By Dr. Nancy Proctor
Dr. Nancy is the Executive Director of the Peale as well as the co-chair of MuseWeb, an international conference that focuses on innovation in the cultural sector.
Pre-Covid-19, this essay began as a discussion of the way in which contemporary lives blur the boundaries between the “real” and the “virtual.” In our cross-platform world, my thesis went, we move between the physical and digital spheres like cyborgs: an encounter can be no less impactful, an emotion no less “real,” for having been experienced in an online environment. By the same token, there are few activities in the physical world that remain unmediated by digital tools, at minimum the ubiquitous “phone,” without which, it is easy to imagine, we would no longer have memories.
Ironically it took a global pandemic to reveal just how deeply rooted we still are in the physical world. By restricting us to online interactions for months on end, Covid-19 showed us how ill prepared we were to use our advanced digital technologies to their full potential, and where our digital blind spots lay. Even at the Peale, with a technologically-savvy team and a born-digital collection, we found ourselves in April 2020 wondering why we hadn’t been doing more online pre-quarantine, given the extraordinary increase in our global reach and audiences as we took all of our programs online for the duration of the pandemic. For example, the Peale now has a growing audience of Deaf participants in its online programs – an inclusive design development that was inspired the Redefine/ABLE exhibition’s move online and will continue into the Peale’s programming in the physical world as well. What took us so long?
As “the oldest new museum in Baltimore,” the Peale has embraced its unparalleled opportunity to question and reinvent the very concept of museum for the 21st century, while building on two centuries of cultural, technological, and educational innovation within its own historic walls. Opened in 1814 by artist Rembrandt Peale, Peale’s Baltimore Museum and Gallery of the Fine Art Arts was housed in the first purpose-built museum in the United States. Rembrandt’s museum was inspired by his father, Charles Willson Peale, who had opened the first American museum in Philadelphia in 1786. Rembrandt also introduced gas lighting to the city of Baltimore. By 1816 his Baltimore Gas Light Company was building the country’s first gas streetlight network, giving Baltimore its nickname today: “Light City.”
Peale sold his building to the city to become Baltimore’s first City Hall in 1829, and in 1878 the City located Male and Female Colored School No. 1 in the Peale Museum building – the first of the city’s public schools to offer Black students a secondary school education. After the school moved onto bigger and newer premises, eventually to become Frederick Douglass High School, the building was used for manufacturing and finally became a museum again in 1930 – the city’s first Municipal Museum. Part of the City Life Museums, the Peale Museum was known as the go-to place for those wanting to learn about Baltimore, from students to out-of-town visitors, and along with an impressive collection presented ground-breaking and critically-acclaimed exhibitions that focused on the social history and fabric of the city.
Unfortunately, the Peale Museum was shuttered in 1997. Along with a number of other city-owned museums, its collection was transferred to the Maryland Historical Society, and the vacant historic building was left to decay for 20 years.
In 2017, we began bringing the Peale back to life as a home for Baltimore stories, and a laboratory for museum practice. We are reimagining the 21st century museum as much more than a treasure house; it is a production house of culture – a laboratory in which we can experiment and share new models for accessibility, sustainability, and relevance to communities across Baltimore and around the world. The Peale is a place where local creators – storytellers, griots, performers, artists, architects, historians, students, educators, and other culture-keepers – can produce and share authentic narratives of the city, its places, and the diverse people who have made Baltimore what it is today to create a more inclusive cultural record of the city. In the Peale Museum building, Baltimore’s stories and voices have a home that honors their contributions to the city’s cultural heritage.
We recognized at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns that without safe physical gathering places to record and share Baltimore’s stories, the Peale risked becoming part of the problems it aims to address with its mission to create a truly representative soundtrack of the city. How could we include the voices and stories of those without access to the internet and digital story recording tools? We added a free “storytelling hotline” to our toolkit, making it possible for anyone to record and hear stories from a telephone, smart or otherwise. Daisy Brown, the Peale’s Storytelling Ambassador, started her “Stoop Shoots” program, recording Covid-19 and other stories of residents around the city in safe outdoor locations to create audio-visual portraits. We partnered with Libraries without Borders to include the Peale’s app and information on how to share Baltimore stories in the “tech kits” the organization distributes for free to people who lack internet access across the city.
