 Susan Barger, on behalf of the IAC, go ahead, Susan. Hi, welcome to everyone. I hope that you've had a nice summer. We've been very busy, and I'm going to quickly go through these slides. First of all, I want to remind you that the handouts are down below the chat box. You can download them if you haven't downloaded the two ASLA technical leaflets before you sign off, you're out of luck. Because we have permission for people to receive those while we're live, so make sure that you download them before you sign off. The keep in touch with us is through the CCCCC announce list, and that's only for announcements, maybe one, two, sometimes three a month. You can also like us on Facebook, you can follow us on Twitter. If you need help because of a disaster, and I know there are a lot of disasters right now, you can call the 24-hour hotline for the National Heritage Responders, and they will help. If you have a question about caring for collections, you can post them in our discussion form. And probably in the next week, the discussion form is going to change to a different format, and I will be posting the instructions on how to register for it, because even if you're registered for the discussion form now, you won't be for the discussion form when it migrates. So just keep that in mind. You can always contact me at this email address. I'm happy to hear from you. And coming up next month, we're going to have a webinar on evaluating collections care information resources. In October, the beginning of October, we're going to have a webinar on feathers and caring for feathers and legal issues with feathers. Late in the month, we're going to have something on dealing with political ephemera. We have a big schedule for the fall, and we're going to start the Connecting to Collections Care courses. We have two coming up for the fall. I expect to get the first course announcement up by next week. It's going to be on exhibitions and preservation. The second one will be on moving stuff. And that's it for me. I'm going to hand you over to Heather Gallaby for our talk today. So have fun. And I will be watching for questions. I will catch them for Heather to answer at the end. If we have more questions and there's time to answer, Heather has said she'll write answers and I'll post them with the recording. As always, I will post the recording and the handouts except for the two technical leaflets in a few days. And as soon as you no longer see the ad for this webinar in our Honor of Home page, that means the recording has been posted. Okay. So thank you. All right. Heather. Okay. Thank you, Susan. And I'd like to thank FAIC for its support of connecting to Collections Care and giving me the opportunity to be here with you today. So my name is Heather Gallaby. I am a conservator with a conservation studio in Cleveland, Ohio where I predominantly treat painting. I teach in the joint graduate program and art history at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. As well as in the conservation training program at the University of Oslo in Norway. I am a peer reviewed fellow at the American Institute for Conservation. I served eight years on AIC's Education and Training Committee. I was a member of its task force on equity and inclusion and I am currently a member of the advisory group for connecting to Collections Care. What you see in the background of my slide is the Great Hall in the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico, which we will get into in just a moment. I first wanted to share a few overarching thoughts though that I have been wrestling with as I gathered stories to illustrate this webinar. There will be examples that I share with you today of institutional response to controversy where the outcomes feel decidedly like a territorial process. Whether you are a conservator like me, a registrar, a Collections Care manager, an archivist, a security officer, a docent or a volunteer, it is natural to question and doubt whether you can contribute to the discussion surrounding heritage objects with problematic legacies. As instruction institutions introspectively examine how well they are reaching all members of their community and how inclusive we are in our practices, I would like to argue that at this juncture it is important to include many voices both inside and outside of our institutions and that when all levels of staff, including outside service providers, engage and embrace a shared mission or chances of being more inclusive will be greater. In addition to participating, I would argue that we also need to adopt a stance of empathetic listening. While the current political climate, which many agree is divisive and disheartening, I see contained within it an energy and engagement on the part of the public with how we memorialize historic events and how we represent our histories within museums, archives, libraries and historic sites. This engagement has the true potential to be truly exciting and I think we need to be involved. So at this juncture I would like to start with our first poll question. Just to get an idea of how many of you have involvement with problematic legacies. So the first question, does your organization or client have collection objects with problematic legacies either through ownership and or symbolism? We'll give you a second to answer the question. I would also like to, once that question is answered, move on to the second question, which is, does your community have any publicly displayed monuments and or arts that have problematic legacies? So since I am asking about your community, I thought I would start this discussion with my community, which while I work in Cleveland, Ohio, I live in Oberlin, Ohio. And Oberlin is a community that both hosts Oberlin College and has a long history of social activism. It was a leader in the abolitionist movement in the United States and it was active on the Underground Railroad. The community of Oberlin and its college also produced a great number of Christian missionaries. And what you see up on the screen here is Oberlin's town monument, the Memorial Arch, which was a monument to white missionaries killed in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. So this monument is on Oberlin College's Taffan Square, which creates the center of our town. And probably in the late or in the 70s, near the end of the Vietnam War, it became controversial as a symbol of imperialism and colonialism. It has historically been used as a way of bringing in the graduates during ceremony from Oberlin College. They would pass through this arch, but during this time, the students began to walk around the memorial to protest the symbolism of the monument. So the college had to wrestle with this monument for years and the students walking around it during the graduation ceremony. Let's see if I can get this slide to advance. There we go. So you'll see two plaques here that are on the memorial. One describing the memorial. It's designer. It's dedication in 1902. And the fact that it's there to memorialize the 13 white missionaries who all were Oberlin graduates. And there are five children who were killed during the Boxer Rebellion. The plaques that you see on the right was dedicated in 1994 by the class of 1994 to finally acknowledge the great number of Chinese citizens that were killed during the Boxer Rebellion. Eventually, more recently in our history, the college moved its graduation ceremony so that the students do not have to enter through the memorial. Sort of taking the symbolism out of this event so it no longer plays a role in Oberlin's graduation ceremony. And a lot of the controversy about the monument and discussions about the monument have died down. As a town member, I will say that this monument is fairly well-beloved as a backdrop for wedding photos. And anybody who's in the town knows that our high school students show up there the night of prom to have their prom photographs taken. So, again, just a little bit of my own community background that is our controversial monument. So, I would like to move on to the monument that or the site that I have had some personal involvement. And this is out at the