Art Museum Fugitivity

[Abram Jackson] An audio essay is not the most unassuming way to detail the current reality for some in the United States art museum world. However, I believe it is important to document this moment as a reminder and beacon for future generations who may have to consider subversion as a means of survival. As a descendant of enslaved African people in the United States, this strategy is one that my ancestors have had to employ as a means of continuation. So, the theoretical framework of fugitivity is on my mind.

Fugitivity is a concept rooted in Black studies, Critical Race Theory and literary criticism. Drawing on the figure of the fugitive or runaway, it names the practices of escape, refusal and improvisation through which Black people resist captivity, enslavement and systemic violence. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers have extended the term beyond the historical context of enslavement to describe the everyday ways Black life exceeds and evades the structures that seek to contain it.

My name is Abram Jackson. I am the inaugural Director of Interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. Although not solely in response to the racial uprisings of 2020, my role developed at a time when cultural institutions were undergoing systemic shifts in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many other Black Americans that were victims of systemic violence.

My background is in ethnic studies, an area of study that originated at San Francisco State University after a year-long student strike during the 1968–9 school year. Students demanded opportunities to learn more about the histories, literature and arts of Black Americans, Latine Americans, Indigenous Americans and Asian Americans. This collective act of resistance by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front led to the establishment of the first ever College of Ethnic Studies in the fall of 1969. I completed my master’s degree in the subject in 2004, and my professional goal was to teach ethnic studies to public high school students, which ultimately led to a different, albeit parallel path, of supporting students of colour at independent schools as an administrator and teacher. I understood my position as an opportunity to share the good news of ethnic studies, and I believe the same to be true about my place in art museums.

You know, I always loved art museums. However, I could not imagine working at one, given my lack of art historical training. And yet, I have had profoundly spiritual experiences in art museums and galleries, and I’ve always been someone who reads every text at museums and national parks. To have the responsibility of reviewing exhibition texts at the de Young and Legion of Honor through an equity lens, is a duty I therefore take very seriously. I imbue the theories of ethnic studies scholars such as bell hooks, Edward Said, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gloria Anzaldúa, into what I have called ‘equity edits’, which I apply to the didactic materials that curators produce for special exhibitions and permanent collection rotations and reinstallations.

The process involves meetings to discuss suggested edits, and at the centre of the work are burgeoning audience segments, many of whom are sceptical of art museums given the long history of colonial harm via the guise of preservation. You know, museums frequently counter requests for the repatriation of looted objects by arguing that their primary duty is to preserve global history for the benefit of the public. This makes me wonder what it means to do the work of art museum interpretation in this moment of ever combustible culture wars, global genocides and what feels like impending world wars.

In the United States, the current administration has made decrees for federally funded institutions to tell a reversion of the American story. For example, in 2024, the Trump administration objected to an assertion in the exhibition, The Shape of Power, Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that race is a social construct, calling it ‘ideological indoctrination’. On March 27 2025 President Trump issued an executive order titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. It mentioned the Smithsonian exhibition as divisive, and I would argue that prior to Trump’s second term, the country’s account of its complex histories was slowly moving toward a more accurate narrative of nation-building that included the contributions of oppressed people. However, the current federal ethos regarding historical contexts at art institutions is either to erase or mute the history of genocide, slavery and acts of exclusion, and the indelible mark on the nation’s history from marginalised groups that have resisted and endured those violent systems. Instead, this administration seems to be committed to upholding the myth of white American exceptionalism, and the work of interpretation through an equity lens attempt to interrupt this dangerous ideological campaign.

For example, early on in my career, I reviewed a wall text in the permanent collection display in the American Art Gallery at the de Young. It focused on objects that reflect the plurality of what we now call California. The gallery included portraits of Indigenous people like Henry Inman’s In the Back of the Lodge [c.1832–3], which depicts a tribal leader who travelled to Washington, DC in 1828 with a delegation from the Ho-Chungra Nation. Portraits also include Spanish colonists, including His Excellency Señor Doctor Don Pedro Moya de Contreras [1850], that depicts Señor Moya, who became the viceroy and archbishop of New Spain in 1570. And even decorative arts that range from objects of religious devotion to a Spanish colonial spice box. The didactic text told the story of how these objects connect. Yet I noticed the curators’ use of the words ‘compulsory labour’ to describe the experience of Indigenous people under Spanish rule. I suggested that the words be changed to ‘enslavement’, to tell a more accurate story about how the missions were built, and the power relations imbued in that historical moment.

