digital scans the scholarship the
publications and perhaps most
importantly the stories that are told
about those collections and that are
really the hooks and the doors that
allow people to connect with them and
find meaning and value so as we start to
think about the definition of the museum
business in the 21st century I think we
need to do a new calculation based on a
new definition of the collection as not
just the stuff but also the content
and the stories and I would argue the
stories is where we are most
impoverished where we have the most work
to do to really complete our collections
now as I mentioned the peel had its
collection dispersed at the end of the
20th century so I like to think that
today its collection is the entire city
of Baltimore all of its stories all of
its places and the people who know them
best that’s a lot that’s a big
collection how are we going to create
content to adequately represent that
vast of a collection I think frankly the
only practical solution is to recruit
the entire city to help us and this is
what we did in the summer of 2016 as a
pilot project called be here Baltimore
we invited the storytellers of the city
to tell us about their culture their
heritage in what was meaning to them the
storytellers who joined us ranged from
traditional griot
to artists to students to professors to
museum people to just amateur passionate
historians with a great story to tell
and today we have over 500 stories that
we’ve helped be published on a range of
free and open platforms from mobile to
web to social media to help change the
narratives that Baltimore is known for
and now these stories have a home and
the very first museum ever built in the
United States a platform to gain their
proper place in the historic and the
cultural discourse of the city and the
state and the country and even though
the museum is undergoing renovation
we’re able to partner with other
storytelling organizations and
initiatives like the media rhythm
Institute who will be running a summer
school this summer at the Peel helping 8
to 18 year olds learn how to tell their
stories of the city in its places
through hip-hop songs and documentary
they
making now really we find the seeds of
this again back in the history of not
just the peel but of all museums museums
have always been a place that creative
people have come to make art to learn to
exchange ideas to take learnings away
that they then use in their own creative
and cultural practice but now we have an
opportunity with the new tools that have
come about through in the Internet age
through connected technologies to help
people update this practice for the 21st
century and that I believe brings about
a redefinition of the museum mission to
take us beyond simply collecting
preserving and transmitting the
artifacts and the cultural heritage to
future generations but also to be
platforms for the production of culture
co-creating with the very audiences that
we serve ensuring that the full
diversity of voices of our city are
heard and that our audiences are not
just consumers of culture but are also
supported as active producers of it so
on that note I would like to end by
handing the microphone over to some of
the great storytellers of Baltimore to
tell you some of how they see the city
and hopefully it will bring new light to
you as well
during the be here Baltimore pilot we
funded local creators museums and
neighborhood organizations to tell the
story of Baltimore in their own words
some decided to tell their stories with
video my name is Janice Curtis green
storyteller and proud black Baltimorean
and let me tell you about my city the
orchard Street Church is the oldest
still-standing structure in Baltimore
constructed by and for African Americans
if you look at the intersection of North
Way and York Road you’ll notice two
things first a large stone wall that
reaches north to old Cold Spring Lane
and south almost to 42nd Street second
you’ll notice a one-way sign leading out
of the community both of these designs
were created for the specific reason to
keep people out everyone’s place African
Cultural Center is one of 54 black owned
bookstores remaining in the United
States they have been in business for 30
years if you want to be in a place that
smells so good
come here at this house on 108
Montgomery Street was a funeral home
founded by Roland Brown’s father the
plans for an extension of i-95 through
Chartres blend hall and over Baltimore’s
Inner Harbor meant that all the homes on
the street were slated for demolition
all the residents were forced to leave
and even after the plans for the
interstate extension were scrapped in
the mid-1970s
the homes remained derelict in the late
1970s however as part of the dollar
homes program under then Mayor William
Donald Schaefer the residences were
auctioned off and miraculously Roland
Brown was able to purchase the home he
had grown up in an option not available
to most of the displaced residents of
Sharpe Lynn Hall who lacked the
requisite credit to qualify for the
housing program
[Music]
in 1921 UV Blake and Noble Sicily
joined forces with the vaudeville comedy
duo flora nee Miller and Aubrey Lyle’s
