Past ruddy brick warehouses and silk mills, we pulled into the McBride Avenue parking lot, and the three of us stepped into the lucid air, navigated the steps, stood at the railing, looked, and listened.

At least, he listened.

My mind was humming a mile a minute as it had been for three months, past actual words and articulated thoughts, more akin to a torrent of cloudy vibrations, anxiety, doubt, and fear flirting with clichéd self-admonitions and resolutions, to be safe, keep calm and carry on, just take one day at a time, keep your head high, don’t waste energy, maintain your emotional ecosystem, etc. etc. etc.

Enough!

A grim act of will shut the rusty spigot in my over-educated brain. I sought the verses of the first poet in my life, William Carlos Williams, imagined him perched at this very spot, declaiming, “A wonder! A wonder!” as ““Around the falling waters the Furies hurl!” while “the river comes pouring in above the city/and crashes from the edge of the gorge/in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists –“*

Shep was smiling. His delicate hands gripped the wrought-iron, his golden hair windblown, t-shirt rippling, eyes wide.

___

*Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. Book I (1946), pp.7,10. Revised Edition. New Directions, New York, 1995.

I saw my image wave to them, and their images waved back.

Then I clicked “End Meeting for All,” and they vanished.

And as a compiler, an amasser. Of the manuscripts and works of others; and of my own papers, crammed into boxes and pushed along the floor into the peripheral corners of the attic, saved just because I might “need” them some day in some undefined way. The boxes gather and sit silently, welcoming dust and aging imperceptibly. I walk past their closed chambers on the way to my study; and lately, in my heart of hearts, I know they cannot stay with me forever.

And most pertinently I venerate the Archives as a creator. There were others before The Creative Research Center, at other institutions and repositories when I saw the need to honor posterity before I even knew what that meant or who would live there, before the word “legacy” was implanted in my imagination. When I could not shake the thought that some day in the indeterminate future, someone would actually need a tangible record — the present serving what was to come. After decades, this mission became unshakeable, and out of it was born the CRC, coming up on ten years.

Here we are. Here you are. Yes, I agree, it is a rich site, the content (as they say) is diverse, representative, alive, vibrant, drawn from the farthest reaches of our University community, intellectual, theoretical, seasoned, raw, opinionated, reserved, humanists and scientists and artists and category-less people emerging from their niches — self-made or designated — into general illumination. That was ever my ideal. I am thrilled it has come to maturity.

But: and this is a big qualification: Now the Archive has to move – because now I accept and understand that the CRC, although proudly and originally virtual, was born out of my traditional analog sensibility and training, very much “old school.”  What good does the CRC serve if it is known only to a limited, if passionate and appreciative, constituency?

The resolution for 2020 and beyond is to disseminate, release, expand, link — to emancipate The Creative Research Center and allow its collective voice to fly and be heard across the Web as broadly as possible.

Watch this space.

Last week, at semester’s end, I sent the following note to my Honors Poetry Seminar:

Dear Everybody – I decided to share some final thoughts with you as the course is ending — to respond to the whole class in writing, instead of one person at a time, like i have been doing all semester.

my most important message to you is something i have learned as a teacher.

as you can probably tell by now, i have been teaching for a very long time, and i do not believe that a teacher’s job is just to convey/transmit information over to the student.

i do not believe that “subject matter” is the key to doing this job effectively.

rather, i believe that the most important thing a teacher can leave with a student is the ability to learn how to learn.

i even wrote and published an essay about it — if you have the time to read it, and are interested:

And so, in this respect, i can honestly say that, for me, this class has been a success, because i have fulfilled my mission as a teacher.

i am NOT saying that you didn’t “know how to learn” before you took my class. i am saying that i experienced the sensation of watching and hearing and reading you do it over the course of the past few months.

this is a thank-you letter. i appreciate that some of you thanked me in your journals, or in person, but now, it is my turn to thank you for being here and allowing yourselves to expand your minds and imaginations into the universe of world poetry and seek out the revealed truth there…

…and for being brave about the new feelings you uncovered and disclosed — that is what aletheia ἶÄλήθεια is all about

and that is why i brought it up so emphatically in class and wrote it on the board:

my one parting hope is that the door you have opened in this class will REMAIN open – and that is up to you.

