As Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, prepares to open the latest installment of the Smithsonian in September, he’s planning for an opening kickoff that will include as many as 7,000 VIP guests and 10,000 members of the public who see the event as a “coda to the Obama administration.”
And as he gets his installments hung and sets the schedule for a weekend of gala events, Bunch is also developing plans for the museum to take on an unusual role, as a
facilitator for the latest iteration of the much-touted national conversation about race.
“We felt it was really important to take on things that might be deemed controversial or difficult,” Bunch said at a meeting with reporters and editors at the Washington Post. “And the challenge for us was to find the right tension between those moments of pain and those moments of resiliency. So we worked very hard to try to find that. This is not the Holocaust Museum. This is not a community simply defined by victimization. But rather, it’s a community that has, in many ways, helped America live up to its stated ideals.”
That meant collecting things like a guard tower and a cell from the notorious Angola Prison in Louisiana and contextualizing artifacts with longer video pieces rather than simply labeling them.
Bunch imagines the museum as a site of actual discussions, rather than simply internal dialogues. “We will have many more people than at most museums to help facilitate those conversations,” he said. Among those people are a core of volunteers who have been trained to help visitors who “might be emotional or upset by these issues” and to encourage audiences to take time in the “reflective areas” in the museum for facilitated conversations.
And the museum offers many opportunities for visitors to share their stories, whether they’re contributing family histories to the museum’s collections or simply reacting to the exhibits.
The dialogues won’t only be spontaneous. “We have an opportunity to be one of the most vigorously public-programmed parts of the Smithsonian,” Bunch said, thanks to an endowment from the Atlantic Philanthropies for “an amazing array of programs around social justice.”
As editorial page editor Fred Hiatt pointed out, that sort of programming could become a political target if the intellectual composition of the Smithsonian’s board changed.
Bunch said he was confident in his ability to please constituents on both sides of the aisle thanks to his experience at the Chicago Historical Society. And in preparation for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he has been staging smaller exhibits, among them an exploration of Thomas Jefferson’s experiences with slavery, at the National Museum of American History to test the reactions of audiences, including Virginia lawmakers.
Though Bunch insists the museum didn’t shy away from any story out of political pressure, the Angola video he and his staff brought to the Post suggested the careful path curators have to walk as they “to help the public embrace ambiguity, to not simply give simple answers to complex questions, to encourage a little work, a little learning” about loaded issues.
The video suggests that Angola’s journey from the site of a slave plantation to a prison with a well-regarded hospice program raises questions about a wide range of questions. But it doesn’t state those questions explicitly, and the video doesn’t offer definitive answers.
Bunch is well aware that audiences will step through the doors of the museum with very different assumptions.
“I’m not sure you can get people to the same place,” he told me. “What you can do is get people to be changed so that if this is a story you don’t know, or you don’t think is yours, so you can go ‘I need to rethink some of the ownership of this.’ If this is your story, you might understand it in new ways. And in a way, part of the goal politically is to do something that’s very hard in museums, to humanize the story. . . .Which hopefully allows those who might not engage to recognize the humanity, recognize the connections.”