to write a Broadway musical shuffle
along when the all-black musical and
cast premiered in May of 1921 add an
obscure New York theater it forever
transformed the great white ways bright
lights
we even had a local storytelling
organization take their live stories and
geo locate them on the app it was
raining and it was raw and my daughter
was at a music lesson and I needed a
place to keep out of the weather so I
decided to drop in to the Walters Art
Museum here in Mount Vernon and what I
saw there really changed my life I was
wandering around the galleries and I
ended up in the ancient Roman portrait
room now for those of you who are
unfamiliar with ancient Roman portraits
they’re a lot like decapitated heads the
Walters did something rather unusual
they set many of their best portraits
squarely out in the middle of the room
where you can see them from all angles
kind of like a cocktail party so I got
to see the back of the heads for once
and I absolutely fell in love with the
hairstyle on this dead chick named Julia
domina and we’ll leave you with this one
last quote that encapsulates the whole
idea of the bee her project that’s like
everything’s art and everything can tell
you the story so I kind of just suck at
it whatever
so handing the microphone over to our
communities to share the culture that
they know best and that they’ve been
producing for generations is a
transformative gesture that takes the
museum from being a treasure house to a
production house and I think it charts
us a new course through blue ocean clear
waters to a new kind of sustainability
for cultural practice in the 21st
century thank you very much
[Applause]
so we’re here to rock the boat today but
I gotta tell you when you find yourself
in dangerous waters it can seem really
foolhardy to rock the boat if you find
yourself as the great ship Britannia
here did in 1793 between the rock of
democracy and the world fooled of
arbitrary power any sort of movement
might threaten to take you off course to
your mission
and your goal your true path well Sarge
huh
I think museums like Britannia find
ourselves in this position today we’re
sort of caught between these two great
powers that both put wind in our sails
and threatened to pull us off course
from our true mission to serve our
communities so on the one hand we have
the bedrock if you will of public
funding which is critical for keeping so
many cultural institutions open and yet
is diminishing every year buffered by
the winds of political forces and then
on the other side we have the vortex if
you will of private funding for culture
which is also subject to commercial
interests not to mention the vagaries of
the egos and the whims of individual
private philanthropists and even as the
gap is growing between the rich and the
poor in our societies this these straits
feel increasingly narrow crowded with
more and more organizations competing
for fewer and fewer resources
unfortunately these are familiar waters
for museums Charles Wilson Peale founded
the very first art academy and museum in
the United States in Philadelphia and he
devoted his entire career to lobbying
Congress in the White House to provide
funding for the Arts and the culture and
the museums and the research that they
did
he argued that an informed and educated
population was essential for the health
and the sustainability of the democracy
unfortunately the founding fathers were
no more generous towards museums and
culture then than they are today and
perhaps it was understanding the
futility in some sense of going after
public funding for museums that led his
son Rembrandt Peale whom we see here in
a self-portrait when he decided to found
his own museum to decide to take the
other path towards private enterprise so
he came to Baltimore he raised private
investment he built this magnificent
building which opened its doors on
August 14th of 1814 the very first
purpose-built museum in the United
States its innovation was it had a real
modern art gallery on the back of the
otherwise federal-style rowhouses and he
depended on ticket admissions to sustain
the operations of the museum he needed
to get people paying to come through the
doors and he was aided in this by
another innovation he introduced at the
museum because Rembrandt Peale was not
just an artist and an entrepreneur he
was also an inventor and he started The
Gaslight Company of Baltimore he
manufactured gas in the back yard of the
museum and he used the galleries as a
showcase in a platform to demonstrate
this new energy technology we hear that
people used to gather outside the
building here drawn like moths to a
flame aghast at the brilliance of the
light streaming through the windows
they’d never seen anything that powerful
so when we hear reports of the huge
increase in ticket sales in the evenings
we wonder where people going to see the
exhibits the art the Natural History
objects and the spectacles inside or did
they really just want to get close to
this miracle of the new technology of
Gaslight
Rembrandt peels company has thrived
since then within three years he had
secured the contract to supply gas light
to the entire city of Baltimore its
street lamps and his company is now