Watch their lively colloquy and Q&A

Catch glimpses of the evening

And then, as my poetic mentor, William Carlos Williams, once wrote, “the world narrowed to a point.”

How many classroom doors had I closed over the past half-century? How many times had I made the liminal transition from diffuse to focused, outside to inside, restless to settled, talking to silent?

Over the course of my teaching journey from elementary through high school to higher education, from day schools to night schools, community centers to libraries, to senior centers and psychiatric hospitals, and on and on, my classroom has, at times, been delimited, ruled, and confined; and has also been “without walls,” “open,” “mixed,” and “a safe space.” Students have been seated on rugs, in wheelchairs, in rows upon rows, in circles and in rectangles.

Yet how many times, no matter where the class was convened, had my synapses habitually lit up without my stopping to think about where the students and I had come from — and where we were going?

The door to my seminar room clicked shut, and I made a point of establishing eye-contact with everyone in turn. An ineffable warmth ran through my body, as if a blanket were draped over my shoulders. I swivelled slightly to look out the window behind me. Darkness had arrived. Through the vertical blinds, I could see intimations of a snowfall. I smiled — the same smile as when I sank back into my couch at home and picked up where I left off with a good book. Now, I told everyone to turn to the act and scene in the play we had been reading for the past several weeks.

The students did so, but not with (so-called) obedience. Rather, their willingness surged over the rustling pages, accompanied by palpable readiness. I had a sudden vision of a wellspring of words gathered in an aura around each person’s head, each halo a different size and shape.

I began to call on them. The first to speak did not respond by obligation; they offered up replies, theories, and interpretations with hesitant pride tempered by vulnerability.  Others chimed in, not to score points on the participation scale, but predicated upon what the person across the table had just said. Still others listened, preferring to hold back until they felt the right moment had come.

Every so often, during a pause, I would ask myself, “Should I interject and say what I believe, or keep my mouth shut, and let them all forge ahead without me?” Most of the time, I behaved myself – until, again as usual, despite my best intentions, I forgot the discipline of pedagogical restraint, my engines cranked up and I started sermonizing. Finished, face flushed, I apologized to their respectful silence. The students didn’t seem to mind — or, diplomatically, didn’t let on if they minded or not.

After one especially provocative question, deep into the second hour of class, the group introspection was so thickly-gathered nobody moved or breathed.

And I heard it: the blessed chorus of collective thought.

, Theatre & Dance – It is hard to know how to talk about the impact of our current sociocultural/political climate. I’ll start where I always start, with my body. I feel the pressure changes on my skin, the air shifts around me. My body feels heavy, rough, exposed. My breath is sharp. My eyes are wide, darting. Every little act of hate I witness cuts. I feel betrayed. My trust in the landscape around me has been disintegrating for the past few years as I’ve witnessed the racism thrown at Obama and protestors, the casual misogyny of the “Bernie-bros” and the gross misogyny of Trump and his apologists, and the echo-chambers that are curated social media news feeds. I am especially frightened and destabilized by the large-scale shift away from of critical discourse and critical analysis that allowed us to be vulnerable to Russian influence hacking. My initial impulse is always to disengage. And to daydream. To become a utopian imaginer. As an art maker, I’ve always been fascinated more by the future than the past or even the present. But these days, in this body, I am confronted with the present. In the studio, I’ve started to slow down, ask more questions. The biggest question: why are we doing this? I don’t know if I have the answer now. But I still show up, and I still book rehearsal space, and I still teach artistic skills to my students. But I think the work has a bigger sense of urgency now. BE PRESENT. BE AWAKE. BE READY. As dancers, as artists, we know how to do this. Maybe this is the role we play in the current world? In my technique class the other day, I went on a rant when my students were performing a step with a kind of cold technical detachment. “Where is your imagination, your humanity? Your thoughts, your dreams? Why aren’t they here in this moment? Your imagination is yours, no one can take it away from you. We can never change the world if we can’t imagine a new one.”

