Engaging Museums

Prologue: The Catalyst of Memory As I finalize this book, acutely aware of the never-ending process of writing, I am struck that just as my work must stop, the ongoing pursuit of social justice, especially as it relates to memory, carries on more powerfully than ever. Drafting these words in early August of 2020, the nation is reeling from the recent losses of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain–to name just a few Black people killed by law enforcement officers in the last several months. The Black Lives Matter movement, first establishing itself in 2013 when Trayvon Martin was killed, is once again front and center in America, on the streets, on social media, and in the hearts and minds of many non-Black people who are experiencing their first racial justice awakening. Casting an even darker shadow over anti-Black police violence is the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affects the health and livelihood of Black Americans, reminding us (as if we needed another reminder?) of the systemic nature of racism. Some have already noted that we are living in a time of a “dual pandemic,” a “twin pandemic,” or a pandemic within a pandemic, underscoring racism itself asa public health crisis. The effects of COVID-19 and police violence, then, are not separate issues, but instead they are deeply intertwined, emanating from systems rooted in white supremacy and designed to oppress Black people (Bion; A. Jones; Kendi).
The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain are individual tragedies, unique in circumstance and person. But they are united as senseless injustices made possible by systemic racism. As a result, these deaths are especially complex in that they are private and public. Each person is mourned privately and individually by families and friends, as well as publicly and collectively by activists, politicians, and even your seemingly least woke white family member or friend, who you never expected would catch on to the movement. In other words, the memory of those lost to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence–recently, long ago, and undoubtedly in the future–illustrate memory as a powerful catalyst for engaging social justice and creating change. 
This catalyst of memory is at the heart of this book, with history museums serving as challenging spaces where visitors learn how to do the rhetorical work, in word and action, internally and externally, of engaging for social justice. It is notable too, that during this fraught twin pandemic summer, some of the most wide-spread and resistant rhetorical actions involve confronting, discussing, and often removing monuments and memorials that perpetuate racist public memory. The removal of confederate monuments in the United States has been an ongoing conversation and movement for many years, but this summer has widened the scope significantly to more regularly include other canonized but troubling historical figures like Christopher Columbus and the founding fathers. A common refrain from people who want to maintain such monuments, even when the monuments are recently established and causing deep pain for many who encounter them, goes like this: to topple a monument or change a name on a building will “destroy” or “erase” history. While there are countless ways to critique that refrain (and many writers have done so in popular and academic publications), what I hope this book can further bring to light is that these painful parts of American history­­ are far from “destroyed” or “erased” when a monument falls or is removed. At modern museums, what is known as “hard history,” such as that of slavery and its concomitant brutality, is front and center. While monuments are usually stagnant and imply a celebration or canonization, history museums are nuanced, complex, interactive places of memory; they demand visitors not only learn about hard, racist history, but they also introduce modes and moments for them to reflect on it, question how they have been taught it before, and grapple with its ongoing implications. In short, museums engage visitors, andvisitors in turn learn to better engage history, public memory, and one another.
One last catalyst of memory, before I admit that I really do have to stop writing this book. On July 17, 2020, congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis died. Shortly before his death, he composed a powerful piece that he requested be published on the day of his funeral, which took place on July 30. The editorial was first released in the New York Times, though it immediately circulated widely across the internet. In this essay, Lewis invokes his own memory, along with those of many other Black folks, to call for continued action. First, Lewis demonstrates his ongoing commitment to the pursuit of justice, even in the throes of pancreatic cancer and in the final days of his life: “That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.” He then connects going to this symbolic space of action directly to the memory of lives lost to anti-Black violence, drawing a painful throughline from the lynching of Emmett Till to more recent killings at the hand of the state: “Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me.” Finally, he concludes his essay by invoking his own memory, making a call to continue to catalyze memory for action: “Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.” Lewis reminds us that the work of anti-racism is never done. Even more, when we engage memory, deeply, and in all its messiness, we can continue to use and teach rhetoric in the pursuit of social justice. 