Zimmerloon Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And you can see I've got it down here. The architect was John Galmib. The construction of the building was begun in 1936. It was completed in 1938. It is a WPA project. So that was government funding that helped build this library. This is the exterior. And if we go inside. Ah, sorry. I lost my screen. Here we go. We are once again in the Great Hall of the Zimmerman Library. And you will see a glimpse of some of the murals in the background that I was brought out to examine and to discuss with a class, which I will describe in just a moment. Before that, though, I'd like to look a little bit at this sort of rich environment in which the murals find themselves. Included with the murals, you can see some tin wall sconces that were part of the construction. There are also chandeliers. Again, tin work that was done in the area locally. There was a lot of very beautiful hand-carved and painted woodworking. The carvers were all of indigenous peoples. They were Daniel Murabelle, Boston Telestie, and Justin Yazi. I do not know who the fabricators of the tin work was, unfortunately. I hear again is a detail of the woodworking. And here is one of the murals themselves. The murals were begun in 1939, and they were stalled in the spring of 1940. They're set into niches, and they were actually not paid for by the WPA, but were paid for by the Carnegie Foundation. I should add here that the library was eventually named after University President James Zimmerman, who was the president during the construction of the library, and who had a role in dictating the theme of unity that these murals are. It's called the Unity of the Three People. Again, it depicts the three major populations in the area. The building itself, also I should add, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on August 22, 2016. The murals were executed by artist Henry Kenneth Adams. He also did some teaching at the university. The first mural you see as it sort of progresses from left to right is a mural called Native American People. And then the next mural down the line was considered to be called Hispanic People. Again, this is Henry Kenneth Adams from 1939. The third mural is the Anglo People from 1939. And then the final mural is called The Union of Three People. And these murals have long been controversial, not just recently, because of the sort of progression from what is considered Indigenous populations, potentially primitive towards an arc of increasing sophistication. And let me remind you again, by the time we get to the Anglos, we have, of course, science and medicine, whereas our native population is represented by handicrafts, Hispanics, by labor, the Anglos by learning and medicine. And, of course, The Union of the Three People was considered the most problematic of the murals because the Anglo figure is faced out. He has eyes. The Hispanic and Native populations are represented in profile. They are considered to be being welcomed in by the Anglo culture, as if we have finally reached the height of our culture. So, this particular, this last mural, this is a photograph of it in the 70s when it was vandalized with paint. This was not the first time that the mural had been controversial, and I believe there was at least one other incident of vandalism involving this mural. So, more recently, the staff, the library staff, members of the library staff at the University of New Mexico, Zimmerman's Library, have petitioned the university and have filed a complaint that these murals create a hostile working environment for them. They have noted that despite all of the historic complaints against the murals, this information was not included in the petition to have this site, including the murals, be listed on the National Historic Register. There are no plaques or signage that make any indication of the ongoing controversy with the murals and the activism against the murals. And the members of the library staff who put in this proposal or this complaint to the university also indicated that they were inspired by student activist groups, the TIVA club, which was a club focused on indigenous Native American issues and support and learning. They had petitioned the university to change the seal, which also included problematic imagery of both conquistador and American pioneers, both populations that had oppressed indigenous cultures that were there originally. So inspired by the student activism, the library staff or members of the library staff again registered this complaint with the university. In response, in partial response to these complaints being registered about the hostile working environments, members of the staff, in particular Dr. Kimberly Pinder, who is the dean of the College of Fine Arts and a professor of art history, and Professor Alex Lubin, who is a professor of American Studies and is currently a provost of faculty development, created a class to discuss the murals called Community Arts Practice, the Zimmerman Library, Three People's Murals. All told, there were 32 invited guests that came out to lecture to a group of students about the history of the mural and the cultures surrounding the area. So I was one of the 32 invited guest lecturers for this class. So there were library staff members who came to kick off the discussions with the students. There were historians, historic preservation advocates, staff members from the Office of Equity and Inclusion, and a variety of professors from across the campus, from the art history department, psychology, political science, native studies, sociology, et cetera. So my job within, or my invitation to come out and discuss these murals was to discuss what it would be like or if it would be possible to remove, safely remove these murals and or to cover them up in situ so that the imagery could not be seen. The reason I had been invited to this was that I had, in fact, here are a few more details of the vandalism, just to recoup so it had been splashed with paint. I was brought out to examine the murals, look at the condition of the murals, and while I was up there on the ladder, I did still see signs of, here you see there, remnants of paint from the vandalism. And this is the molding at the floor where I was standing. You could see that it was both green paint and black paint that were used to splash the mural. This was in the 70s. Here, and actually my pointer is an appropriate place, you can still see remnants, slightly discoloration. Some of the retouching has shifted, but a lot of the damage to the murals ended up being retouched over. It's not clear to me whether it was easy to remove the vandalism or if it was decided safest just to retouch over it, but you can see a little bit of it here all the way down the feet of the Anglo figure. And again, this is an image taken in UV light to sort of show all of the retouching. So I came out to examine these murals to see again whether they could in theory actually be removed from the wall. And again, I said that my experience came out of work that I had done with the ICA Art Conservation Center regional lab here in Cleveland, Ohio, where I worked for 16 years. The images that I am showing you now were part of the discussion I had with the students where I demonstrated to them the removal of WPA murals. I should add that these murals, which were by Elmer Brown, the one that you see in the pictures here, is Cleveland Past and Present Industry and Commerce from 1941. It was part of the WPA Valley View Home to State. They were installed in the Recreation Room, and you should note here that the estates were demolished in 2005. And before it was demolished, the ICA went in and removed the mural so that they could be saved. You will see one of my colleagues from the ICA. I believe this might be a conservator, Per Canusa, who is now at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It's hard to tell in Tyvek. The reason the ICA conservators are dressed in Tyvek here and wearing respirators is that WPA murals were adhered to the wall with a lead-white adhesive, which means that their removal involves the creation of lead dust, which is a hazard to