Dylan Cleverly is a writer and artist based in Boston, MA. He will be pursuing a Master's degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University in the fall.

Our right to imagine is under siege. While the Trump administration unravels America’s safety nets, dissolves our most critical research and aid, and weaponizes the state against our most vulnerable, our collective imagination of a just future is becoming hazier. bell hooks identified the creative imagination as the last frontier of colonialism, only at risk if one surrenders to collective despair.1  Art has never been more important. New exhibits at the Brooklyn Museum and National Public Housing Museum challenge us to resist and reimagine.

Facilitating interactions between creatives and the public, museums hold an essential role in protecting the public’s ability to imagine. Museums are critical spaces of cultural heritage and laboratories where institutional representations of history can be challenged, critiqued, and revised. The Trump administration continues to target museums and the arts through sweeping budget cuts and ideological limits on what can (and can’t) be exhibited in federal museums. A particular executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, targeted an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that explored American sculpture and the construction of race.2 The order directly quotes the show’s accompanying text, which interrogates the relationship between race and power, as an example of anti-American ideology. Promises follow to reinstate American values in the institution. If our museums are unable to challenge hegemony, our story will be written for us. If the artists best prepared to visualize the change we desperately seek are unable to do so, our future will be determined by those in power.

To me, museum-going has always been as much an exercise in imagining the future as it is in considering the past. I was raised by a single mom with a degree in art history who brought me to art exhibitions while my friends flocked to the beach during elementary school vacation week. I was an odd kid with a bowl cut that covered my eyes and an avid interest in birding; I was most excited to see the taxidermies at the Museum of Natural History during an early trip to D.C.. Yet, the only part of the trip I can vividly recall was a stop at the Phillips Collection, which houses half of Jacob Lawrence’s famed Migration series. 

I dreamt of where the grandchildren of Lawrence’s geometric abstractions might be, and I left with a yearning to learn about the world that surrounded Lawrence’s canvas. The museum became an incubator for my imagination, and art became a medium in which I could consider my world. In the years that followed, the contemporary museum grew alongside me, featuring an increasingly diverse slate of visionaries who offered me an education and imagination that I couldn’t have cultivated in my predominantly white classrooms. 

Counterintuitively, the administration’s anti-art agenda and imposed threats to creative liberties have left me desiring more from the museum. 

In Participating in the Neoliberal Art Museum, scholars Rina Kundu and Nadine M. Kalin introduce the notion of "sticky-note participation," a recent trend in exhibitions where audiences are prompted to jot down their reflections on a sticky note and place it on a pinboard near the end of the exhibition.3  These exit surveys typically appear in collections that challenge viewers’ thinking by presenting issues related to race, sexuality, imperialism, etc. Sticky notes offer a criminally small surface to pen a nuanced reflection, and may produce the opposite effect of their intended use; instead of sparking questions and opening dialogue, they encourage viewers to summarize their learnings on a few square inches. Like similar modes of performative engagement, sticky notes are tidy; they don’t require extensive outreach or navigating the sensitivities of developing effective cultural programming. They allow the museum to remain a distant entity: overseeing the conversation, but not entering it. Of course, this is only one example of the limitations of the Neoliberal Art Museum, but it is an effective way of demonstrating the need for facilitating deeper modes of engagement, especially when considering museums as sites of radical imagination.

When pressured to facilitate institutional changes that transcend optics or signal a break from neoliberal values (like exhibiting Palestinian artists or severing ties with weapon manufacturers), our largest institutions remain reluctant. This lingering hesitancy to structurally reckon with promises in 2020 to "listen and learn" from marginalized communities results in stinging irony. At worst, shallow commitments to inclusion absolve institutions from reform, and at best, they offer inclusion into a system that can’t promise adequate support to the most vulnerable creatives.

I want to draw your attention to two examples of facilitating radical imagination: the first suitable for encyclopedic museums that feature didactic exhibitions, and the other for museums that rely on community engagement and locality. 

Toward Joy at the Brooklyn Museum: Radical Transparency & Subverting the Canon

In 2005, the Brooklyn Museum opened its American Art storage to the public, softening the divide between exhibition and archive. Accessed through the American wing, the Visible Storage and Study Center allows visitors to step behind exhibition walls, traversing between the works on view and the repository from which they were selected in succession. Tall glass vitrines house the museum’s collection, organized and classified with little clarifying text, contributing to the impression of stepping into an authentic cross-section. 

Exposing the museum’s innards reveals more than a hidden cache. The parallel placement of archive and exhibition discloses the curator’s ability to shape history. This notion is best illustrated by conceptual artist Fred Wilson’s installation at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, Mining the Museum. Wilson reconfigured the museum’s collection, pulling items from the institution’s existing archives to reveal a brutal story about chattel slavery on American soil. For example, Metalwork 1793-1880 featured the typical ornate silverware one may find in a local history museum, but a pair of metal slave shackles prominently occupied the center of the display. 

