Poverty in the WCMA online collection

Warning: The following material includes discussions of discrimination, visual caricatures, and violence against BIPOC and poor communities as they appear in visual culture.

How can museums help visitors find socially-relevant work in their collections without marginalizing or stereotyping subjects or artists?

Emil Corb (He/him), Art History M.A. student, seeks to explore one possible approach to this question by engaging with poverty in the online collection of the Williams College Museum of Art.

WCMA's  Online Collection   is a public resource that allows you to browse some of WCMA's 15,000 artworks and objects from your computer. Students, who make up WCMA's primary audience, use this database to find artworks relevant to their studies or interests, browsing through medium categories, or by searching for specific artists, artworks, or date ranges with the Search function.

But what happens when you search for works relevant to specific social issues, like race, class, or gender? Typing these words into the search bar may produce a few images, or the ever disappointing "0 results found." You may even close the tab thinking that the museum doesn't collect works related to your search.

The reality is that the art is there, but the website simply doesn't provide a way to sort images based on social issues. How can we help students and other museum audiences find works on issues of importance?

Under the guidance of Beth Fischer, I have had the opportunity to address this issue by preparing an experimental project that will reshape the metadata of WCMA's online collection to make images relating to poverty "findable". This will hopefully act as a pilot program for a larger scale rethinking of collection metadata to make other social issues locatable as well.

Metadata is a term used to describe the structure of information that allows an online collection to organize, describe, and track artworks. This can range from the name of the artwork to details about how or when the work entered the museum's collection.

By applying a new hierarchy of metadata focusing on class and poverty to a small selection of objects from the collection, we hope to prepare WCMA for the complex questions that will arise when addressing issues of race, class, and justice through the digital humanities. While doing this, I try to avoid perpetuating harmful biases and practices common in museum categorization, such as diminishing groups of people to objects of study through categorization. I navigate this in part by creating a category dedicated to makers who have experienced poverty first hand (titled Maker Poverty). This presents the poor as active participants in art making.

Why begin a wide scale project with poverty? First, poverty is a subject that I can confidently address as a formerly homeless student who studies poverty in Art History. Poverty is also particularly relevant to museums and Williams College as institutions that are connected to class disparity. Finally, poverty is a shared experience for many people due to their gender, sexuality, race, and ability, and so it can provide a jumping off point for other social issues.

But why does this project matter? Hopefully, if teachers, researchers, and students alike can more easily locate the visual history of poverty, they can learn about the many rolls that class inequality plays in in our world. Understanding these issues brings us one step closer to addressing them.

For example: As a formerly homeless student, I wanted to use art history to explore how the negative treatment of the poor could survive through history and impact my own life. However, I found it challenging to locate artwork that included the poor; I knew the pictures were out there, but I had no way to sift through thousands of objects to find works that included poor people. I found socially relevant (interactions with class, race, etcetera) works were nearly invisible in online collections, much like the identities they reflected. Locating these works means uncovering stories, and stories surrounding poverty are powerful. They can be powerful weapons against oppression or exploited to play into stereotypes.

One way of addressing these varied stories is by considering the difference between poor people as subject matter (what the work is about) and poor people as makers (the person who made the work) by establishing the categories “Maker Poverty” and “Subject Matter Poverty”. With this distinction, the collection can place a spot light on lived experiences rather than treating poor people as subjects of study.

These intersecting identities mean one can not simply tag every image with "poverty". Poverty can mean different things to different people. Because of this, we have developed a network of tags to recognize these different experiences:

Proposed Network -Class and poverty -Maker poverty -Subject Matter Poverty -Settings / built environment -City -Rural -Temporary housing (tents, shacks, etc) -Tenements / low-income neighborhood -Public Housing/ government housing -Economic and class issues -Caricature -Government aid -Taxes -Activism -Jobs/labor -Housing -Immigration -Schools/education -Law -Homelessness -Gender -Disability -Race -LGBTQA+

Consider this network as a way of finding specific kinds of experiences and ideas relating to poverty; If I want to look at artworks about women and poverty, I can connect "class and poverty" and to "gender", and find images relating to that specific experience. Similarly, if I wanted to see pictures of low-income housing spaces, I could connect "class and poverty" to "built environment". This way, we can reflect how poverty is a different experience for different people, and relates to a variety of issues like housing, education, and government policy.

Maker Poverty identifies works that reflect a maker's lived experience with poverty. Makers use these experiences for identity exploration and activism.

The definition of this "category" is currently in flux. Identity is complicated and never black and white, and therefore, categories can not - and should not - be used to define them. However, these categories can be useful in highlighting experiences to broaden our understanding of lived poverty.

