Evolving Muse:
A brief history of the Revolving Museum


By Jerry Beck (as told to Chelsea Spear)

I would describe the Revolving Museum as an organization that's responsive to the moment, in that it can -- it has to adapt itself to everyday life. Early on, it was a very site-specific organization. We responded to unused or abandoned spaces, so that the site became the museum. I would bring together groups of artists whose work I was inspired by, and asked if they'd work with me to represent their work in such sites as trains, (in the) "12 Abandoned Railroad Cars" (exhibit), out on George's Island at the Civil War fort. A lot of that, the Revolving Museum was trying to locate a place of origin. To me, the Revolving Museum was about going through the process of exploring the moment and moments that create an art experience. You can't diminish that it's also about the conversations and the experiences you get in creating art, in collaboration with others, whether it's other artists or even the public. Early projects we were sleeping in the train cars, we were on-site. We weren't in the studio, we were out in the open. And when you're out in the open, to me the Revolving Museum on a more conceptual level is about transforming consciousness, and the world is the museum. We all have the ability to be inspired, to be creative, to talk about the great mysteries of why we're here. So on a holistic level, I guess it's the idea that we defined as a museum has to be broadened. It's not just about artists or great masterpieces, but what happened to all the in-between stuff that might have been preserved in people's memories. Are they less significant than, say, the high art of the people in power. To me the Revolving Museum is about demystifiying power to recognize that everyone has the creative power to be part of the Revolving Museum.

We've been taught what art is, and what an artist is, which might not necessarily be the definition that interests me about what an artist is. I try to keep away from stereotyping people's jobs as artist or non-artist. That way, it allows a lot more of an opportunity to be whoever you want to be, or whoever you ever imagined to be. Maybe that spark of inspiration could be for everybody.



That viewpoint is somewhat idealistic, but I really do think it's about consciousness-raising and learning, and mostly it's about personal growth. Community setting supports personal growth. People that share in that dialouge -- but you can be clunked over the head when you least expect it. It's the myseriousness of everyday life, as well as what we consider as our framework. Outside the framework is where the Revolving Museum lies.

The early history was mostly -- and I would say in kind of a reactionary sense, in terms of what I've been taught about how to be an artist -- was a reaction against the art world in a sense. "This is what it's supposed to look like, you're supposed to do work in your studio, like what they teach you, you're supposed to create the masterpiece, your goal is a kind of careerist model, get on the cover of Artforum, sell your original artwork." I'm from Florida, and there's no contemporary art institution there, so I was influenced by other cultural models, like carnivals, and theme parks and Native American culture -- things that were my museum. I think the history of the Revolving Museum was based in an alternative art arena. The abandoned spaces seemed to be the most adventurous way to move. It was something that started way back in college, when you could only show this many paintings in this space, and you had to follow the rules. If you didn't follow the rules, then you've got to do your own thing -- which artists have always been doing. Throwing that away, we early on were like an adjunct, nomadic institution, where groups of artists would work together. Which is a unique thing for visual artists -- with dancers and theatre, it's very common, but in terms of words and pictures, and also the kind of stereotype of the artist enslaved in his studio or her studio, and fighting away at creating that one masterpiece. That kind of stereotype of one artist. The Revolving Museum did the opposite -- you could still create your individual work, but you had to do it in a collective, collaborative setting. So these spaces really brought a vocabulary of aesthetics. The train show used 12 abandoned railroad cars, which is where we started. The insurgence of moving into a realm where you had no skill of understanding how to make it happen or getting permission to use it, realising you had to get insurance -- the whole vocabulary of public art was in that way a learning process. You wanted to do something in this amazing place, and all of a sudden there were all these rules and guidelines and conversations with people that knew nothing about art, so how that conversation included those people were crucial to our success. So those early projects, surprisingly enough -- people say, "how'd you do it in these places?" I asked, and then I found out what was required, and I had to get them excited. It really invested in the idea. A lot of it was about communication. These first five histories or so, five years, were really a response to unused or abandoned spaces, and reacting to them and bringing them to life, and celebrating those projects. ... There was no money, and we all had to pitch in. It was a real exciting period in its history.

