'What if We Act as if We Love the Future?' A Museum Human Interview
How do we stay hopeful while doing the hard work of organizational change?
Note: Last summer, I had the pleasure of talking at length with Robert Weisberg who writes the blog Museum Human, focused on organizational culture and cultural organizations. I’ve known Robert for many years, and I have always enjoyed and respected his ideas and writings. Our conversation swims through many topics related to museum culture, change, community engagement, and radical optimism for the future. It all came together in this interview which I am cross-posting here with Robert’s blessing.
I encourage you to visit and follow Museum Human for more great content, and to check out the fantastic archive of posts, links, and interviews.
I hope you enjoy this long form interview, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the Comments.
Reminder: Upcoming Workshops
“Making Change Happen,” an online introductory workshop designed to help you get started with change and build your skills as a changemaker. The first workshop date is March 21st, which is coming up fast.
“Community-Centered Engagement,” a more in-depth three-part online intensive designed to help you build a stronger community-centered practice and advocate for more meaningful community involvement and partnerships at your organization. Early registration discount ends this Friday, March 15.
‘What if We Act as if We Love the Future?’ An Interview with Mike Murawski
Robert J Weisberg: Mike Murawski is charting a path of honesty and reconnection for museums. He is the kind of museum-field professional who asks a lot of questions, listens deeply for answers, holds museums to account for their practices, and also provides a blueprint of hope that institutions can build upon what they already have inside and outside their buildings.
For a doomer-ish person like me, talking to Murawski is being gently nudged in optimistic directions while hearing about many kinds of resistance to change. It's a testament to his outlook and belief in the potential of the field that keeps him working with institutions of all kinds—and still emphasizing the nature-centered consultancy that Murawski started with his partner.
Like a few of the interviews you'll read in the first part of this year, this chat happened last summer, so there will be some added mention of things that Murawski has been working on since we spoke, besides the usual edits for length and clarity.
And with that, on to the interview!
Robert J Weisberg: Mike, thank you for sitting down and talking with Museum Human. It's funny, we've been orbiting each other for a few years now in a particular pocket of the museum world. Our collaboration started with a “tweet-off” about the book Museum Activism that Bob Janes, whom I interviewed last year, had edited. You read a few chapters and I read a few chapters and we tweet-threaded about our thoughts, back when that particular mode of communication was still working.
I feel like a lot of people might not know how you came to museums and your more recent work consulting with museums and nonprofits.
Mike Murawski: I'm glad that we're talking now and I'm honored to be a part of the work that you're doing. I have really enjoyed your writing about museums as it dives into organizational culture, how we organize the work of museums, and how we can continually rethink and challenge the way that's done. You've been able to ask a lot of really important questions, especially as you’re still inside an institution, which gives you a very different and specific vantage point.
I was in museums for about 15 years, but now I'm on the outside and working with all kinds of different organizations and nonprofits.
What's connected me with your work is the focus on that aspect of museums and organizational culture, and the ways that we as human beings work and interact within those systems.
Robert J Weisberg: Thank you.
Mike Murawski: I think most people who work in museums find themselves on a winding journey to get there.
I had never thought of working in a museum until I got a job at one. I was studying history and education in college to be a social studies teacher, and then I went into graduate studies in education at American University. When my wife and I moved from Washington, DC to St. Louis, one of the jobs I applied for was at the campus museum at Washington University, the Kemper Art Museum. They needed a head of education to coordinate their programs.
I always reflect on how meaningful those early career experiences were for me. A university museum can be a laboratory for all kinds of experimentation and trying things out. They're small and tend to be pretty creative spaces. At the Kemper Art Museum, I got to do a lot of awesome things with a whole range of audiences, without needing to be at one of those art museums that tries to be everything for everyone.
Working there made me love museum education. I moved on to the Saint Louis Art Museum, and after that, the Portland Art Museum here in Oregon, which is where I'm living now. I loved being able to experiment, push boundaries, and try to challenge the way museums were thinking about education and teaching.
While I was out here in Portland, I dove into community engagement partnerships work and tried to see how as an institution—not just through education programs, but through the whole institution—we can change museums to make them more community-centered. How can we start to bring community partners, residents, community members, and neighbors into the decision-making processes of our institution so we can connect and serve our local communities better and more directly?
Where things have changed
Robert J Weisberg: I feel like you've been asking questions for a long time about community engagement and being a partner and not just a savior. It also feels like now these questions are being centered more in a lot of institutions, but are still hard to ask because so many institutions have many internal groups fighting for dominance.
Where do you think we are right now in the relationship between museums and communities? Have things gotten better or are we still fighting the same internal and institutional battles?