humans. So murals, when they are removed from the wall, these murals are painted on canvas, have to be sheared off the wall. It is highly labor intensive. It is somewhat, obviously, risky for the mural, but in this case, the choice was removal or destruction. These murals are now been remounted and are installed at Cleveland State University and are continued to be on public view. This is an image of myself and conservator Wendy Partridge getting ready to roll the murals. So once the murals are reinstalled, these are sonotubes for pouring concrete. Murals can be rolled. These ones that are on canvas, they're rolled face out and they can be stored this way. These lines you see back here are incisions that are made into the mural during the process of installation. You will see that just in a moment on the murals in New Mexico. Then my job was to sort of indicate to the students at the university what was possible. I was not there to advocate within this class for one action or another, but just to discuss what was physically possible and how things needed to be done in order to ensure the safety of both the artworks and the human beings who were de-installing these murals. So once again, this is the University of New Mexico's murals, the Adams murals. And you will see here this is one of the slits that was made in the mural during the installation process. When the mural was installed, they often had to release air that caught big traps in the installation, and they would cut along the design elements in order to try to make those slits cut in, blend into the rest of the mural. And this is me inserting a spatula, testing the adhesion of the mural to the wall. And in fact it was possible to break the adhesion of the mural. Again, it's not to say that one wants to do this, it's just to determine whether it is in fact possible to do so. And in my estimation it was possible to remove these murals, but once again I need to remind the audience here that in doing so the conservators would be involved to see up here this is residues of the lead white adhesive. This is under the wood molding, the murals when they were put in were pushed in underneath the molding to make it appear that the molding was in front. And in that process some of the lead white adhesive transferred onto the wood molding, which is where I did tests to determine whether there was lead presence, and there was in fact lead presence. So the students and Dr. Pinder and Dr. Lubin's class as an assignment had to come up with proposals to the university on how to address these murals. There were, as far as I understand, seven student groups. They worked in groups that were groups of students that represented different disciplines on campus. So they were cross-discipline groups of the seven groups that made proposals to the university. Only one group proposed the removal of the mural. The additional six groups all proposed covering over the murals in situ and introducing new murals that would be placed safely over the hidden WPA murals so that at any time or any time, not that it would be easy, but it would be preserving the murals in situ, allow them to become back to view should that ever be desired. And that would also allow them to more easily navigate the protections that are now in place because this is a registered site. So for me, it was during the process of these students coming up with their final proposals, I was contacted by two of the groups. They had to come up with cost proposals. Not that I could answer all of their questions, but they were very curious. They were very respectful of the discussion. And again, I should remind people that six of the groups wanted to preserve these murals in situ. I have since more recently talked to Professor Pinder who said that the discussion was ongoing. The university has not made a decision. There is a committee designed of library members and some of the faculty who participated in the discussion who will also be making a proposal to the university. It is my understanding that there still is quite a push to have these murals physically removed. And I more recently was contacted by an architect hired by the university to talk about what those costs would be because even if you cover over the murals in situ, you do have a cost at hand. But if you actually remove them, you have even larger costs at hand. So they are gathering those numbers in order to be able to have a conversation about what is even possible because obviously institutions do not have endless resources. And the removal is really an incredibly large expense to do so, not to mention hazard for both the operators and it is within an active library setting. So this is, I present this sort of case study as an example of community discussion. Again, there is no final solution yet, but there is an ongoing active discussion. You can access a lot of the lectures that were given during the class online and the link to those records of the lectures including my own is part of the resources. All of the lectures were open to the public at the time that I gave my talk. There were members from the local press there. There were members of the student press there reporting on what was going on. So I applaud Professor Pinder and Professor Lubin for trying to make the process as inclusive as possible. I will say that it takes an enormous amount of time commitment for the general public to sort of follow the discussion. But again, those resources are there if you would like to. Moving on to a different type of engagement with protest and problematic objects, exhibitions, signage, providing a context and a space for sort of hidden stories. I'm going to present a very small sort of case study very quickly just to give you an idea of other activities that are ongoing. Most of this I have found from the popular press. This citation here came from Hyperallergic, which is a newsletter that does a lot of reporting on cultural events and included also did some reporting on the Zimmerlunen Library and the University Field. So this is from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. This is a painting by John Wolston. It is a portrait of Anna Gibbs. It's from 1767 and the Worcester Art Museum undertook a project in which they began to label objects on display with their history and connection to slavery. Right here I'm going to point to an additional label that's on the wall. This is the standard museum label giving you information about the painting, oil on canvas, the artist's name. But this here is a label which indicates that Anna Gibbs's father owned a plantation in South Carolina that had 68 enslaved persons. So this is one example. Again, this is a bit of a curatorial practice, but it is giving voice and giving presence to untold stories within our museum setting. This example comes from an ongoing traveling exhibition. Its original title was Casanova, The Seduction of Europe. It started at the Kimball Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas in 2017. It was up on view in Texas until December 31st in 2017. It then moved on to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, California from February to May of 2018. But at this point, if you all recall, the Me Too movement was really getting into swing in the late 2017. And the Legion Museum of Honor felt that it needed to address the ongoing discussions of predatory behavior, oftentimes towards women, but obviously other populations that we have seen more recently as accusations are being made against women now in the Me Too movement. So the Legion, with this exhibition up, felt that they needed to provide more context and hosted evening events. One was called Reckoning with the Past, a forum in which they invited a lot of scholars, predominantly female, to sort of discuss 18th-century attitudes towards women and the presentation within museums. The portrait that you see here by Nakier was included in the exhibition. Manon Baleti was, in fact, who was depicted in this portrait, was a lover of Casanova. She was 17 when she began her affair with him while he was 32. And Casanova, I'm sorry I sort of glossed over this, but I'm assuming that many of you know that he