We did get a grant to do a project in the mid-80s -- 1987 or '88 -- to do work in a neighborhood. That was a much different environment, because people were living there, this particularly community was multi-ethnic...It was through a grant called "What Would the Neighbors Say?" Stella MacGregor ran an alternative space there called The Space, and I was one of three artists commissioned to do public projects. The Revolving Museum shifted at that point, primarily because community and work with young people -- which is what triggered responding to that neighborhood -- was basically asking questions and really being scared about how can dealing with racism issues, my own of being a white person in this neighborhood that wasn't mine, how do you engage on that level? I could be a sense of mediator, and the community could participate in projects. What happened within that was that I met these kids, Hosea and Becky, and I asked them to be my partner. Whatever project they wanted to do, let's do it together. That's where the Revolving Museum was shifting towards what it means to work in a community, and what it means to work with young people. ... And then we came up with a huge project called "Off-Season", which used sports -- primarily baseball -- as a metaphor for exploring identity and celebrating some of the themes that came up. It was the first workshop proponent to the Revolving Museum, and we had a series of afterschool workshops that were developed so that the young people could come after school and we could work with different artists. All of a sudden, it kind of snowballed into this huge project. I think it was one of the most successful in terms of my own experience, because I was back being a kid and working with young people, who had very ambitious ideas and very unrelentless energy. Also, there was a streetwise understanding ... kids have this way of basically saying the truth. They don't like what you're doing, you'll know that they're not interested. I was challenged in terms of moving the project through their perspective and through their guidelines. I really had to learn on my feet. We brought in art educators that had all the skill that they learned in school about how to work with curriculum and young people, and the experience they had was -- young people didn't want to deal with it. So you had to be adaptable, and you can't ever force an aesthetic on a community. I've learned that along the way -- I hit the wall many times in that project. The resuts were incredible...but I think what shifted the Revolving Museum was that at the end...was that Hosea came up to me after having this extraordinary time, looked me right in the eye with a bunch of the young people and said, "Well, I guess we'll never see you again." When he said that, I said, "yeah, I did my thing. We did our project, and now it's time to move on." But something resonated on a deeper level about commitment to this particular group of kids, and the challenge of the Revolving Museum to look in the mirror and wonder, "what is a public art institution, in regards to responding to those kinds of questions?" And the need, the obvious need, being unserved and these kids not having a creative outlet. And when you further eliminate the bell jar of your thinking and your past, you recognize that this particular group of young people that work really hard, and dealing with culture, and drugs and violence, all these particular issues -- there's a great need for expression. These kids when we started were between the ages of eight and fourteen, and they're very responsive to art. But I also recognized that they weren't having much to do. They couldn't go to camps and stuff over the summer, so I think it asserted their questions and emotions hit home for me. Here's a nomadic institution that during its journey all of a sudden meets a neighborhood, and the neighborhood responds to it and embraces it, even the differences. And it says, "hey -- art can be fun. We want to do it, and there's not a lot of it here." That shifted the organization, because it was always project-driven. Now I realised that I had developed some friendships -- part of what they said was something I didn't want to realise. I had feelings for these kids even after I worked with them, and I didn't think these feelings would have something fruitful, even after that one event. Slowly but surely I kept in contact with them, and ten years later I can honestly say they probably had the biggest impact in my life, and certainly the biggest impact in the organization. They're like friends and family now, and I'm not even in the community. If that can happen, these ideas and boundaries and ideas between communities and between people of different backgrounds and economic background and skin color and gender and age, that it can work, and it brings tremendous areas to explore.

