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In 2009, soon after the fourth Indiana Jones film came out, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) awarded Harrison Ford with the Bandelier Award for Public Service in Archaeology.

In his speech, Ford expresses his gratitude to the AIA and for the work archaeologists are doing today to “understand and interpret the past to learn from it and enjoy a better future.” But he added, “it is quite disarming to see that the Indiana Jones films have been an inspiration to archaeologists.”

I was thinking about this speech while watching the previews for the latest Indiana Jones film, where Ford takes his last bow as Dr. Jones, the archaeology professor-cum-international treasure hunter. Three decades since 1930s-era Nazis sought to take over the world in Radars of the Lost Ark, they’re back in this fifth installment, The Dial of Destiny, set in the late 1960s, which finds them once more in pursuit of a powerful artifact (this time, a time-traveling device they can use to change the past).

Who better than Indy to save the world again? But if our now-aging hero is deservedly beloved for his penchant for punching Nazis (and his “healthy respect” for snakes), his own exploits also further what Ford recognizes as the dangers of archaeology as a tool of empire.

The real-life Nazis were, of course, infamous for coopting archaeological practices in service of the state. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi-sponsored archaeological digs took place throughout Europe and North Africa to further the racist ideology of the Third Reich and destroy or suppress any material that did not support their imperial doctrine.

One of the Third Reich’s primary endeavors in these expeditions was to find any evidence that would support the myth of an ancient Aryan race, the pseudoscientific theory first popularized in the 18th century by French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, among others, and operated as a central ideology of the Third Reich.

Nazi archaeologist Hans Reinerth, the head of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, one of the Nazi Party organizations tasked to appropriate and loot cultural property, was explicit about such an agenda:

German archaeology is for me … indigenous, blood-bound Germanic and Indo-Germanic prehistory. Our spadework has the preeminent goal …of illuminating our hitherto neglected indigenous prehistory. Anyone who opposes this effort … is a pernicious threat to the German people and should be fought accordingly.

Such expeditions were also intended to justify the state’s territorial aggression and expansion. For instance, after Hitler invaded Poland in 1940, Wolfram Sievers, the managing director of Ahnenerbe, another SS organization that sought to find evidence to justify Nazi racial superiority, had the idea of sending a representative to Poland to seize any material that would retroactively establish the Nazis’ right to the land and endorse the annexation.

But while the crimes of Nazi archaeology were numerous, as archaeologist Bettina Arnold warns in her study of race and archaeology in Nazi Germany, what the Third Reich was doing was neither a “uniquely German phenomenon nor something we can safely relegate to the past.”

Modern archaeologists are forever disavowing how the Indiana Jones franchise equates Indy’s treasure hunting to serious academic archaeology to distance the fictitious looter from their field. (There’s a great McSweeney’s list that jokes about the many… many reasons Dr. Jones would have been denied tenure as a professor in mid-20th century America.) But Indy’s wont of looting priceless artifacts is also part and parcel of the history of Western colonial plunder conducted under the auspices of archaeological research.

Even Jones’s creator, George Lucas, first described Indy as “a grave robber,” hired by museums “to steal things out of tombs and stuff.” And despite in-movie quips by Indy’s museum director friend in Radars of the Los Arc about how he’s sure that everything Dr. Jones acquired for his museum conformed to the fictional “International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities,” the museum was always more than happy to take the stolen goods Indy procured for it.

This story remains true to the real-life history of acquisitions, even following the landmark 1970 UNESCO convention that pioneered international return and restitution of cultural property.

“When I first entered the world of curators, it was the Wild West, ‘1970’ notwithstanding,” as Gary Vikan, a curator who came up in the 1980s, told the New York Times last year in an essay suggesting that the “Indiana Jones Era Is Over” for U.S. museums. “Curators and museum directors wanted to get important works,” Vikan continued. “You wanted to be the one that gets that icon, that sculpture, that bronze.”

While the repatriation movement to decolonize museums has continued to gain steam leading to the introduction of more legal protections for cultural property, from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 to the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects in 1995, countless national treasures—from the Benin Bronzes to the Elgin Marbles—remain separated from their countries of origin. As human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson pointed out in his 2019 book, Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure, “mighty ‘encyclopedic’ museums, like the Met and the British Museum” continue to “lock up their precious legacy of other lands, stolen from their people by wars of aggression, theft, and duplicity.”

The latest Indiana Jones movie, interestingly, takes place in 1969, just one year before the watershed 1970 UNESCO convention. But the ethics of looting were already established before Indy came up in the field, as evinced by British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s condemnation of the seizing of treasures from Maqdala in Northern Ethiopia in 1868. Addressing the House of Commons, he said he “deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army.” Going back all the way to 70 CE, Roman magistrate Gaius Verres was already being put on trial for plundering Greek temples during his reign as governor of Sicily.

Indiana Jones’ favorite lament—“That belongs in a museum!”—should ring hollow today. But though the Indy era may be ending at the box office, whether the “Indiana Jones Era” of museum practices is truly over, as the Times crowed, has yet to be seen. That same Times article also included musings by critics who bemoaned the loss of “treasures that showcase a country’s artistic brilliance from an international capital like Washington, where they are much seen, and send them to remote, uncertain settings.” (Whether they mean the metropolises of cities like Cairo, Lagos, and Santiago is unclear.)

It suggests there’s a ways to go before the chapter of pillage and plunder glorified by the Indiana Jones franchise fully closes. But with the new release debuting this holiday weekend, at least we can still enjoy Ford, now 80 years old, continuing to do what he does best: dodge snakes and perform the important public service act of punching Nazis.

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In 2019, an unassuming package arrived at my front door.

Inside was a sooty 2-by-4-foot scrapbook filled with candy wrappers over 70 years old. On the surface, a piece of trash—one that in fact came from a dumpster, saved from oblivion during the move of Necco (the New England Confectionery Company) from its Cambridge, Massachusetts factory to nearby Revere in 2003. After the company went bankrupt 15 years later, it traveled 2,950 miles to La Verne, California, to the ranch house my husband Joe and I call home.

Why am I now its keeper?