As a product of the California education system, I can attest that I learned a history that suggested that indigenous communities who built California’s Spanish missions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did so more out of compulsion than force. The updated gallery text tells a more accurate history, and so much of my journey in ethnic studies has been about unlearning false narratives, and I’m truly honoured to pass that on to our visitors through the labels that contextualise collections and special exhibitions. All of this work, especially in this political climate, has me thinking about fugitivity.

Scholars such as Hartman, Moten, Christina Sharp and Tavia Nyong’o have written about how the experiences of everyday Black life include fugitive performances. Their theories resonate with me as an art museum interpretation professional tasked with interpreting bias and asserting histories and narratives untold and intentionally ignored. This work is my everyday. I believe the current moment called for art museum interpretation to be bold and rooted in community. I cannot underscore the latter enough, as a fugitive does not traverse toward freedom alone. It is always done within the inner workings of a community focused on that same goal. Moreover, fugitivity is not the goal of liberation. However, it is a pit stop toward the realisation of a post-colonial freedom for Black people.

I began this work as a consultant while working full-time as a high school humanities teacher and administrator. The opportunity came my way serendipitously, and the texts sent to me to review were a wonderful interruption from the routine of teaching. You know, one of my favourite books to teach was Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing [2016]. In it, a character named Yaw asserts that history is storytelling. I would often write this on the whiteboard in my classes as a reminder to all who entered the classroom and dared to engage with history and historiography.

Initially, my work with the two museums focused on substituting words and reconsidering how narratives were told. This then evolved to become, what I have coined equity edits. As demographic research consistently shows, art museum audiences in the United States are predominantly highly educated, older white women. Consequently, museums stand at a critical precipice. They have an opportunity to engage a wider range of identities, and practicing true equity means recognising the potential range of audiences who interact with exhibition texts, and providing diverse resources necessary for all visitors to achieve a meaningful, shared outcome that sparks curiosity, encourages close looking and honours the awe that comes with engaging with works of art.

Part of my workflow includes a scan of didactic texts for potentially problematic terms or frameworks that uphold white supremacy. After making edits to texts, I meet with the curators who wrote them to discuss the suggested changes. The dialogue that happens is generative in terms of both of our hopes and is one of my favourite parts of the process. It’s an opportunity to be in conversation about intention versus impact, and I’m often blown away by the brilliance of curators and their deep specialised knowledge from which I learn so much. In many ways, our areas of specialty create an ideal marriage of strengths that aid in our shared goal of wanting visitors to understand the object in front of them and the exhibition as a whole in an engaging, dynamic and meaningful way.

Although my work with curators at the de Young and the Legion of Honor feels collaborative, at the macro level in the US, my role can sometimes feel fraught. In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being [2016], she reflects, ‘living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday lack existence … while even as that terror is visited on our bodies, the realities of that terror are erased’. The pervasive attempts to erase histories that challenge the fragile narrative of American exceptionalism are both a deeply rooted historical legacy and an ongoing modern reality. To know the terror of one’s ancestors while experiencing racial terror is both maddening and instructive, and to support the more accurate storytelling of a terror that has often been sanitised while witnessing and experiencing it in real time is the source of righteous indignation, and it gives deep purpose to the work of interpretation through an equity lens.

Before becoming Director of Interpretation, I was a consultant to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and I reviewed the audio tour for the exhibition Soul of a Nation [Art in the Age of Black Power] at the De Young in 2019. Written by writer and audio tour producer Frances Homen Jue, and narrated by pioneering journalist Belva Davis and actor Danny Glover, it detailed select objects as they related to the overall narrative of the exhibition. Soul of a Nation was exhibited in the United States toward the end of President Trump’s first term, and there were early rumblings of erasure as a backlash to what has been coined by this administration as ‘woke indoctrination’.

I remember vividly my edit for Dana C. Chandler’s Fred Hampton’s Door Number Two [1975]. The artwork commemorates the ambush on 4 December 1969, by Chicago police and the FBI on the apartment of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. During the early morning, officers fired between ninety-nine to a hundred shots into the apartment, murdering Hampton in his bed. Panthers later opened the apartment to the public, showing the bullet-riddled doors and walls to prove that the state narrative of a shootout was a lie. The other panther inside on security duty, Mark Clark, only fired a single, accidental shot.

Chandler’s work depicts a green door with red trim riddled with bullet holes. At the top right corner of the door lies a government stamp with four stars that include the words ‘US Approved’. In my edit, it was important to note that Hampton was not killed, but murdered, and it was equally significant to point out the role of COINTELPRO – an abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program to refer to a series of covert and illegal operations conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the FBI.