One of WCMA's more famous examples of identity exploration in poverty is Asco's Walking Mural, photographed in 1972 by Asco member Harry Gamboa Jr. The four founding members of Asco, Patssi Valdez, Gronk, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Willie Herron, grew up in the barrios of East Los Angeles in the 1960s, a time and place entrenched in conversations of class and race. In 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium March entered Whittier Boulevard, initiating a massive protest against the Vietnam war and drafting practices that targeted poor and Chicanx youth.

The annual Christmas Parade down Whittier Boulevard was cancelled by authorities after the 1970 protest, leading Asco to organize their own impromptu parade by themselves. In their handmade costumes, Asco displayed communal pride and resilience. This photograph now embodies the power of the "aesthetics of poverty", which allows lower class makers who find strength in their identity.

After a long period of neglect, Asco's powerful stories are now being used to teach about Chicanx history and the financial realities of places like Los Angeles. However, other images like these are still hard to find.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson's 1980 drawing Pointdexter Village depicts the vibrancy of the area where the artist grew up. She recalls playing children, church sermons, Black-owned shops, and Black Power protests. Pointdexter Village in Columbus, Ohio, was also   one of the first public housing projects in the United States,   created to offer Black Americans affordable housing.

How does Pointdexter Village challenge our ideas of poverty in art? Simply put, you can't tell her work is about poor people just by looking at it - there is no "poor aesthetic". Pointdexter Village is also not just about being poor- it's about Black women, children and families who are poor.

This illustrates the necessity of a complex network of terms, subjects, and identities, rather than tagging everything as just "poverty".

Subject Matter Poverty, on the other hand, simply identifies works that include poverty as the subject matter. The class of the person who makes the artwork does not matter in this category. At times, this means that the people depicting poverty aren't "stakeholders", or the people who are most effected by conversations of class. As a result, many objects in this category are prone to violent and derogatory caricatures, while others can be read from the perspective of allyship.

WCMA's collection contains many American newspaper clippings with political cartoons. They illustrate how caricatures allowed artists to encourage readers to distrust the poor. These images were often used to publicly lobby for particular laws or social change on the East Coast.

Addressing these images in the collection is challenging; they are deeply violent and painful. Museums also historically benefited from the divides in race and class that these images encouraged, especially so on Williams campus. However, identifying these works and recognizing their impact can bring us closer to understanding the roots of modern discrimination.

Another issue that "Subject Matter Poverty" introduces: class is not so black and white. People can move in and out of poverty through their life, so it is challenging to say whether or not their art reflects a lived experience. Born in Saint Martin, Jersey, illustrator and caricature artist Edmund Blampied (1886 – 1966) was raised by a single working class mother in an agricultural town, which influenced his studies of agricultural workers and the homeless. However, many of his more famous etchings, such as Poor People (1926) were produced after Blampied had developed a successful career as an illustrator. This introduces some questions about identity:

Was Blampied an outsider studying "the other"?

With a lower-middle class upbringing, was he ever "poor enough" to identify with the struggles of a disabled man on the streets?

Or did his life provide proper empathy for the lower class?

We may all have different answers to these questions, and it is hard for a museum to pose these questions through an online collection. Thus, the identification of Subject Matter Poverty and Maker Poverty is a useful tool in locating work, but it's can't reflect all of the different identities we see in the collection.

"Poverty" now exists as collection category in   WCMA's e-museum  , providing a preliminary test for what may be a larger change to collection metadata design. The network needs to be more fleshed out before being applied to a larger group of artworks, and many questions still need to be addressed. We have already discussed the challenges of building terms and categories around very subjective identities and experiences, and there is also the issue of labor. Finding stories of poverty from the less explored corners of the collection will require considerable time and effort from multiple people. We will collect input from both the community surrounding Williams College and professionals in the museum field to treat this project carefully and thoughtfully.

We hope that this project will lead to the creation of similar networks for other identity issues in the collection, like "race", "gender", "sexuality" or "ability." Other less identity-based subjects, like environment and climate, will be just as challenging to categorize and make "searchable" because of the impact these issues have on many different people and cultures. Despite these challenges, I propose that this work may be helpful in recovering unique, diverse, and empowering stories from museum collections that may otherwise stay hidden within thousands upon thousands of objects.

This process has been deeply personal and contemplative for myself as a low income trans student at Williams, but also as a museum worker. How can a museum address these complex stories of trauma and resilience in a space that was not designed to do that work? This project is attempted response to that question, but is by no means the perfect answer. Therefore, we predict and embrace at least partial failure to seek productive conversations about challenging histories.