called Baltimore Gas and Electric it
celebrated 200 years this year the
museum unfortunately didn’t have quite
such auspicious fortunes after 15 years
of struggling to make the museum really
a going concern Rembrandt and his
brother Rubens decided to sell the
building close up shop the city bought
the Peale museum and used it as its
first City Hall later in the 19th
century it became the home to the very
first public school in Baltimore for
people of color in the 20th century
threatened with demolition the citizens
of Baltimore came together and reopened
the building as a museum of city life
unfortunately that too eventually failed
and in 1997 the Peale museum closed its
doors once again and its collection was
dispersed the city of Baltimore has had
similarly mixed fortunes and today it’s
perhaps better known for images like
this one taken by local photographer
Devin Allen of the popular uprisings in
2015 against police brutality than it is
for the full breadth of the creativity
and the innovation among the communities
in Baltimore Baltimore needs to be known
for the full diversity of those
narratives and this is not just a
problem of branding and PR for the city
there’s so much that the city has to
give to the whole world I think the
world needs to hear these stories as
well and it’s an urgent problem as the
African proverb goes every time an elder
dies it’s like a library burning to the
ground we need to collect and save and
share these stories
so the peel is now being restored
renovated and plans to reopen in 2020 as
a center for Baltimore history and
architecture what can we do to help the
city be known for new stories and new
voices for the full diversity of its
talent and its creativity
we’re gonna have to find blue ocean
we’re going to have to find uncontested
waters and new markets to sustain it to
take us beyond the Scylla and the
Charybdis of public funding and I think
we also need to look back to the history
of the museum to learn from its past
both as a museum and as a platform for
innovation for new technologies to find
new ways of doing this
John Hendricks the founder of Discovery
Channel and Discovery Communications
wrote in his autobiography that so many
businesses fail simply because they have
failed to correctly define themselves
and he knew because in his day the TV
networks failed to recognize the power
and the potential of the new technology
the new platforms that cable TV were
offering as a result entrepreneurs like
Hendricks were able to come in and he is
now a billionaire what are the new
opportunities for museums in the
cultural sector that the new
technologies of the Internet age are
bringing to us how can we learn from the
past to create a new future well if we
start by thinking about what is the
definition of our core business and the
cultural sector what is the currency if
you will with which we trade in the
cultural markets it would be easy to say
that it’s the collections it’s the stuff
that museums collect be they objects and
artifacts or ideas as you might find in
a museum of conscience and this is
certainly true but what I’d like to do
today with this coin of Dolly Madison I
thought it was important to introduce a
woman from the period into my early into
the earlier part of my talk is to look
at the other side of this coin as well
on the other side of the coin of our
collections is all the content that
grows up around those objects that grows
up around the stuff so this is yes the
labels and the metadata but also the
digital scans the scholarship the
publications and perhaps most
importantly the stories that are told
about those collections and that are
really the hooks and the doors that
allow people to connect with them and
find meaning and value so as we start to
think about the definition of the museum
business in the 21st century I think we
need to do a new calculation based on a
new definition of the collection as not
just the stuff but also the content
and the stories and I would argue the
stories is where we are most
impoverished where we have the most work
to do to really complete our collections
now as I mentioned the peel had its
collection dispersed at the end of the
20th century so I like to think that
today its collection is the entire city
of Baltimore all of its stories all of
its places and the people who know them
best that’s a lot that’s a big
collection how are we going to create
content to adequately represent that
vast of a collection I think frankly the
only practical solution is to recruit
the entire city to help us and this is
what we did in the summer of 2016 as a
pilot project called be here Baltimore
we invited the storytellers of the city
to tell us about their culture their
heritage in what was meaning to them the
storytellers who joined us ranged from
traditional griot
to artists to students to professors to
museum people to just amateur passionate
historians with a great story to tell
and today we have over 500 stories that
we’ve helped be published on a range of
free and open platforms from mobile to
web to social media to help change the
narratives that Baltimore is known for
and now these stories have a home and
the very first museum ever built in the