As Sharp reminds us, we live ‘in the history and present of terror’. We are truly living in the wake. So, an equity edit is an attempt to mitigate and ultimately dismantle the stronger than ever re-attempt of erasure of the nuances that tell a more truthful story about history. In this case, the equity edit is attempting to do the same thing as the work of art. Chandler is ensuring that the state narrative of a shootout is debunked and exposed as a falsity, while my edit, substituting ‘murder’ for ‘kill’ and adding the FBI into the list of actors, ensures that a visitor engaged with the work has a more complete understanding that they can then apply to their experience of meaning-making. I like to think of the work of the artists and inclusive interpretation as the opposite of erasure. It’s all about adding colour.

This work is not solely held by me, and by design, I work closely with community support. Shortly after beginning my role, I began working with interpretation partners in preparing for the exhibition Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence. The exhibition confronted the silence related to the systemic violence against Black people using the visual language of the fallen figure in Western European art. I knew that interpretation for this exhibition should be rooted in local lived experiences. As one of the few Black Americans at the institution behind the scenes, I had a hunch that if not done in community, we might enact harm as opposed to healing with our interpretation of the exhibition.

This led to the development of the Interpretation Partners Program for which we work with local and sometimes global partners whose lives are tied closely to themes of exhibitions. The interpretations partners for the Wiley exhibition included local Black Americans who are working to dismantle systemic violence toward Black people. Since this first trial, I’ve worked with interpretation partners for over ten exhibitions, ranging from Ansel Adams in Our Time in 2023 to more recently, for the Art of Manga exhibition. Each time, I am affirmed by the power of community voice.

The Wiley exhibition had sparked this inner knowing that community and lived experience can be leveraged to improve how visitors experience exhibitions. For example, in the case of Wiley’s sculpture Youth Mourning [2022], which is a bronze of a young Black man kneeling with his body folded forward, resting heavily on his thighs. He’s wearing a hoodie and tennis shoes, an outfit similar to that worn by Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Black seventeen year-old high school student that was killed by George Zimmerman, a twenty-eight year-old neighbourhood watch captain in Sanford, Florida. The case sparked national debate about racial profiling and its deadly consequences. After public pressure, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with second degree murder. But on the 13th of July 2013, a jury found him not guilty of second degree murder and the lesser charge of manslaughter, which ultimately sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

For the audio tour of Wiley’s exhibition, we included the voice of interpretation partner, Rev. Wanda Johnson, the mother of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer on New Year’s Day, 2009. This happened at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, California. Johnson profoundly reflects what the object means to her, and to hear how such an artwork can evoke someone’s lived experience of deadly racial profiling drives home the urgency of interpretation through an equity lens and its impact on local communities and individuals. Many visitors have shared feedback about how Rev. Wanda’s audio stop made their understanding of the work more meaningful. It’s one experience to see the beauty of the bronze and to understand the context and references of this material. It is another to hear from a mother grieving the loss of her son. The audio tour told this larger story of the impacts of systemic violence toward Black people and also included reflections from Wiley himself and the curator, Claudia Schmuckli.

[Rev. Wanda Johnson] My name is Wanda Johnson. I’m the mother of Oscar Grant that [sic] was killed 1 January 2009 at the Fruitvale Barts station in Oakland, California. When he was killed, this Youth Mourning was his friends mourning for the loss of a loved one, mourning for the loss of a friend, mourning for the loss of family member. Never to go back to be able to call this person and talk to this person. Never to go back to be able to joke and laugh and eat with this person. But now, having to face being alone, they laid on the platform and at the hospital, mourning, all of us mourning, but having the questions of why? Youth Mourning seems to read, I should have peace. I should be able to live in freedom, not have to cover up who I am. Being identified and targeted because of my appearance. I shouldn’t have to have a hoodie or a hat on so that you can’t see the real me. I begin to think about how so many of our people have had so much strength and so much zeal and just different gifts and talents and abilities, yet lose their lives senselessly. And now all those gifts, their talents, their bravery is [sic] buried in the ground along with them. Like this Youth Mourning, many mornings, many evenings this was me bawling up, praying onto God, ‘Why did it have to happen?’ And thirteen, fourteen years later, that question still resonates. Why did you have to pull out your gun and shoot him when it wasn’t necessary?