Mike Murawski: Well, I should take a step back. A lot of the ideas that I've tried to advance and advocate for in museums are always building on other mentors or thinkers in the field. One person who was a huge influence on my thinking early on was Nina Simon, with her work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and her book The Participatory Museum. There was this continued push to think about how museums can be more a part of their communities, and Nina and I were having conversations right when I started getting interested in this. I started seeing myself as a role of a questioner.
I tend to think about communities geographically as well as through an equity lens. Who are the communities, groups, or neighborhoods that museums traditionally haven't included in shaping decisions and working with the museum on exhibitions, programs, collections, and all those types of things? Have things gotten better? Have museums changed? I feel like it's too easy to say it's the same old, same old, though we could point to a lot of examples of institutions where not much has changed or where the power dynamics are about the same.
Recently, though, I've been thinking that things actually have changed a lot. We are in a better place. This work of thinking about how museums are functioning within their local communities and engaging with communities that have been traditionally excluded from these institutions—that work's been going on for 50 or 60 years or longer than that.
Since I've been involved in museums, the whole conversation has changed quite a bit, in my opinion. The language we use has shifted and so has the questions we're able to ask. The conversations are totally different. People are having engaged conversations about how to make these changes. We’re asking questions like: What is the social impact of institutions? How can museums start to think about equity in much greater ways? What is the role museums have when it comes to well-being, healing, and care?
There are a lot of institutions that have done exceptional work in these areas. And I think they're getting a lot of deserved attention for the work they're doing. So overall, I tend to be a little bit more optimistic these days.
Have we done everything we need to do? No, there's a lot of work still to do, but I feel like things are heading in a great direction. And museums have so much potential to live up to these goals and expectations.
Robert J Weisberg: Talk a little bit about the work that you've been doing with museums since your time at the Portland Art Museum. You were part of the pandemic layoffs that touched so many parts of the field. What was your step after that, and where are you right now in your work with museums and museum professionals?
Mike Murawski: Well, you reflect a lot when something like that happens to you. At the time, applying for jobs didn't make any sense because museums were gutting staff at greater numbers than we've ever seen in our lifetime.
And the economy was in a global crisis. So it wasn't a time to be submitting your application to a museum. I decided not to wait it out and go in that direction. I used that as a moment to do a few things. One, I had been writing a manuscript for a book for two or three years up to that point. So it was great to be able to have the time to just sit down and finish that project, which became Museums as Agents of Change. I was thinking, though, is any of this relevant anymore? And then after reading through the entire manuscript, I thought this is more relevant than it's ever been.
This was a particularly human moment as we were thrust into this global pandemic. So it felt like the right moment to be thinking: can museums use this idea that the pandemic was a portal?
Can we use it as a portal into a more human, more community-centered future? Can we rethink what museums are here for? So I dove into that mentality in finishing the book, to help inspire people to change and take up that mantle of change within museums.
Then I decided to dedicate my consulting work to that idea of change, and how we could inspire into action a lot of museum workers, arts and cultural professionals, and nonprofit workers who are passionate about change but who often just feel frustrated at how that change is happening within their institutions. One of the things that I found early on was that people felt alone as just the one voice for change. So a lot of my work has been giving those people the tools to connect with others and to understand that this is collective work.
We've got to build communities of change and learn how to make change happen within our institutions, not only as museum directors but from the middle, from within an organization. How do we start to affect change and make some of these urgent changes happen?
One of the things that kept me going throughout all of this was developing a new business with my spouse and partner, Bryna Campbell. A few years before the pandemic started, she had launched a business that created trail maps and nature-based learning materials for kids and families.
As the pandemic started and as I left my position at the Portland Art Museum, we decided to fully engage with that business, now called Art Nature Place, and see where it was going. So we started client-based work and doing consulting and design work for nature and outdoors nonprofits. That has grown and has been a large focus of the work that I do today. It’s been some of the most rewarding and enjoyable work that I've been able to do these last few years.
Museums, nature, and building relationships with what's already there
Robert J Weisberg: I'm wondering in terms of what's going on now with climate collapse, do you feel a special relevance in the work you're doing with nature?
Mike Murawski: I like climate change a little better than climate collapse—I'm not a doom-and-gloom kind of person. I'm more of a radical optimist, and I want to recognize that there is a lot of positive work happening in this country and all around the world to address these issues.
Part of our work at Art Nature Place is designing maps and interpretive materials that help kids, families, and people of all ages make a connection with nature and the places where they live.
We recently finished working on an urban birding guide for New York City, focusing on urban nature spaces, urban tree canopies, and birds that are common within those areas.
That’s how that ecosystem operates and how people can start learning about it and build relationships with birds, trees, and local spaces. So you don't need to go out into a national park or something to experience nature. You can literally walk down the block and experience it.
A lot of our work is about building that relationship. People are way more likely to protect something they love and care about. So a lot of the work we do is about building those initial relationships, and giving people who don't often go out into nature that bridge to cross, to get into these spaces to build or rebuild those relationships.
