Seeing Hard History at the Walters Art Museum
A Student Researcher Looks and Looks Again
When students become involved in the work of historical reckoning, they bring fresh eyes to ongoing scenes in which hard histories can be discovered and then made more visible. We’re delighted to share some of these perspectives with you this summer. — Emma Katherine Bilski
In recent years, Johns Hopkins University and the Walters Art Museum have undergone similar reckonings with how racism has shaped their histories. During the “Hard Histories: The Walters Art Museum” webinar, which originally aired on March 5, 2023, I was surprised by the parallels between these two institutions. In the years following the Civil War, a founder of the Walters promoted the Lost Cause myth while at the same moment Mr. Johns Hopkins was founding a university, hospital and orphan asylum.
Both Hard Histories at Hopkins and the Walters are committed to community engagement. Webinar guest, Theresa Sotto, the Ruth R. Marder Director of Learning and Community Engagement at the Walters, emphasized the importance of community engagement and the power embedded in the stories that institutions tell. Ms. Sotto explained that the Walters aims to give Baltimore community members a more active role in exhibition design and shared the example of the “Activating the Renaissance.” The exhibit paired works by local, contemporary artists with artworks from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, side-by-side in the Walter’s galleries.
Ms. Sotto did a great job of explaining the responsibilities that museums have to their communities and her insights equally apply to our work at Hard Histories. This brought to mind how our team regularly engages with a general public by way of a webinar series, public dialogues, and this Substack. In the process, we invite interaction through providing references that encourage other researchers to fill in gaps and expand on our work.
Ms. Sotto’s presentation encouraged us to consider the full meaning of community engagement in light of how much of the Walters’s collection is comprised of European and Euro-American art. The museum does have art from Africa, the Indigenous Americas, and Asia. However, only when these items are displayed with a critical explanation of their origins, such as colonialism, can the museum avoid furthering the violence that first brought such works to the Walters. Ms. Sotto explained that it would be disingenuous to exhibit Asian art, for example, if the curation team did not address questions about from where the artworks came and how they came to part of the Walter’s collection. I am happy that the staff at the Walters is asking these questions about their displays, as it allows visitors to understand the collection in a hard histories context.
One of the Webinar’s most interesting discussions was about the challenge of making difficult histories more visible for visitors. Dr. Jones introduced a Baltimore School for the Arts student-led “guerilla art” project that marked the museum’s Hackerman House (also known as 1 Mount Vernon Place) as a site where enslaved people had once lived and worked, among them a woman named Sybby Grant. The museum learned something new about its own past, and it was a lesson for us all.
When the past is not visible, visitors, even native-born Baltimoreans, might walk through the city and overlook traces of it hard histories. This discussion insight struck a chord with debates in our Hard Histories Spring 2023 lab about how to remind our community of the existence of a forgotten institution: The Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum. We also concluded that our work was suited to a “guerilla” installation which we staged in May 2023.
Ms. Sotto further built upon the theme of visibility, telling us about efforts to make connections between the museum and the racist past more evident through exhibits in Hackerman House itself. I deeply appreciate this work. Still, on a recent visit to the Walters, I looked for some acknowledgment of its founders’ political and artistic support for the Confederacy but had trouble finding it, or anything about these histories, outside of the confines of Hackerman House itself. For visitors like me, more information on the museum’s walls about its efforts to address this past would be appreciated.
I learned from Theresa Sotto that the Walters Art Museum is doing important work by giving more “hard” context to its exhibitions, exposing its connections to histories of slavery and racism, and becoming a more active member of the Baltimore community. This work is on-going and I am excited to visit again in a few years to discover how different the museum may look as it fulfills these newly defined goals. I also bring this hope to our work in the Hard Histories Research Lab where we aim to change Johns Hopkins University for the better.
Matt Palmer, KSAS BA ‘23
Emma Katherine Bilski, Editor
Good and informative look at Walters and its efforts to place its cultural assets and former leaders into a Hard History context. Final words especially important; that current efforts are progress and not complete. Thanks.