HARRY W. HAINES, Communications Studies – I’ve taken to riding the tram to Roosevelt Island a few times each month. I go on solo pilgrimages to contemplate FDR’s enormous bronze head, the Four Freedoms etched in stone, and the most dramatic view of his generation’s postwar vision, the UN buildings on the Manhattan side of the East River. Sometimes I sit, reading an old New Yorker or scribbling some notes, but most often I just think about what’s goin’ on, in the sense that Marvin Gaye asked the question. The phrase subclinical malaiseÂť comes to mind. That’s how a sociologist described the consciousness of Vietnam War vets somewhere in the 1970s, and it summed up the psychological dislocation that many of us felt as we navigated the World, having purged our military service from our resumes, trying to get back to “normal” in a society where “normal” was hard to come by. I remember experiencing it as simply anger, but it was probably more complex than that. During the last six months, I have felt transported back to that condition, and I am not alone. Family, friends, co-workers, strangers on the train, all seem off-balance and often pissed-off. My vet buddies especially so. prompted therapeutic phone calls during which a few of us suggested to each other that we needed to take R&R, not just from µţłÜ°ů˛Ô˛ő’ intense reimagining of the war, but from Trump’s America itself. I don’t like the condition. In fact, I resent it. I have done my time with American weirdness, and I didn’t willingly sign-up for it in the 70’s, let alone now. There seems to be a systematic attempt to undermine social and political norms, or perhaps it isn’t systematic at all. Perhaps it’s just the collateral psychic damage of the narcissism and contempt that play out in the Tweets and get amplified nightly by our thoroughly fractured media system. I can’t help but take it personally. Trump beat the Vietnam draft by means of a bone spur diagnosis that still raises more than a few eyebrows among my crowd of aging draftees. The disrespectful comments about McCain, the claim that a bad-boy prep school provides better training than most actual soldiers receive, the comment that Retreat was being played to honor his or Hannity’s TV ratings, the gratuitous humiliation of transgender soldiers, and the self-disclosure of the hardness, the distress, the personal suffering involved in communicating with Gold Star parents leads me to conclude that we should not thank the current crop of returning warriors for their service. We should apologize to them. So, that’s the frame of mind that contextualizes my current work, including a memoir about my experience as a gay soldier at Cam Ranh Bay and my initial research for a literary biography of W.D. Ehrhart, the Wilfred Owen of my generation. I am often immersed in the Vietnam War archive at LaSalle University. Come to find out, the anger actually helps. There’s a lot to be said for sublimation. And the anger is familiar. I, along with so many others, have been here before, whether we like it or not. With the benefit of maturity and a bit of luck, we may actually be able to use it productively against the tyranny that threatens us all.

MARISSA SILVERMAN, Music – One of my recent publications is Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis. This book investigates the very issues your WHY ART NOW? symposium seeks to address. We have a website that further illustrates the ideas in the book.

ANONYMOUS – The current climate outside of ourselves is so loud, disjointed, and polarized that fight or flight reflexes are on overdrive. Returning to the body, which is an environment of healing, collaboration between systems, and possibilities, has never felt more necessary. The students come to class and rehearsal and they seem overwhelmed; but after they begin to move together, collaborate, problem solve, I observe them tuning to each other, and a vitality and resilience return.

