In Conversation with Michelle Wilkinson
This transcript is an informal conversation between Saeb Ali Khan (MAUD '20) and Michelle Wilkinson on November 25, 2019.
Michelle Joan Wilkinson is a 2020 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is expanding the museum’s collections in architecture and design. She co-curated two inaugural NMAAHC exhibitions: “A Century in the Making: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture” and “A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond.” In 2018, Wilkinson served as lead organizer for the museum’s three-day symposium, “Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners, 1968 to Now.”
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Saeb Ali Khan (SAK):
How did your early formative years shape your interests (art and architecture) and your career (teaching and curation)?
Michelle Wilkinson (MW):
I grew up in Guyana, South America which is where my mom’s side of the family is from. Even though I was born in Brooklyn, I spent my first five years living in Guyana with my grandparents. I grew up in a house that my grandfather had built, and I have a lot of memories of growing up in that house, just feeling very comfortable, feeling like it was my house, like I belonged there.
There was something about the space and the openness that made me feel comfortable. In terms of art and architecture, I didn’t really connect my early experiences to that until much later, into my 30s, when I started thinking about the house again. I remembered being young, being on the verandah, looking out and just having a sense of peace and joy.
I’ve always been really interested in research and writing, and I think teaching is a natural byproduct of that. I did teach for a couple of years. Regarding curation, I had written about museums in my dissertation; I had seen some museums that seemed to be doing really exciting things with their programming and I started thinking about museums being a place to explore the kind of research and creativity that I wanted to engage with, maybe as opposed to academia.
SAK:
In V is for Verandah, you link design to “social relations and interpersonal exchanges,” and suggest that design has the potential “to engineer social integration and inter-ethnic civility.” Could you share anecdotes or exchanges that you came across through oral history interviews or that you experienced personally that could highlight this relationship?
MW:
When I wrote that, I was talking specifically about trying to understand the design development of that particular house. It is important to recognize that Guyana is a multi-ethnic society. There are Afro-Guyanese, descended from Africans that were brought there during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. There are Indo-Guyanese, Guyanese of Indian descent, that were brought in at the end of the slave trade to be the new work force on the plantations. There were Portuguese from the island of Madeira, whites from England, and the original people of Guyana – the Amerindians, as well as the Chinese who also came as laborers. Guyana had been colonized by the Dutch before the British. So, it has this variety already.
I can’t make a statement saying that architecture can make all those ethnic differences somehow disappear, but what I was interested in was the house that my grandfather, who was Afro-Guyanese, built in a village that was predominantly Indo-Guyanese. Historically, there have been a lot of racial tensions in Guyana between those two groups. They are the largest groups, and I was very interested in how, by having a space that has this second floor verandah – a space for visibility and access that allows for somebody on the ground level, on the street, and somebody inside to have some type of engagement, might it be a visual engagement or sonic.
There are lots of houses that have verandahs, depending on what type of community you live in. They may function differently, but I was very interested in the fact that in a community that has a history of racial tensions as well as history of collaboration, what a space like that could do. I looked at photographs and found different people – Portuguese, Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese being entertained at my family’s home, sometimes working on the premises. From my own childhood, I remember the ethnic variety of people that I saw circulating through my house. So there’s not really a specific memory that I have but it’s an accumulation from talking with my relatives and looking at the people who appear in our photo albums, that there could be these spaces of exchange that are sometimes refusing a social border or hierarchy that’s been rampant at different periods in history.
SAK:
Your work allows you to shape how history and culture is experienced, studied and valued – in the present and in the future. How do you balance that responsibility with making it an enjoyable experience, while also presenting it in a way that a wide range of visitors can understand and absorb it?
MW:
The key thing about curating at an institution is that you are part of a team and you share that responsibility. As a curator, you’re often primarily responsible for setting up the narrative content – what story are we telling and what objects are we going to use to tell these stories. In the context of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, it’s a large museum and you won’t be able to see the whole museum in a day. It’s an experience where it takes multiple visits to delve into. There’s a saying, “exhibitions shouldn’t be like a book on the wall,”; it should be more than that.
So how do you capture emotion? Designers think about what types of materials to use and environments to create. It helps to moderate between how serious and how heavy a particular story is and what the environment for it should be. There are spaces that are darker, and you have to figure out how you move through those spaces. There are moments that are a lot more open, and that does something to you spiritually. Personally, what I think about is making sure there are touch points – points of familiar knowledge to most people that they can then proceed to delve in deeper. It’s our responsibility to take it a step further.