I’m curator of the Candy Wrapper Museum, my online “roadside attraction.” Here I share my 50-year collection of little slips of paper, designed to be torn and thrown away. Why? Because these ephemeral objects serve as time machines, opening an emotional portal to the past.

I was 15 years old when I started collecting, inspired by friends with cool collections like beer bottles from around the world. I wanted to start one of my own, but of what? I usually spent my few coins on candy at the 7-Eleven. The candy shelves were a wonderland of tasty treats with colorful wrappers and names, all clamoring: Pick me! Big Hunks, Milk Duds, Jujyfruits, Choco’Lite, Lemonhead … How could a girl decide?

Then inspiration struck. Instead of throwing away those wrappers, I would save them. I would create the Candy Wrapper Museum, where I envisioned that the wrappers would one day be enjoyed as art, nostalgia, and humor. I had a plan: I would collect these wrappers throughout my lifetime, then open up the museum as a roadside attraction in my “old age.” I chose my first pieces, Nice Mice and Cinnamon Teddy Bears, and so began this journey. Friends caught the spirit of fun and donated pieces. Collecting became an affordable, novel way to explore the world around me, one that could turn even a mundane shopping trip into a treasure hunt.

In 2002, inspiration struck again. Why wait until retirement? Why not open the museum right now on the internet, the ultimate “superhighway”?

Building the online museum was a massive six-month, one-person project. First, I curated roughly 650 of my favorite wrappers into themes such as: Celebrities, Classics, Holidays, Big Eats, No Fun, and Vices. I scanned everything that was flat, photographed the rest (shot on film), scanned the prints, cleaned all the now-digital images, then wrote lighthearted commentary to provide each visitor with my “personal tour.” Then, I bought a book on how to write HTML and built the site myself.

When it launched, I had no expectations. Would anyone even be interested in this quirky endeavor? To my surprise, without any promotion, the site went “viral,” even getting selected as Yahoo’s “Funny Site of the Week.”

The sudden burst of popularity inspired bemused comments, like, “A candy wrapper museum? Now we’ve heard everything.” But mostly people wrote in to thank me, sharing how the sight of a long-gone favorite candy bar proved to their friends that they weren’t delusional. One person asked if I had a wrapper from the 1930s that his 90-year-old mother fondly remembered enjoying as a child. He later told me that the images I sent flooded her with emotion, rekindling the feelings of being a little girl again.

This is when I knew I was doing something important. We think of collections as “things,” but we also collect special moments that may not stay front of mind, but never fade from our hearts. A rush of joy returns when we reconnect with them through objects of the past. In fact, this was how my now-husband Joe and I first met: He was in search of a cherished childhood candy, Nice Mice—the very first item I’d collected. To this day people come to me with questions about ephemera they can’t find anywhere else, hoping I can help uncover connections to cherished memories around candies from their past.

Through collecting I’ve learned how quickly history is lost. The history of candy is particularly difficult to trace back. Most companies preserve little of their history, especially after an acquisition. That’s why we’re fortunate when organizations or individuals do take care to save history, like in the case of that scrapbook that arrived at my door.

Vintage Necco candy from The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

1970s candy from The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

Nice Mice and Cinnamon Teddy Bears, the first pieces Darlene collected for The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

The Candy Wrapper Museum when it was launched in 2002. Courtesy of author.

Darlene Lacey as a teenager in the 1970s when she started The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

It was sent by Jeffrey S. Green, who was Necco’s vice president of research and development before the candy company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Necco had launched the U.S. candy industry back in 1847 when its founder, Oliver Chase, invented the first candy manufacturing machine. But by 2003, to remain competitive in an industry now dominated through consolidation by giants Hershey, Nestle, and Mars, Necco needed to sell its landmark 1927 factory and expand to a new facility. The sale kept the company going for ten more years. When Necco shuttered, Green did his best to keep as many irreplaceable artifacts as he could; understanding the importance of this company, he had already done his best to save items during the initial move and now, with the company no more, he purchased more items at auction, and even salvaged whatever he could from the Necco dumpster.

Green wasn’t interested in keeping these items forever in his basement. Instead he sought out “forever homes” for these artifacts, which is how he found the Candy Wrapper Museum online. He contacted me in March 2019, eight months after Necco closed, asking if I would like to have the scrapbook. Of course, I instantly said “Yes!”

When the scrapbook arrived, Joe and I were astounded by the treasure inside. Within its yellowed pages, we found a meticulously annotated time capsule of packaging, promotions, photos, and ephemera spanning Necco’s 171-year run. Most of these items had not been seen by the public since they appeared in A&P, Shop-Rite, and Star Markets 70 years ago or more.

The more I dug to discover the history behind these artifacts, the more stories I uncovered about the generations of people who worked together to bring us sweet treats. I learned how many belonged to the Quarter Century Club with tenures of 25 years or more, how they kept making their candy with pure cane sugar even through the Depression, and how they transformed 60% of the factory into the electronics production for World War II. Necco’s rich history even resulted in Joe and me publishing two books to share its story in a safe, permanent place.

It pains me that our world is in an ever-increasing rush to throw everything away. We may never realize the value of what was lost until it’s too late. Hotel room “do not disturb” signs, plastic food, milk bottles, and even scents and sounds are just some of the artifacts saved by collectors who see their value.

I know that only a dreamer would try to save it all. Most institutions have a hard enough time trying to save the “big stuff”—works of art, landmark documents, antiquities, and even V.I.I.s (very important insects). The Smithsonian Institution alone holds a staggering near 156 million objects, and that is still a fraction of all the significant objects that have come and gone.

But even though we can’t save everything, imagine the richness of history that we could preserve—stories of family, community, and culture—by appointing ourselves caretakers of the little things that matter to us the most. Such simple, individual actions, like, say, collecting hundreds of items of candy ephemera, can be a precious gift for future generations, offering them a larger and deeper understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.

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Protecting cultural heritage during crises and wars is a big challenge, especially if conflict erupts suddenly and consumes a country with violence.

As head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria during the worst stage of history for my country, I contended with this challenge firsthand. That’s why I know, in this moment, it is essential for Ukraine to choose the right strategy to protect its threatened cultural legacy. Not everything can be saved in such circumstances, but we have a scientific, moral, and humanitarian responsibility to provide all forms of support to help guarantee the protection of our world heritage.

