Civil Rights museum throws hat in the ring for La. ArtWorks space
16th December 2013 · 0 Comments
By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer
After spending more than 15 years at the drawing board, members of the state-level panel charged with creating a museum dedicated to the civil rights history of Louisiana are inching closer than ever before to finding a permanent home for the facility, which would be the first of its kind in the state and embody the dreams of many who have worked for years to make it a reality.
In late October, a handful of board members from the now-defunct publicly funded ArtWorks project in downtown New Orleans announced the sale of the group’s five-story, 96,000 square foot facility on Howard Ave., which has sat largely dormant since 2010 after organizers failed to secure adequate funding to keep the project afloat. The sale of the building comes after city and state leaders sunk more than $20 million into the project amid cost overruns and questions over management.
At least three bidders have emerged to take the financial albatross from around the necks of state and local taxpayers and return the building to commerce, although none of the bids are projected to revisit use of the space as a complex dedicated exclusively to fostering the city’s art scene. Early on, organizers, with the help of the Arts Council of New Orleans, envisioned turning the former corporate office building into a space where visitors could see artists in the process of creating various works.
But 10 years after the ArtWorks project broke ground, a new crop of tenants is vying to enter the facility. Launch Pad, a tech start-up that has been part of the city’s emergence as a digital hub, proposes to use the building as an incubator for new businesses, providing rented office space and shared resources to other Information Age companies coming of age in New Orleans; and Delgado Community College is joining Tulane University and the University of New Orleans in an effort to turn the space into a culinary and hospitality institute, which would expand resources for each institution.
But the proposal garnering the most local and statewide attention is the plan emerging from the Louisiana Civil Rights Museum Advisory Board to locate the long-desired project in the heart of the city’s museum district, just blocks away from attractions such as the Ogden Museum of Art and the National WWII Museum. Madlyn Bagneris, a member of the advisory board and president of the non-profit association set up to raise private funds for the project, says the museum will represent the civil rights struggle in all corners of the state and depict the struggles of various dispossessed groups in Louisiana and the efforts of women to achieve equal footing in the state.
“Realizing the civil rights museum means a lot of things for this city and for this state,” Bagneris says. “It’s an opportunity for us to showcase and present to the world everything from the boycotts that occurred in New Orleans to the incidents that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement across Louisiana in places like Plaquemines Parish and in cities like Monroe and Lafayette.”
But the museum, Bagneris says, promises to be a symbol of the struggle for freedom of various groups. In the organization’s statement of purpose, the advisory board asserts that “[c]ivil rights have become a wider conversation than equity and social justice for African Americans. It has also come to mean, the organizers contend, “a rallying call for prison reform, education reform, immigration reform, and the [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer] community as well.”
In a Dec. 3 letter to Corporate Realty president, Michael Siegel, advisory board chair Brenda Williams said museum organizers, through exhibits, presentations and various events, plan to use the state’s civil rights history “to heal, educate, celebrate and engage for social justice.” Siegel heads the real estate firm that was tapped earlier this year to help the ArtWorks selection board, along with state and local officials, decide which bid will emerge from the final review process. A decision on which group will assume ownership of the building is expected early next year.
“The primary thing that we are trying to achieve is to provide opportunities to not only tell Louisiana’s extensive civil rights history, but to tell it in a way that will grow with the times,” Williams says. “The emphasis on civil rights will be broad and not just racial and we also want to provide an opportunity for self-expression. We want people to tell us how the Civil Rights Movement affected them or how it may have affected their parents or someone else that they may know.”
Williams rejects the view of some critics who contend that the story of Louisiana’s civil rights saga is already being told through various art centers, cultural institutions and other museums. “Some have said that this is a story that is already being told, but we happen to disagree. Louisiana’s civil rights history is very unique and is unlike what occurred in any other part of the South.”
But many efforts to build museums throughout the country have been plagued by the economic downturn and the large task of raising millions of dollars to open the doors of a new facility. Carol Bebelle, co-founder of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center in Central City, lauds the prospect of locating the new museum within walking distance of the historic Oretha Castle Haley corridor, but notes the challenges museum organizers face when getting off the ground and maintaining momentum.
“I think there is a very dedicated core group of people who are working to make this happen and to see this story manifested and I believe that they will be successful,” Bebelle says. But, of course, one of the challenges they face is that they are not the World War II museum and don’t have the kind of funding behind them that will allow for constant renovation and improvements to a facility.”
But, still, Bebelle says, the project, which has more than $1 million dollars set aside from state funds, is an important asset to the community. “I like the proposed location and believe being in proximity to what was once Dryades Avenue will help reinvigorate the area and help connect visitors to the very history that they will see in the museum,” Bebelle adds, who was involved in the early stages of creating the Ogden Museum of Art. “I also believe that because the museum would be a stone’s throw from what is now Confederate Memorial Hall, we have an opportunity to create a space that overlooks the past, represented by the Confederate museum, and our future, depicted in the renaissance that is occurring on Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. at this time.”
But the proposed location has generated some criticism among activists in New Orleans. Danatus King, who heads the New Orleans Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, cautions that a possible downtown location for the new museum could shut out members of the very communities the facility is expected to highlight when it opens. “I believe that we have to always think about economic development when we consider projects like this,” King says. “It would have been better to place the facility in a part of the city more connected to civil rights and in an area that could benefit from the location of a new building and everything that goes along with that, like restaurants, foot traffic and street improvements.”
Yet many observers are pleased that the project appears to finally be making headway after more than a decade of planning and setbacks due to political wrangling, the lack of adequate funding and the years-long interruption of the development phase caused by Hurricane Katrina.
“I believe this is a very important project,” says Beverly McKenna, who operates, with her husband, the George & Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art and the Free People of Color Museum. “We have been waiting for this for the better part of 20 years and its time to get this done.” She believes the success of the museum lies in the chance for Black residents to tell their own stories. “Until the lion writes his own story,” McKenna says, “then the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
This article originally published in the December 16, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