1. Rhetorical Education and Why Museums Matter: Entanglements of Rhetorical Education, Public Memory, and Social Justice In the spring of 2019, I was teaching a class called “Rhetoric and Social Justice,” which serves as both a broad introduction to rhetorical history and theory but through the lens of rhetoric’s connection to civic engagement and social justice. The first assigned “text” for the class was a visit to the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) to view an exhibit that was leaving only a week after our semester started: Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis. Wiley, most well-known for his 2018  portrait President Barack Obama, has long created art that offers political commentary about race. As SLAM describes his oeuvre in their exhibition summary, “His works address the politics of race and power in art, drawing attention to the pervasive lack of representation of people of color in the art world” (“Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis”). Not surprisingly, then, Wiley’s Saint Louis was locally focused in terms of the portraiture subjects, but the commentary resonated nationwide. Through Wiley’s process of “street casting”–approaching strangers on the street and asking them to pose for portraits–Saint Louis featured African Americans from Ferguson and adjacent locations. Each of the eleven St. Louis portraits he painted took as their starting place, and often their title, works of art from SLAM’s impressive historical collection. The proud poses and gazes of Wiley’s Black subjects, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, purposely and powerfully revise and “talk back” to venerable Western traditions represented elsewhere in the museum.
Ferguson, of course, came to the forefront of national conversations about race and police violence in 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown and never faced charges. It was the power of the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter and the Ferguson Uprising, and the seeming lack of space on my campus, just over a mile from Ferguson, that pushed me to design “Rhetoric and Social Justice” and offer it for the first time just months after Brown’s death. The Ferguson connection is also what prompted me to include the Wiley exhibit on the 2019 syllabus. Wiley’s portraits reminded the class, and St. Louis, that Ferguson was far from over, and Brown’s death was far from an isolated event that we could now “move on” from. Reflecting on this exhibit, Wiley said, “The project became a kind of moment around celebrating Brown’s life. . .A strange kind of elegy” (G’Sell).  Wiley’s Saint Louis asks visitors to similarly celebrate Brown, Ferguson, and the Black community. In other words, though 2019 marked the five-year anniversary of Brown’s death and the Ferguson Uprising, St. Louis, and America, need to continually revisit these events in our consciousness, conversation, and action. This revisiting is especially necessary for White people, who have the privilege of not facing racism on a daily basis. And what better way to provide both content and space for that revisiting than through massive portraits occupying an impressive amount of square footage in a very elite, and often very white, art museum? 
When I put this exhibit on my syllabus, I had no way to know how it would continually shape and shift our conversations in the course that semester. We found ourselves returning to Wiley’s work over and over again. The exhibit often served as a complex example of some of the rhetorical theory we were reading. We would discuss and write about how the exhibit, as well as the supplementary materials like pamphlets and news stories about it, and especially Wiley’s street casting method and the ways in which he drew from and simultaneously resisted the Western artistic canon, challenged our sometimes narrow definitions of rhetoric, its purpose, and how we grappled to define what makes rhetoric succeed or fail. Wiley’s exhibit, both explicitly and implicitly, calls attention to how rhetoric must center social justice and change, even when that centering reveals assumptions and biases and creates discomfort–but also joy, community, and solidarity–in audiences. 
I start with this rumination about Kehinde Wiley and my rhetoric class because it shows the important ways that public memory at museums, rhetorical education, and social justice are entangled. Saint Louis, as a creative way to both remember and honor Michael Brown and Ferguson itself, illustrates and concretizes an oft-cited definition of public memory from historian Jon Bodnar, “ [public memory is] a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past [and] present, and by implication, its future” (15). This temporally expansive definition of public memory brings it firmly into the rhetorical realm; not only is public memory based in beliefs and ideas, it is also invested in shaping the here and now, as well as influencing what comes next. In understanding public memory as change-focused and forward-looking, not only is it in the realm of rhetoric, public memory is also in the realm of social justice. Finally, the unexpected and important way Wiley’s exhibit became a central text in my class provides one final insight: public memory and social justice are central to rhetorical education, both inside and outside of classrooms.
 In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, Wayne Booth laments, “Passionate partisans cannot seem to find convincing ways of talking about their beliefs” (xi). Booth’s lamentation is spurred by what he perceives as the failure of on-campus protest movements during the 1960s, but his words remain relevant today in a world that is saturated with discourse in varied media, yet much of it remains rhetorically ineffectual—failing to reach audiences, deteriorating into polemics, or refusing to engage topics that are difficult, uncomfortable, or complicated. The ongoing struggle to meaningfully engage, as Booth puts it, “to find convincing ways of talking about…beliefs,” serves as the impetus for this book. Through museum-based research, I seek models and methods to improve the state of public rhetoric and engagement in the United States and suggest new directions for rhetorical education.
