Interview with Hope McMath & Adonnica Toler
Editor’s note: the following transcription has been condensed or paraphrased for readability. Some questions have been edited for clarity. To listen to the full interview click here.
NYAH: In your own words, what do you do and why?
HOPE: I work in a place that happens to be a museum, but what I do is try to connect art and the things it represents to the people viewing it. If I’d been doing this job 20 years ago, my job would be deciding what to hang on the walls. I think art is a truth teller and love when people connect to art and to each other through art.
ADONNICA: I do what I do because I was born to do it. I remember saying I want to work in a museum when I was 10. This is what I was born to do. My responsibility is to inform the city of the history of this great community. I grew up loving history in school, but I always heard about Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson. I was not taught about James Weldon Johnson or Eartha White. James Weldon Johnson is one of most internationally respected people in history, but his own hometown hasn’t embraced him. My job is to make our history relevant to this community. Jacksonville history is so rich and vast, but we haven’t learned to appreciate it. Here there is African American history but also Syrian history and so forth, there are so many ethnicities here. Think of all those important people. I can name them because I'm a historian, but it’s not “in the air” here.
NYAH: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was an inspiration for this upcoming collaboration between the Ritz and the Cummer, but the two haven’t really came together before this. Why hasn’t the Ritz and the Cummer collaborated in past?
ADONNICA: Segregation, [a belief that] races shouldn’t mix, not respecting what others have to offer… a difficulty just accepting differences of people who were not even trying to change things. A belief that if you don’t look or sound a certain way, this place doesn’t apply to you. We, the larger community, have never honestly sat down and said what we want to say about how we feel about each other.
HOPE: Adonnica is right. It’s not surprising that the museums have been more separate than together. Even when individuals were passionate, there were barriers set up to keep things from happening. Even in last couple of years, we began talking about efforts like the Lift project, and donors pulled money because Lift was on the calendar. One donor pulled $25,000. If that’s happening today, imagine what it was like 15-20 years ago. Now there is the desire to work together, the infrastructure to work together, and the community believes it matter. Adonnica and I found it shocking that we and our institutions haven’t worked together. It may be less about institutions than about people in leadership taking initiative. It’s a complex history, and we’re experiencing some of it now.
NYAH: What does change look like for two institutions that have historically not mixed?
ADONNICA: We don’t know because we’ve never taken the leap. Since we’ve not been brave enough to take the jump, we don’t know because we are worried about what others will think. Up to now, we’ve only gone so far, and then we back off.
HOPE: We were speaking earlier about the weaknesses and strengths of the arts in this community and for one of the weaknesses we talked about silos. We’ve certainly seen that. [Change that is] like a snake shedding its skin; uncomfortable but ultimately good. We tell people we work with, you need to be ready. You need to educate yourself and get a Teflon suit, because this will be hard.
NYAH: What do you hope to achieve through Lift?
HOPE: With several exhibits at the Cummer we are trying to have conversations of race that connect to community history. For example, Augusta Savage was an artist and leader in the Harlem Renaissance; we made efforts to pull her reputation back up to where it deserves to be. There’s also a James Weldon Johnson connection there. We wanted to have local artists take their works and ideas and express them through their own eyes, but we knew to do that we needed to engage the Ritz and the larger community. It was the idea that both institutions could create something together that neither could do on their own.
ADONNICA: It is incorporating the historical meaning of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” including emphasizing John Rosamond Johnson, whose idea the song actually was. We have Broadway stars perform here and show them our exhibit and they get really excited about John. W. C. Handy, the Father of the Blues, talked highly of him. He’s so well known in classical music. We wanted to highlight his impact on our culture. My responsibility is to make sure you understand the history and legacy of that song. When it was written, racial tensions here were at an all-time high. Most people don’t know this, because they mostly just think about Mississippi and Alabama, but Florida was in the top 3 states for lynchings. I want to help people understand context in which it was written and why it was written. I will say, if you don’t have tough skin, you won’t be able to handle this exhibit. We wanted to artists to be honest; we told them, “We can handle your honesty.” If you’re from Jacksonville, you need to know that song. We have people from around the world come to this museum and they sing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in their native tongue, but people here may not even know the song, James Weldon Johnson, or that he was from Jacksonville.
HOPE: When “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is performed here [at the Ritz], there is a certain response to it. When performed at the Cummer, there’s a different response, and that is telling. We had artists actually ask if it was ok to focus not on the uplifting part of the song, but on the violence and loss and the bloody road. We said, absolutely. We gave up curative control. Our curation was picking artists who represented the diversity of our community. They represent what we are trying to lift up.
