What is the role of an art museum’s education department in an increasingly complex cultural sphere?

This is the first in a series of forthcoming interviews with leaders in art museum education as they discuss the ways in which educators are poised to tackle the contemporary dilemmas of their cultural institutions. From engaging with the ethics of power to finding the balance between mission, theory, and practice, educators respond with their approaches, lessons learned, and conclusions.

Kathryn Potts, Associate Director and Helena Rubinstein Chair of Education at the Whitney Museum of American Art, talks about rebuilding and restructuring the Whitney’s educational program over the past 10 years, shaped by an artist-centric mission, and how it has informed how the Whitney works with artists, empowers community, and develops issues-based programming.

Nisa Mackie (NM)

Tell me about your tenure at the Whitney and kinds of the changes you’ve seen in Education in that time.

Kathryn Potts (KP)

I’ve been Chair of Education for just over 10 years. When I started as director, the program had grown in this very organic, not very strategic way, representing the passions and interests of the people that had passed through. We had program on top of program. Our director, Adam Weinberg, who actually started his career as the head of Education at the Walker, always teases me saying that he never met a museum educator who didn’t like a program.

NM

He’s probably right!

KP

When I got into the position, I realized we were doing things on autopilot, and I wanted to bring an intentionality to the work. In order to do that, we had to take a step back as a team and start from scratch and rebuild, thinking through why we were doing things and what kind of impact we were hoping to create. At the same time, the big picture was that the museum was in the first phase of a giant capital campaign for our new building. So I had this sense of urgency—I had just started and was already in meetings about what the education spaces might look like. I just felt like it was going way too fast. We didn’t have the underpinnings of a kind of conceptual thinking that would enable us to answer even the most simple questions like “How much storage space do you want?”

So, we started working with an outside consultant, Randi Korn and Associates, and Randi did a series of workshops that brought my team together with people across the museum. I think the department was suffering from the traditional problem that education often has, which is that we were kind of working a little bit under the radar. We knew we were very passionate about our projects, but we were a little bit disconnected from what else was happening in the institution—partially by choice, because we wanted to be independent and we didn’t want to be told what to do. But actually, I felt that’s not how we should be working. I wanted us to be connected to the larger institution, respond to our colleagues, and really build a program we could be proud of.

One of the central ideas that emerged from the work that we did with Randi was to think about what was unique about Whitney Education and how our programming related to the overall mission of the museum. As an institution, the Whitney prides itself on being a museum that supports artists and having a longstanding artist-centric ethos and sensibility. In the context of our planning we thought about these ideas in relation to what we were doing and realized the projects where we collaborated with artists felt like the most authentic programs. We worked through this concept and other ideas that surfaced in our workshop and came up with a series of values that would be the underpinnings for our work. “The Artists’ Museum“ is one of those values. Another is the idea of “Making Complexity Accessible,” which is about opening up the thinking behind contemporary art and what contemporary artists are doing in a way that’s accessible to a range of audiences. With our collection in particular (because it’s a collection of American art), people have a tendency to see it as illustrations of key moments in American history. Instead, we wanted to support our audiences in thinking critically about the art on view in our galleries.

NM

So you did this work with Randi Korn to establish the tenets of Whitney Education. Fast forward, and now we are in the new Whitney downtown….

KP

Yes, thank goodness we had a chance to rethink everything. In 2015, we opened downtown with the first-ever dedicated space. The Laurie M. Tisch Education Center has brought new transparency to our work. Referring back to “being under the radar,” a lot of our programs happen either when the public isn’t around or off-site. I don’t think our visitors, or even our colleagues, knew what we were doing. I’ve tried really hard to make the work more visible so that people can see why it’s important.

When you’re building a brand-new space you can think about the kinds of audience experiences you might want to have. And with the current prevalence of technology there is a tendency with building projects to build a giant digital footprint as part of that building. At the Whitney, we actually took the opposite tack. We wanted to have beautiful spaces that would be aspirational, spaces really for the art. Also, there are some aspects of the building that I think are really important, like the floors at the Whitney are a rough-hewn, reclaimed wood. The floors have a lot of character, it’s not like poured concrete that’s tough on your legs. You can sit on the floor and it feels warm; it feels like nature.

NM

Focusing on this idea of the artists’ museum, I have noticed that your discursive programming is very issues engaged, particularly issues that artists tend to care about. What does that development process look like in terms of the various conversations that are happening outside of the institution and how they are brought in?

KP

There’s a tendency with public programs in general that programmers take their cue from the catalogue contributors, or we make a symposium because the curator says we should. My colleague Megan Heuer, Director of Public Programs and Public Engagement, has been super careful about not wanting to be driven by that kind of thinking. She always starts with a question that the programs are intended to answer. I think what makes the programs more discursive here is that they are productive; they’re generating new ideas because they’re actually exploring a question. This idea of critical inquiry is a thread that links all of our programs, whether it’s the school tours or these public programs—they’re asking urgent questions. I think that the job of programs is to go deeper to make connections that an exhibition maybe hasn’t fully answered. You know, we like to think about the exhibitions and collection displays as kind of jumping off points to go somewhere else.

NM

I imagine that with the kind of relevant, resonant programming that you’re doing, artists are very engaged. Does this open up space for artists to come into the institution in new ways?

KP

It sounds really simple, but one of the things that I think we do best is that we’re a convener of communities and we create all kinds of communities through our programs. One of those communities is the artist community. Last month with colleagues in curatorial and research resources, we organized a program for artists looking at how they use and maintain archives in their practice. Part of the program was a very practical series of prompts for artists to be thinking through their own working process and to consider how their own archives could be created.

We’ve been doing programming in collaboration with artists and giving artists a space to explore and dream up programs. But then we’ve also been doing more discursive programs where we bring artists in conversations with other people that we haven’t had a chance to really connect with. The idea that the museum would be doing programming in service to the artist is sort of the next logical step. Thinking about artists as an audience is something that I think we’ll be doing more of and it connects back to the idea of being “The Artists’ Museum.”

NM

Do you find that the things that artists are interested in, and the issues they tend to be advocates for is working its way into the inner machinations or the function of the museum more broadly?

KP

One of the things that’s exciting about working with artists and giving them agency in the context of the museum is that they’ll ask for things that the institution can’t ask of itself. Given the Whitney’s own self-professed identity as the artists’ museum, I think we’re actually set up really well to respond to the challenges that an artist would put in front of us. For example, during the last Whitney Biennial, the artist Chemi Rosado-Seijo had the idea of turning one of the Whitney’s galleries into a classroom. I don’t think that normally could have happened, but because the artist asked for it, the curators approached us for help programming the space. It was a fantastic collaboration. We had a group of students from one of our partnership schools who went to school in the Biennial for the whole semester. That got me thinking about things in a different way. I appreciate that my own practice is challenged and pushed by that kind of engagement with an artist. The project helped me envision what it would it mean to have a school in the museum.

NM

Relatedly, I do think people are interested in knowing about how Education departments have been handling the different political pressures that museums have been under—a call for a higher level of participation and activism in the sociopolitical sphere, if you will.

KP

Last year on January 20 many cultural institutions and artists were calling for museums to shut their doors in observance of the J20 strike called for Inauguration Day. We felt that that was exactly the wrong impulse for us and that our museum should be open. As a museum of American art, the Whitney has a real opportunity to be a leader in this complicated political climate. So, instead, we organized a large-scale public program in our theater that was a collaboration with Occupy Museums, a group of artist activists (who were included in the 2017 Biennial). We were open all day and offered pay-what-you-wish admission in keeping with the spirit of the J20 strike. Occupy Museums issued an open call to artists, writers, and activists to come to affirm their values and speak about the importance of the day. One of them was the artist Martha Rosler, who came in and said, “Thanks, Whitney, and fuck you, Whitney, because next time this needs to be in the Lobby and every single floor of the museum and you can’t ask people to pay.” It was kind of a heartbreaking moment for us. The truth is that we’re not always in a position to do everything that artists would want us to do.

