Curator Dr. Kelli Morgan responds to the resignation of Newfields CEO Charles Venable
This is a transcription of an Instagram video posted by Dr. Kelli Morgan, Newfields’ former curator of American art. The video first appeared on her Instagram account across two IGTV posts on February 17, 2021, a few hours following the announcement that Charles Venable had resigned as CEO of Newfields (the Indianapolis Museum of Art.) It has been transcribed with Dr. Morgan’s express permission. The original posts can be found here and here.
Eight months ago, Dr. Kelli Morgan warned of the toxic and discriminatory culture at the museum in a widely-publicized resignation letter (and alluded to it in a sharp essay weeks prior.) When, on February 12, museum leadership came under harsh criticism for a racist job description, the media looked to Dr. Morgan for comment, especially considering the fact that her warnings had gone unheeded. Beginning on February 14 she shared her thoughts through a number of IGTV videos (Feb. 14, 15, 16) in spite of having no obligation to continue this tiring work.
KELLI MORGAN:
I’m back, as promised. I said I was gonna come back and do a longer video to let you guys know how I was thinking. I had to take notes! Because I am so tired. But it’s a good tired. The work is tiring. It’s tiring in a good way.
I think first I’d have to say, it’s kind of surreal. That’s probably the first feeling. It’s kind of taking a minute to sink in, right? The other thing that’s kind of strange is I can’t get the Wizard of Oz out of my head so it keeps going, “Ding dong the witch is dead” ever since I typed it. The song keeps playing over and over again. [Laughs.] Just that part, which is weird.
But I think that on this video I’m going to get a little personal, to be honest. Because this is a very personal kind of vindication for me. I know a lot of you reached out to me this week and were just like, “Don’t even worry about it, thank you so much for what you’re doing, but just stay on your self care. Don’t go back down the rabbit hole.” And I’m going to tell you guys why I went down the rabbit hole. I had a very particular moment on Monday where I had learned from my colleagues how they had pretty much been ignored in the all staff meeting, and that kind of thing.
And I got so angry. Because I started thinking about how much we’ve lost under that administration. And in particular thinking about how much I’ve lost.
Part of my self care practice over the last eight months has been just trying through therapy and being with my family and all of these things… a lot of other things… exercise, drawing and painting, and coloring…to find my way back to my love of art and my love of museums that really came out of my relationship with my Grandfather.
I’m giving a TED talk on March 27 (just to promote myself a little bit) where I’m talking about all of this stuff, because I’ve taken the road less traveled in this art world, this curatorial trajectory I’ve been on. And this situation was the straw that broke that camel’s back. Not this literal situation with the job description, but my experience at IMA, was really the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. Because I have been harmed in these ways or undermined in my work at every institution that I have worked at. Part of the fight that you all see or have observed over the last few months leading up to my resignation comes from the fact that I didn’t fight what was happening to me at PAFA. And I really should have fought that situation more than I did.
And on Monday after talking to my colleagues, I really started thinking about that. I started thinking about how over the weekend I was really struggling because I have been working on my TED talk. And I was really struggling with writing the last section. It’s just the section about my Granddad. And I kept saying to myself, “Kelli, why are you struggling with this so much? You loved Granddad. This stuff should be easy. You should be able to just bam, type it out.” And in mulling over that for myself I realized that I didn’t want to remember.
I didn’t want to remember the moments with Smithsonian magazine with my Grandfather. Playing in the attic as a kid with all of their stuff. Which now I understand was kind of my preschool form of curating. My interest in Black material culture before I knew that was what it was actually called.
I didn’t want to remember that that was why I got into the field in the first place. Because the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields had literally just broken that for me.
Broken it to the point where there have been some really great invitations and offers that have come in the past eight months that I couldn’t take, classes that I couldn’t teach, because the trauma and the PTSD was that bad. Something that I had been doing pretty much my whole life was out the window.
I was thinking of it kind of more so like a bad break up. You know, like that song you listen to once you broke up with the terrible dude you’ve been with for way too long. I kept saying, “Well you can’t listen to a lot of those songs now Kelli, it’ll come back at some point.” But it’s hard to feel like that about something that you’ve dedicated your life to and an interest you’ve had pretty much your whole life. And an interest you’ve spent over ten years in classrooms, over three degrees confirming, substantiating, bolstering, compounding…to walk into institutions that literally tear you apart because of it.
And so I thought about that. That’s my story.
For two-hundred-and-some people on the IMA staff — they have very similar stories. There are hundreds of people who no longer work at Newfields who have similar stories. And I just lost it.
And I said, I’m so tired of the fuck shit happening and there never being any consequences for it. And part of that is because the general public never gets to hear the side of the story of what we lose under bad leadership. What we lose under abusive leadership. And I think there’s no time like the present to really illuminate that.
Because we’re all at our wit’s end with COVID quarantine and all of the stuff: unemployment, the kids in school, masks, social distancing, the vaccine. There’s all this mess. We’re not even going near the capitol riot, that’s a whole other thing. But all because of how damaging bad leadership is for years of this … God knows where he came from as a President. And here we are
Newfields and the museum field is no different. So where this is really a wonderful step in the right direction… (As much as you hate to celebrate somebody’s downfall — I do think that Venable was the root.)…
Toxic white supremacy culture does not rest in one person. It is a hydra. It’s an engrained kind of hydra. So you cut the head off and another one will grow back. Sometimes you cut the head off and two will grow in its place.
