Collaborative Curating and Research: A roundtable discussion with Ruth Phillips, Cory Kratz, and Bob White

CEREV recently hosted a roundtable on collaborative curating and research. Three exemplary scholars and public intellectuals – Ruth Phillips, Corry Kratz, and Bob White — rose to the occasion by addressing “big questions” related to the topic at hand. Having helped to draft framing questions for the discussion, I can attest that we asked a lot of our guests. We sought information on best collaborative curatorial practices and research methodologies, as well as reflections on limitations, failures, and ambiguities. Our guests offered wonderfully concrete and detailed information and examples.

Ruth Phillips is Professor of Art History and the Canadian Research Chair in Modern Culture at Carleton University. Drawing on her deep experience as a critic of Canadian museology and a key player in the shaping of contemporary relations between museums and aboriginal communities, Phillips stressed the fact that at this point in time, there exist multiple models for collaborative curating and research. The trick for curators is to be aware of the spectrum of models available (e.g. community-based museology versus multivocal exhibitions) and to strive for clarity as early as possible in the process of exhibition development. How will decisions be made, and by whom? Collaboration cannot create equality between differently positioned participants. But it can strive for a high degree of reflexivity and transparency in relation to power relations and exhibition development.

Phillips emphasized that exhibitions in large museums always involve negotiations between team members, bringing together academics, curators, conservationists, designers, project managers, educators, and, sometimes, advisory communities. She recalled how, in the landmark controversial exhibition The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples (Glenbow Museum, 1988), a designer with whom she worked attempted to recreate a 19th century ethnographic presentation, introducing a subtle irony that was irrelevant once the exhibition became a site for protests against exploitation of Lubicon traditional lands by Shell Oil (http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/canada-the-lubicon-lake-cree).

This discussion of design and collaboration was pushed further by Corinne Kratz, Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Emory University where she also co-directed the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship (http://www.csps.emory.edu/index.html ). As Kratz put it, even during the “curator as hero” era, exhibitions involved collaboration, but this was done without reflexivity or recognition. Phillips and Kratz agreed that design decisions influence exhibitions’ verbal and visual communication, along with factors such as architecture and local and global political contexts. Reflecting on this, it occurs to me that while critical museology offers rich case studies on collaborations between museums and communities and multivocal exhibitions, we know less about negotiations and conversations between curators and designers. On a practical level, curators can learn a lot from designers about different techniques for translating theoretical ideas into displays and visitor experiences. Hopefully designers, too, want to hear theoretically informed critiques of their work.

Bob White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Montreal, where he directs LABRRI (http://labrri.net/?lang=en ), a “laboratory” for research, teaching and development of expertise in intercultural relations. White highlighted the issue of power as he evoked Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a key touchstone for collaborative research. Activist and populist in its orientation, Participatory Action Research has most resonance in Canada in relation to shifts in power relations, since The Sprit Sings, between aboriginal communities and museums. These shifts extend far beyond exhibition development, to include museological training, policies and protocols, access to collections for research and community needs, repatriation, and youth education. An exemplary institution in this regard is the Museum of Anthropology (http://moa.ubc.ca/about/ ) at the University of British Columbia, of which Ruth Phillips is a former director. Participatory Action Research focuses explicitly on addressing the needs and interests of all parties involved. While some community consultation models can be paternalistic, a collaborative model following Participatory Action Research would allow for communities to co-create and plan projects.

The group’s discussion led me to conclude that collaboration is a slippery term whose meaning cannot be taken for granted. As White noted, we can think of collaboration as a technique, an ethic, and an epistemology (see White 2012). It forces us to ask nuts and bolts type questions (What decisions were made prior to the collaboration and how is this understood by different participants?), but also to think about big questions related to negotiating diversity in public culture. Adding nuance to our discussion, Kratz reminded us that exhibitions are both processes and events, with both aspects offering different opportunities for collaboration and communication. As forms of collaboration and visitor participation multiply with new uses of social media, I sense that we will need increasingly to talk about multiple moments of collaboration, negotiation (and failures of communication), in the germination, life, and afterlife of exhibitions.

By Shelley Ruth Butler

Center for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence