Volume 55 Number 4 October 2012 THE THOUGHTFUL MUSEUM For Whom Are We Building These Gems? Redefining Impact at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca LEAH REISMAN Abstract Can museums still be valuable to populations that don’t visit them? The city of Oaxaca, Mexico is home to a flourishing museum scene, but despite a desire by those museum professionals to serve the Oaxacan community, the city’s museums largely lack a local visiting base. This article, which reflects on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oaxaca in 2010, explores the implications of the disjunction between intention, assumption, and reality in some of Oaxaca’s museums, especially the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, a small private textile museum in the city’s historical center. By considering the museum’s inherent value and its innovative attempts to tangibly impact a specific community outside of the museum edifice, I suggest a way to rethink impact in museums by, in effect, turning them inside out: shifting the focus away from ‘‘public value driven by a universal right to cultural access’’ (Stein 2012, 219), toward more tangible, external outcomes, including direct interventions in the dynamic world beyond the quiet galleries. Home to only 260,000 residents, the city of Oaxaca, Mexico is blanketed in museums. These include the imposing Centro Cultural Santo Domingo, the cutting-edge Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, the tiny Rufino Tamayo Museo de Arte Prehispanico, and Instituto de Artes Graficas, and the esoteric Museo de Filatelia de Oaxaca (Stamp Museum). In 2010 I spent several weeks at one small Oaxacan museum, the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (MTO), conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my bachelor’s thesis. Opened in 2008, the museum, like many of its compatriots, is beautiful. Rich woodwork contrasts with rustic whitewashed walls and contemporary terracotta sculpture. Darkened galleries feature state-of-the-art lighting that illuminates brilliant textiles suspended via transparent cord. During the many hours I spent at the Museo Textil interviewing, observing, and hanging around the galleries, I began to realize the uniqueness of Oaxaca’s museum scene, in which a disjunction between intention, assumption, and reality (in terms of the museum’s audience) coexists with a unique type of outreach. These conditions offer a chance to question the function of museums and broaden our thinking about the impact they can have on the communities surrounding them. CULTURAL CACIQUES AND THE OAXACAN COMMUNITY How did Oaxaca attract such a wealth of lavish cultural institutions? The state is unique in Mexico for its diverse indigenous groups, delicious food, and vibrant artisanal traditions. Its museums are inspired by that rich local culture, but they did not organically emerge from it. Instead, the Museo Textil, like many of Oaxaca’s museums, is privately funded. But rather than depending on multiple contributions and Leah Reisman (lmgreisman@berkeley.edu) is a research assistant in the Research Group of the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. 401 Photo 1. A workshop for weavers taught in 2010 by Museo Textil de Oaxaca staff in the nearby weaving village of Teotitlán del Valle. The technique of ‘‘feather weaving’’ was traditional to the area in the 17th century. It was reintroduced by the MTO staff through workshops in Oaxaca and Puebla. Weavers were encouraged to re-interpret the technique. All photos in this article are courtesy of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. grants, it is run by a single foundation. This foundation functions like an NGO—instead of supporting external projects, it sets up and runs its own institutions, hand-picking executive directors and overseeing decisions. Headed by a single man, this foundation, along with a few other ‘‘cultural caciques’’ inspired by a tradition of giving back to the community (tequio), have built Oaxaca’s museum scene from the ground up. Despite these benefactors’ intentions to ‘‘give back,’’ I found it difficult, during my research, to discern the community’s relationship with Oaxaca’s jewel-studded landscape. Eric Chavez Santiago, the Museo Textil’s edu- cation director, asserted in an interview that the museum means to reach Oaxacans: ‘‘It serves the local community.’’ He explained that few of his college classmates knew about his hometown of Teotitlán del Valle, a nearby weaving village— that many Oaxacans have never been exposed to the textiles that are produced in and around their community. He declared that without this exposure, ‘‘[some] are not interested in learning about them. When they see [textiles] they don’t buy them because they don’t think they could use them.’’ Showing residents the value of their local textile heritage is, he said, ‘‘the most important part of this museum, and I think that’s the purpose of the museum, too.’’ 402 The Thoughtful Museum: For Whom are We Building These Gems? Redefining Impact at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca Volume 55 Number 4 Despite this goal, the many hours I spent in the MTO’s darkened galleries revealed that, besides school tours, few locals visited. While I did not conduct an exhaustive visitor study, my observations revealed that the MTO’s exhibitions were important in terms of academic contributions and were frequented by artists, tourists, and intellectuals, yet they clearly lacked an everyday Oaxacan audience. As a local expert explained to me, local populations don’t feel comfortable in Oaxaca’s sumptuous museums—they don’t feel like these institutions are meant for them. AN UNREACHABLE PUBLIC? This failure to attract locals to elegant institutions is a problem museums in many places encounter—and it’s common among Oaxacan cultural institutions. But when I mentioned the dearth of local visitors to Ana Paula Fuentes Quintana, the MTO’s director at the time, she gave a surprising reply. ‘‘I think many people still don’t know [the museum exists],’’ she said. ‘‘Some people aren’t interested, and some live in another world and don’t leave their world.’’ Though the museum been open for just two years at that point, and planned to increase outreach and publicity, underlying a stated desire to reach a broader Oaxacan audience was an assumption that many of the local people were, in fact, unreachable. Indeed, Oaxaca’s myriad museums are foreign concepts to many of its residents. I experienced this first-hand while conducting interviews at a local marketplace. Though we were just blocks from the Museo Textil, few of the local shoppers I spoke with knew it existed. The Museo Textil, like some of Oaxaca’s other private museums, appears to have been built on something of a paradox. Intended as a gift to the community, the museum seemed to assume that locals wouldn’t come. As I saw it, Leah Reisman October 2012 such a paradox suggested a belief among Oaxaca’s cultural benefactors in the inherent value of museums—their importance in and of themselves—accompanied by an unresolved question about their intended audiences. Initially, I thought perhaps that the MTO should move past traditional notions of intrinsic, automatic value and do more to welcome local communities. In an era in which museums, endowed with public responsibilities, are increasingly called upon to cultivate access for domestic audiences (Shatanawi 2012, 65), I reasoned that the MTO should abandon the assumption that local Oaxacans are out of reach. It should work to convince them of their right to access and of the museum’s value for even the most disconnected of citizens, and it should perhaps involve them in developing and producing community-relevant programming. But this thought simultaneously struck me as empty. Such a task was much easier said than done, and it would entail changing much more than patterns of leisure activity. It would necessitate the refashioning of entire worldviews. In my mind, the absence of locals in the galleries of Oaxaca’s museums raised the question of whether or not museum-building was the right way to give back to this particular community. After all, as Stephan Weil challenged, ‘‘Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve something of value beyond their own mere existence’’ (2002, 4). REFRAMING IMPACT AT THE MTO But I also questioned so fatalistic a conclusion. I wondered, can museums still be valuable to populations that don’t visit them? While local Oaxacans are largely absent from the Museo Textil’s visiting audience, the private flow of money into the arts has been fertile soil for valuable 403 Photo 2. Visitors in an MTO exhibition, Hilos del Pais de las Nubes, Textiles Comunitarios de Oaxaca (Threads of the Cloud People, Communal Textiles from Oaxaca), 2011. developments in Oaxaca. The city’s many museums attract a healthy flow of tourists and artists. With these visitors come commerce, income, and prestige for many Oaxacans far removed from the museum scene. So the mere presence of museums like the MTO in the city positively impacts the livelihoods, present and future, of Oaxaca’s residents, even those oblivious to the museum’s existence. The museum’s tradition of exhibiting textiles as artworks amplifies this inherent impact. By exhibiting spotlighted pieces in spartan galleries instead of embedding them in dioramas depicting cultural history, the MTO sends a message to the tourist audience (if not to the local population) that handmade textiles are art, and should be valued as such. By means of such messages, the MTO contributes to a new discourse about Oaxaca’s textile traditions, repositioning them from quaint handicrafts for sale to bargainers, to fine artworks worthy of respect and high price tags. This reconceptualization, though not immediately impactful for local Oaxacans, transitively affects them by changing tourists’ behavior in the marketplace. Despite its lack of local visitors, then, the MTO produces indirect impacts on the Oaxacan community that, though harder to see, are still deeply felt. The museum’s existence fortifies local communities’ livelihoods, and its presentation style helps reformulate tourist attitudes about one of Oaxaca’s most important artistic traditions. Both of these outcomes help ensure the persistence of Oaxaca’s textile traditions into the future and the continuance of the Oaxacan way of life. In addition to these indirect outcomes, the MTO does directly serve a certain part of the Oaxacan community—but does so using meth- 404 The Thoughtful Museum: For Whom are We Building These Gems? Redefining Impact at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca Volume 55 Number 4 ods that resemble those of direct-service nonprofits more than exhibition programs. The museum’s education department works closely with Oaxaca’s weaving communities, inviting weavers and other textile artisans from remote locations around the state to give workshops and hold exhibition-sales (called expo-ventas) in the space. Additionally, the staff creates longterm relationships between the museum and weavers, relationships that produce instrumental impacts. Many of Oaxaca’s weaving communities live in a state of poverty brought about by the influx of knock-off, machine-made textiles into the state’s marketplaces (Tiffany 2004, 297). Natural colorants and materials are prohibitively expensive, so the quality of their work is diluted by the synthetic materials they can afford. Furthermore, their profits are narrowed because their remote locations often necessitate the use of middlemen to bring their works to market. Responding to this plight, the MTO helps weavers develop their skills. Staff members work with artists to develop their personal brands, quality standards, and styles. By affiliating with the museum, artists