JULIE HEFFERNAN, Visual Arts – I started a series of paintings featuring with the desire to scold, to lambaste the likes of Exxon Mobil and other degraders of our precious environment, to expose their depredations of the land, and to publicize in high resolution what they have wrought. This seemed to me to be the only subject worth giving time to. What are our talents for — if not to further our most cherished beliefs, critique societal ills and serve our deepest concerns? But attentive painting does not lend itself well to propaganda and I was saved from my own zeal by the pull of art’s greater wisdom, that is: letting the paintings tell their own stories. What I discovered underneath the desire to make painting into a screed was a more interesting journey of the imagination, there for the uncovering. We are at a momentous point in history. We find ourselves at another cusp, one that will certainly prove to be as wild an upheaval to life-as-we-know-it as the Industrial Revolution was for all those farmers like my grandfather, who worked by the seasons and wasn’t controlled by a time clock. I see similar furies to our own simmering in the work of as he confronted the particular struggles of his time: the changes that technical progress and industrialization wrought on both the landscape and civil society. Today, instead of locomotives tearing a wound through pristine wilderness or the timber industry logging out old growth forests, it’s the invisible nature of our environmental problems that we have to contend with as well as the overt ones. Whether it be Monsanto’s poisons creating superweeds and superbugs, or the Keystone XL pipeline running stealthily through the Ogallala aquifer, potentially contaminating our biggest underground freshwater supply, the average person can’t see what’s happening to the world, because the causes of toxicity can be thousands of miles away, or simply kept secret. As we know all too well, Greed and Secrecy are co-habitants in toxic practices, whether manifest in Trump’s and Weinstein’s crotch grabbing or governments creating endless wars for multinationals to profit from. And yet, as a painter, I am still drawn to Beauty and Art, to the cultural artifacts and rhetorical devices that allow us to imagine a better world. Art reminds us to believe in powerful imagery that can manifest truth and change minds. Whatever happens with the slowly rising waters and wild fluctuations in precipitation, it will be incumbent upon us to figure things out fast, bringing real inventiveness to confront those dilemmas whose outlines we can barely recognize. It will be a journey of the most profound sort, and I am always keen for a good journey: that is what, in miniature, the painting process offers me practice in: imagination as a mechanism for preparation. Unlike the kinds of pre-packaged adventures video games offer, painting a world allows the maker to have real skin in the game, as she must research and invent the terms of that particular world, while virtually living it. Like the game Chutes and Ladders, whose basic thrust is to fly down slides and plod up pathways, I make my paintings with the idea of a journey in mind, encountering in that imagined space what I need to see and experience in microcosm in order to understand the huge reality of our actual predicament. Things are heating up fast, but we still have art to slow us down, give us pause to imagine alternatives and how they might be achieved.

BRADLEY FORENZA, Social Work & Child Advocacy – These Ai Weiwei exhibits on immigration have been installed throughout New York City. The installations are quite provocative, and– I think– accomplish exactly what art should accomplish.

ERHARD ROM, Theatre & Dance – Art is not escapism. Art is contemplative. Art allows us to see the world more clearly, providing a means for us to contemplate everything imaginable without it affecting our personal needs, wants or desires. “things are certainly beautiful to behold, but to be them is something quite different.” “aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves.” “Aesthetics is at the heart of philosophy for Schopenhauer: art and aesthetic experience not only provide escape from an otherwise miserable existence, but attain an objectivity explicitly superior to that of science or ordinary empirical knowledge.” Aesthetic contemplation is the highest form or thought humans are capable of achieving in life. Art forces us to confront ultimate reality good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Art provides a means for exploration of the unknown and opens door for all who are curious. Art strives to reveal ultimate truth. Art and Science both strive to uncover the truth, but one picks up where the other leaves off, so both are essential. Art is known to produce something the French call – – Skin Orgasm (known only to 2/3 of the population). An interesting article: Results from the personality test showed that the listeners who experienced frisson also scored high for a personality trait called openness to experience. Studies have shown that people who possess this trait have unusually active imaginations, appreciate beauty and nature, seek out new experiences, often reflect deeply on their feelings, and love variety in life. Some aspects of this trait are inherently emotional (loving variety, appreciating beauty), while others are cognitive (imagination, intellectual curiosity).

ELIZABETH McPHERSON, Theatre & Dance – When I was in college, I had a button on my jean jacket that said “the time has come for peace.” (one of my favorite and most beloved teachers) stopped me in the hall and said, “the time has always been for peace — it is not something for just right now.” I thought about it, agreed with him, took the button off, and dropped it in the trash. I tell this because I do not think now is a more or less important time for art than any other time. Art reflects/investigates/comments on human experience. It does not just begin or stop. However, in thinking about the prevalence of violence in the larger world and our own communities at present, I have thought about what we are saying through the productions we put on. Because I often stage other choreographers’ works instead of choreographing my own, I have been pondering if there is a dance that might be particularly relevant that I might consider re-staging, like Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table or . Those dances speak to man’s inhumanity to man. But on the other hand, maybe it would be better to stage a dance that speaks to the goodness in people, that focuses on hope.

