Inside the Issue

Who Decides the Narratives?

One could call it a law of nature: a story multiplies.

Like a drop descending into a petri dish, once it separates from its author a story gets busy making more of itself, taking on new shapes, becoming plural and nebulously shaped things, forms whose boundaries are sometimes a distant echo of the lines that were first laid.

A story isn’t singular, and neither are the complicated people that make up its audience. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, I contain multitudes. Our narratives do, too.

The mechanisms that drive this multiplication from story to stories are many. Historians, for one, try their hand at making sense of the forms. Politicians attempt to redraw the lines themselves. Artists, aiming to interpret and build upon the past, seek new ways to define what counts for a shape. Even we play a powerful role, as listeners and re-tellers. Understanding that there is more than one story unlocks a relationship with the past that is alive. In this living exchange, past, present, and future remain in conversation—dynamic, changing, evolving. As knowledge and perspective grow, so do the stories.

That is the only call to action, if it can be called one, for this spring and summer’s art experiences at TMA: to reconsider. Who crafted our stories, and why—and which will we choose to inherit, to pass on, to make our own in the retelling? This question is more relevant than it may seem at first blush, for the artists tasked with asking it, but also for you, the audience.

Arming ourselves with this knowledge creates a novel way to experience art. At first it might feel like an unmooring of sorts. Where there were authoritative statements, there are now open-ended questions and the opportunity to ask them. There’s far less telling than there used to be, and while it can be uncomfortable, even prickly, it also holds the

potential glow of discovery.

With that comes an invitation to share your feedback, comments and insights about how the art in the Museum is displayed in its galleries. It will give curators— historically the authority in this area—a renewed relationship with you, the audience, one that encourages dialogue as TMA embarks on the years-long project of reinstalling its collection with an eye for fresher, truer storytelling. The first iteration of that discussion, the American art installation Expanding Horizons: The Evolving Character of a Nation, includes in its title the essential concept at the core of these exchanges and learnings: evolution.

Like the United States of America, this institution is also ever-evolving. It is growing to be a clearer mirror for the community that surrounds it, one that understands there is never only one story—and that our world is richer when we make space for more of them.