Art + Museums + Cultural Sensitivity = Great Things

Continuing on Monday’s idea of the Artist in Residence at the Field Museum, I did a little more poking around to see what other similar programs existed in other museums.  There are a lot of wonderful programs out there bringing art into museums in new and exciting ways, but I was most struck by the Natural History Museum in London’s new response to some old images in its collections.

The Natural History Museum houses the John Reeves Collection, a collection of nearly 2,000 scientific illustrations John Reeves commissioned from local artisans while he was stationed in Canton (now Guangzhou) in the early 1800s.  The prints are gorgeous, and at a time when Europeans could not travel freely in China they introduced Westerners to the amazing flora and fauna of Asia.  The Natural History Museum has chosen to use these images as the basis for their first international artist-in-residence program, and invited artist Hu Yun to London from Shanghai.

Artist unknown. Image (c) Natural Museum of History

The residence program is loosely structured, and while Hu Yun spends much of his day in the thick of the Reeves Collection the artwork he produces does not have to draw from any specific theme or style.  The general idea is that by immersing himself in the collection—and I have to tell you that I’m super-jealous of the access he has to those prints and the library stacks in general—anyway, the idea is that the style and feeling of the Reeves drawings will infiltrate anything Hu Yun creates, so all of his art will be an indirect response to the originals.

There are many things I love about this, but my favorite part of this program is the way it gently addresses some of the colonial issues at the heart of the collection.  These prints are named for the man from England who collected them, but none of the artists who actually created them are credited at all.  We don’t even know their names.  Inviting a Chinese artist to bring his cultural understanding to bear on images that were so thoroughly co-opted by an agent of the British East India Company is incredibly thoughtful (and I mean that in the “full of considered thought” sense of the word, not the Miss Manners etiquette sense).  More than thoughtful, having learned that this program exists it immediately seemed necessary to me—there needs to be more conversation around the way artifacts in many natural history museums were obtained in the past and this seems like a beautiful and sensitive way to begin that discussion.

And now my real question is not about the artwork that Hu Yun will produce or the kind of grants NHM applied for or whether the discussion this project engenders will truly address the issues of colonial influence in museum collections.  The question I’m left is, “Why on earth aren’t more museums doing something like this?”