, Yoga & Meditation Teacher – From my perspective in the healing arts, given my background in yoga and meditation, I’ve noticed a marked increase in the level of stress that my students are shouldering over the past nine months. The election and state of the world – including natural disasters happening with unprecedented regularity – seems to have created a bit of a vortex that has been difficult for many to climb out of. I spend much more time now teaching simple practices – focus on breath, simple stretches, restorative poses, meditation and compassion practices. My students are responding best to these cues: (1) whatever you came from, and whatever you have to do next, you can lay to the side because this [e.g. laying on your back and breathing] is the most important thing. Just for right now, give yourself permission to be here and no matter where else your mind takes you, gently remind it that you came here for a reason, whether it had a name or it was just a feeling in your body; (2) take a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth. (Sighing breath is a strategy for activating parasympathetic nervous system response); (3) let your body feel the support of the props. No matter how heavy you feel, know that there is something meeting you, supporting you from beneath, allowing you to be lifted and to feel buoyant. (restorative yoga postures are held for long periods of time with the support of props creating an opportunity for muscle tension to become neutral and the nervous system to reset.) This small bit of evidence in my life leads me to believe that people are hungry for beauty and release. The healing arts treat our bodies like a canvas and I believe people come to these classes because they are hungry to paint something simple, beautiful and peaceful on their canvas.

SARAH GHOSHAL, Writing Studies – As a poet, one of the first lessons I was ever taught in a formal setting about the importance of my art was of my responsibility as an artist. I have often been pointed toward Adrienne Rich’s famous speech in this regard – that it is the poet’s responsibility to inform the world, to speak out against injustice, to be a part of a larger and more important conversation than the one between herself and the blank page in front of her. I believe this is true now, maybe more than it was then, and especially in light of the current political and social climates in our country. If artists don’t use their voices to bring light to injustice, then why are we creating art? One might argue that we are doing it for beauty and wonder, and that’s a valid and important argument. But I would argue that art, in any form – poetry, journalism, visual art, creative memoir, or any of the very many others – is a mouthpiece, a way to bring both sides of any issue into the open and to start dialogues. Many of my friends joke about being afraid to speak out right now, but doesn’t this, just the fact that they feel the need to “joke” about this, even more of a reason to speak? Just as the to speak out against an injustice that they have witnessed, artists can and should use their platforms to teach and to foster intelligent, reasonable, nuanced thinking. Why art now? Because we need it more than ever.

For my part, having led an Arts Advocacy life, I am moved to revive some affectionate memories about the NEA –and how, during its first decade as a new federal agency, its financial assistance enabled me to make my mark as an emerging poet.

Yes, you read that right: poet.

In June, 1973, I received my PhD in Modern American Poetry from the State University of New York at Buffalo. My mentor, the great Robert Creeley, wrote the preface for my dissertation, a descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts and letters of . I began to send out my own poems, and , and, after enough of my work was published in the so-called “little” magazines, I brought forth a slender letterpress poetry collection with the .

Most thrilling of all, I launched a three-year career as an itinerant teacher in a program called New York State Poets-in-the-Schools. I got up each morning bright and early in my little apartment in downtown Buffalo, made a cup of coffee (Starbucks hadn’t been invented), gathered my looseleaf notebooks and box of chalk and well-thumbed copies of various poetry anthologies, stuffed them into my satchel, jumped into my car — and drove.

My travels would take me to the inner city one day, a sprawling K-12 suburban campus on another, and, farther afield, fifty miles due north, to the midst of windswept, snow-crusted farmlands where the rural district school building stood like a fortress.

This long-haired, skinny, wire-rimmed glasses wearing, language-obsessed, earnest young fellow in his twenties – that’s me — striding around like an adrenaline-fuelled, idealistic minstrel (“Here comes the poetry man!”), inspired kids to write down their earliest memories, a dream they had last night, a few lines about their favorite animal, what it felt like when their grandmother got sick, or the first time they spent a weekend away from home. and tacked them to the bulletin board.