created a record of his life, including his conquests of women, and in our day and age many of his activities would be considered illegal and predatory. By the time the exhibition ended up in Boston, where it is now, the museum, the MFA in Boston, took steps to change the title of the exhibition. It is now called Casanova's Europe, Art, Pleasure and Power in the 18th Century. They felt that this was a more sensitive title at this stage in the exhibition rather than celebrating sort of the rakeish behavior and the seduction of Europe as Casanova was initially presented. I think that the MFA went into storage and brought out additional objects highlighting the activities of female artists during this time period, whereas the focus had included a lot of bouche paintings, a lot of paintings by male artists. And with that I would like to move on to our next poll question, and I'm thinking actually I have sort of glossed over poll question number three. Does your organization or client have resources for a forum in which the community could discuss new meanings or untold stories surrounding controversial objects? I'll give you a second to start to address that poll question. Client, welcome the opportunity to take a leadership role in community discussion surrounding objects that are not part of your collection. Question poll question number four. And then finally you can move on to poll question number five. Do you feel that your organization or client has objects in storage, again much like the MFA, that could help to tell new stories, provide greater context for these hidden stories that we would like to start to highlight. My final example of providing additional context before we move on to more dramatic steps comes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. This is an exhibition of artist David Boynarovitz. The exhibition is called History Keeps Me Up at Night, and here you see a protest that was carried out by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or ACT UP as it is more commonly known. This protest was carried out on July 27th, 2018, and I think most of you probably can relate to the fact that obviously when you start to have protests in the galleries, there is concern for objects on display. This is not, again, a new thing. In 1914, Mary Richardson, a suffragette, went into the National Gallery of London and slashed seven times the Roke v. Venus by Diego Velazquez to protest the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, another suffragette, another English suffragette. So, again, protests have been happening in our galleries more and more, but, again, it does have historic presence. In this instance, David Boynarovitz was an artist that came of age in the 1980s or came of prominence in the 1980s. He was a gay man. He was very active in protesting government and action in the AIDS crisis. He was a member of ACT UP. And currently in 2017 or 2018, ACT UP was concerned that the witness' presentation of David Boynarovitz's activities made it seem as if the AIDS epidemic was a thing of history and not an ongoing and important epidemic. And so they showed up this night and made the protest. In return, the Whitney Museum responded with public statements supporting ACT UP. Staff members greeted the protesters at the museum. They listened to what the protesters had to say. They welcomed the protest. And in return, the protesters were invited back on August 4, 2018 to once again provide further information to the public while they were in the exhibition. And here are these signs that they are holding up. They designed these to mimic the labeling that the Whitney Museum used as wall text for David Boynarovitz's work. And these placards brought attention to contemporary events that drew parallels to the work and issues that David Boynarovitz was drawing attention to in his own lifetime. So now I would like to turn to the issue of removal of monuments and other artworks when they have become controversial. And I just, again, to sort of set the stage on the local level, I wanted to return to my hometown of Oberlin and look at some more sort of commonplace removals as removal does happen for monuments. This is the soldiers' monument from Oberlin, Ohio. It was erected in 1870. And it was finally dismantled in the late 1930s due to poor condition. So again, this is one reason that monuments do become dismantled. And here is the monument here in the foreground here. And I will show you in just a second right here. This is the monument as it stands now. As you can see, it has been entirely dismantled. The historic plaques have been incorporated into a new monument. This monument went up in the 40s and has been added to. This here is the latest addition to the monument to note Oberlin residents' participation in the Afghanistan War. So it went from a monument that memorialized actually civil war soldiers to represent soldiers from the community of Oberlin, Ohio. Again, this is removal of monuments. This is another monument. This is a monument to Charles Martin Hall. This is in Oberlin again. It was installed in the center of Patham Square in the pavement. And there became an increased concern that the actions of snow plows and snow removal was wearing down the monuments. And it has been resituated, raised up on a block and reinstalled at another corner of the square. So aesthetically, I have to say personally, I don't think either of Oberlin's reconfigured monuments are as visually successful. But it does indicate the types of reasons that monuments can be removed and the fact that monuments are removed historically. I would like to then start to turn our attention towards the community of St. Louis where we will be looking at the removal of one of their Confederate monuments. Before I do that, I'd like to draw attention to this monument or actually this park, which is the Lion Park in St. Louis. And elementary school teacher Stephanie Teachout Allen, who I will introduce into our discussion in just a moment, brought this monument and this park to my attention. And told me about a memorial to Union General Nathan Lyon that was erected originally on the campus of St. Louis University. When St. Louis University had a donor who was a Confederate sympathizer, that donor indicated that they would not give money to the university unless the monument was removed to this Union General to another location. And the university did, in fact, comply with this request. And the monument got moved to Lyon's Park. Unfortunately, the monument I am showing is not the monument that was moved to the park, but another monument in the park already to Nathan Lyon. I only discovered that this morning. It was moved in 1960. There are very few pictures that I can find of the monument that I believe was moved from the campus of the university, but that may require a little bit more research on my behalf. And I should also say that the monuments to Lyon have also recently been suggested in the wake of their Confederate monument being removed that these monuments should also be removed to General Lyon, because Lyon was responsible for the bloody island massacre of Native Americans in California. I do not know if the community has taken up that request yet, but I will now turn our attention to St. Louis's Confederate monument that was removed in 2017, I believe. So this is the Confederate monument in Forest Park, St. Louis. The artist who created it was George Zolmay. He had won a commission in order to produce this monument. He was an artist originally from Hungary, but he actually was practicing in St. Maria and was a professor at one of the universities there in St. Louis. The monument's bronze and limestone, it is 23 feet tall, so this is a rather large monument, and it was donated by the Ladies' Confederate Monument Association, as are many of our Confederate monuments. It was erected, as I said, originally. I want to return to this information, though, in 1914. So quite a bit after the Civil War, and amongst the resources that I have included, there is plenty of information out there. I'm not going to spend a lot of time reviewing it. The Southern Property Law Center does a very good job at sort