My leadership tenure was the most difficult period of my life. For five years, from 2012 to 2017, I took on the work of overseeing cultural heritage preservation during the war. But these years were also the most important ones of my life. I gladly served as a volunteer, without a monthly salary or any compensation, for the honor of helping preserve Syrian cultural heritage, rescuing artifacts that serve as markers of identity and collective memory for Syrian people.

When I was appointed director in August of 2012, it was clear that Syria was heading toward tragedy. As violence escalated throughout the country that summer, the Syrian prime minister fled Syria and the minister of defense and four generals in the army were killed in a bombing.

Proceeding from the idea that the protection of cultural heritage unites us all, my colleagues and I developed a plan outlining how to save what could be saved, especially from the 34 museums distributed throughout Syria. This was in line with our charter—the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums was founded in 1946 as a government-owned agency tasked with the protection, promotion, and excavation activities in all sites of national heritage in Syria. Because we are not affiliated with political parties, we could put ideology aside to come together around this shared vision.

Our cohort of scholars and artists were determined not to repeat the tragic experiences of other countries such as Iraq, when the national museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003. To this end, we set out to work with cadres in all provinces, seeking cooperation with members of the local communities in areas where institutions were absent, to mitigate damage to archaeological sites.

By the end of the summer of 2012, when we concluded the general situation in the country was heading toward destruction, we made the decision to empty all museums of antiquities and transfer them to safe places, such as underground warehouses equipped with surveillance cameras and resistant to explosions, fire, and theft. We transferred important historical documents, especially from the Ottoman period, to similarly fortified spaces, which were also equipped with devices that helped provide the appropriate humidity and heat to protect them from damage. We reinforced the museums themselves with strong iron doors, alarms, and surveillance cameras.

When violence escalated and spread throughout the country in 2015, we realized we needed a new strategy. By then, the security situation in Damascus had improved somewhat, so we resolved to transfer the archaeological holdings from Syrian museums throughout the country to the capital. Still, the decision carried its own risks due to threats on the roads between Damascus and other cities.

Take Palmyra. On the evening of May 21, 2015, when the city fell to ISIS terrorists, we had no choice but to act fast. Palmyra is one of the most important world heritage cities due to its historical importance, millennia-old archaeological sites, and the diversity of its ancient buildings, many of which are exceptionally well preserved. So, in coordination with the Syrian military police, colleagues at the National Museum of Palmyra transported three trucks full of hundreds of statues and artifacts across the desert in the dead of night.

The mission ended up becoming one of our most successful operations in violent conditions. Once Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, we weren’t taking any more chances: we began moving the remaining holdings we couldn’t evacuate during the first mission to Damascus. After two months of hard work, with the participation of about 60 employees from the National Museum in Palmyra, we succeeded in emptying the museum—rescuing hundreds of ancient statues that represent Palmyra art as well as the huge statue of the Lion of Al-Lat (Athena), which weighs about 15 tons—before ISIS occupied the city for the second time, in December 2016.

We followed this strategy in the rest of Syria’s museums during the same period and under the same difficult circumstances. Whether it was rescuing the Deir ez-Zor Museum’s clay tablets, the Aleppo Museum’s precious statues and jewelry, or the Homs Museum’s treasures from the Qatana site, which dates back to the second millennium B.C.E., we were always careful to choose the most important artifacts that could be transported, and to document and photograph them before and after carrying out each mission.

Since the spread of armed groups throughout Syria threatened the roads, one of the most important precautions we took before each transport was to ensure our routes were safe. When we could not securely remove the artifacts by ground, we were forced to get creative. In Raqqa, for instance, which fell under the occupation of ISIS and turned into their capital, we hid a large part of the Raqqa Museum’s holdings in one of the rooms on the second floor of the museum that we secretly converted into a warehouse. By getting rid of the room’s door and building a wall in its place, we were able to keep around 1,097 artifacts hidden during the three years of ISIS rule, despite the destruction the museum building faced.

Following this strategy, we were able to rescue the vast majority of antiquities in Syrian museums. It is with great pride that I look back on the priceless heritage we safeguarded, but I do not wish that specialists in archeology and cultural heritage preservation in countries experiencing wars and violent conflicts should ever find themselves in such a position. Except for some loyal friends from international cultural institutions, who helped us in Syria during those difficult years we lived, we were on our own.

That’s why we need cooperation between all specialists everywhere to help countries that suffer from crises and wars save their cultural heritage from vandalism and theft. Such work does not need to wait for strife to get started. In 2019, for example, I was an expert on the UNESCO team that developed an emergency plan for the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum and the World Heritage Site in Sudan. It was an opportunity to convey the Syrian experience to my international colleagues and to make plans during peace rather than wait for conflict to break out first.

But that’s not enough. We must continue to push for a world where protecting cultural heritage falls outside of political disputes when they do occur. As we’ve seen time and again, world treasures need to be kept out of wars and conflicts between different countries, so that when they do occur in a particular country or between two countries, everyone respects the international conventions that provide for the protection of cultural heritage.

The protection of cultural heritage must be seen as a means to bring us together. Over time, political differences stop and change according to interests, but the loss of cultural heritage will be eternal for us as peoples and civilizations everywhere in the world.

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But I study the world’s heritage museums—the national, state, or city museums that tell stories from the past—and I am convinced that the best of these institutions forge national identity and impact our civic actions far more profoundly than we recognize. National identity is a myth we create together in order to cooperate as large societies, and heritage museums tell the stories that perpetuate—and also modify—those national myths.

To understand what makes museums most effective, the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa makes an especially useful example. Te Papa embraces its role as the nation’s cultural glue, celebrating unity, while also functioning as its cultural goad, encouraging new viewpoints.

Te Papa avoids the classic trap of national museums which sometimes assert either that the old story of national history has always been right or that a new story of national identity is vastly superior, by instead embracing the ambiguity of these stories. My research, focused on the rhetoric used by heritage museums, convinces me that one-sided assertions only persuade those who already believe them. Te Papa and other persuasive museums instead ask visitors to think about the highs and lows of a society rather than merely demand their allegiance. Paradoxically, what is more persuasive in developing national identity is asking people to contemplate alternative views of and paths for their nation.