I’ll give you an example. In an exhibition I curated prior to working at NMAAHC, I included a Gordon Parks photograph of Ella Watson, who was a domestic worker in the government and cleaned government buildings. She’s holding up a broom and a mop in front of the U.S. flag, and that image by Parks is called American Gothic--which plays on an iconic Grant Wood painting. The exhibition I curated was titled “For Whom It Stands: The Flag and the American People,” and we showed that famous image, but what a lot of people don’t know is that Parks also went to Watson’s house and he photographed her with her grandchildren, in her own domestic sphere. In the exhibition you also got to see that side of Watson that’s not as iconic. This is an example of what museums have to give you, touch points that you know and can expect, but then unravel and show you points in history and culture that you may not have experienced and juxtapose the two to tell a fuller story.
SAK:
We spoke about design and its consequences and curation. My next question combines them both and is about the NMAAHC building. You said earlier that the way you curate it also shapes the way that it’s looked at and interpreted. We’ve had a conversation about how you study a building – thinking about different kinds of people and the way they’re engaging with the building. It would be interesting to know what you think of the building as a curator.
MW:
For the African American museum, I feel the exterior of the building is iconic and I love the fact that you notice it when you walk by. It’s hard to pass that building and not take note of it. That’s significant because we’re in a prime location and we need a building that speaks to that location. There are interesting connections between the upward angles of the building and the angles atop the Washington monument. People read about that and they try to take photographs, lining them up. It’s great to have narratives that can be shared and circulated and attract people to look for those moments. The other thing I love about the outside is that it’s porous because of the perforated screen, and that for me that visually relates to the concrete breezeblocks that you see in the Caribbean and West Africa. Ours is metallic, it’s bronze-colored. The way light filters through the building, you see patterns on the ground inside the museum, like a lovely filigree effect. There are wonderful conversations that the iconicity of the building is having with other types of architecture.
For the visitor, how the exhibits sit in the building is also important. There are four levels below ground and five above ground and depending on where you start you have very different experiences. A lot of people like to go to the lowest level and work their way up and I think there’s a sort of magic that happens when you do it that way. You can also start at the top and see the majesty of African American culture, as well as the struggle. When you go through the history galleries at the end, you can ask the same question – how was all of that able to happen with the kind of things people were confronting at the time, and actually still confront. I think what was interesting about the building is that its footprint had to be designed before we knew all the stories and had all the objects, and before we knew how people were going to be able to use it. To me, it does work with how the people flow through it. There are places where the ceilings are lower and it’s tighter and denser, but in those places we are talking about the trans-Atlantic slave trade – with its own spaces that were cramped and uncomfortable. If the visitor has an inkling that it doesn’t feel as spacious, then that’s actually a good thing.
SAK:
Do you think there’s a way that it can be interpreted to speculate on the future as well, since a building is a fairly permanent object and will stand for several years to come?
MW:
The building’s silhouette looks like it is something from the future, although we know it’s based on a sculpture by Olowe of Ise who was a Yoruban master carver; the silhouette resembles the capital of a verandah post that he carved. So, there’s a historical and architectural legacy that we see in that form, but if you’re just driving by and you see this shimmering bronze three-tiered crown sitting on glass, which almost makes it levitate a little bit, it can have a futuristic appearance.
SAK:
I’m a Muslim from India. I’m a minority in my country and if there was a museum that was built about South Asian Muslim identity, which captured our history and what’s happening in the country’s politics today, the form and appearance would mean a lot to me. As I said before, buildings are fairly permanent and at least two or three future generations would look to that building and it would shape their identities too.
MW:
I think it’s very complicated. There was a design competition with six finalists, and they all had the opportunity to display models and people got to comment on them, but it wasn’t just the architectural firms that were putting ideas forward. They were doing it in conjunction and collaboration with what they were hearing from the museum staff and our founding director, Lonnie Bunch. One of the things that was important was that the design of the building have references connecting it to the US. Even though there’s this verandah post iconicity of the corona shape, and it’s perforated, which to me participates in a kind of African diasporic tropical modernism, there’s also the quality of it being brown and bronze-colored and that these designs are also speaking to the craftsmanship of enslaved and free black craftsmen here.
For example in Charleston, South Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana, we see the really ornate iron and metal work, so it was important that there were US based connections that could be made in the narrative of the building, because the story is not just about the past that we came from but also the future that we built when we got here. Between the architects and the staff, talking about how these different elements come together and the making of the building and what the images and symbols can be used to represent, I think the narrative is really strong. If you walk by the museum, you may not know all of that. You may just see the shimmering building, and for me that’s enough because it stands out and it makes you ask the question – what is it about? For a visitor, whether they’re a black visitor or anyone that happens to be on the National Mall, it makes them pay attention and ask the question – that’s the place that you want to start.