of setting the stage for both the rise of the KKK and a rebirth of monuments towards the Confederacy that were not contemporaneous with the end of the Civil War, but with a reaction to goals of the white leadership to sort of suppress our black citizens within the community. So these monuments, and this has been discussed a lot, are considered by some monuments towards Confederacy, but also monuments that propagate white supremacy. So just giving a little more background to the climate at this time in Missouri and in St. Louis. I wanted to remind you all that on August 9, 2014, a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American teen, and that set off riots in Ferguson, Missouri, which is just outside the St. Louis metropolitan area. On June 17, 2015, the nation saw a mass shooting that killed nine African-American parishioners by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, which set off a lot of public debate on the national stage about the display of Confederate symbols. So then in April of 2017, when St. Louis' newly elected mayor, Lita Creuson, entered into office, she vowed to review the Confederate monument that was located in Forest Park in the first 100 days of her administration. In August of the same year, of course, we had Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which at its outset was about the potential removal of a Confederate monument there. So at this stage, I would like to introduce fifth grade teacher, Stephanie Teachout-Allen, who works at New City School and is the director of diversity there, in addition to being a fifth grade teacher. Stephanie-Allen and I spoke over this past weekend about her work trying to teach her students about the Confederate monument. And this Confederate monument was within walking distance of their school classroom. Stephanie's school, the New City School, is made up of 44% students of color, with 40% of the students there on some sort of financial aid. Stephanie teaches a two-week unit called Choices Make History. And one of the things that I really appreciated about Stephanie's discussion of these murals, and you can hear her and Professor St. Louis who did some work with her on this and was a parent at the school, one of the things that I really liked that she said was that she wanted to encourage her students to listen, to understand, and not just to respond. So she sends her students home to interview the adults in their lives again, encouraging her students to listen, to understand, and not just to respond with their preconceived ideas to listen to the adults in their lives. And she had them interview them about Confederate symbols, looking at the flag, the Confederate flag, and what it meant to those students. And then the students came back and discussed it amongst themselves, amongst the other students, and came to the realization that a lot of these symbols meant different things to different people. She took her students to the monument. This was obviously before it was removed. She allowed them to touch it. They discussed the monument on site and noted that nowhere on the monument was there a discussion of slavery. This monument had imagery of Confederate families extending their children off to serve in the war. So, and the text on the back of which you can barely see down here with the students here, this text here, that text says, erected in the memory of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederate states by the daughters of the Confederacy of St. Louis. Much like the students in the university setting in New Mexico, and here, I'm sorry, this is Professor David Cunningham whose name had escaped me. This is him at meeting with the students from the fifth grade class. David Cunningham has written a lot about the Ku Klux Klan, and he was met with the students to talk to them about symbolism and monuments in the area. The students from the fifth grade class had the opportunity to make proposals to the mayor, and here you see the mayor, Lita Cruzon, with the students from the New City School. And here you can see this is New City on the Air. There is a link to the interview that was done with both David Cunningham and Stephanie Teachout on National Public Radio. I highly recommend listening to that interview. It's really quite amazing and quite impressive what fifth grade students can come up with just so that you can all be somewhat alarmed by fifth grade students. One of the proposals that they made to the mayor, the monument being cased in Lego, and that Sharpie markers be made available so that people could record their hopes and dreams on the Legos. Stephanie told me they even created a budget, I think, of three Sharpie markers, which they considered enough to give the public a chance to give their feedback to the mural. Stephanie was also very quick to point out that none of the students actually proposed the removal of the monument. They wanted to see this monument contextualized and altered, but not to be necessarily removed. In the long run that did not happen, and you see here I'm going to move through these quickly so that we can get to some questions, the debate continued about these monuments on the community level. And this is May 23rd. There was a confrontation. Stephanie says that the photographs from this make it look a lot more dramatic than it was. And the mural, excuse me, the monument was vandalized overnight. These are city crews removing that vandalism the next day. And once again, a few days later, the monument was once again vandalized. At this point, this vandalism was not removed, and the mayor of St. Louis finally came to an agreement to have the mural, excuse me, have the monument removed from the site. There was an agreement made with the Missouri Civil War Museum who is paid for the removal of the monument and has agreed to reinstall the monument, but not within St. Louis or even within the county of St. Louis. And once again, they paid for the removal of that monument. And here you see that monument in the process of being removed. It has not been reinstalled yet at this point, but it is a site in which the monument was removed. So once again, I want to sort of highlight the fact that in the incidents that I have both discussed with Stephanie on the elementary level and my experience out at the University of New Mexico, where the community has had the opportunity to participate in discussions actively, whether they are children, where they are adults, students, there often can be a great deal of sensitivity brought towards these monuments. But we all know that in light of recent activities where students at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina recently toppled a monument referred to as Silent Sam from a monument of Confederate soldiers. Recently, just two nights ago, I believe, toppled a monument that without that forum for public discussion, I would like to suggest that sometimes the results have a huge impact on the artifacts that we spend so much time and involvement in trying to protect. So I would like to leave you with those examples of case studies. I know many of you may have other ideas, and I welcome you the camps. Here are my acknowledgments of all the people that have helped me in putting this together. But as I said, I would like to at this point start to open this up to questions, and I would like to post my contact information here because I would like to encourage you to contact me and let me know what your communities have been up to, what they have been involved with, solutions that you have come to in broadening a dialogue in order to essentially create a safe environment as we've seen, vandalism, toppling monuments. These obviously have a great deal of impact on the care of these objects and are something that we would like to avoid. So Susan, can we get some questions at this point? Yeah, we haven't had very many questions. But Stephanie Washburn said, when the statue came down, this is the one in Forest Park. Where did it go? Was it destroyed or put somewhere else? If somewhere else where? So it has not been reinstalled yet. Yes, it was taken away and it's been put into storage. It is under the care of the