In the Storytelling Salon, we consider the power of storytelling to enact change through artworks from the collection, interactive materials for visitors to share creative responses, and a conversation space intended for gathering ideas about what new kinds of stories can be told in the Museum.

The Learning Studio was born of improvisation, as we adapted an exhibitions gallery into a socially distanced place for classes to meet during the 2020-21 school-year. Now part-gallery, part-classroom, the Learning Studio is a place for the public to take part in intimate conversations about art and material culture from the Museum’s collection. Works on view in this gallery demonstrate how artists have always found a rich vein in that radical openness to documenting experiments and showing work in process.

Markers of Absence: Seeing and Unseeing the Fleming’s Collection will be on view as large labels throughout the Museum. In these spaces, we have removed artwork or are deinstalling galleries that have been on view for decades and whose subject matter or background is hurtful to members of our community. Instead of filling these spaces with new artworks immediately, we have left them as intentional signs of the Museum’s commitments to transparency and holding itself accountable. Staff and students are using these texts to reflect on the problematic histories behind the collections and galleries, and to rethink what we collect, how we display it, and the words that accompany it.

All these changes have had a ripple effect in the Museum. After long featuring nearly all-white New England artists and especially landscapes, the Marble Court balcony now features Abstracts: Opening Space for Imagination. Just as our Absences project uses gaps on the wall to envision new possibilities, abstract artworks make room for imagination. They allow us to reconsider outdated traditions and start to envision what comes next.