The curator wields great narrative power, and the same artifacts that once told a story of unbridled American patriotism could expose state-sanctioned brutality. When curators pull limited works from museum archives to constitute a canon, they possess the power to (re)frame history. 

In 2024, the Brooklyn Museum completely reimagined the American Art wing. Titled Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, the reinstallation featured an aesthetic and conceptual overhaul of the American Art wing, inspired by Black Feminism. Works that had previously represented America at the Brooklyn Museum (rendered mostly by white, male artists) were relegated to storage, which, given the Brooklyn Museum’s unique footprint, meant they were still accessible but no longer centered. White walls were seldom visible; the exhibition’s vibrant wallpapers and salon-style hanging contributed to the impression that this American story had new narrators. 

Divided by conceptual subthemes and ideological frameworks rather than periods or geographies, the exhibition's organization disrupted hegemonic methods of representing history through art. “Several Seats,” named after a turn of phrase that emerged from the Black and Latino ballroom scene, featured wall didactics written by drag queens and a sculptural prototype of a chair designed to honor the words of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm: “If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” While perhaps the most innovative of the subthemes, all rooms featured unique curatorial threads that encouraged viewers to consider history through a poetic framework. The resulting presentation allowed visitors to think conceptually, as opposed to passively accepting a curator’s vision of what belongs in the existing canon. What results is an attractive alternative to the sticky note; instead of the classroom-simulating written reflection, Toward Joy treats the museum-goer as an intellectual contributor by entrusting them to adopt frameworks authored by members of the communities centered in the show. 

The encyclopedic museum’s power lies in its ability to remain fixed despite the rapid change occurring at its margins. Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art presented a theoretical overhaul of the art museum’s role in representing the nation, and, in turn, offered the Brooklyn Museum encyclopedic credibility in its willingness to represent nationhood with nuance from new perspectives. Poignant in a willingness to reconsider the canon and center the cultural contributors who hone their craft from the margins, a rich repository and its contributors prospered throughout the kaleidoscopic view of America offered in Toward Joy. 

National Public Housing Museum: What could a museum accomplish if it opened doors for others before opening its own? 

In April of last year, Chicago’s National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) opened after eighteen years of extensive public programming, research, and engagement. Informed by thorough oral histories and housed within the only remaining building from the Chicago Housing Authority’s Jane Addams Homes, the museum features reconstructed apartments and an exhibition of ephemera from public housing, accompanied by labels written by current and former residents. The museum offered art workshops, teach-ins, toolkits, free workshops in professional development, and classes in museum education and oral history development to public housing residents, low-income individuals, and communities of color before opening. The adaptive reuse renovation of the original 1936 building features 3 preserved apartments on view, office space, programming areas, and 15 new affordable housing units.

Every step in the museum’s conception and execution demonstrated consideration for the community it sought to represent through lasting partnerships. Representation courses through the museum; nearly a quarter of the museum’s board is comprised of former public housing residents, including the chair and vice chair. It’s clear that, after eighteen years of programming, the National Public Housing Museum wanted to get it right. By cultivating community trust, the museum also benefits; the stories shared by former residents create a rich educational space for visitors. This rigorous inclusivity should become standard practice for institutions that seek to represent diverse populations, whether a racial group, socioeconomic class, or locality. Most importantly, the museum doubles as a community space to uplift and dignify public housing residents. By diverting from the extractive history of both art and anthropological institutions, the National Public Housing Museum offers an alternative founded on belonging.

The museum features a volunteer-run community garden and a corner store selling goods from local vendors, offering a retail space for independent creatives. Alongside the apprenticeships, internships, and workshops held before opening, almost all programming represents small-scale redistributions of knowledge, wealth, and access to the local population. The NPHM is a site of radical imagination: a space where both stakeholders and participants can engage in new modes of community participation and guide conversations on the future of public housing. Chicago’s new social housing initiative offers renewed relevancy to a reimagined public housing sector.

The Brooklyn Museum and the NPHM differ in their intended goals; one instructs its viewers through large exhibitions featuring globally renowned creatives, while the other immerses visitors in locality through lengthy and meaningful community partnerships. Both function as laboratories of the future. If we are left without places to imagine collectively, the possibility of restructuring our fractured nation diminishes. If all art is political, we should treat it as such. We should demand that the institutions protecting it do so with fervor, challenging dominant narratives and protecting their neighbors in the process.

As a kid, Lawrence’s Migration eclipsed my memories of the National Mall because I was watching a story I hadn’t been told unfold across canvases. As executive orders demand that bronze confederate soldiers be dredged from lakebeds and school textbooks bolster their ressurection, I hope that our museums provide an irresistible alternative: a series of untold stories for those of us willing to listen.

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Banner photo credit By ajay_suresh - Brooklyn Museum - Entrance, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122165160