Missouri Civil War Museum. They have accepted responsibility for the monument, and as I indicated, they paid for the removal of the monument. So presumably they have not publicized where they are storing the monument. It came apart in multiple pieces, and they do not want to advertise where those pieces are being stored for fear that it could draw further interactions, unfavorable interaction with the public. But they do intend to reinstall the monument. Typically the proposals for reinstalling these monuments have been within a museum, a controlled museum setting, graveyards, sites that are already known for their involvement within the Civil War. Even the students in New City School felt there was a big difference between walking to a park where the intention was to perhaps enjoy nature, be outside with your family, where you're not necessarily in the mode of learning at that point, whether that is a good environment in which you can provide the kind of educational material that you need to provide in order to contextualize these moments. Again, I think that is a point that is worth discussing, controlling the environment in which we provide our audience greater context. Oftentimes I find all the other, the smaller examples, the interior examples, labeling, holding events, these are all controlled interior environments where the audience enters with an intention to learn. Laurie Sandrolin says, some of our cemeteries are concerned that they'll become the land of removed monuments. She says Wilmington, North Carolina has at least three. Yes, and in fact I believe the elementary school students at New City had also suggested, can't remember what community, they may have suggested giving their monuments to, was it Richmond, Virginia, and Stephanie had to question the students about whether other communities really wanted to accept these monuments as well. Yes, we do potentially have a problem in our hands of the number of monuments, although I think one could make an argument that the sheer volume of numbers depending on the numbers that are removed does give voice and physical presence to the activity that went on, post-failed reconstruction during the Civil Rights movement about the number of these monuments that were erected. Yes, these are all good questions and they are challenges. Yeah, Michael Galvin had mentioned that in his town they removed a monument and then Jimena Valdivia asked what happened to it and he said that the monument, it was a monument commemorating the removal of native peoples from his area and they removed it and took possession of the main bronze element in his collection. I don't know where Victor is, maybe you can tell us, Michael. And then Pamela Brown from Arcada, California says, what do you find would be effective responses to people who say you're erasing history? Yeah, that comes up a lot and it is discussed far more eloquently by many other people than myself. It's obvious from the point of view of somebody like my husband who is a historian is that we do have lots of primary sources, books, literature, writings of the time that do help us establish our history. The sense that a monument is the most effective way of preserving history I think could also be debated. I at one time thought about starting with a quote from the writer and novelist Robert Mussel who in a 1927 essay wrote something about monuments saying that there is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments. They are somehow impregnated against attention, it runs down them like water on oil cloths. One experiences them as a tree, as part of the scenery and would stop in momentary confusion that they'd be missing one morning but one never looks at them and usually does not have the slightest idea whom they represent. One could argue that that is far cry from the truth but monuments do start to sort of lose some of their potency. Again Oberlin high school students taking their prom photographs in front of this monument to the 13 white missionaries who died from Oberlin in a rebellion that killed thousands of Chinese. So I say that I don't think that we are erasing history when monuments are removed. We are creating new stories and we should be aware of those new stories that are being removed. Not that I am advocating for violence. Obviously when monuments are pulled down there is that imagery of those monuments being toppled that does create new history, does create new stories. Are they valid stories? Do we want to memorialize them? Some of the professors down in St. Louis do have a website where they talk about some of the imagery and one of the suggestions that I saw on that website was that the Confederate monument in Forest Park should have been left in place with the vandalism in order to document both sides of the story. Again I'm not sure what it would be like to live in your own community with a vandalized monument. I could see a lot of discomfort with that and I'm not necessarily advocating that. In fact I feel a pretty strong discomfort with that. I'm not sure that's where I personally feel comfortable. But these are arguments that are being made. I did see one scholar who suggested that one of the things we do erase is the impetus to have the discussion when the monuments are removed. Again that was a very valid point and I think these things will be decided community by community. In Santa Fe we live with a vandalized monument on the plaza because we have an obelisk in the middle of the plaza that at one time had a thing that said something about savages. There was a controversy about it. One morning people came and savages had been chiseled out. That's the way it was left. Molly Cannon says, is there a role for recontextualizing monuments or murals? Have there been examples where added interpretation has helped bridge communities? That's a good question. The murals that are at the University of New Mexico, initially when the library staff started to write up their objections to the murals, and you can see this, two of the members who were involved, two of the library staff members who were involved in writing that formal complaint to the university, they were kicked off the lecture series at the University of New Mexico and they discussed the fact that they initially had wanted to petition the university to include labeling or some placard again to discuss the ongoing controversy with the murals. Eventually they decided that's not what they wanted. They wanted more. They wanted those murals gone. Again, I think if you go back to the image of that great room, it is in a library setting. There is a label that discusses the murals and I'm not sure how many people look at that label. Again, it's not discussing the controversy and I'm not sure how much the labeling of those things can help or not. Those are the examples that I used in the museum trying to provide the information to the willing audience who wants that information. I think it certainly could be a very good first step. I think it is harder to do in an outside environment. Yes. I know so many people that studied in Thurman and never noticed the murals because they were busy studying. Simon Lambert says, are you aware of any curatorial solutions that were developed in collaboration with interest groups, not by an internal curatorial team? There is amongst the resources. There was an exhibition that happened in Birmingham, England, where they brought in community members from underrepresented minority groups to sort of curate an exhibition. There are at least some responses to that sort of activity. I don't recall right now the name of the exhibition, but it is in the resources. Some of those outside curators who were brought in discussed that experience and whether it is possible in the language that they were using to decolonize the museum to take out the white man's acquisition of other cultural properties and putting them on display within the museum setting. They do question about whether that can be done in the museum setting. I recommend that you take a look at some of that discussion. I do think there are curators. The Museum of American Indian and the Smithsonian has done a lot of work with Native