However, I think that what’s powerful—as in the case of Martha Rosler—is that artists are our toughest critics, challenging us to think differently, making us ask ourselves, “What would it mean if we were open all the time and free, and why aren’t we?” We have to constantly navigate and negotiate these questions, and the artists keep us honest. They don’t let us rest on our laurels and they’re not going to be happy with us doing the right thing on one day but not the next. With Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Biennial, for example, we’re not going to get a “pass” from the art world and the artists for having the most diverse Biennial if we have the Dana Schutz controversy in the middle of it. As powerful institutions we can take the critique and, in fact, we need it. I think it’s hard for institutions to understand how resilient we are. And if we can lean into these moments, we can we can actually use them to make change. When I think about the power of our collections, exhibitions, and programs—again, thinking about this context of the American—if we can present a very diverse picture of what American art is, audiences can visualize what that world might look like. In this particular moment in time, there’s a role for museum culture to provide some alternatives.

NM

You were talking about your approach to making the department more symbiotic with the wider institution. And it made me think about why we both connected: we are both working on inclusion, access, and equity work. Can you talk a little bit about your role in this and what it looks like?

KP

Sure. I think the reason that I’m involved is that in Education, and I suspect this is the case for you, there was a disconnect between our staff (their racial and ethnic makeup) and our audiences’. So for years—before anyone else at the museum was talking about this—we were talking in this department about the importance of diversifying our staff as a necessary first step. That has happened over time with years of commitment to bringing in more diverse staff in. We have actually lived and understood what that looked like, how it felt different, and what we were able to do differently than other departments, so the issues of diversity had already been really talked about in great detail in education.

More and more, my department has been a kind of catalyst for larger initiatives that are happening at the institution, whether they be the response to the Dana Schutz or the J20 art strike. Because of the skills we have (and this one of the things that Sandra Jackson Dumont talks a lot about, you know, our skills as educators and facilitators, our ability to think about multiple audiences) I think we’re really well suited for doing this work. I do think that the traditional art history training doesn’t give anybody the right skills for this particular moment in time. I think my biggest takeaway from the Dana Schutz controversy was actually that if you don’t have a diverse group of people around the table, you aren’t seeing the whole picture.

NM

It’s great to hear about some of the less visible work that you are doing inside of the institution. Speaking of visibility, are there any initiatives of things that you’re working on that you’re really excited about, that you want to share, that people just won’t see?

KP

The most interesting project I’m working on right now is something that people won’t see for quite some time. I’m part of a cross-museum team that is exploring the possibility of working with artist David Hammons to create a large-scale public artwork in the Hudson River on the exact spot where Pier 52 once stood. Hammons has sketched out a plan for a metal sculpture that looks like a line drawing of the former pier shed. Hammons calls the sculpture Day’s End, in homage to the artist Gordon Matta Clark—whose 1975 architectural intervention of the same name consisted of a series of cuts into the structure of the then empty Pier 52 warehouse. Hammons’s Day’s End also refers to layers of history on that site—the histories of queer people on the piers before and after AIDS, the waterfront as a center of commercial shipping and industry, and even the longer ago history of native people who lived and fished along the river. One of the things that we learned in our research in advance of our move downtown is that the Meatpacking District is in the midst of rampant gentrification. We’ve heard many stories from people who have lived in this neighborhood for a really long time, who have watched things change right under their noses. What the museum can do is to hold on to some of this history that is being erased and lost in the process. The Education department is thinking about how we can bring these longtime residents along with artists and activists into this project and then share these histories with our audiences, especially young people and the neighborhood’s newer residents. It’s a fascinating project on so many levels.