Robert J Weisberg: You're talking about relationships as the key to seeing a certain participatory relevance to nature, that you're part of it and it's not something that's packaged and you have to go on a vacation to a distant place to experience. I feel some echoes of that in your work in museums, like giving people a sense that there's something that's already happening right here, and how you can build relationships with something that you already experience.
And I'm thinking about how we talked in our previous conversation about whether the museum field is in a rut or not and what could be done about that. Hearing you talk so joyfully about relationships, it seems that you feel like there's already a solution that people have and that some people have already been pursuing. That is to stop with the relentless internal eyes-down focus and instead build relationships and networks not just inside of the museum but outside of the museum.
Mike Murawski: This idea comes from a marine biologist and climate change policy expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a brilliant thinker and scientist, and also an artist and creator who has asked this very profound question about climate change, but I think it applies to all change in general. She asks, “What if we get it right?” I am really drawn to his idea of an optimistic future. “What if we act as if we love the future?”
This may not have always been the way that I've thought about museums, but people evolve and change. I've had my moments, and it'll continue, where I just get angry and frustrated with the field and how toxic museums can be sometimes. None of this disregards or negates that, but I think what I've been trying to do is understand the value of radical optimism, of having a vision of a different future and cultivating the belief that it is possible. As we think about museums in terms of the work that we can do within our ecosystems, it's really important to embrace this mindset of hope.
As I started writing more broadly about museums, I've always said we need to do a way better job of celebrating what we do. Sometimes we are afraid to celebrate some of the initial, little victories that we get when we're working well with communities and we're having great programs and a lot of that experimentation in museum education departments.
Museums haven't sung those songs enough: recognizing the amazing work that is happening, connecting with the people who are doing exceptional work, asking the right questions, developing new approaches, and then making sure everyone knows that this is possible.
In 2022, I gave a talk at the ICOM Germany conference, and it was basically about human connection and love in museums. And I was able to show how these radical ideas have been happening in museums by showing example after example. I was trying to advocate for the idea that museums are all of these things, and we can see it happening in all of these amazing examples from institutions all around the world.
We're seeing communities brought to the center of institutions. We're seeing power inequities addressed. We're seeing love and care and healing become central to these institutions.
Museum workers think about their relationship to change
Robert J Weisberg: This vision that you have of radical optimism, I think is a really important voice to be present. I won't pretend that everyone can adopt it, but it's an important context for a lot of the toxicity and overwork that goes on in museums. There’s a book I’ve mentioned called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. It's a science fiction future history and presents a collective, essentially communist vision of the world. I always think of that book when I hear others talk about the love and care that must go into our institutions to heal them for the future.
As I'm closer to the end of my museum career than the beginning, I notice now a lot of people coming into museums with excitement and many positive things that they want to work on. And the lines of power in the status quo can interfere with doing some of these positive things. People go rogue or seek out different networks of people.
What always worries me is the number of people who get left behind because of the ossified culture that we have. Do you, when you work with museums, tend to work with a very small cohort of people who are already thinking positively? Or do you work with a larger group of people whom you might need to win over? What's your process when you first engage with a museum as a client?
Mike Murawski: All of the above. I've led workshops at conferences and professional associations. I've done this series of Institutes for Changemakers online—my partner and I both run them now. That's for people who are thinking of themselves as changemakers already; they’re opting in and want to help further their abilities to help make change happen within their organizations.
I love helping those individuals understand that they can start to build broader communities of change within their institutions and in their work. They come to these workshops often feeling like they don't have a lot of support or colleagues thinking about things the way that they are. So it's learning how to build those networks and create change in a much more sustainable and long-term way.
Right now we're also working with a couple of museums—working across the entire institution. There, you have some people who aren't opting in. Through this work, we’re challenging a lot of the assumptions we might make about barriers to change or who might be resisting change and why.
One good example is a core strategy that I start with, which invites people to reflect on their own relationship with change. I have so many workshops where people come in and I'll ask them, what's your comfort with change?
And they'll say, a hundred percent I'm a change maker, I'm a rebel, I love change, I lean into it. And I'll say, well, what's an example of a change that's challenging to you or that you don't enjoy? And they will list tons of things like, when the pandemic happened, my kids were home from school, there's a lot of change that was forced upon me that I didn't have a choice in.
So we start to unpack what it feels like when you experience change that you don't appreciate or have control over, that you find challenging, what that feels like, and how you can then start to understand how other people might feel as you force change upon them that they don't necessarily feel like they're a part of.
And people always have these light bulb moments of like, oh yeah, I forget that there are other people on the receiving end of this change that I'm so passionate about. I think it's just learning that our human response to change is really complex. In all of my workshops and consulting work, we try to get people to start listening to each other and understand how they respond to change in different ways.