communities to contextualize their objects, to bring knowledge to it, to bring the knowledge that they have of their objects. There have also been discussions about that knowledge moving the other way from the museum setting and being repatriated to Indigenous cultures. There are a lot of fruitful exchanges in those environments that can be found if you start to do the looking. There was also, I believe, in Minneapolis there was a very large outdoor sculpture that was erected. I'm not going to recall the contemporary artist's name. It was meant to memorialize government executions, including a group of Native Americans who had been hung. The indigenous population in the area were outraged by the monument and felt oppressed by its presence. That was a very interesting story. The artist gave the monument the ownership, the copyright to that monument to the indigenous people in the area, and they ceremonially buried the monument. It was dismantled from the Walker Art Center up in Minneapolis. It's a very interesting story. People have brought in that was actually after the fact, but it was the controversy that arrived before this very large sculpture went up. It's a very interesting story to look at. Sarah Hattie says, this is a reference to the work scaffold at the Walker Art Center. Yes. Thank you very much. Grant Briscoe says, is there an effective way to protect objects or monuments and still discuss how to address them? In other words, won't talking about these, talking about how to address supposedly controversial pieces, invite protests and vandalism that can damage adjacent pieces? So I guess I would never buy into sort of the slippery slope argument to ignore something, to ignore a discussion, because you're afraid of having it. I don't think it's a valid reason. I think it's better to get out in front of things, I would say. Yes, I guess I'm not sure that I would agree. I understand the fear. There is definitely, and I think that is a big factor for us. And I realize that when I showed up at the University of New Mexico, I probably should have had more fear stepping into that situation than I did, because I felt I was there to sort of discuss neutrally what was possible rather than to advocate. And it wasn't long before I became aware that my presence could be taken as an advocate for these murals removal. If I suggested how you could remove, then I was therefore suggesting that they be removed. I will state for a fact that I don't want to put a Tyvek suit on and a respirator and deal with lead white for a very long time now. I hope never have to do it again. But I realized once I was out in New Mexico that there potentially should be some anxiety on my part in having that discussion. But I don't, acknowledging that fear and making your audience comfortable, I think is an important thing. And I still welcome the opportunity to have these discussions with people, knowing that I certainly do not have all of the answers. Yeah. Phil Ford from Enrico Virginia says, it seems like the idea of what could be done reasonably would be storage of these. Or for us here in RVA, which I guess must be regional Virginia, to maybe put them in a museum setting with the proper context. But it's so expensive. But it seems like if this is a reasonable solution, why can't money be put to solve this? That is a very good question. There really is the burden of this because people are going to get caught up in the symbolism, the emotions of the time, the events that are going on. But of course, as collections care people, we are the ones that need to find the way and the place and the funds to store these things. So that is a big burden. And that really does need to be examined closely. Yeah, Lynn Sanderlin says, Phil, I understand what you're saying. But the museums can only fit so many. During the huge push for Confederate monuments around the turn of the century, make it nearly impossible. Civil War battlefields, they could, but how many? I guess Brianne can take these monuments. Yes, and a reminder again that one monument in St. Louis was, I believe, 23 feet tall. I mean, these things are big. Some of them just cannot be moved into an indoor setting. And I could just imagine a field where these monuments are mothballed. Maybe the Confederate daughters will step into a system? I don't know. I don't know about that. Sorry for my poor sense of humor. But yeah, this is Michael Redman from Las Vegas, New Mexico. Yeah, Phil says that would be the hope that the UDC would jump in. Michael Redman from Las Vegas, New Mexico says, my museum has considered an exhibit on a controversial group in the 19th century, a group of night writers that targeted a group that locally was a minority but nationally in the majority. Depending on the audience, they were considered freedom fighters, terrorists, and or cattle thieves, and a criminal gang. Local gossip claim that the group still exists. If we proceed with the exhibit, would it be better to tell the group's story or should we focus on modern opinions and views on the group? Cannot both be done. I guess I'm not sure they entirely understand the question. Is the implication that their stories are not an accurate story of the group or is it only part of the story? Because a lot of the argument is about broadening the number of stories that are told so that we have a larger picture, a more complete and accurate picture of a group, a time period, a moment in history. Again, I'm not sure I'm doing this question justice. Yeah, I think it's a tough question. And certainly when people put up controversial exhibits, sometimes they get a lot of pushback. But sometimes it helps break open a discussion like the Inouye controversy. And that really helped, I think, bring a lot of stuff out about why we were bombing people. I think one of the tactics that has also worked sort of curatorial, curatorially, is to give those vested audiences a preview of what you intend to do or what you hope to do because you may be surprised by their reaction to that. Again, the Whitney Museum with Act Up, David Wojnarowicz, was a member of Act Up. And in fact, the Whitney had done programming, already had programming, about AIDS activism incorporated into the exhibition. But remarkably enough, for whatever reason, they hadn't reached out to Act Up specifically. So there was information about AIDS activism, but it wasn't from Act Up. So the Whitney obviously quickly adjusted. They invited Act Up back in. I think there was good ceilings between the groups. But it's very clear that people do like to be asked before they are presented with the information and before your final decisions have been made. Yeah. I just want to say there's been a big discussion in the chat box about the Minneapolis exhibit. And I will include these things in a second handout. And so don't worry. Uncle Rehman says in reference to this group in Las Vegas, the larger picture is hard to find as the sources do not agree on their story. Just another New Mexico story. Okay. And I live in New Mexico. I understand that our history can be kind of weird. Let's see. Eileen Wang says, what was the counterargument of the protesters with the Confederate flags at the St. Louis monument? If you go online, you can find some actually recorded interchanges between various people. And my general understanding is it's, again, removing heritage objects, erasure. I think they're fairly standard arguments to the removal of Confederate monuments. And these were no different. Yeah. Jennifer Gundry says, how did the university decide which panelists to invite, if you know it? I'm not sure what the process was. I mean, just looking over the list of people who came in, I think some of it makes clear sense. The historic preservation people were invited in. People were familiar with the process of a monument becoming listed on the registry. People from the library invited in. I think it was fairly, I think they discussed this a lot. I mean, I first ran across Kim Pinger. She and I were college classmates sometime in 2017. And she started to basically interview me and discuss with me about what my experience was as a conservator. Once she found out that I