Te Papa, which opened in 1998, draws approximately one-fifth of New Zealand’s population each year, alongside hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors. “Identity” is such a focus that its logo is a giant fingerprint, and it asks visitors from the moment they enter to think about what it means to be a New Zealander today.

This starts with its name. “Te papa tongarewa” translates as “the place where treasured things are held,” according to the guide provided for visitors. Its collections—indigenous Maori, European settler, and (most recently) Pacific Islander artifacts—demonstrate that the common heritage of the nation includes treasures from multiple cultures. The dual-language (English/Maori) signage and careful depiction of multiple viewpoints emphasize this hybridity as well. Its Te Marae meeting house, a traditional Maori structure, incorporates symbols from Maori, European, Asian, and Pacific cultures and “embodies the spirit of bicultural partnership that lies at the heart of the Museum, and is based on the idea that Te Papa is a forum for the nation,” according to the Te Papa website. The first two of the museum’s four exhibit floors repeatedly emphasize two unifying traits: the connection to New Zealand’s landscape that Europeans and Maoris share, and the history that all New Zealanders share as seafarers who arrived relatively recently (Maori settlers arrived in the 13th century, Europeans in the 17th to 19th centuries, Pacific Islanders largely after World War II).

The interactive exhibit Ourspace, which ran from 2008-2014, involved visitors themselves in creating a shared nation. Ourspace was a giant floor map of the country onto which visitors’ footsteps triggered preset images of New Zealand’s people and places. Visitors were invited to upload their own images to “create your vision of New Zealand … mix it, own it, share it.” Over 10,000 images were contributed by the time the exhibit closed. Crucially, these individual images were mixed with those of others for the next visitors to see. So, rather than visitors selecting the New Zealand they wished for themselves, they were contributing to a hybrid communal identity—the same hybridity embodied in the design of the newer Te Marae exhibit.

Only after firmly cementing these commonalities does the museum shift to presenting the nation’s divergent challenges. A recent exhibit chronicled the European/Maori wars of the 19th century, for instance. A permanent exhibit considers refugee struggles. And until 2016, a final exhibit on the many social changes of 20th century New Zealand summed up the Te Papa identity as both glue and goad in its final placard:

Us and Them: Entering the 1950s, New Zealand society seems prosperous, peaceful, and integrated. The ‘us’ behind this image of unity are heterosexual Pākehā blokes (male European New Zealanders)—the country’s dominant players. Other groups, however, find themselves marginalised. In the 1970s and 80s different voices start to speak out … By the century’s end, many diverse groups have a say in New Zealand society and politics. ‘They’ have become part of ‘us.’

Who is this new “us”? The Essential Guide to Te Papa defines the new “Kiwi identity” as someone who sees unity and values diversity: “Kiwis live in a broadly egalitarian society and believe that everyone deserves a ‘fair go.’ … Widespread protests have reflected Kiwis’ willingness to oppose injustice or back a principle … Kiwis have grown wings—many have travelled extensively or lived in other countries … [But] Kiwis retain a strong identity … Home or abroad they feel a strong affinity with the land.”

The assertion of unity in diversity is, admittedly, a common theme in many forward-looking museums. It is the master narrative of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where citizen groups historically unite across differences to forge “a more perfect union.” In today’s divisive times, unity-in-diversity is a good message—but it can also become so much pablum, a broadly pleasant statement that all can agree with but few need to act upon.

The Te Papa goes further. Its new Pacific Islander exhibit, for instance, asks visitors to consider a fundamental aspect of their own identity: “Aotearoa [New Zealand] is a Pacific place in location and history. But do New Zealanders consider themselves Pacific Islanders? Do you?” And in a central section of the museum hangs a key artifact of the museum: The Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 agreement between the British Crown and Maori chiefs. Largely ignored for more than a century, its provisions, which took much from the Maori, have been used since the 1970s as a template to redress breaches of Maori rights. In the new New Zealand it has assumed the role of a foundational document.

In Te Papa, signage informs visitors that the Treaty deals with “ideas vital to modern New Zealand,” and New Zealanders today walk in with an understanding of the Treaty principles learned in school. Yet it also points out that the document is still controversial, its purpose in the modern nation still a matter of debate. The Treaty, therefore, is surrounded by speaker poles broadcasting the voices of different people debating the treaty. Some voices praise it as transformational to New Zealand society in righting old wrongs, while others wonder if society has gone too far in protecting Maori rights and redressing legal disputes over land/resources. Do the values the Treaty represents embody the “fair go” of Kiwi identity, and if so, what should happen next? Allowing this new story to be debated within a museum that celebrates points of national commonality means that debate is not seen as antithetical to nationhood. What divides can be discussed—and so the work of persuasion is ongoing.

The divided United States might learn from this example. In fact, these lessons are already being applied in some surprising places. Just last month I visited the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in Philip, South Dakota. For the past 20 years, the site has told the story of the mutually assured destruction of the Cold War. The missiles scattered throughout the Dakotas “[hold] the power to destroy civilization, but [are] meant as a nuclear deterrent to maintain peace and prevent war,” the National Park Service introduction says.

Thirty years ago I spent my college years active in the Nuclear Freeze movement; when I visited the museum last month I happened to be sharing a guest house with a Cold War-era member of the U.S. military, and both of us found the exhibit surprisingly balanced. Both of us, in fact, spent the next morning persuading a young Russian guest to stop at the exhibit as well—which, we both assured our new friend, included a surprisingly significant recounting of Russian perspectives.

The site’s exhibit manages to cover not only the obvious divisions of that time—mistrust and miscommunication, hysterical ideology—but also the less-discussed commonalities that included the mutual fear of global annihilation and how it shaped identity on both sides of the Cold War. It begins with the bravura of cold warrior missileers (“Minuteman II: World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less” boasted a hand-painted silo door in the shape of a pizza box), but ends with the sobering placard “Too Close for Comfort”—five narratives of specific dates when accidents and false alerts “came close to ending the world as we know it.”

