Texas Society / If These Walls Could Talk

If These Walls Could Talk

Texas Society

by ROWENA DASCH Executive Director, Neill-Cochran House Museum

This year, the Neill-Cochran House Museum (NCHM) in Austin, TX (headquarters of the NSCDA-TX) has been engaged in a project significant in scope and impact, If These Walls Could Talk. This show places trompe l’oeil contemporary porcelain sculptures by visual artist Ginger Geyer throughout the museum’s historic spaces to disrupt those spaces and to question dominant historic house museum narratives, particularly those related to race and equity.

If These Walls Could Talk was scheduled to close on May 3, 2020. However, after the museum closed on March 15th due to COVID-19, the leadership team quickly agreed to extend the show into the summer. Though the decision was predicated on COVID-19, the extension placed the NCHM and If These Walls Could Talk in a position to provide leadership, education and the opportunity for conversation about racial reckoning and culture in Austin.

The Neill-Cochran team already had been working to translate a sold-out bus tour of Black Central West Austin (the neighborhood and areas just to the museum’s south and west) to a self-paced driving tour for the Juneteenth (Friday, June 19th) weekend. By mid-June, it was clear this offering would be one of the few opportunities in Austin to get out and do something in person (rather than virtually) in celebration and commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved Black people.

The museum visitors’ responses were powerful. One woman (white, late 20s) said that she had lived in Clarksville (one of Austin’s original Freedman communities, and on the tour) and now lives in East Austin (the area of town to which people of color were coerced to move in the wake of the segregationist 1928 City Plan). Her employer gave everyone Juneteenth off and she registered for the tour because she didn’t want that day to be “just another day off”—she wanted to learn something. A young girl (white, 8 years old) told her mother she learned more on the tour than she ever had in school. A grandmother (Black, 60s, with her grandson) choked up more than once while watching the orientation film and then walking through the slave quarters—she loved what the museum was doing and that she could share Black history with her grandson, both on-site and through the tour.

This event and related exhibitions are part of a longer-term plan to reinterpret the museum’s Dependency, the antebellum slave quarters and workhouse, to more fully reflect its historical significance.

Ginger Geyer, artist (left), and Jennifer Rousseau Cumberbatch, actor (right), were instrumental in If These Walls Could Talk