The Walker Art Center’s Nisa Mackie on Orienting Toward Impact
Interview by Chris Hudson | February 18, 2021
Photo by Dylan Nelson
SPOTLIGHT
Tell us a little about yourself and your new role at the Walker.
I came to the Walker from the Biennale of Sydney in Australia, and I’ve been here for just under six years. My prior position at the Walker was Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs, but recently the museum was reorganized to elevate how public and community engagement, visitor research, and learning might work together to shape museum strategy and operations. This new department, which I head, is titled Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact. While my day-to-day has not materially changed, I have a different aegis to inform whole-museum thinking around the kinds of relationships we want to have with our visitors and community, the dimensions of engagement we want to foster, and how the Walker will go about achieving these things.
Department names often bring intersecting or overlapping pursuits together. How do public engagement, learning, and impact fit together in the way that you’re approaching them?
The Walker has such a rich history of experimental and rigorous programming that crosses artistic disciplines. As a result, I think we have become prone to believing that our programming epitomizes us at the exclusion of other kinds of experiential, interpretive, and contextual work. The three areas of the department bring different disciplinary vantages to how the museum articulates itself in this realm, including visitor analytics and data insights, theories of learning, community capacity building and community engagement, and interpretation.
These things fit together in the sense that they all center reciprocity and exchange with the public, albeit in very different ways; collectively, they represent a range of feedback loops for the institution that have the power to represent the museum and its values in new and different ways. I would add that it’s not unusual for museums to have learning and public engagement departments, but [adding] impact is new. I think [attention to] impact is particularly important as we peel back the layers on social and racial injustice in this country; it invokes the need for the museum to demonstrate its impact. The stakes are high.
“I think [attention to] impact is particularly important as we peel back the layers on social and racial injustice in this country; it invokes the need for the museum to demonstrate its impact. The stakes are high.”
Relatedly, one word I have been using recently to describe our visitors, audiences, and communities is constituent. I like to use this word because it’s a bridge to conceptualizing our various publics as more than just visitors—a term that feels both transactional and transient to me. In fact, the people that come through our doors, use the website, engage on social media, seek out learning experiences, encounter offsite projects, or even talk about us having never visited, they all form a component part of the museum. And those that engage regularly and repeatedly, well, they have a different type of stake in the institution altogether. Whether they realize it or not, they have a level of power to frame or alter our work. Like the civic space, there is a constitutive relationship there.
What aspects of the design of the Walker’s indoor and outdoor environments are most conducive to the engagement, learning, and impact you want to grow in the months and years ahead?
We’ve actually just embarked on what will be an almost year-long strategic planning process to tackle some of these very issues. I think the redesign of the Walker campus in 2017 helped immensely in unifying our indoor and outdoor environments. We have HGA’s wonderful new entry doing a lot of legwork there. And yet, there are still so many people who avail themselves of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden without ever realizing what lies inside the building. I believe this is more of a communication issue than a design issue, and I’m excited to think about what kind of interpretive breadcrumbs we can develop to entice people inside. Inside the building, we know we have a little work to do to address accessibility and to create more convivial spaces for participation and exchange.
Have learnings from the 2017 Scaffold controversy shaped the Walker’s focus on public engagement, learning, and impact?
Learnings from Scaffold are shaping our work in many ways—not just in the elevation of the importance of public engagement, learning, and impact. That said, I think arts organizations across the U.S. are grappling with how systemic racism has informed past practices, and how our collective work as cultural practitioners must evolve. I see the PELI team supporting the Walker in developing clear processes through which community feedback is taken into account; in supporting staff in their efforts to develop deeper relationships of trust and reciprocity with constituents, through listening and learning; and in creating culturally relevant and contextualizing programs and experiences that facilitate meaningful engagement with contemporary art.
Do you partner with Minnesota-based arts organizations led by people who are Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color?
Most of our work is achieved in partnership with local organizations, particularly those that are BIPOC based and led. The Walker recently established a number of cross-functional teams that drive particular initiatives. One example is a round of emergency grants that we distributed to BIPOC artists in late 2020. The grant came about as a response to the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the BIPOC arts community—an impact compounded by the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings. The Walker wanted to recognize and alleviate the financial and social toll these crises had on artists of color in the Twin Cities. Staff reached out to 10 Minnesota-based organizations that directly support artists in their communities. Each organization nominated two artists to receive a $5,000 grant, and also received $2,000 in compensation for their time and expertise.
Where do you look for inspiration in your work? What new ideas or insights have caught your eye recently?
I try to look for inspiration outside of the museum and art world. Oftentimes, I read fiction and theory—not as something to be taken wholesale but to find little snippets that might ignite some thinking. For example, I just finished an essay by Zadie Smith in which Smith describes belief as desire disguised. That one sentence has made me think a lot about the intersecting roles of belief and desire in cultural institutions. So much has been written about desire and art, desire and culture. Desire for self-actualization and inspiration isn’t the gestalt of the moment anymore; perhaps now it’s desire for social change. We’re currently in a moment of radical reimagining that is coupled with loss of faith in institutional structures of all kinds, in particular, museums. I think that’s scary for a lot of people, but I for one feel invigorated by it.