Most crucially, the site asks its visitors to think, with panels posing questions ranging from “Would you do your duty?” to “Do you think nuclear weapons make the world more safe? Less safe?” At the very end, a prominently placed guest book invites visitors’ thoughts on all these questions.

Reading through comments from just the day I was there, I saw diverse opinions, rather like the Treaty of Waitangi speaker poles: “It was a scary time growing up in Washington, DC.” “Nuclear weapons are only safe if put in the right hands.” “I grew up in Finland in the ‘80’s … It was a source of constant anxiety.” “The strategy succeeded for all of humanity. Would a strategy without Minuteman have been successful?” “Nobody wins.” “Kill em all and let God sort em out! Trump 2020.” “Never again, please.”

A Swiss visitor nicely summed up the purpose of the book, and the exhibit, in German (my translation): “There were a lot of interesting comments … some I do not agree with, but it is very cool that it was free!” I like to think he meant both “free” access (there is no admission charge) and “free” debate. Did this small museum change my opinion on nuclear weapons? No. But it left me better able to have a real discussion with someone who believes in their necessity.

In today’s heterogeneous societies, public speeches and pageants are too homogeneous and too propagandistic to unite people. When societies know they are divided, one response is to let those differences rest side by side. But a more nuanced response, demonstrated by some of the world’s best heritage museums, is to seek to consider competing and difficult ideas together. Museums, if well designed, can provided rare public spaces where different people from the same place can engage thoughtfully with the basic questions of who we are, what we value, and, therefore, what we may be willing to do next.

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It seems that talking about borders and walls in these times is much more common than talking about bridges, alliances or free trade among the nations of the world.

However, for the city of Tijuana, talking about connections and intersections, and how to make the most of them, has been an everyday pastime since the city was founded barely 127 years ago.

That’s because our young city collides with the city of San Diego to the north, the municipality of Tecate to the east, Rosarito Beaches to the South and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Since the beginning of our history, we have been linked more to the economic activity of Southern California than to central Mexico, or the capital, Mexico City, some 1,400 miles away.

Tijuana’s economic and cultural inter-connection with Southern California is key to our mission at El Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), where I work. The interconnection influences the way we program exhibitions, musical concerts and performing arts events that draw cultural enthusiasts from both sides of the border. Through our artistic offerings, we have helped build and expand a bilingual, transnational cultural community. In 2016, 1,946,000 people visited CECUT for one event or another, of which approximately 15 percent were from Southern California.

One of the strategies we use most to attract visitors from both sides of la frontera is to make our content available both in English and Spanish, mainly through social networks and the internet. We also form alliances with tour operators who run tours from the various museums of San Diego.

And we also work very closely with museums and galleries in San Diego, such as Mingei International, and the San Diego Contemporary Art Museum at La Jolla.

You could say that Tijuana’s cultural affinity for Southern California dates back to before 1776. The first settlers of this area, the indigenous Kumiai, an offshoot of the Yumanos of North America, inhabited the hydrological basin of what is today the Tijuana River and its surroundings. In the late 18th century, Spanish missionaries established Jesuit, Franciscan and, later, Dominican settlements along the peninsula of Baja California, and in what decades later would become the U.S. state of California.

From these beginnings, Tijuana-San Diego arose as a single region, split apart politically only after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War. Yet the intrinsic, dynamic connection between the two cities remains, as can be seen in the overlap of key industries such as tourism, aerospace, the medical sector and electronics manufacturing. Not to mention the 150 million annual crossings that make the Tijuana-San Ysidro border the world’s most heavily trafficked. The region consists of a total population of about 6.5 million, making it the largest binational metropolitan area on the U.S.-Mexico border, now called Cali-Baja.

A good part of this cross-border traffic is cultural—by musicians, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers, some of whom are currently shooting the series “Fear the Walking Dead” in Baja California.

El Centro Cultural Tijuana exists within this cosmopolitan and binational context. It was founded on October 20, 1982 by the Mexican federal government, in an area of ​​3.5 hectares, as part of the National Fund for Social Activities (Fonapas) project, which sought to strengthen our national identity along our northern border and promote cultural tourism from the United States. Cultural centers were planned in other northern border cities, such as Ciudad Juárez and Tamaulipas, but only Tijuana’s was finished.

CECUT consolidates the broadest and most diverse cultural offerings in the northwest region, and its infrastructure is the most substantial of any project of the Ministry of Culture outside of Mexico City. Its facilities include the 300-seat circular IMAX Dome, which screens documentaries and educational films; and the Museum of the Californias, which was inaugurated in 2000 after a major renovation of the central building, and houses the most complete display anywhere of the peninsular history of Baja California, from its first settlers and the missionary era through World War II.

The IMAX dome at El Centro Cultural Tijuana. Courtesy of El Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Our 1,000-seat performance hall regularly programs musicians and other performing artists with cross-border appeal: Diego Ramón Jiménez Salazar, aka “El Cigala”; Concha Buika; Fito Páez; Julieta Venegas; the Orchestra of Baja California; the Mainly Mozart Orchestra; the Amalia Hernández Folkloric Ballet; and a wide variety of theater. In recent years we’ve hosted an exhibition of “Frida Kahlo’s Photos” and a show of European painting, in coordination with major Mexico City museums, such as the Soumaya, the Franz Mayer and the San Carlos. In this way, Tijuana brings works that normally stay in the capital city hundreds of miles closer to border art lovers.

We have shown the work of 20th-century masters like the Mexicans Rodolfo Morales and Dr. Atl, and the Colombian Fernando Botero (known for his gargantuan human figures). We’ve also featured contemporary artists such as Alejandro Santiago and Damián Flores, whose work, which draws heavily on U.S. pop culture iconography, has been exhibited at the University of Southern California and is popular with U.S. audiences and critics.

Another part of our facility, the 270-seat Cineteca Tijuana, was inaugurated in 2011 with the aim of being a meeting place for film directors, screenwriters, videographers, actors and public and private institutions of the cinematographic industry. It specializes in Mexican and Latin American cinema, as well as films for children and young people. It was christened Sala Carlos Monsiváis, in honor of the Mexican man of letters, whose witty writings and colorful personality for decades have been a guidepost to many U.S. students, academics, journalists and tourists seeking a richer, more profound understanding of contemporary Mexican culture and thought.

Approximately 70% of CECUT activities are free of charge, and the museum and exhibitions are also free on Sundays.

The image of Tijuana has perhaps been unfairly hit by safety concerns related to drug trafficking at various times in the past. But CECUT has become a point of dignity and pride for the city. It is not only a cultural center, but also a meeting point for the border citizens of Tijuana and Southern California. Our aim at CECUT is to be a cultural beacon of understanding, dialogue and knowledge that will guide the Cali-Baja binational region to create bridges between the two nations, in times when the tides that steer the world increasingly appear murky, obscure and aimless.

The post A Mexican Cultural Center That Builds Bridges, Not Walls, With the U.S. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the best advice I can offer from my own career working in museums to connect the arts to different people, communities, disciplines, and places. The art of arts engagement flows from this recognition: Because the arts connect to so many things, artists and arts organizations need to always be trying new things.

I’ve tried everything from giving museum tours in the middle of the night to using artworks to help medical students develop their powers of observation. Experimentation naturally produces failures. But experiments are also fun, and allow you to experience, over and over, the three stages of learning once outlined by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: romance (as you pursue a new idea), precision (as you learn how your experiment works in practice), and generalization (as you extrapolate from the results of your experiment to broader lessons).

My interest in experimentation may be the result of a peripatetic life that allowed me to see all kinds of arts in all kinds of places. I grew up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, an artists’ community back in the mid-20th century. We lived across the street from the Walker family, who established the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and my parents took me to art museums on the East Coast. Because I am dyslexic, reading is not my preferred method for learning, and that made museums even more special—because they excel at educating through observation, listening, and imagination.

I joined the museum profession in the early ’70s, when there was a mandate to increase the educational role of institutions. I worked in Winnipeg, New Orleans, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, and got to see even more museums during the 12 years that I spent on the accreditation commission for the American Alliance of Museums. I also spent time at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

By the early 1990s, I had drawn some conclusions: Museums had become isolated from their communities as the country had become more diverse and sprawling, and museums didn’t know what to do about the lost connections. In 1992 I prepared a report called Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. It argued that museums needed to start trying new strategies to build new communities of support. To do that, they would have to restructure themselves, breaking down internal divides (among curators, educators, fundraising and marketing professionals, etc.) so that everyone was collaborating with a shared mission to serve the public. This wasn’t a popular idea then—I got chewed up by critics all over the country for a couple of years.

The entrance of the Dallas Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of Edward Larrabee Barnes/Flickr.

Then in 2000, Jack Lane, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and his board gave me the opportunity to create change in their museum and community.

It took a while to understand why more people weren’t coming to the museum. I conducted 42 town meetings—informal gatherings really—around greater Dallas to understand what the museum was doing or not doing. We also received funds from a foundation for a comprehensive study, lasting seven years, of how people interact with the arts and the museum. How, we needed to know, do we take a community that barely knows we are here and have them fall in love with the possibilities of the museum?

We needed the entire museum on board. We brought together everyone—curators, educators, marketing, researchers, development, even the security guards—to meet and come up with experiments. Whenever we got a new report on the survey, every single person on the staff received the results. We needed to make many small changes, starting with putting up more signs outside and around the museum, since we learned that many people couldn’t find it when they came to downtown Dallas. But we also tried new approaches to exhibitions, education, programming, and marketing. The idea was to try things that would be comprehensive across the museum.

At the beginning of the study, we had a standard museum audience—older, white, and interested in art. Years later, after changing the way we presented and engaged our audiences, we carefully studied people who came to our popular J.M.W. Turner exhibition and learned that it drew a younger and more diverse audience than the normal museum show. Demographics were not the defining issue for engaging our audiences. Instead we learned that our audience consisted of four different clusters or groups, distinguished by different ways they came to engage with the art in the museum. Those four groups were the Tentative Observers, the Curious Participants, the Discerning Independents, and the Committed Enthusiasts. We sought to reach and engage them all.

There were too many experiments to mention them all here. (The DMA documented its research and experiments in a publication, Ignite the Power of Art: Advancing Visitor Engagement in Museums, in 2010.) We brought chamber musicians and poets into the galleries. We presented joint programs with the symphony and theater companies. Members of our local Indian community, with the help of Hindu priests, assisted us in dressing statues of Shiva and performing and teaching dances. We invited in people who collect gold to share their samples and knowledge about this metal in front of art from ancient America.

And we experimented with museum hours. One of our most successful efforts involved opening the museum until midnight monthly. We would stay open for 48 hours to celebrate the closing of a major exhibition. I enjoyed this personally—I’m a late-night person, kind of an insomniac. I gave tours on many nights between midnight and 2 a.m., and had 75 or more people in the group. We would roam all over the museum and visit my favorite things in it. You’d get these incredible collections of people at that hour—parents with colicky babies, bus drivers and taxi drivers, physicians, and more than a few people with cancer or health problems that made it hard to sleep.

When we celebrated our 100th anniversary in 2003, we were open for 100 hours without closing the doors. Indeed, our trustees manned the doors, working as greeters and guides for the occasion. During that stretch, we hosted 150 programs, of all types, in which local people shared expertise that related to the museum and its art in some way. Some 45,000 people attended during those four straight days of open doors. After that response, we did even more with artists and the community. Once we had an opening with 600 artists involved. Many gave presentations. Family and friends came. These were joyous occasions and they created what engagement is about—a visceral connection between art and people.

Yes, I went too far, more than once. I’ll never forget the time we booked an African drumming group. The drummers wandered through the whole museum; their thunderous sound filled the entire place. The sound disturbed some visitors—and it threatened the art, since I had failed to brief the drummers on the fact that they needed to stay at least 3 feet away from the paintings.

There was so much more to do with the amazing and creative staff of the museum, but I developed chronic illnesses and had to leave the museum in 2012. Today, though, I still experiment with new ways to connect art to the world around us. For the past eight years, I’ve made a practice of doing something new every day and writing about it. Museums are great places to do something new—which often involves the celebration of little things, making new connections, and finding creativity. (You can follow this practice on my Instagram.)

