Ten thousand nights at the museum

New MSU Museum director Mark Auslander has stories to tell

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Mark Auslander juggles cultural, artistic and scientific interests as the director of Central Washington University's Museum of Culture and the Environment. In July, he will leave that post to take over as director of the MSU Museum.
Photo by Ellen Schattschneider

In spite of all the talk about a post-truth society, Mark Auslander insists that he “is not willing to give up on the truth thing.” But the truth is often unsettled and unsettling.

In July, Auslander, 56, takes over as director of the MSU Museum. He comes to campus with the truth wriggling in his portfolio like a slippery eel.

“How do we create exhibitions around the toughest stuff?” Auslander asked. “How do you create an exhibition around lynching?”

Auslander helped to do just that at Emory University in 2002, in the heart of Georgia, where he worked with the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site on an emotionally wrenching exhibit of lynching postcards, “Without Sanctuary.”

Before that, he was on the team that overhauled the Smithsonian Institution’s old African exhibit, widely decried as a racist relic of great-white-hunter times. The new exhibit, “African Voices,” became a prototype for a community-based museum model he plans to bring to MSU.

On a recent visit to MSU, Auslander talked about museum culture’s big shift from lecturing to listening, from ”voice of God” authority to a flexible fusion of academic expertise and old-fashioned story-telling — a shift he helped to bring about.

Slow release capsule

Picture a stereotypical museum curator, fussing over flint arrows and farmstead furniture, organizing baskets and bones, and you are as far from Auslander’s career profile as you can be.

For Auslander and a whole new cohort of museum directors, the key to doing a controversial exhibit is opening the process up to the community the museum serves.

Recent exhibits at Central Washington University’s Museum of Culture and the Environment, where Auslander is wrapping up his tenure as director, have not shied from controversy.

When wolves were re-introduced into the state of Washington, curators organized listening circles at the museum where ranchers, cowboys and hunters sat across from scientists and environmental activists and debated the issue.

“Everybody had misconceptions about the folks sitting across from them,” Auslander said. “But by the end of it, everybody acknowledged they were decent people and maybe we all had something to learn.”

Auslander prizes open-ended inquiry rather than received truth — a sneaky way to get to bigger truths. “Welcome to the Kuiper Belt,” a current CWU Museum exhibit on new findings on Pluto from the New Horizons probe, ends with a carefully chosen image of the scientists at the moment they see the first pictures of Pluto coming across the screen.

“They realize everything they’ve ever known about Pluto was wrong,” Auslander said. “They’re laughing and they’re hugging each other and crying, and the third graders who visit the exhibit say, ‘Wait a minute. Science isn’t just about memorizing a bunch of stuff?’”

Auslander knows that a lot of the kids who visit the museum are home schooled or come from conservative academies “where they’re not hearing much about Charles Darwin.”

“But in a sense, I don’t care whether or not they leave believing in evolution or not,” he said. “We have injected something in there, a sort of slow release capsule of critical thinking. And they’re going to wake up a few years from now and start questioning all kinds of things.”

“Liberty Denied: Immigration, Detention, Deportation,” a winter 2016 exhibit at CWU Museum, included a detailed a look at the grim lives of two detainees at the 1,500- bed Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, run by the for-profit GEO Corporation under a contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We’ve done a few exhibitions on immigration and migration,” Auslander said. “We don’t try to tell anybody what to think, but we certainly make sure that in addition to the official line you can get on TV, there are a lot of other voices out there.”

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Painful postcards

Auslander got the museum bug growing up in Washington, D.C., and haunting the museums, especially the old History and Technology museum. He spent hours watching the famous Foucault pendulum swing to and fro, slowly tracing the Earth’s daily rotation on the dial underneath.

Seeing the unseen turned him on.

“Everybody said you can’t see the Earth rotating, but there, you could,” he said.

As a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, he lived in villages in Zambia and neighboring African countries. He came back to the U.S. convinced that there is a “deep human desire to tell our own stories, to see ourselves in museums.”

“Every community, even the ones that had been ravaged by war, wanted a museum,” he said. “They wanted to tell their story.