Robert J Weisberg: Like any kind of practice, if you stop doing it, you may backslide a little bit. You can have a day where you're locked in on something and you end up making a relationship blunder with someone you work very well with because of something else that you're locked in on.
I used to write about going rogue, encouraging people to get in a little bit of trouble. But then I experienced someone going rogue around my team. Suddenly you start to wonder, am I a barrier to someone else’s change?
More recently, I was in a set of meetings across all groups and levels of the institution. And we talked about the assumptions that we make about other people, which lead to mistrust and defensiveness because we don't know who they are. We wonder, who is this person? They don't know anything about what I do. And yet, I've never found a person, who, when during a calm moment, who learned more about the museum, wasn't really excited to fill in some of that mental map.
I think that goes back to some of the things you were talking about with nature. People are filling in these mental maps that nature isn't something far away that nature is right there. And that community isn't something far away, but it's something that they're a part of.
Mike Murawski: Just like we create distance for safety or sometimes just to protect certain people or power or stability. It's reaching across those gaps or learning that they don't exist. It's important to think about ideas of nature and community as interconnected. As we use the word community, sometimes it feels like we're talking about something that we're not a part of.
One of the ideas that I constantly challenge is this false dichotomy between museums and communities. We have to think of museums and everyone who works for them as parts of communities. Individuals who work for museums are members of many communities that exist in that place and in that space.
The same with nature. We talk about nature as if it's a thing out there, but we are nature. It's important to understand that there isn't a separation.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has talked a lot about how saving the planet is really saving us. It's about saving ourselves. The planet's been around for a little while and it's going to be around way past when humans are long gone. I always remember to connect that idea to museums.
There was this amazing Indigenous artist and weaver from Alaska, Clarissa Rizal, a Tlingit artist that I had the fortunate privilege to work with while I was at the Portland Art Museum. At one point, there was a weaving that was coming into the museum's collection, a new piece that was being commissioned and created. There was concern about the piece entering the collection of a museum, and she said, we've been weaving long before museums ever existed and we will be weaving long after they are gone.
I love that perspective. Some people say, should we get rid of all museums? But they're here, let's use them in the best way possible. If museums did go away at some point because we felt like they were no longer useful, that's okay too. We don't have to fight for the existence of museums, especially in their traditional context. We can let go and let a different future emerge for these institutions.
For museums to remain relevant in a constantly changing and shifting world, they have to be constantly changing and shifting. I don't think we can stick with this idea of a museum that existed a hundred or more years ago.
Ditching the current museum leadership model
Robert J Weisberg: So there doesn’t have to be a singular idea about what a transformed museum would look like? Would you say that a successfully transformed museum will take a contextual shape based on what it's doing and who it works with and who works there? A successful museum will morph and evolve as its visitors do and as the people who work there do.
Mike Murawski: I think so. It's one of the things over the next year I'd like to spend more time on because I get to ask this question a lot. What is the museum of the future? It's a cool learning experience, but I want to spend more time thinking about if someone gave you a magic wand and said, shape the museums of the future, are there some things that I would say, it should be this or we should at least try these things.
Maybe we celebrate the museums of homelessness; the museums of broken relationships; the museums that are completely created by a neighborhood coming together and resurrecting their history, neighbors just coming in and having an object, a piece of history, or a photograph; and the museums that are completely community-created or pop-up. Museums can be only online, or even just experiences. And they don’t need to have any objects.
The more museums get creative and explore radical and imaginary ways that we haven't thought about yet, the more successful they become.
Robert J Weisberg: That's a testament to moving beyond this neutrality idea, that neutrality myth that there's only one way to have a museum, this middle line between commerce and education, between scholarships and communities. Museums managed to keep from having any kind of vision because they would just stick to this self-defined and fearful middle path.
Mike Murawski: The idea of neutrality kills the museum as an active verb. This idea is that a museum can be out there having an active role in this change. I mean, our world is experiencing a lot of change. There are a lot of things that we need to work on to make our future better. And I think museums can have a role in that.
But we've got to see them as active agents of change. My book is called Museums as Agents of Change. I kind of wish it was called We Are the Agents of Change. It's the people that need to see themselves as agents of change. The institutions are just buildings and they don't do anything. But if we think of museums as made of people, then we see them as a collective of active agents that can be empowered to change things.
I keep thinking less about Museums Are Not Neutral, which is based on an idea of what museums aren't, and want to think more about the next step, which is to ask, so what are museums?
Robert J Weisberg: I appreciate the vision that you're bringing to this open-ended and open-minded idea about the changes that we can make. There’s no set definition going in. They can be anything.
I always enjoy how our conversations bob and weave through so many directions, into museum work and out to bigger issues and then back into the real nitty gritty of museums.
Mike Murawski: Always great to talk with you. It's so important that we have more and more conversations that help us think about where museums are, where they're going, and where they've been.