For the next 4-5 years, the organization was a freelance organization -- people would hire out but it never generated income. We were being hired out by many different organizations, like the ICA and Very Special Arts. They basically wanted the Revolving Museum to continue its work in community and serve as an outreach program in their own communities by hiring me to go out and work with these populations of young people. I embraced it fully. These kids, I really relate to how they approach artmaking. The next 4-6 years, we're talking dozens of project, we're talking dozens of projects, non-stop almost, in many different neighborhoods, leading to what we called "The Wonders of the World" program, which used the carnival as a strategy and format to involve large numbers of artists collaborating with youth groups and social service organizations and our organizations. So in a sense I became a producer of large-scale public art projects involving collaborations between lots of artists and young people. But not just that -- then we started involving people with disabilities, and seniors, and seniors and teens. Looking back, it was really just a surge of community based projects, and what that meant in terms of learning how to successfully work under those conditions. And they're not easy conditions to work within. It's a lot easier working in your studio alone on aesthetic than it is when you're in a community that has all these things. And a sense of community is ambiguous. The community became anyone who was working with us, so it was very large and it had people from all different ages and backgrounds interacting from day to day, project to project, event to event. It was almost like being thrown into a rodeo with no experience, and you try riding the bull. You're scared, you get thrown around, you think you can be hurt, you're nervous. That's what it felt like, and if I didn't have a genuine interest in people, I don't think I ever would have...

People really want to communicate, but they don't know how necessarily. Or they limit themselves to thinking, "oh, I'm not an artist, you're an artist. I can't participate with you." When I see the boundary, whether it's with a young person or an artist or myself, I try to move towards that boundary and push it. Sometimes you don't see it, but you can see it with kids, and it's easier to see out than see in. But it's that line, "how many kids can draw, raise your hand" -- five, maybe ten, and then trying to demystify what drawing is. It's not what you've been taught. You want to draw perfect, get a piece of tracing paper and trace Michelangelo or sports figures. Practise. But our attitude isn't that there's only one right way to draw, there's only your way. It gets back to this, "sure, you can learn that stuff. You can learn facilities and skills, definetely. But more importantly, you have to learn about yourself and what keeps you from learning." Where art really plays a key role in trying to people access to their creativity and learning. It does take a lot of practise to work in that realm. That is in a sense a spiritual realm, but it's where the spiritual has fun, and where you have more of a motive. Things that can happen at any moment. And even that is a hard thing to deal with, especially when you go into a museum. I worked as a museum guard, and I never saw anyone cry or laugh in a museum. I saw people walking quietly, but that to me wasn't the expression or experience that I was drawn to. That's why carnivals and the experience around being curious and being really involved with the creativity is much more interesting to me.

There's so much that having a home and a facility and permanent income and some structure and some guidelines broadened opportunities. With it becomes a whole system, a political system. It's not just one person flowing through, now it's several people. Recognizing a whole new base of policies and procedures and economics and -- everything. When you have your building, it changes. It almost goes against our grain in some ways, and yet adapting situations, what I hoped this would do was provide more creative freedom for more people. How many artists can we have working in how many neighborhoods? Having a staff that can administrate these projects gives us total freedom. We don't have to adjust to other people's agendas or be hired hands. This was supposed to give us freedom. But I think with the amount of growth, and going from one floor and one studio to three floors and over fifty studios and an exhibition space -- the ambition of the organization is now pretty large. We had to pretty much learn from scratch again. I never really had experience within an institution. ... Now we had to do all the parts, and figure out how to make people happy and give those chances for people to be inspired, like artists having studios and alternative space and theatre space, so that artists could be seen. And also giving artists a chance to work within the community, as we continue to work with young people within those communities. Over the past couple of years, the organization feels like it's been shot out of a cannon, and just hoping that the net is there, and the net serves as a metaphor of making sure we have support.