Traveling the U.S., Auslander realized that you don’t have to be a village dweller in Zambia to feel shut out of museums.

“I realized many people here had never had that experience, either,” he said.

But the stories that needed telling were sometimes unbearably painful.

For Auslander, the toughest test of what a museum can do came in 2000, when a collection of 150 postcards depicting lynchings was donated to Emory University, where he and his wife, Ellen Schattschneider, were both teaching. When lynchings were at their height, around 1900, hundreds of thousands of these postcards were circulating.

“It’s hard to believe it, but in the late 19th and early 20th century America, one of the most popular genres of photography were postcards of lynching,” Auslander said. “The question becomes: What do you do? Do we exhibit this stuff or do we lock it away in a vault?”

Auslander and a team of researchers and curators fanned out to schools, barbershops, libraries and other social hubs in African-American neighborhoods. They went to synagogues, too, because Jews were also lynched.

“We heard from the black community, ‘Do this exhibition, but do it right. Don’t show us as abject victims.’” Auslander said. “Most important — and we heard this again and again — don’t leave out the names.”

Alongside the postcards, the exhibit showed the long and multi-faceted struggle against lynching, not only via armed resistance and political fights, but also through culture — art, literature, poetry and music.

The exhibition's opening ceremony was held at the New Ebenezer Church, in Martin Luther King’s neighborhood.

“Young people read off the names of every single person who had been lynched in Georgia who was in the photographs,” Auslander said.

A passionate research team, including students recruited from troubled neighborhoods in south Atlanta, had tracked down every name.

Nearly 200,000 people came through the exhibit in six months. Many of them had never been to a museum before.

The MSU Museum opened in 1857, making it one of the nation's oldest, and has amassed a collection of about a million objects.
Photo courtesy of MSU

Auslander was amazed to see visitors scrutinizing every caption. “People usually walk on by, but this one — people had a sense it was something serious,” he said.

The museum team got permission to hold the closing ceremony in Old Ebenezer Church, at King’s old pulpit, where students, staff and young people read emotional messages from the visitors’ comment books.

“Amazing things happened every day at that exhibit,” he said. “And that was only because we worked so hard with the community first. Before we even started to paint the walls, everybody had signed on to the design.”

‘Voice of God’

No matter where Auslander has gone, from Africa to Georgia to Washington, D.C. to Washington state, he’s followed a simple formula for finding stories: look around.

For another exhibit at Emory, Auslander and other researchers simply talked with the university’s custodial staff.

“Five generations back, their ancestors in slavery times had built Emory College,” Auslander said. “They taught us about that history, and we created exhibitions about that. Who really built the place and who takes care of it?”

Again, the curators were urged not to focus exclusively on victimization.

“Everybody in this community went to school,” Auslander said. “Parents may have been washing clothes, working fields to send their kids to college. They wanted us to tell that story.”

The idea for the conclusion of the exhibit came from community interviews: a big vintage radio where the black community in Oxford, Georgia, including everybody who worked at Emory, got together to listen to boxer Joe Louis’ victories.

“We never would have thought of that in a million years,” Auslander said. “The old folks remembered what it was like.”

Working with non-academics to create exhibits opened Auslander’s eyes to a new world of possibilities.

“After that, you realize the museum world can change,” he said. “We have to tear down these walls, and we have a lot to learn.”

In the late 1990s and early aughts, Auslander tackled one of his biggest jobs, the “re-imagining” of the African exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The old Africa hall was shut down in 1992 after complaints about racist content. People of color were put off by its paternalistic, voyeuristic “darkest Africa” vibe. In the middle of a city that is predominantly African-American, Auslander saw shockingly few visitors of color.

But what should take its place?

Modern museum studies programs routinely teach partnership between scientifically trained curators and community stakeholders, “but back then, we didn’t know how to do this,” Auslander said.

Opening the process to community input can get messy when every object is fraught with cultural consequence. In one particularly passionate dispute at the Smithsonian, the Somali community wanted to include an aqal, a nomadic house that can be carried by women every night on camels and rebuilt every morning.

“We had that object,” Auslander said. “But for many African-Americans, schoolteachers and businessmen, it looked to them like a mud hut and it was kind of insulting.”

