This project examines the process of collaborative knowledge production within the Oakland Museum of California as it undertakes the first major redesign of its permanent exhibitions in 40 years. The research will observe the formation of historical narratives and the delineation of "communities" through the lens of the object as museum staff, community members, curators, and the objects themselves interact to co-produce new representations and narratives. Objects are at the heart of the investigation since groups define, lay claim to, repudiate and are in turn defined by them. The project interrogates how definitions of "community" and "expertise" affect the resulting exhibitions, and how power relations infuse decisions that seem innocuous. The resulting ethnography will not only compare how approaches to race, class and gender have changed between the 1969 and 2009 exhibitions, but it will most crucially provide insight into how cultural institutions collaborate with alleged "non-experts" to provide new, dynamic forms of knowledge. This research brings together insights and theoretical tools from the disparate fields of visual anthropology, material culture studies and science and technology studies to explore the role of objects in performing identity and constructing historical narratives. The project is an investigation of science and its publics, contributing to understanding how members of underrepresented populations participate in the creation and consumption of knowledge presented in museums. It will impact how institutions collaborate with communities to produce more multivocal narratives of identity and difference. The project also has educational relevance in producing deeper understandings of exhibition reception by multiethnic stakeholders. It will examine the co-creation of narratives in conjunction with diverse communities; such narratives have huge educational potential because of their public prominence, use in the curriculum of elementary schools, and their presentation of public culture and generally accepted views of history.
My research focused on a group of muralists in Oakland, California who utilize outside urban spaces as their own version of the museum. The Community Rejuvenation Project (CRP) is a collective of mural artists who painted more than twenty murals during the year-long period of NSF-funded research. During this time, I attended weekly meetings of the collective, conducted one-on-one interviews with its executive director and many of the artists in the collective, and assisted in and documented their weekly mural painting activities. I attended numerous conferences, art openings, community gatherings, business district summits, and governmental meetings with CRP. My primary discipline is cultural anthropology, and this research brings together insights and theoretical tools from the disparate fields of visual anthropology, urban studies, and science and technology studies. The project examines how definitions of community and expertise affect policy decisions. The resulting ethnography will provide insight into how institutions collaborate with alleged non-experts and self-defined 'experts' to provide new forms of knowledge such as public understandings of history (as represented in murals) or policy approaches to blight abatement. My research has documented the process whereby 'non-experts' – artists in urban outdoor spaces who had previously been viewed as a nuisance by city government - transformed themselves into 'experts' who influenced city abatement policy and even won a competitive contract with the city to produce a mural in a blighted area. The group successfully argued that in the context of decreased city funding for maintenance of public space, it would be more cost effective to hire CRP to create murals on highly blighted walls. Murals would incorporate community input and garner more neighborhood respect, and would therefore suffer less vandalism and have less need to be repainted repeatedly. On the basis of this argument, they won a $25,000 contract with the City of Oakland to paint a large mural on a busy corner. They also worked directly with the blight abatement sector of city government to identify murals to help preserve them instead of painting over them, which had happened repeatedly in the past. For some members this was a transformation from the role of persecuted street artist into curator of urban spaces. The Community Rejuvenation Project was able to achieve this change in the status of their expertise by building networks and connections with various people/objects/neighborhoods, through mastering the technocratic language of the governmental institution, and then working to transform the definitions of key terms such as what counts as 'blight' and 'abatement.' They also transformed their clothes, manner of speaking, and methods of interaction in conscious and unconscious ways depending on the social milieu at hand. I have observed how governmental institutions and nonprofits collaborate with communities to produce more multivocal narratives of identity and difference. My research focuses on generating better models for community collaboration and produces insight into the construction of 'expertise.' I have documented one group's innovative methods of approaching neighborhood revitalization and mobilization, and the city policy changes they were able to achieve as their arguments won more and more support within local government for their cost effectiveness and community involvement. The background of the economic recession affects many aspects of the work, and its causal affect is analyzed.