I actually had a paying job as a working poet. Thanks to funding received by the from the National Endowment for the Arts, I made $75 a day. Moreover, the literary magazines with stapled bindings and mimeographed pages that published my early poems, the independent press that brought forth my slim volume of verse, and the poetry magazine I edited and published all thrived, thanks to grants by ; the writing workshops I taught at prisons, senior citizen centers, daycare centers, and psychiatric hospitals were subsidized by ;  and residencies in the NYC public school system were underwritten by .

All of these visionary presenting and regranting organizations came to life through the generosity of .

I have read the economic-impact success stories and the voluminous economic studies attesting to the millions of tourist and employment dollars exponentially generated by the vast institutional nonprofit sector and the culture industry. Thanks to the leveraging impact of federal funding, the arts in America have always been an engine for growth.

However, today I express my personal indebtedness as just one author and teacher whose writing life was given its initial imprimatur of support by the ; and to remind my readers that we need the NEA, now more than ever, to make investments that will inspire the next generation of our young artists during these troubling times.

• Neil Baldwin, cultural historian and critic, is and Director of in the College of the Arts at ĚÇĐÄvlog (NJ). He is currently working on a biography of .

In July of 2010, I breathed a sigh of gratitude when the ĚÇĐÄvlog Board of Trustees formally approved the establishment of The Creative Research Center.

Five years have gone by — and we are still here.

Much has been accomplished; however, there is no doubt that much, much more remains to be done.

That is why we are conceptualizing CRC 2.0.

As I review our informing principles, they still do hold true: to serve as an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary forum/platform for works — and words — predicated upon the uses of the imagination among students, faculty and administration. The CRC was born, and lives, in The College of the Arts; but the arts are not the sole exemplars of the imagination. We have reached out and will continue to do so across the entire campus. In my earliest prospectus for the CRC, I said that our commentary would be a rich combination of voices from within and outside the University community; however, as the years have passed, I have found, much to my continuing delight, that — although our annual Symposia on the Imagination in all its forms have brought a multitude of personalities into the mix — there are more than enough fine minds right here on our home ground to populate the CRC.

Another major component of our early mission that has become more important over time is the CRC as an archive for the imagination. This purpose has grown in tandem with the exponential growth of the Web as a valid place for scholarship. Five years ago, I had to struggle to make this case. Now, it is self-evident, and the concomitant “problem” has become one of excess, giving rise to the intensified curatorial function of the CRC. We want to continue to be regarded, and respected, as a highly-selective and conscientiously-edited site, where content is refined through collegial interaction with our contributors, where the long form thrives, where students will continue to play a foregrounded role, and where junior faculty can feel secure that they will find a respected platform for their work.

I don’t know whether it’s because I have been a college professor now for almost a decade and therefore am sensitive to a life in academe that I never had before — but, whatever the reason, I cannot go through one day of my resolutely mediacentric, information-addicted life without coming across a dark declaration that we are in the midst of “the end of college as we know it” or being told to stand accountable to the underlying existential question, “What is college for [or worth]?”

Facing these issues and questions fracturing the facade of higher education, I will conclude this piece by saying that as CRC 2.0 gears up for the next stage of its institutional existence, I most certainly do not believe that it is the end of college. I believe it is the beginning of a commitment that all of us in the teaching profession must make to our students: We must teach them to learn how to learn, transcending the subject matter in which we specialize. Insofar as what college is “for,” I believe it is a place where our students should be given the opportunity to discover and understand and exploit the workings of their inner (i.e., imaginative) landscapes so that when they graduate they are equipped to face the world with the strong mentality of intrepid, undaunted explorers.

— N. B.

Neil Baldwin, PhD

Director

baldwinn@montclair.edu

Dear Neil:

I am pleased that you are publishing my MA thesis on the Creative Research Center website.   I came to this topic through discussions with you a few semesters ago.  After researching several other topics, I wrote on managing controversies and censorship issues because I think that discussions about artistic freedom must continue to be at the forefront of museum managers’ concerns.