I’ve also tried to take advantage of my deep familiarity with the health care system by looking for ways to combine art and health. After leaving the museum, I joined the University of Texas at Dallas as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence, where my work is focused on art and medicine. I’m researching and developing new programs for patients and caregivers at the Dallas Museum of Art, Baylor Health Care systems, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Some of this involves bringing artists into hospitals and other health centers so patients can enjoy art and even make their own. There is evidence that art helps patients feel less pain and stress and thus need less pain medication.

I also teach a course on the “Art of Observation” to UT Southwestern medical students, using art to enhance their ability to observe, make visual inspections, and describe what they see—to help improve their diagnostic skills. I take students into my old museum and have them look at an 18th-century painting, The Abduction of Europa, by the French artist Jean Baptiste Marie Pierre. We study the painting for 45 minutes, and then I have them turn their backs and write down, without looking, answers to various questions about the painting. They learn that observation isn’t easy, and that different people see the same work of art—or the same patient of course—very differently. These students have work to do. In a class of 30 to 35 med students, typically only two or three notice which figures in the painting are looking directly at them.

The real beauty of art involves not just a connection between an arts institution and a person, but real moments of convergence within a community. For all the progress that’s been made, people who work in the arts are still figuring out how to make such moments happen. We need to know more—especially about the social interactions among people when they come together to experience art.

Which is why we need to keep experimenting, now more than ever.

The post Want to Find New Audiences? Keep Trying New Things appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Six years later, Salort-Pons is now the Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the museum that left that Van Gogh outside the library—on purpose. The painting was part of its Inside|Out program, which places high-quality reproductions of masterpieces around town in order to engage audiences in their own neighborhoods and communities—though not necessarily as a makeshift security detail. In 2017, DIA installed actual-size, framed digital prints on walls and posts in 11 communities during the spring season, and later this year it will work with 10 more communities. Each installation lasts for approximately three months, clustering seven to 12 images within walking or bike-riding distance in each community.

The program has expanded from simply focusing on DIA’s notable collection to creating a deeper dialogue with places around the city. Families stop together to look at paintings from artists that range from Caravaggio to Ben Shahn, and the museum sends its staff and volunteers out to lead walking tours. Those interactions allow people to see art in a new light, and the museum’s staff to learn what those people think about art.

The Osborn Neighborhood Alliance was one of DIA’s Inside|Out community partners in 2015, as part of efforts to revitalize a neighborhood that has seen significant population decline and was called one of the city’s most dangerous. DIA had no real presence in the community, and first saw the partnership as a way to build connections while showing off the diversity of its collection, especially in contemporary African American art. Yet the installation of the works sparked further arts collaborations in the area. A brightly painted piano popped up at the Osborn Neighborhood Center, provided by the program Keys in the Cities. Later DIA and three Detroit-area artists worked together with the Osborn community to paint a large-scale “Welcome to Osborn” mural. Inside|Out installations elsewhere have helped those neighborhoods secure public support and increased funding for the arts too.

A reproduction of Caneletto’s The Piazza San Marco, a painting at the Detroit Institute of Arts, outside near the Cranbrook Institute of Science. Photo courtesy of Maia C./Flickr.

In this way, Inside|Out is more than an opportunity to market the museum – it is a chance to introduce art to a community in a way that meets people where they are, creating a real conversation. For Jillian Reese, DIA’s Community Relations Program Manager and the woman with day-to-day responsibility for Inside|Out, bringing paintings into the community clarifies that an art museum can be for everyone. Inside|Out is an opportunity to be playful and fun; it is also a launching point for a deeper relationship between the community and the museum, creating a feedback loop that can provide unexpected insights. “We stay flexible to introduce ourselves to communities,” said Reese. “The strength is in that community focus.”

The program started after a group of DIA employees visited London in 2007 and were awed by striking reproductions of artworks from around the city they saw while at lunch in a pub. They returned to Detroit with the idea for a similar project. It was an experiment, and the museum didn’t know how it would go over. Would audiences still come to the museum?

The museum collects each visitor’s zip code, and it has seen an uptick in attendance from the areas where Inside|Out artworks have been installed. Perhaps the best news is that the increase is most significant from the communities that previously supplied the fewest visitors. The program is not only reaching friends and families of people who already come to the museum, but also expanding its network across the city, finding visitors that had not been connected before.

The success of Inside|Out in Detroit has led to expansion. Locally, DIA has now partnered with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History to include 10 reproductions of objects from that museum’s collection in installations around Metro Detroit. Meanwhile, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has helped fund the program at DIA since its early days, has brought the program elsewhere: to Ohio at the Akron Art Museum; to Charlotte at both the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture; to the Pérez Art Museum Miami; and to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) completed its first set of installations in 2016, focusing in three communities around South Florida: Hialeah, Homestead, and West End. (Full disclosure: PAMM is a recent client of AEA Consulting, where I work). Already the program has expanded to six neighborhoods in 2017, chosen from 17 applications from communities around the city. Such strong interest gives the museum committed partners in the community, which means the program can build alongside existing events such as local art fairs or bicycling tours. Miami citizens are frequently turned off from traveling great distances due to the snarled-up traffic on the city’s roads, so an opportunity to increase arts awareness with an interesting installation only five minutes away from people’s homes benefits both the community and the museum.

Nicolas Poussin’s Selene and Endymion is also part of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Inside | Out program. Photo courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation/Flickr.

“We want to be the community’s museum,” said Anita Braham, PAMM’s Manager of Adult Programs and Community Partnerships and the manager of its Inside|Out program.

The program is just beginning to inform the museum’s other outreach efforts. Inside|Out has increased PAMM’s list of contacts in the communities where art has been installed, and it has been the starting point for discussions that could bring even more art into the public realm. Occasionally the community response is too positive: One resident in Miami wanted the artwork turned to face their house instead of the public space it sat next to.

Inside|Out is still growing. In Detroit, DIA and Reese are collaborating with the Knight Foundation to develop a playbook for the program that will enable organizations and communities to create their own masterpiece installations in other cities. The process, however, requires at least one full-time person at each museum to build the partnerships and manage the events in local communities, and it requires the collaboration of others within the organization to select the art, obtain copyrights and local permitting, and reproduce and install the pieces.