Redefine/ABLE extended this mission by specifically addressing the needs of and inviting people living with disabilties to be a part of this cultural record. We originally planned for the exhibition to be accessible in two physical locations: at the Carroll Mansion in Downtown Baltimore, the Peale’s temporary home while it was undergoing renovations, and at the University of Maryland’s Herman Maril Gallery in College Park. In order to connect and extend audiences at these sites to online participants, the exhibition would also include a website and social media outreach to gather and share stories from people with differing abilities and accessibility preferences.
With the intervention of Covid-19, the exhibition website became Redefine/ABLE’s primary location, showcasing powerful video interviews of people living with disabilities and insightful essays on inclusive design. Anyone can share their stories of challenging inaccessibility by using the Peale’s web-based story recording tools, the free Be Here Stories app, and a free “storytelling hotline.” Contributors’ stories become part of the Peale’s collectively-authored archive of Baltimore stories – now the largest in the world – that are published on a wide range of digital platforms as well as presented live in the historic Peale Museum building and beyond. All of the exhibition’s events— from a workshop on inclusive storytelling to panel discussions of how Covid-19 has impacted accessibility and bridging the “digital divide”—happened online with live-streamed CART transcription and ASL interpretation. The recordings of these events and their transcripts remain a free online resource, available to all.
In addition, we recreated the Peale in the virtual world, Second Life, through a partnership with Linden Lab and Virtual Ability, Inc. Within the virtual Peale we installed a re-imagined version of the physical Redefine/ABLE exhibition in a digital gallery modeled on the physical Peale’s “Picture Gallery,” the room that makes the historic museum building architecturally unique. The benefit of this additional exhibition version is that, like the Redefine/ABLE website and social media posts, it is accessible to online audiences 24/7 and engages an entirely new global audience for the Peale. The project has already received more “virtual visits” than people who would have been likely to see the physical exhibitions in person at the Peale in Baltimore.
Nonetheless, as a panel discussed during the exhibition’s open event in Second Life, there are limitations on accessibility even in the internet’s oldest and most developed virtual world: sign language interpretation is not yet possible due to the limitations of rendering for avatars, and some find the need to build and navigate the world via an avatar too onerous, either for their technical skills or their computers’ processing power. Even as virtual worlds have enabled access for people of many differing needs and abilities to a wide range of experiences and communities, they are not a panacea for inclusion. With no single platform or solution for universal accessibility, inclusion must be approached, as Debbie Staigerwald from The Arc Baltimore commented during a Redefine/ABLE online event, “one person at a time.”
Distributed across multiple physical and digital platforms, the structure of the Redefine/ABLE exhibition reflects the emergent nature of the museum as distributed network in the internet age. Perhaps more now than even in its original dual-site format, the Redefine/ABLE exhibition represents an important initiative for testing and exploring ways of creating spaces that are not just more accessible but also more inclusive, whether physical, digital or social, in cultural organizations and beyond. The project has transformed the way we approach presenting online exhibitions and events at the Peale, helping us make important advances in the accessibility of our programming, as well as delivering on our mission to be a laboratory for developing more accessible and inclusive cultural spaces.
In a sense, the Peale has never been more accessible than since the pandemic began. The Redefine/ABLE exhibition exemplifies this pivot in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak as well as the Peale’s commitment to inclusion. But is the Peale more inclusive as a result? As the Peale’s focus on online programming since the pandemic started has demonstrated, there are limits to the reach and accommodations afforded by digital technologies. Like the historic Peale Museum building, currently under renovation to add accessible facilities and an elevator, the tools and techniques needed to bridge the “digital divide” today are incomplete, in development, and in some cases completely absent. How can we “dismantle the master’s house” using the digital tools currently at our disposal?
Speaking in a panel discussion on this topic as part of the Redefine/ABLE exhibition project, Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, digital artist and educator, argued that we can only be fully inclusive when those who have been excluded by the systems of power and oppression build and control the platforms and tools necessary to create a new cultural discourse. This is an important inflection on the 1980s rallying cry, “nothing about us without us,” suggesting the need to redefine not only the Peale’s commitment to accessibility, but also its strategy for inclusion. It requires the Peale and cultural organizations of all kinds to commit to capacity-building and enabling access to the means of cultural production for constituents. With these tools and resources Baltimore’s storytellers can bridge the physical and the digital, connecting platforms and communities globally in their own distributed networks to write a soundtrack of the city that, by including all its voices, helps people everywhere see Baltimore in a new light.
Source:
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007. Print. Accessed September 1, 2020 https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf
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