[Abram Jackson] It is important to ensure that the relationships with the interpretation partners are part of an ongoing dynamic of mutuality. So often, institutions might ask what a community partner can do for them, but shy away from the question about how the museum can support the community partner. For example, we pay interpretation partners more than we would a typical consultant, given their labour of tapping into sometimes traumatising experiences to support interpretation. Or we provide space for organisations that are connected to our partners to hold events with the aim that the experience is one of synergy and symbiosis. The Wiley exhibition led us down a third path toward inclusive interpretation and involved exercising fugitivity as one solution. The interpretation partners worried that the experience of moving through the exhibition might be challenging for Black people and those close to the themes of the exhibition. This was affirmed when the de Young was tagged on a social media post from a visitor to the exhibition, Mariah Rankine, in which she stated.

[Mariah Rankine] Dear DeYoung Museum, I would love to experience the Kehinde Wiley exhibition with other Black bodied folks as a place where we can wail and grieve. Would it be possible to create Black space like this? Let us sit with this work without the gazes of folks who haven’t lived so close to this pain. Let us cry in the magnitude of the complex narratives at play. Without people talking on phones, talking about a rager they went to last night and bypassing the enormity this work presents. Let this be Black space for an hour or two. Please consider.

[Abram Jackson] It led us to develop a programme of working with people and organisations that are rooted in affinity to experience exhibitions on days we are closed and, or, after hours. This allows for a different experience, one that is grounded in the shared experiences that come with affinity. The programme that was developed included a presentation about the context of the show, including references to the objects from Western European art history that Wiley pays homage to in his works, a guided tour and a sound bath, followed by a closing circle to process the experience. After the programme that we organised with Mariah, she posted the following response.

[Mariah Rankine] To witness the sense of relief to have this space, to listen to multiple people say, I never would have come, but I knew I could move through this work in this space dedicated for us. To see the awe, to hear ‘this means so much, this means, so much’. To witness the tears, the release of pain, the acknowledgement of pain. To surrender to sound. If museums are still trying to understand how to do the work, this is perhaps the invitation to follow the lead of those who say ‘Yes, we can do that here’.

[Abram Jackson] In his book, Black and Blur [2017], Moten asserts that ‘fugitivity is not absence, but the disruption of presence; not invisibility but opacity’. Disappearing in one context allows for a stronger, more salient existence in another. Initially, shifting an in-gallery experience with the general public to one that happens in racial affinity after hours might seem like an erasure of sorts, when in fact, it allows Black visitors a paradigm shift from feeling invisible to being affirmed in their Blackness. Since this first exhibition, we have been able to host affinity programmes for a variety of exhibitions and have expanded affinity to its many forms. Although racial affinity is top of mind in this context, affinity based on interests and hobbies is also a promising way to think about engaging visitors.

In a recent retrospective of Isaac Julien at the de Young titled Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, we were able to host an affinity group reflecting the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. We welcomed the group Black Health from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which supports older, mostly gay Black American men living with HIV AIDS. Part of this first comprehensive museum retrospective of Julien focused on earlier works that chronicle a particular time of deep loss and fear for Black gay men, such as Portrait in Blue: Essex Hemphill [2005], This is Not an AIDS Advertisement [1987] and Looking for Langston [1989]. As a Black gay man myself, it was insightful to host an affinity programme that centred the experiences of these men, and honoured their life and survival.

The day included context about the interpretation of the exhibition. In addition to setting participants up for how to navigate a film exhibition, we included lunch and opportunities to process what was coming up for them in viewing the collection of films. Most of the men were drawn to the exhibition’s presentation of Looking for Langston. It was just one screen, unlike the multi-screen gallery installations of Julien’s other works. Participants were intrigued by the merging of the Harlem Renaissance and the emergent energy of the late 1980s and early 1990s ballroom scene that’s captured in the film. The overt fabulousness and self-assuredness in a time of state negligence, and the response of the subjects in the films, evokes Nyong’o’ reminder that ‘Black life is always already a performance of survival; to fabulate is to flee’. So, the fabulation or narrative creation inherent in the subversion of ballroom culture by queer, Black and brown people is a refusal of erasure and a path toward freedom from oppressive social strictures at the intersections of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. This intersectional fugitivity viscerally resonated with the participants of the Isaac Julien affinity programme, and seeing my elders in the strength of their fugitivity was truly profound.

The terror is here and has been for a while. The privilege and responsibility to tell a more truthful, multivocal and critical story about our collections and special exhibitions is not lost on me. It is in the imagination of the ancestors and part of that elastic arc of justice. This manifestation of fugitivity might not be the last for me as a Black American and is part of the experience of being Black in America. However, the path toward achieving more belonging and supporting the experience and perception of art museums for all includes this important part of the experiences of Black peoples. And utilising the theory is a tool of many practises in everyday life and in ways not always seen by dominant culture. This is the power of fugitivity that I lean on in my life and work.