#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 9: Oklahoma City, OK
My time in Oklahoma City has been largely spent with the very excellent Adrienne Lalli Hills, a museum education and interpretation pal and all-around lovely human. It’s been such a long time since I’ve done things that were once very normal like… making plans to meet friends at a restaurant for dinner, or… sitting around someone’s living room talking.
I know these have been more regular features of other people’s lives in other parts of the country for some time now, but I’ve been pretty hermetically sealed away and it was really nice to poke my head out of that shell for a couple days.
My social muscles are definitely atrophied, and while we talked for literal hours about museums and museum education and the state of the world and the state of our field and more (big trash day, power clashing style, doggie health care), there were definitely moments where I was aware of how much less able to string my thoughts together I was than was my previous norm. And I was fully exhausted at the end of a day of meeting new (lovely) people and thinking and talking about all sorts of interesting topics.
The social side of my brain and my heart feel a little bit like those first few crocuses that peek their heads up out of the ground when there’s still some snow lying around and nothing is yet green. I’m hopeful for a verdant season ahead of seeing how these interpersonal pathways re-grow.
One of the delightful things I got to do with Adrienne was visit the newly opened First Americans Museum, where Adrienne heads up the Learning and Community Engagement department. (Depending on who you are reading this, this next sentence will resonate differently with you.) I joined a session of her training with her new and awesome class of docents and played gallery games and facilitated my first VTS conversation in… literal years. It was a total joy and a reminder of how it feels to be both good at and happy with one of my own skillsets (gallery teaching… not just VTS… don’t @ me).
Also? FAM is ❤️🔥💥🔥 fire. Much like my feelings at the Legacy Museum, this was a place where it was so refreshing and inspiring to see museum labels and pedagogy that is explicitly addressing the historical and contemporary wrongs, erasures, and roles of a huge group of people. This time, that’s the 39 tribes indigenous to Oklahoma, and listening to Adrienne explain how much attention is being paid to prioritizing tribal relationships over academic scholarship or even museum visitor experiences (ie not displaying an object when a tribal representative says they don’t want it on view) was really powerful.
Also there are labels like these (click to enlarge)!
Cloud of the day: not so much a cloud as this gorgeous sunny blue sky over the windy plains (yes, the wind was indeed sweeping down the plain) at the entrance to FAM.
