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Women of Influence


DR. CHELSEA HERR: HOLDING SPACE FOR INDIGENOUS ART

Edition 38
Aug 16
Story By Michael Kinney

Growing up Dr. Chelsea Herr was a frequent visitor to the local museums and
galleries around Los Angeles. Despite living in Riverside County, which is more
than an hour away, her school often took field trips to prestigious and world
renowned institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Getty
Center, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, the Huntington Library and the
Norton Simon Museum.

As Herr found out later, this was not the norm for most students. “Those were
not funded by the school,” Herr says. “Parents had to pay for it. That’s a very
limited population of kids whose parents could afford to pay for a bus trip out
to L.A.”

Even though that was more than two decades ago, Herr is still thinking about
access when it comes to museums, art galleries and historical sites. But now as
a curator with Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum, she can not only do something about
access, but also what people see once they come inside. “It’s very easy and very
common to push aside people from marginalized communities or people who don’t
have as much access to cultural institutions to feel alienated,” Herr says.
“That’s something at Gilcrease that we’re trying to rectify.”

Gilcrease appointed Herr, 34, as the first-ever Jack and Maxine Zarrow Curator
of Indigenous Art and Culture in May of 2020. It is her first full-time curator
position. Herr joined the Gilcrease just as it was embarking on transforming the
museum from what it, and most historical institutions, has been throughout
history. The Gilcrease is closed to the public as of July 4 for a massive
re-working; expect to see its reopening in 2024.

“In the United States and throughout the Western hemisphere, museums are a tool
of colonial power,” Herr says. “The idea of preserving art or cultural items,
that is something that was brought over through European enlightenment thought.
So, trying to work in an anti-colonial way by giving voice to people of color in
these colonial spaces is going to be difficult no matter what.”

Herr saw the new path Gilcrease was taking and jumped at the chance to be part
of their curatorial team and build the Indigenous collections. “I feel
incredibly blessed that even before I started at Gilcrease, they had already
started on this process of deconstructing what their function and their purpose
as an institution was,” Herr said.

“Maybe this is a chance to include more people that have ever been included
before. That really is the goal. Not necessarily to silence other people or to
rewrite the history that other people are familiar with. But really to say there
are multiple people who have experienced some of the same events. We are not
rewriting certain histories, but we’re expanding them. We’re saying there is not
only one narrative that brings us all into the same space or same moment.”



Herr comes from a family with an artistic and educational background so she had
a great appreciation and interest in both. But it wasn’t until Herr went to
college for her undergraduate work in graphic design that the idea of working in
the public sector began to formulate. After taking a few art history courses,
she decided to double major in graphic design and art history.

“From there I just got more and more interested in museum work and I knew that I
wanted to work with the public and really kind of advance museum missions of
bringing art and culture to the public that they might not get in other
settings,” Herr said.

Bringing art to the masses became a focus for Herr for a variety of different
reasons. That includes her conviction that art makes society better. “I have a
personal belief that art, creative expression and cultural production are really
imperative to our existence. I think that is very often overlooked, especially
in the United States,” Herr said. “ I grew up in an era when art funding in
public schools was diminishing every year. I could see our schooling system
becoming more focused on social sciences and math. I really do believe that
creativity connects us more to our own humanity. One of the things that help us
understand civilizations and cultures from the past is artistic production.”

While working on her undergraduate degrees in Seattle, Herr volunteered as a
tour guide at the Seattle Art Museum in 2008-10. It was there she saw for the
first time just how much power museums have in shaping the story of history.
“That opened my eyes to the fact that museums are narrative,” Herr said. “They
are subjective. They are driven by certain motivations. They are not neutral
institutions. The folks involved with museum work very much impact how a visitor
will experience the art or whatever is on display. For me, coming from an
indigenous family, I knew that kind of representation is even less accurate and
less well thought out than the art and culture of Euro-American artists.”

Instead of being turned off by the process and system, Herr gravitated to it. “I
realized our voices are not heard in the same way other people’s are,” Herr
said. “It was in that experience that I decided it’s not enough to see a
problem. So, I decided I was going to do my best to try and correct some of that
historical representation of indigenous people.”

Herr officially moved to Oklahoma in the Summer of 2015 when she started her PhD
program at the University of Oklahoma. However, that was not her first time in
the Sooner state.

Herr’s family on her mother’s side, which is native Choctaw, hails from
Southeastern Oklahoma. So she spent her summer traveling to Oklahoma to stay
with her grandmother.

Five years later, after earning a doctorate in Native American Art History, Herr
joined the Gilcrease. Despite the museum being closed and under construction in
since July 2020, she has been hard at work transforming the indigenous
collection for the day the doors re-open in late 2024.

“The way I view my role as a curator of indigenious art is primarily to care for
the items that are currently in the museum collection,” Herr said. “One of the
ways we’re doing that now at the museum, we are collaborating with about 35
tribes across the country to make sure when we reopen in a couple of years that
any story or history that relates to these indigenous communities that it’s
fully done in collaboration with the appropriate communities. Making sure that
when the public interacts with items on display that it’s not my voice, not the
museum’s voice, but it is the voice of the community it comes from. That to me
is the foundation of what being a curator is.”

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Michael Kinney

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