Most centrally, this book argues that this improvement can come from the centering of social justice in rhetorical education. The term rhetorical education is frequently associated with specific historical practices, such as the rigorous progymnasmata of classical times used to train students in the elements of rhetoric and prepare them for their own orations, or 19th century writing and self-improvement handbooks, often used by women with no access to schooling. It is also a term largely associated with formal education. It is generally accepted, if not always explicitly emphasized, for instance, that the composition classroom is a space of rhetorical education. Though both history and formal education are meaningful contexts in which to understand rhetorical education, these associations may also narrow scholarship on the subject and give the impression that it is an outdated practice with limited reach. However, in the current divisive American social climate, one that rewards polarization and extremism rather than meticulous ethical work for social change, rhetorical education is arguably more necessary and should be more dispersed than ever. In a celebrated piece on the value of first-year writing from Inside Higher Ed, John Duffy explains, “To say that the current state of public discourse is abysmal seems self-evident. Toxic rhetoric has become a fact of everyday life, a form of entertainment, and a corporate product.” While Duffy suggests that first-year composition is a partial solution to this problem, explaining that it “promote[s] an ethical public discourse,” this book seeks answers beyond the ivory tower, arguing that rhetorical education is a concept that needs reviewing and revising for the 21st century, both inside and far beyond the college composition classroom. We seem to recognize toxic rhetoric when we see it; Duffy and many others provide clear examples. But what should ethical rhetoric look like and feel like? Ethical rhetoric is necessarily blurrier, harder to pin down. Perhaps we recognize ethical rhetoric when we see it, too, but how can that recognition be clarified, more deeply understood, and taught to others? How might the ethical work of rhetorical education in our classrooms be complicated by pressures, from our students, our institutions, our colleagues, even ourselves, to remain depoliticized or somehow “neutral”? 
But should rhetorical education ever be a neutral enterprise? While local conditions and individual philosophies make this nearly impossible to address across rhetoric and writing classrooms, I turn to history museums as rich spaces to ruminate on this question since they frequently encourage civic discourse and participation both inside and outside their walls. Rhetorical education at the museums I study comes in the form of asking visitors to attend to certain artifacts, as well as the correlating civic issues and lessons. In a way that might seem quite similar to what happens in academic classrooms, visitors then are encouraged to engage with these issues—think about them, talk about them, and compose about them to take steps toward critical awareness and civic action (Figure 1.1). But, just as the definition of public memory as invested in shaping the present and future suggests, the history museums I study in this book cannot be neutral; they are bold sites of public memory addressing hard, discomforting histories and prompting visitors to do the same. I thus argue that museums offer a revision of how and where rhetorical education takes place, allowing for a fuller theorization and enactment of its connection to social justice.  
In this introductory chapter, I first explain the focus of this book in terms of the sites I selected and why they lend themselves particularly well to the project of revising rhetorical education. I then historicize and define rhetorical education, explaining how it operates as my guiding theoretical framework. This discussion of rhetorical education brings me to a brief history of museum education, with attention to how it connects with the pedagogical imperatives of rhetoric. I then spend significant time explicating my multi-method approach to museum research, raising questions about the roles and ethics of rhetorical scholars in the process. I conclude with an overview of the book’s remaining chapters.
[end of excerpt] “Lauren E. Obermark deftly explores three compelling museum spaces to consider both the rhetorical and social justice pedagogy they cultivate for visitors. Engaging Museums extends and invigorates conversations in rhetorical studies centered at the nexus of public memory and rhetorical education, and it offers powerful heuristics that will deepen and complicate readers’ teaching and their museum attendance.”—Jessica Enoch, author of Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work  
“Obermark tackles a critical issue by exploring the techniques of an often-overlooked partner. Her timely analysis of three midwestern museums is critical but complex, equally ready to learn from successes and challenges. What I most appreciate is her willingness to put her own thought processes on display as she grapples with how best to engage in public education for social justice action.”—Elizabeth Weiser, author of Museum Rhetoric: Building Civic Identity in National Spaces "Engaging Museums: Rhetorical Education and Social Justice is a seminal work of extraordinary scholarship."—Helen Dumont, Midwest Book Review “Lauren E. Obermark deftly explores three compelling museum spaces to consider both the rhetorical and social justice pedagogy they cultivate for visitors. Engaging Museums extends and invigorates conversations in rhetorical studies centered at the nexus of public memory and rhetorical education, and it offers powerful heuristics that will deepen and complicate readers’ teaching and their museum attendance.”—Jessica Enoch, author of Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work  
“Obermark tackles a critical issue by exploring the techniques of an often-overlooked partner. Her timely analysis of three midwestern museums is critical but complex, equally ready to learn from successes and challenges. What I most appreciate is her willingness to put her own thought processes on display as she grapples with how best to engage in public education for social justice action.”—Elizabeth Weiser, author of Museum Rhetoric: Building Civic Identity in National Spaces