had actually been involved in the de-installation of a WPA mural, she then in January sent me an email and invited me. Again, I think they were looking for resources and people who they felt could just give the students a full sense of all of the moving parts. So that meant bringing people in from the native community, from the Hispanic community. They brought in former activists, students who had graduated already but had protested those murals in the past. They invited them back onto campus to have a forum to discuss their early activism against the murals. Again, it was all to create the setting and the stage for what could be done. Some of us were there for giving pragmatic information and others were to give historical context. The psychology of living in these environments with oppressive imagery, all of that was discussed. Social justice was discussed as well. So again, there were two professors who were involved in setting up the class. So they tried to be multidisciplinary. And in the resources, there's also a long interview with some of the presenters and the people at the library. So I really encourage listening to those and listening to some of the talks. They are quite intensive. Let's get back to the questions. How do you recommend for conservation professionals, how do you recommend that conservation professionals engage in these conversations? That's from Alicia Boswell in Santa Barbara. I think that we have to approach it like we would do anything. That we give the information that we have at hand. You know, there is some advocacy involved. I will say that I do hope that the university does not remove the mural. I hope that they cover them over in situ. I emotionally, as a person, I understand why the mural has been advocated for the mural to be covered. So emotionally and personally, I actually sort of agree with that proposal. Professionally, I would like to see those murals stay behind, but keep in mind part of me just doesn't want to see anybody up there in a Tyvek suit and a respirator having to tear those murals off the wall, which is such a hard job. But I think we need to provide people with the appropriate information so that they can make their decisions. I was never going to go to the University of New Mexico and say, it would be wrong if you cannot remove these murals from the wall. That's not my job to say that. I know for a fact that those murals could be removed from the wall. Would it be an entirely safe process? I know anytime you have that type of invasive process, there's always risk to the object. We have undertaken that kind of risky de-installation when a building was about to be destroyed. We could justify it then. It obviously gets harder, but if somebody is to take those murals off the wall, I do hope that the university employs appropriate professionals in order that it is done safely. Again, that's not what I would advocate. I think it just makes more sense to cover them over in situ, both for the safety of the people, the murals, and to give the opportunity for the community to introduce new artistic endeavors in those spaces and to explore new histories, knowing that the other murals are still there. Again, I think it is our job to provide information as requested. Michael Galvin said, to decolonize a museum is a strange concept. Knowing that the very foundation of museums as an entity is a colonial concept. In Native American context, we're really looking to indigenize or reinvent the museum to reflect our worldviews and cultural concepts. I'm going to say right now there's been a big discussion about several topics. I won't collect them from the chat box and I'll post them. Go ahead with that one. That is a very important sentiment and one that I think is really relevant. Again, some of the resources, again at this exhibition in Birmingham, suggested that it can't be done, that you cannot decolonize the museum because it is inherently a colonial structure. But taking that and then deciding what can we learn from that structure, what can we do to improve that structure. Again, there's been a lot of work done with Native communities here in the US, I believe in Australia and potentially New Zealand. There are lots of models out there. Again, I apologize, I have been very American centric here. I know that there's a lot of very important work that has been done along those lines. I think those things present opportunity, right? Opportunity rather than just this burden that we can't be what we've been all along. We should view this as an opportunity. Sue Taylor from Mellon, Magordo, New Mexico says, it is the job of museums to educate when faced with a controversial issue rather than moving to have it removed. Use the object as a springboard to discuss changing points of view and public perception. Interpretive signage, as mentioned above, showing all points of modern views regarding artifacts as opposed to what point of view would have been a century or more ago. People today are too quick to superimpose their modern views onto the past, which was different. I see some valuable things in that statement, although we do live in the present. One of the things that the present is teaching us is, again, to bring in other voices. We already know that oftentimes what is represented in our museums and our settings is not the full story. To bring modern attitudes towards telling more than one story, I think is... I don't really have a problem with that. I also think that it's interesting to see how other populations react to what we take, for a lot of us who are white museum professionals, as being in the total sum good. There was recently a video essay by two journalists. One was from the New York Times, I do not recall where the other was from. Both African-American journalists who recorded a journey through seeing various southern monuments. There was a slave auction block, and I'm sure one of our audience members knows the answer to this. I do not remember the town that it was in. But they filmed the street corner in which that slave auction block was in. Obviously, it's right in the center of town. They went into the black community and talked to them about what it was like to have that auction block in the center of town. The black community wanted it gone, at least the population that they spoke to. Even though it is a historic object, they did not want it in the center of the town. They didn't want to be reminded on a daily basis, casually. If people walked by not paying attention to it, that that legacy was there. Whereas the mayor of the town was arguing that it needed to be preserved. And I think it was the mayor, I could be wrong on that, was arguing that it needs to be preserved. And potentially the answer to that is both and. Yes, it needs to be preserved. It is an important artifact. We cannot forget that part of our history. But to have it in the center of town, perhaps you need to listen to the African-American community there who says they don't want it. How do we respond to those audiences who do not agree with us? Okay, so we have a few more minutes. I want to remind people please fill out the evaluation. And I will collect all these conversations, and I'll put them on a separate thing. I also want to remind you that these two technical leaflets from ASLH, if you want them, please download them before you sign out, because they won't be available otherwise, unless you go to ASLH and buy them. And one of the things that Rebecca Alanda-Hemanda says is that the murals are only part of the discussion in Zimmerman. The building design itself, which is beautiful, is inherently native by design. Where do you draw the line? And I mean, Wang says, I agree with Heather's view about how to deal with the murals in the New Mexico Library. When dealing with controversial works of art or monuments, it's useful to remember what context provides. Yeah, so I think that's it. The resources for dealing with audiences who don't agree with you. Yes, there are some there in the handout. And so it's time for us to go. Thank you very much, Heather. Thank you everyone who participated. Remember, download this ASLH technical leaflets. We'll see you next month.