With this study, I identify the elements that go into successfully managing censorship issues when mounting museum exhibitions that may be considered controversial.   I create a proactive, business management approach modeled after “plan, do, check and act”.  I hope to ensure that any museum organization can better anticipate and successfully navigate issues that may arise when planning and presenting exhibitions. The problem is of interest to the museum industry because they are likely to struggle with the issue of censorship at one time or another, whether they are prepared to or not. Therefore, museums need a positive, proactive way to stand up for their actions and communicate with their public.

I find that while controversy can occur in any museum throughout the country, even in sophisticated cultural centers, organizations continue to have a hard time controlling the fallout. This can make it difficult and disruptive to maintain the relevance of the show, without exerting great effort to defend their decisions against dissenting opinion. There are legitimate reasons for deciding to present challenging, even difficult subject matter. Such actions expand the boundaries of art and culture, while engaging the public. For better or for worse, challenging exhibits have a way of complicating the operational process. However, the extra work brought about by producing demanding exhibits may be a windfall for an organization, if managed deftly. Enticing and demanding subject matter may create interest, thereby helping to enhance or sustain interest in museums. It is no secret that tantalizing shows attract visitors. Regardless of how the exhibition is produced or why scrutiny is brought to bear on a given museum, the organization needs to be in a position to take advantage of the situation.

While the difficulty in sustaining any museum is rooted in a healthy economy, contemporary art has become more sociologically and politically based during the last several decades. In order to best engage the public, the museum industry must continually look at itself critically. Understanding demographic and changing tastes are a few of the ways museums have changed for the better. In order for museums to move forward and continue growing stronger, they must reinvent themselves for new generations by incorporating contemporary subject matter and new perspectives into their exhibitions. This keeps shows fresh and young audiences attending. By addressing challenging socio-cultural issues, museums have captured the attention, imagination, and identity of the country and individuals. Connecting with the audience will enable longevity.

Enticing exhibitions, challenging subject matter, and great works define museums. Visionaries, solid leadership, and hard work will get an organization to where it needs to be. However, managing the museum of the future comes down to accountability to the public. Understanding the public’s desires and giving them what they want, sprinkled with what they need to know, will do more to solidify a museum’s place in the mind of its patrons than anything else it might do. Museums remain a substantial draw to visitors and residents alike. Devising a plan to include the public and other organizations before a controversy erupts will go a long way toward sustaining a museum’s place in the community.

My motivation for researching censorship controversies in art museums is to allow me to delve more deeply into the juxtaposition between art and culture, and the practice of organizational leadership. Through my research, I identify a need for a more proactive and innovative approach to managing controversies that arise from mounting challenging museum exhibits. This approach requires understanding, not arrogance, and the courage to refrain from bending to any political pressure that may arise. I hope this approach is valued by the museum industry as a way to manage such issues.

You asked me include some background about myself.

I have been a professional in Environmental Management and Public Health for more than two decades.  My vocation has seen its fare share of controversy through the years, from vaccine safety to global warming, so I am no stranger to the subject. Some early controversies I confronted came from being overtly philosophical and from my curiosity with the scientific theory of evolution. Additionally, I experienced “censorship” at an early age, in a variety of situations. My scientific curiosity, especially regarding prehistoric times, was met with disdain in my early school years. My interest in the sciences stems back to my childhood, but my passion has always been the arts.  Yet even the art topics I explored, which were typically of a darker nature than was expected from someone of my age, came under attack by school teaches, peers and even family members. Along the way, I developed a fondness and curiosity for all art forms, from literature, to performance and visual arts, especially for those that “push the envelope”.

Over the last decade and a half, I have performed extensively and increased my involvement with various arts organizations from the production side. I have worked with many performance groups throughout New Jersey, in addition to founding and operating my own theater troupe and music ensemble. Over the years, I have functioned as director, producer, writer, treasurer, fundraiser and board member. This work has amplified my interest in my thesis topic. Presently, my years of experience and education have culminated in my completing a Master of Arts degree in Museum Management. My educational background, personal interests and work experiences make me distinctly capable to undertake controversial subject matter involving museums.

To read my thesis, Strategies to Manage Censorship Issues and Controversies in Museums, click.

— Kyle San Giovanni