Interviewers: Jamie Kasulis and Elvira Alonso Interviewee: Name redacted. Referred to as V here.
Contextual Inquiry at WCMA
We conducted a contextual inquiry in WCMA with V on a Sunday evening. V is a senior at Williams College with no particular interest in museums. In fact, she expressed that she often feels significantly put-off by museums and uncomfortable during her visits to them, which were things we also observed during the contextual inquiry and took note of. V was an excellent person to interview; she provided us with important insights into the issue of “museums for all,” namely, some of the factors that might cause people of color to feel unwelcome in museums. It was also very easy to establish a rapport with her.
During the contextual inquiry, we followed V as she examined various pieces of art and navigated through the museum. On the bottom floor of WCMA, she seemed not too emotionally moved by anything. She expressed that she really relied on the explainer plaques as a way to help her into the piece, so to speak, because she did not consider herself an “art person” and expressed that sometimes she doesn’t “get it” without the extra information.
When we went upstairs, where the Dance We Must and Hawai’i exhibits were, V had a much stronger emotional reaction. She mentioned issues of colonialism, orientalism, cultural appropriation, and accountability, and expressed the opinion that WCMA was not doing a good enough job of addressing these contexts in its exhibits.
Actually, the theme of context was present throughout the contextual inquiry. V expressed that she felt it was almost impossible to feel engaged by a work if she did not have information about the context in which it was made and if she did not know how the piece related to important social and political themes. She felt that several of the exhibits failed to provide sociopolitical context to many pieces that seemed to have obvious sociopolitical relevance. This was one of the main things that turned her off from museums in general, she said, and WCMA in particular.
Narrowing Our Focus
The data gathered at WCMA makes us wonder if there is much to be explored in the realm of improving museum accessibility for people of color, as museums might fail to make people of color feel welcome by a) failing to center their stories and experiences, and b) putting ethnic/cultural effects on display in a way that feels uncomfortably “anthropological,” as V said– in other words, on display in a way that feels consumptive and potentially colonialist. We form these inferences from many different points of data our interviewee provided us throughout the contextual inquiry.
Planning Ahead
At this point, we are planning to narrow our focus to the accessibility of WCMA and museums for people of color. We hope that narrowing our focus will allow us to be more intentional about who we reach out to for contextual inquiries and interviews and the kinds of questions we might ask. V provided us with the name of another Williams student who is a Mellon Mays Fellow and has done extensive research on museum sciences and how museums are relevant to people of color issues. We hope to interview this person this week. This person might be more of a stakeholder than the kind of subejct we’d like to use for a CI, but they might be able to offer up direction for our research. We also would like to still interview a WCMA staff person to ask them about accessibility concerns at the museum at large and, specifically, what kinds of dialogue the museum has been involved in around issues relating to people of colors’ reception of WCMA exhibits.