So to me, the entire leadership needs to go. Because what you can be…nobody’s expecting leaders to be perfect, we’re all humans. Ain’t nobody perfect. And I said this to Hyperallergic. You can be a flawed leader. What you absolutely cannot be is a leader who refuses blatantly and deliberately to listen and learn. And the leadership across the board, save one person, made that decision on July 17 of 2020.
That’s the day I resigned. And I’m not saying that everything rests in my resignation. But nobody listened to me. I wouldn’t say people didn’t necessarily believe me. I think there were a lot of people who thought I was exaggerating, other than the people who actually witnessed the shit. In my opinion, there’s no way that Venable’s resignation can assuage that reality. Because on Friday everybody, including people on Twitter who just saw Sarah Bahr’s posting of it, some of the first things they said was, “Dr. Kelli Morgan said something about this eight months ago.”
So going back to sitting on the end of my bed on Monday, so pissed off, about my colleagues still not being heard. I said to myself, “You know what, I fight a lot for a lot of people. I am proud of that, I will always do that, it’s part of my work. But in doing that, I asked myself, you know what Kelli — who fights for you?” So as tired as I am right now, and I am tired.
This was a decision for the only time in my life to fight for myself — to make up for all of the times that I did not.
This has also been a decision because, as we talk about the gains in regards to Black museum workers and the visibility of Black art. It has been for a couple of years. Thinking about the HBO documentary, Black Art in the Absence of Light, as great as it is, it’s a very particular narrative. I’m not the first at any of this. I’m standing on the shoulders of a lot of people, a community of Black museum professionals and Black art historians and artists too who have been doing this work since the late 60s and 70s.
There’s also a community of those workers who found themselves down there buried, who found themselves erased from the art history and the institutions for doing exactly what I’m doing right now. Hundreds of Black museum professionals from history museums to African American museums to art museums. So this is something I’m also doing to bring visibility to their lives and their fights and their fights they didn’t win. Fights that other people in the art world didn’t support them through.
I say to people all the time this is bigger than me. I used to say a lot at the beginning of my career, “I don’t do this work for me, I don’t do this work for even you, I do this work for God.” This has always been a spiritual calling for me. Because I didn’t know anything about becoming a museum curator. I didn’t set foot inside an art museum until I was 25. And when you’re called to do something it’s hard, it sucks, you don’t know why the universe works like that. It is the fucking worst when it is something that you’re called to do. But it builds you. It makes you a completely different person. The person who started July 17, 2016 at PAFA is not the person who is sitting on this screen talking to you right now.
I was talking in an earlier video about knowing your “why?” Knowing that the “why?” was building me to something greater. Was leading me to something greater. Which was allowing me to build relationships for other people for myself, the whole nine…for something greater.
And I don’t know what that something greater is. I just know that it’s coming and I just know that I wouldn’t have it without the collectivity in which I work. This was a collective effort. This was not just something that I decided to do. Or that I did alone.
My colleagues, they supported me in the best way that they could in that art committee meeting and afterward in 2019, and they were reprimanded for it. They were threatened for doing so. I mean, shit, so was I but I just kept defending myself. This effort, this result that we got…this win I guess I could call it…would not have happened without people like Danicia Malone, (who is an urban planner and one of my closest friends in Indy,) putting that petition together. People like Michael Kaufmann, Christopher West, just the Indiana arts community, period. The artists that worked on the murals. This has been something that has been in the works for a really long time.
My decision to kind of pick it up and really get on the horn about it this week was to do the thing that I set out to do when I came into this field. And that was to change the structure of the field. And I feel like I actually did that today. I feel like that’s actually happening. Not at all in the way I thought it would. Because I thought I could just do some reinstallations, reinterpret some paintings, write a few essays, do an exhibition catalog, you know, keep it moving.
But it was something deeper than that. My “why” was always structural change. It coming like this is… phenomenal. This never happens.
Talking about being the first Black curator to do whatever-whatever. Or the first Black curator of American art, which I’m not that. But I’ve definitely been the first Black curator at the couple institutions. But to be the first Black curator to unseat a director. To be the first Black curator, or the first curator period, to literally change the trajectory of one of the most prominent institutions in the Midwest…that’s a first I’ll take.
And even more so, extending that to my IMA colleagues as one of the first museum staffs to unseat a director.
And with that I hope and pray to God that that gives other museum staffs who are dealing with crazy directors or problematic boards the power to do the exact same thing.
There was a question that has followed me my entire career. White collectors or donors or even some of my colleagues and supervisors have asked me over the years, “How did you get here?” in this confused way. And this is what the TED talk is going to go into next month. Is how I actually got here. But I bring that up because I want to tell museum staffs around the country that there are other ways. Don’t let them make you feel like you can’t do it a different way. The only thing you have to do is decide to do so. Whether you decide to do that singularly, or whether you decide to do that collectively. Collectively is better. Let me just put that out there.
But there are other ways. I hope if nothing else this week, you gather that, you take that, and you hold that. And when you’re ready, you do what you need to do to save yourself.
