Summer 2021 Reading List: Letter from the Editors
By: Naea Museum Education
Tags: Museums, Museum Education, Summer Reading

Daniela Fifi, Hannah Heller, Hallie Scott, Kabir Singh, Sierra Van Ryck deGroot, Viewfinder Editorial Board

This summer, perhaps more than ever, it feels necessary to try to make space for reading and reflection (in addition to rest, relaxation, and fun!) For this year’s summer issue the editorial team chose several texts we are (re)reading that we feel speak to our work as museum educators working towards social justice. We hope you check some of them out and let us know what you think in the comments, and please add your own ideas for what you’re reading this summer!

This is also our last issue with Kabir Singh at the helm as Editor in Chief. Kabir has served on the Viewfinder Editorial Board for four years, leading our team for the last two. We will sorely miss Kabir’s generous, thoughtful, and forward-thinking leadership, but look forward to carrying forward Viewfinder in all of the ways that it has been shaped by him and the other brilliant editorial minds who have guided this publication.

Happy summer reading,

The Viewfinder Editorial Team

Daniela’s Pick

Lewis, S (2014). The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery. Simon Schuster.

Book cover image for The Rise. Text at the top reads “The Rise.” Bottom text reads “Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery,” with the author’s name Sarah Lewis written below that. The background image is gradated sunset-looking colors, beginning with light blue at the top, turning to tan-yellow, to burnt orange, to gray green at the bottom.

The creative field has been heavily impacted by the global pandemic with many of us in the creative and arts industries losing jobs and stability. This was compounded by ethical questions that surfaced in creative sectors around access to health care, confronting salary inequities, and equity of representation in the field. Museum Educators and other frontline staff were hit especially hard as museums laid off staff from these departments. I recommend this book to readers as an offering to those who many have felt displaced and disheartened. Renowned art historian, curator, and teacher Sarah Lewis reflects on the central concept of failure and challenges in her book, The Rise. She presents failure as a pivotal and crucial landmark in the lives of important historical figures such as Fredrick Douglass and Samuel F.B. Morse. She exclaims that loss has propelled the world’s greatest thinkers into their most celebrated innovations and work. An understanding, acceptance, and surrender to failure, challenge, and loss can manifest into incredible possibilities.

Hallie’s Pick

Onyewuenyi, I. (2021). “On the Future of the Museum,” Art in America, June 3, 2021.

I do not recommend reading this if you are seeking to uplift your faith in museums and museum work. But if you are like me and trying to make sense of complex feelings about institutions and labor this may be a poignant read for you. Author Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi describes the concept of “emancipatory rhetoric” that characterizes the complex narratives museums have been broadcasting over the past year. Ike (who, to be transparent, is a brilliant colleague of mine at the Hammer Museum) questions the push for museums to adopt “activist-adjacent” missions, asking if this thrust might be seen as a by-product of neoliberal policies that diminish government funds for social services. Drawing upon Aimé Césaire, Christina Sharpe, Audre Lorde, and others, Ike suggests instead that the future of the museums may be their own death and ponders what that means for all of us workers who toil within these institutions.

Cover image for May/June 2021 Art in America issue. Text reads starting at the top “International Review since 1913, Art in America, New Talent Issue with Guest Editor Antwaun Sargent, May/June 2021. Background artwork is a tapestry titled The (Black) Madonna-Whore Complex by Qualeasha Wood.

Hannah’s Pick

Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage.

This was one of the first texts I read when I was first seeking out definitions of Whiteness written by people of color. Morrison employs several examples of White American authors to demonstrate ways that Blackness and Africanness has been constructed in the White imaginary, in literature written by White people for a White audience. Her analysis reveals how perceived principles of Americanness (e.g., individualism, freedom, masculine strength, feminine innocence) are all predicated on constructions of the Black Other that both solidify stereotypes of the Black figure in literature, but also delineate Whiteness’s own fears and conditions. On observing this dynamic herself, Morrison writes: “It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl — the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface — and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world” (p. 17). As the museum field continues to seek to understand Whiteness and how it orders our internal work, our relationships with our audiences, funding structures, and conservative responses to calls for change, I appreciate how this text offers one way to see and define the “bowl” that contains our work.

Book cover. Text reads starting from the top “National Bestseller, Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, ‘Her revolutionary little monograph… is a major work by a major American author… [Toni Morrison] is one of the living writers who really matter,’ Los Angeles Times.” Morrison is pictured in sepia tones standing holding a straw hat, wearing a long strand of pearls, looking to her right into the distance.

Kabir’s Pick

Matar, H. (2019). A Month in Siena. New York: Random House.

This beautiful short book manages to be both a delightful travelogue and a meditation on grief. I found it a perfect pandemic read, vicariously satisfying some of my longing to travel and to set foot in museums again. The author is perhaps more well known for his 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning The Return about the search for his father in Qaddafi’s Libya (which I have not yet read, but look forward to). In this memoir, Hisham Matar shares notes from a mostly solitary stay in Siena that include befriending strangers through common language and culture, close looking while museumgoing, a history lesson on the plague (which felt more relevant than I would have liked!), and processing the disappearance of his father. Matar is a keen observer of art and life. His voice keeps the reader engaged and makes a wide range of topics feel personal. Art is very much at the center of this book, which features numerous color reproductions of Sienese paintings that Matar describes in detail.

Book cover. Text reads from the top “A Month in the Siena, By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return, Hisham Matar.” Background image is watercolor looking painting of city architecture, with a large orange building in the background with what looks like a circular stained glass window covered with a grate, and smaller buildings in pinks, tans, and greens in the middle ground, and a gray staircase leading down in the foreground.

Sierra’s Pick

May, K. (2020). Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Riverhead Books.

It would be the understatement of the past decade to say last year was a challenging year. We saw loss, struggle, and oppression loom over so many aspects of our lives. Wintering was a much needed read during a year of struggle. The book is slow paced and, while normally that would cause me to put a book down in pursuit of something faster, it was exactly what was needed after almost fourteen months of quarantine. May’s book is a memoir, but it reads like a conversation — as if you and a good friend were sitting down on a sunny afternoon on a restaurant’s outdoor patio, catching up after the past year. Over a meal or small bite accompanied by a glass of wine or a sparkling water, you share the struggles and triumphs you both have endured. You will wade through some awkward moments and bask in some glorious times. It’s a book that, after a couple of chapters, it felt okay to put down and process some of the feelings that bubbled up over the course of reading. May sets a tone with the book’s narrative in a way that encourages the reader to take their time with it. So, I encourage you to buy this book or get a long loan at the library and take your time with it. Wintering is the reset you may need after a difficult year.