Dr. Chelsea Herr: Holding Space for Indigenous Art
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.”