All that work opens up much larger opportunities, however, in the community. In Detroit, Salort-Pons is thinking big.

“We want the program to have a more strategic impact on the City of Detroit,” said Salort-Pons, “to be used as a tool for economic development and the revitalization of the city.”

The post Just Leave That Botticelli Near the Bike Rack appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For those of us who work at the Oakland Museum of California, one moment came during our exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” which was on view at OMCA from October 2016 through February 2017. The realization arrived with a simple text message one Friday night during the exhibition.

Engagement has been part of our institution since its founding in 1969 as the “museum of the people.” A multi-disciplinary museum of California art, history and natural sciences, OMCA strives to connect our community and our visitors to the places, people, heritage, and creativity of our state through our exhibitions and programming.

Over the past several years, though, the OMCA has been on a journey to bring community engagement to the very core of our organization. We have made an even more concerted effort to see our mission as broadly embracing social impact and civic well-being—thanks in large part to support from the James Irvine Foundation through the New California Arts Fund, a statewide initiative that supports organizations in better engaging with new audiences and particularly low-income communities and communities of color.

The Black Panthers exhibition is part of those efforts. The history of the Panthers is, at its heart, an Oakland story, just like our museum. The Black Panther Party was founded in the same place and time as the Museum. When our building opened in 1969, the Party was mobilizing mass protests across the street at the Alameda County Court House. After Party co-founder Huey P. Newton was released from jail in 1970, he moved into the top floor of an apartment building just blocks from the Museum. Adjacent to OMCA is the Oakland Civic Auditorium, a building that held many large-scale community events, including a July 1969 conference organized by the Party that brought together leaders from civil rights organizations around the country.

Vistors enjoy “Friday Nights @ OMCA,” a program of the Oakland Museum of California, during the exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50.” Photo courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.

In 2014, with the 50th anniversary of the Party two years away, the Museum began to develop an exhibition that would tell more of the unknown story of the Black Panther Party. OMCA staff worked extensively with former Party members, scholars, artists, and civil rights leaders, including leaders of the coalition Movement for Black Lives (the coalition that includes the organization better known as Black Lives Matter), to bring personal stories, multiple perspectives, and creative responses together with contemporary art works, historical artifacts, and commissioned media pieces in an immersive way.

As an institution, we had a number of major goals for this project. We hoped to share a deeply local story that also had broad relevance for California, the nation, and even the world. We also aspired to connect events and movements that took place 50 years ago with what is happening in our streets, courtrooms, and civic institutions today. And, yes, we hoped to engage new audiences—including audiences that may never have come to OMCA.

Not everyone in our community was enthusiastic about our decision to embrace this subject. We got questions about whether we would tell “both sides of the story.” We were asked about whether we were glorifying a group that promoted violence. We knew we could face potential pushback both from more traditional Museum supporters and from people affiliated with the Black Panther Party about the legitimacy of a “mainstream” institution representing this still-contested history.

The exhibition opened on October 8, 2016—just one month before the presidential election. Throughout the development of the show, we had been thinking about incidents of young black men being killed by police and the resulting Movement for Black Lives. But the election hadn’t quite figured into our thinking. The exhibition and its programming took on new, even greater, relevance after November. For example, on January 21, 2017, the day after the presidential inauguration, the Women’s March took place right outside our front door while, inside our theater, the Panther Party co-founder, Bobby Seale, spoke at a public event with the poet and activist Chinaka Hodge. What had always been a timely show suddenly felt different. Very urgent.

People hungered for a place to come together to remember, to hope, and to feel empowered, just as they had 50 years ago. “All Power to the People” provided that space. Over the four-and-a-half months of the exhibition, more than 84,000 people attended, including close to 45,000 in the month of February alone. Lines stretched around the block during the culminating days. Seven hundred people joined the museum as members in the last five days in order to be sure to get into the show. We reached capacity in the gallery, since people stayed, and stayed some more, in the space. Indeed, our visitor tracking indicated that people spent two to three times as long as they do in typical museum exhibitions. Moreover, 62 percent of the visitors surveyed were people of color and 30 percent were visiting OMCA for the first time.

Vistors enjoy “Friday Nights @ OMCA,” a program of the Oakland Museum of California, during the exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50.” Photo courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California.

The exhibition succeeded according to less traditional measures of engagement as well—such as the number of times a visitor reaction took our breath away (as when a grandmother pointed herself out to her young grandson in a picture of a protest at DeFremery Park). Or left us in tears (as many of us were at the opening when former Panthers and OMCA supporters gathered as if it were a family reunion). Or gave us hope. Or made us believe that a revolution is still possible (a belief reinforced by the many middle and high school students who came on field trips and then returned on their own with family and friends).

Which brings us to the final Friday before the Sunday closing of the exhibition. René de Guzman, the curator of the show and the Senior Curator of Art at OMCA, received a text while we were in a meeting together at the end of a long afternoon. OMCA is open late, until 10 p.m., for Friday Nights @ OMCA, a program that includes food trucks, live music, hands-on activities for kids, and other programming. It regularly attracts thousands of visitors. We already knew we would be packed that evening and it was an all-hands-on-deck affair for staff—to help with greeting guests, signing up new members, and generally ensuring a positive experience for the long lines of people.

The text was from one of the most well-known and beloved former leaders of the Black Panther Party, Ericka Huggins. Ericka asked René if she could bring a few special guests to the show that evening. We all took a deep breath, knowing that navigating special entry on this particular night was going to be tricky. René asked for the names. Ericka responded: Lezley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother; Gwen Carr, Eric Garner’s mother; Tressa Sherrod, John Crawford III’s mother; and Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant’s mother.

Ericka was bringing members of the Mothers of the Movement—a group of activists whose children had been killed by police violence—to experience the OMCA exhibition. We passed the phone around the table to take in the implications of this message—and the trust and pride that it represented. For many of us, that moment meant more than even the lines around the block or the new member sign-ups.

As OMCA has evolved in our engagement work, we’ve had some successes, some set-backs and challenges, and many discoveries. This was a moment, though, in which we came to understand what engagement feels like at a whole different level.

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