To complicate matters, the shape of the aqal is associated in Somali poetry with the belly of a pregnant mother.

“So to attack the aqal is to attack their mother,” Auslander said. “Each side was shouting at each other, furious.”

The team’s solution was a spectacular, inclusive panorama of African architecture.

“We had skyscrapers, highways, modern transportation, but also many kinds of environmentally sustainable strategies — including the aqal,” Auslander said.

Men and women were invited to decorate their halves of the aqal. The men brought an AK-47.

“We couldn’t have put it in there after Sept. 11, but that’s what they wanted in there,” Auslander said. “They didn’t want the traditional dagger.”

The exhibit was re-named “African Voices,” with audio tours by a variety of people from many walks of life.

“It wasn’t the ‘voice of God,’ usually the white curator,” Auslander said. “We had voices from all over the continent — market vendors, scientists, athletes. It became a different kind of space.”

But the process took eight years and bruised a few egos.

“It was hard for scholars who devoted their life to the scientific study of Africa to hear what they were doing wrong, unconsciously shutting out a whole bunch of people, but the payoff was enormous,” Auslander said.

Tearing down the wall

Auslander wasn’t destined to come to MSU. In fact, he and Schattschneider had just closed on a house in Washington when they got the offer to direct the MSU Museum last year.

“I thought I was happy where I was,” he said. But the more he heard about the museum and MSU, the more intrigued he became.

He remembered a conversation with Michael Rush, the founding director of MSU’s Broad Art Museum, who died in 2012. Rush and Auslander both were professors at Brandeis University and worked together to save the Rose Art Museum’s art collection from being sold off by the university.

“He’d always thought the MSU Museum, just around the corner from the Broad, had amazing possibilities,” Auslander said.

Like CWU’s museum, the MSU Museum has a wide range of exhibits, from archaeology to natural history, art and history.

“I’m used to the cross-fertilization of all those things, but this is on a much broader scale, with more than a million objects here,” he said. “And a lot of the history of American museums is tied up in this building, and that’s exciting. It’s one of the older American museums and the oldest in Michigan.”

Museums were changing radically when the MSU Museum opened in 1857, turning away from cabinets of curiosities ogled by aristocrats to institutions of public enlightenment.

“But that certain aristocratic spirit always sneaks back into museums,” Auslander said. “The challenge for every generation is to find new ways to tear down the walls.”

For now, Auslander views the museum as a sleeping giant, ripe for an awakening.

“When people find their way in, they realize it’s a hidden gem,” he said. “It has an amazing staff — 15 extremely skilled curators and some of the most skilled museum educators I’ve ever seen in action.”

He expects to spend a lot of his first year or so at MSU getting the lay of the land, listening not only to students and faculty on campus but anyone with stories to tell.

He wants to work with schools in Lansing and East Lansing to offer more kids, especially from disadvantaged areas, a chance to do hands-on science and art.

“It’s informal education, but you can do an awful lot, even in a 20- or 45-minute visit to the museum,” he said.

He also plans to build a cohort of “youth curators” to chronicle various aspects of life as it is actually lived in the neighborhoods of Lansing.

“They’ll be measuring the purity of water, doing drawings of where the grass is, observing new kinds of hairstyles and what happened in hip hop this week,” he said. “They’re the experts.”

The youth curators will work with museum staff and students to create pop-up exhibits, in school cafeterias and libraries at first and then in the museum.

“The university and Lansing are fantastic living laboratories our students could learn so much from,” Auslander said.

MSU’s other new museum director, the Broad’s Marc-Olivier Wahler, is just a dinosaur bone’s throw away. Collaborations are inevitable.

“Marc-Olivier and I share a love of the conversation between science and art,” Auslander said. “In the Renaissance, they were all the same thing, and we need to get back to that spirit.”

The MSU Museum’s million-object collection is scattered across campus, in both exhibition and storage. That gives Auslander one more thing to dream about — a new building.

“Down the road, who knows?” he mused. “We may be finding ways to unite (the collection) and create a space that is deeply welcoming and transparent and let community people around town and across mid- Michigan to feel it’s their museum.”

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