gain access to customers. These services, many of which are delivered far from the museum building, concretely impact individual weavers by bolstering their abilities to succeed in a twenty-first-century market. Though they may not be reaping the tangible and intangible impacts of visiting museums, Oaxacan locals still definitely benefit from this relationship in other ways. So the MTO’s primary mode of impacting locals is not directly manifested within the exhibition program itself. Its locus lies far from the museum’s silent galleries, deep within the fabric of the city and its surrounding weaving communities. By helping to improve Oaxaca’s livelihood and capacitar (build the capacity of) its weavers, the MTO ultimately functions to keep the region’s weaving traditions alive and thriving. Leah Reisman October 2012 Such cultural preservation is a common mission for museums. However, the MTO delivers value by untraditional methods: through the museum’s inherent value and direct service to a niche community. Instead of decrying museums’ place in the lives of everyday Oaxacans, then, we could regard the MTO’s example as an opportunity to re-conceptualize the purposes of museums—the ways in which they produce impact and the nature of the benefits they provide—by shifting the focus away from ‘‘public value driven by a universal right to cultural access’’ (Stein 2012, 219) and toward more tangible, external outcomes. We can do this without threatening exhibitions’ centrality to the museum institution. The museum’s edifice and exhibitions indirectly bolster community coffers, and its staff’s work in the community tangibly fortifies the future of an art form. These methods of achieving impact exemplify a new-old type of value that museums can offer, an impact created by direct interventions in the dynamic world outside, which are supported by, but not secondary to, the quiet exhibitions within the museum. Stephen Weil charged, ‘‘Only rarely—and even then, more often than not in synergy with other institutions—do [museums] truly dent the universe’’ (2002, 40). But such dual direct ⁄ indirect impact could potentially alter this diagnosis. The current emphasis on a ‘‘tangible demonstration of public value’’ (Stein 2012, 219) resonates throughout the American museum world. Museums are increasingly called upon by scholars and funders to play instrumental roles in their communities and to prove their value in areas seemingly distinct from their collections and content areas. They are ‘‘challenged today to justify their existence, and this justification is frequently requested in hard economic terms’’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 11). Museums are being questioned about their pertinence to 405 Photo 3. A 2012 exhibition at MTO: Herencia de Moros, Alforjas, Alfombras y Almohadas (A Legacy of the Moors, Pillows, Saddlebacks and Rugs). income- and employment-generation, and their contribution to the alleviation of social ills (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 11). In rising to this challenge, collecting museums such as the MTO perhaps should not automatically consider exhibitions to be their primary means of producing impact. Exhibitions can be configured to produce value for visitors while direct and indirect impacts on other populations are pursued by other means. If so, the question still nags: Is it acceptable for galleries to stand empty of local visitors if impact is being generated elsewhere? More broadly, are museums obligated to directly serve the larger populations they are placed within? For museums concerned with sustainability, failing to attract local communities as visiting populations could lead to financial instability— especially in cases of museum-builders who believe their institutions can create their own audiences. But in Oaxaca, it’s another story. The Museo Textil, along with most of the city’s other private museums, is free, and doesn’t depend on admission revenues to survive. Like public art projects, these museums can afford to be valuable intrinsically rather than in financial terms. Accountable to no one but themselves, they are also able to demonstrate their impact in nontraditional and innovative ways. Perhaps, then, Oaxaca’s museums have a unique function: existing within a population that isn’t interested in visiting them, they produce impact outside their walls instead of within them. END REFERENCES Chavez Santiago, Eric, director of education at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. Interview by Leah 406 The Thoughtful Museum: For Whom are We Building These Gems? Redefining Impact at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca Volume 55 Number 4 October 2012 Reisman. Tape recording. The Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico, August 23, 2010. Fuentes Quintana, Ana Paula, director of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. Interview by Leah Reisman. Tape recording. The Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. September 20, 2010. Holo, Selma, and Mari-Tere Alvarez, eds. 2009. Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 2000. Changing values in the art museum: Rethinking communication and learning. International Journal of Heritage Studies 6(1): 9–31. Shatanami, Mirjam. 2012. Engaging Islam: Working with Muslim communities in a multicultural society. Curator: The Museum Journal 55(1): 65–79. Stein, Robert. 2012. Chiming in on museums and participatory culture. Curator: The Museum Journal 55(2): 215–226. Tiffany, Sharon W. 2004. ‘‘Frame that rug!’’: Narratives of Zapotec textiles as art and ethnic commodity in the global marketplace. Visual Anthropology 17(3): 293–318. Weil, Stephen. 2002. Making Museums Matter. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Wood, W. W. 2008. Made in Mexico: Zapotec Weavers and the Global Ethnic Art Market. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Leah Reisman 407