To look at this artistically is one thing, to look at it practically is another, and to look at it institutionally is still another. We have a board now, and we have to raise money, and we have to keep to our morals. And we have to do it all right, but the pressure of figuring it out -- especially with a staff and myself -- is that we've never done this before. So the learning curve is so hard to hit. I believe we've been responsive and successful on a lot of levels, but other times it feels awkward and we feel clumsy. You can have all the inspiration in the world, but then you have to saddle it. ... It's like anything. Sure, everyone wants to be in their studios as much as they want, they want to vacation when they can, but there's this other thing about part of the work. The work should be pleasurable, but sometimes it's not. It's always been true on every project, but sometimes while you go thorugh these stages, you think "how many different stages can you go through and survive?" I'm trying to figure out for myself.


I try to think of creating an institution like this as a project. Some of them, you just want someone whose art is the administration to free you up to what you want to get to. I haven't really gotten to the place where I've had the silence to be lost again. I keep seeing the image of me spinning a log in the water and just falling into the water all the time. You just want to stand on top of that piece of log and say, "okay! This is really cool." But it hasn't been that way, because as soon as you step on the log, you fall. It's more complex to do something you have no training with and still have fun. So it hasn't been the organization growing as much as me growing with the organization, and how I can manage to understand what that means. At times it's incredibly fun and people are excited, and I'm watching how people are coming forward to talk to staff ... It feels really good. And there's another side of it where we have to deal with evictions and laying the law down, and artists thinking that we're not giving them creative freedom -- there's all this other logistical administrative stuff that's just contradictory. We want to do it right, and I think this is the nature of all systems. The same dynamic that you go into a project with, only with me I think I haven't been able to completely synchronize my role within this new venue. But it's only been two years. It's hard to be paitent.

I've tried to figure out how to take my hand off the record, because I feel responsible for getting us to this place, but there's also ways I have to shift down into neutral again and not be so hard. We've done so much that we've done that it's hard to see, but there's also so much ahead. We have a great group of people here, and it keeps getting more and more gelling. I don't want this to be a beaureaucratic, stifling organization -- I want to be able to keep to what we've been doing. Conceptually, I've been thinking, "does this eliminate doing what I've always wanted to get back to," spending time in the community. I'd also like to respond to the urban revitalization. Early stuff offered stuff of being in a space that had nobody there. To me, personally, that stuff was as powerful and interesting, and working with young people. How do you juggle all these interests and feel like you're having a great experience? That is a certain recognition that everything I aspire to is not what it is. I hope the maturity of the organization is something that's happening. Maybe we need to recognize that there's something higher than our mission, that slowing our pace down might be the access to places where we can really get lost in that creative space. I think the same thing pertains to the organization's growth -- things are going so fast that I'm having trouble breathing in my normal rhythm. The inspiration gets too much. Maybe it's not inspiration at all -- maybe it's desperation of dealing with the magnitude of the scale. ... I'm starting to realise how important it is not to be overambitious. What is a healthy work environment for really working with creativity? How do you work in that environment, so that you don't have to fall into the same old routines you had with your old job? How do you keep people slightly off-balance but still enjoying coming to work and stuff? That's another element that I try to bring here day to day, but sometimes there's clogs that need to be flushed out. Things don't change that way.

One of the hopes for the Revolving Museum is how do we provide people with that realm called curiousity? That's where I respond to kids -- they might not have done it, and they might not have been told that this is the way it's supposed to be yet. There's something that happens between in adolescence, the cultural restraints, like gender issues, vanity issues, ego, how you're supposed to do things, how you should be doing things, your expectations. If anything the Revolving Museum wants to deal with that, but what are the spaces in between that offer you some curiosity and let you deal with memory and reminisce? Deal with passion, certainly, and pain -- a lot of work we do is social issues, and I'm drawn to ways to explore those other issues in society that affect all of us. How do you stay curious and not stuck? What is the trigger that art offers that allows that to happen? That's a key question, and I think that's something we'll always be moving towards. We're not the experts. We just want to be able to provide the safety net for people to be able to explore these bigger questions around self. Who are we? Why are we? It's always the process that's important. Why you do it is what I'm curious about, because I have no idea why I make art. I think I do, by connection, but I'm still not sure what it is. I just have a sense of connection.
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