backstory: We made it to 350!

How did it start? Well… way, way back, on June 26, 2019 (literally hundreds of backstories ago) I wrote to you about another of my most important mentors, Irving Sandler. Many of you knew and admired Irving, a luminary in the field of art history who taught here at SUNY Purchase for many years and was even a director of the Neuberger for a short period of time.

Here is what I wrote about Irving back in 2019 with its original bolding:

The greatest gift Irving gave to me, beyond the great gifts of friendship and mentorship, was that he encouraged me to dip my toe into writing in the style of memoir. When you train as an art historian, you don’t typically use words like I or me or my. At least throughout my studies, it was highly discouraged. It always had to be: he did this, she did that, or they did the other thing. If not for Irving’s enthusiasm and encouragement, I probably wouldn’t be writing what I’m writing to you in the way I am writing to you now. Thank you, dear Irving, for this and so much else.

Many leaders of cultural organizations blog like I do, so I know you have a lot of choice in who you read and why. Likely unbeknownst to you, you have grown from a tiny startup group when I launched this blog to over 4,000 subscribers now.

Why do cultural leaders blog? I can’t speak for others, but for me, as the leader of a museum on a college campus, one of my most important goals has been to deploy strategies that chip away at threshold fear, the fear of approach that makes so many of our students (and, really, even members of our general public) nervous about being in museums.

Museums have a very well-deserved reputation for being unapproachable, even dehumanizing. Big giant columns. Crisp white walls. Do not touch signs. Guards surveilling you. The strategy of questioning the museum’s dehumanizing qualities ties back to a post-modernist construct, one that stems for many of us in the field from the publication of Brian Doherty’s 1976 essay entitled “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space,” which questioned the ways in which modernist, crisp, white gallery walls convey fictive neutralities.

Since then, progressive cultural leaders have sought to demystify the “white cube” by deploying a method that has come to be known as “institutional critique.” What’s that? Well, it basically means that we work hard to show that nothing about what the museum does inside of that columned, crisp, untouchable, and surveilled space is neutral. Rather there are people in those museums with opinions who make decisions about what you see and how you experience it.

This has been the backbone of backstory. In short, it’s been my way of cracking the institutional box open by providing a behind-the-scenes, humanized look—a backstory—into the leader, the organization, and the choices that get made.

But, with 350 backstories under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time to sunset backstory.

I’ve loved hearing back from so many of you over the years. Those of you who appreciated what I wrote. And even those of you who occasionally did not! Thank you. Thank you.

And don’t go anywhere. Stay tuned for new ways of hearing about what we do and how we do it!

Tracy Fitzpatrick
Director, Neuberger Museum of Art