United States a platform to gain their
proper place in the historic and the
cultural discourse of the city and the
state and the country and even though
the museum is undergoing renovation
we’re able to partner with other
storytelling organizations and
initiatives like the media rhythm
Institute who will be running a summer
school this summer at the Peel helping 8
to 18 year olds learn how to tell their
stories of the city in its places
through hip-hop songs and documentary
they
making now really we find the seeds of
this again back in the history of not
just the peel but of all museums museums
have always been a place that creative
people have come to make art to learn to
exchange ideas to take learnings away
that they then use in their own creative
and cultural practice but now we have an
opportunity with the new tools that have
come about through in the Internet age
through connected technologies to help
people update this practice for the 21st
century and that I believe brings about
a redefinition of the museum mission to
take us beyond simply collecting
preserving and transmitting the
artifacts and the cultural heritage to
future generations but also to be
platforms for the production of culture
co-creating with the very audiences that
we serve ensuring that the full
diversity of voices of our city are
heard and that our audiences are not
just consumers of culture but are also
supported as active producers of it so
on that note I would like to end by
handing the microphone over to some of
the great storytellers of Baltimore to
tell you some of how they see the city
and hopefully it will bring new light to
you as well
during the be here Baltimore pilot we
funded local creators museums and
neighborhood organizations to tell the
story of Baltimore in their own words
some decided to tell their stories with
video my name is Janice Curtis green
storyteller and proud black Baltimorean
and let me tell you about my city the
orchard Street Church is the oldest
still-standing structure in Baltimore
constructed by and for African Americans
if you look at the intersection of North
Way and York Road you’ll notice two
things first a large stone wall that
reaches north to old Cold Spring Lane
and south almost to 42nd Street second
you’ll notice a one-way sign leading out
of the community both of these designs
were created for the specific reason to
keep people out everyone’s place African
Cultural Center is one of 54 black owned
bookstores remaining in the United
States they have been in business for 30
years if you want to be in a place that
smells so good
come here at this house on 108
Montgomery Street was a funeral home
founded by Roland Brown’s father the
plans for an extension of i-95 through
Chartres blend hall and over Baltimore’s
Inner Harbor meant that all the homes on
the street were slated for demolition
all the residents were forced to leave
and even after the plans for the
interstate extension were scrapped in
the mid-1970s
the homes remained derelict in the late
1970s however as part of the dollar
homes program under then Mayor William
Donald Schaefer the residences were
auctioned off and miraculously Roland
Brown was able to purchase the home he
had grown up in an option not available
to most of the displaced residents of
Sharpe Lynn Hall who lacked the
requisite credit to qualify for the
housing program
[Music]
in 1921 UV Blake and Noble Sicily
joined forces with the vaudeville comedy
duo flora nee Miller and Aubrey Lyle’s
to write a Broadway musical shuffle
along when the all-black musical and
cast premiered in May of 1921 add an
obscure New York theater it forever
transformed the great white ways bright
lights
we even had a local storytelling
organization take their live stories and
geo locate them on the app it was
raining and it was raw and my daughter
was at a music lesson and I needed a
place to keep out of the weather so I
decided to drop in to the Walters Art
Museum here in Mount Vernon and what I
saw there really changed my life I was
wandering around the galleries and I
ended up in the ancient Roman portrait
room now for those of you who are
unfamiliar with ancient Roman portraits
they’re a lot like decapitated heads the
Walters did something rather unusual
they set many of their best portraits
squarely out in the middle of the room
where you can see them from all angles
kind of like a cocktail party so I got
to see the back of the heads for once
and I absolutely fell in love with the
hairstyle on this dead chick named Julia
domina and we’ll leave you with this one
last quote that encapsulates the whole
idea of the bee her project that’s like
everything’s art and everything can tell
you the story so I kind of just suck at
it whatever
so handing the microphone over to our
communities to share the culture that
they know best and that they’ve been
producing for generations is a
transformative gesture that takes the
museum from being a treasure house to a
production house and I think it charts
us a new course through blue ocean clear
waters to a new kind of sustainability
for cultural practice in the 21st
century thank you very much
[Applause]
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