ADONNICA: The fact that the artists were so unsure of themselves speaks to what the larger problem is... that some artists were not comfortable expressing themselves and needed reassurance is an example of that.
NYAH: I revere art because it creates safe spaces to talk about these difficult issues. What is it about art that allows these conversations to happen?
HOPE: It’s hard to sit directly across from someone and have a truly honest conversation. Art elevates the conversation and widens our view, but it can still be incredibly intimate. There is something really social about it. I've said before, museums are some are the few places where social discourse happens every day. But the audience needs to be engaged.
NYAH: Can you talk about the significance of the Ritz being specifically an African-American institution, historically and today?
ADONNICA: The Ritz is important because every person in that museum has not been properly represented in history… even in my own AP or honor roll classes when I was in school. We are bringing those names out, that helped bless this city. They are of a different complexion [as other major historical figures], and have the same character and grace, but they have been left out of the city’s story. We segment those stories because of the way history is taught. If it was taught the right way, I wouldn’t need to tell you that Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Davis and Frederick Douglass were alive at the same time. I will also get comments [regarding the museum] like, “Oh, it’s so clean it here,” or, “Oh, this is so nice, how does she do it?” Well, museums are clean, how else should it be? Now, these comments come from other museum professionals who are supposed to be our colleagues who have biases about what it means to be an African American museum.
HOPE: Recently the Cummer hosted a regional conference for museum professionals. We took people to MOSH and the Ritz, looking at voices of the river through African American history. People said “Gosh, that Adonnica, she’s so articulate.” Well, of course she is, she runs a museum, she has multiple degrees, she’s brilliant. No one would have said to Adonnica, “That Hope, she’s so articulate.” And these are other museum professionals! It’s those moments, as painful and wrong as they are, that are a motivating force.
ADONNICA: It’s important, once we make the decision to rock the boat, that we rock the boat.
NYAH: So in light of all these things – siloed institutions, oppressive forces, individual biases – what is the artist’s role in social justice?
HOPE: Not every artist walks on the path of social justice. But they are our truth tellers. They raise questions without answers. People ask what they should “get” out of a work of art; that’s totally up to the viewer. Artists lift up truths for us to respond to. And in the wake of things like police brutality, artists are often the first ones stepping out to say, this is not right. At the Cummer we just went through staff training for Lift, and some of the staff were nervous about what we are doing. They felt uncomfortable. So we had an art history lesson and learned about the context of what we’re doing. We told them, they are just facilitating; they are not owning the message of the art. They are just saying, this is something that matters and deserves attention.
ADONNICA: Not every artist is called to deal with those issues, but [as museum staff] you have to have the ability to have those conversations. I am not afraid about what Lift is going to bring. I know it already because I live it.
HOPE: And honestly, if my staff were more diverse, the conversation would be totally different.
NYAH: Hope, as the gatekeeper of the “premier” arts institution in Jacksonville, what have you observed as the minority artist’s experience in this city?
HOPE: For black artists it’s been challenging, and support has been scarce or nonexistent. Until seven years ago, the Cummer owned one work by a black artist, Augusta Savage, and Ninah Cummer had purchased it in 1939! Most of our most talented artists are our (for the sake of this conversation) “minority” artists. And they’ve shown a real interest in organizing.
ADONNICA: Through our eyes has been going for 23 years. In 1993, black artists had a hard time getting work in the Cummer and in MOCA. Lydia Stewart started Putting on the Ritz and Through Our Eyes, and gave artists access. But even today, if Overstreet [Ducasse] and Marsha [Hatcher] were white, their pieces could go for $100,000 or $50,000. Black artists still don’t have access or support. There are still these ideas of what is “good” and “right”. [Some people ask,] “Is it black art if it doesn’t have a slave cabin in it, if it’s abstract, or if it’s a landscape?” That makes absolutely no difference. What matters is that the art came from that person.
NYAH: To me, ArtWalk is the most diverse night in Jacksonville. When have you seen diversity, and what seems to be working?
ADONNICA: It’s not as diverse as it should and could be, especially Through Our Eyes. We have some white patrons, but they’re not at openings for Through Our Eyes. It’s part of our mission to celebrate African American heritage, but we don’t get support from the media for our openings. When there are openings at the Cummer and MOCA, news trucks go there. In 16 years, not one news truck has come to Ritz. People come here and say, “This could be in a New York gallery!” and they’re in Jacksonville, but I don’t see those trucks with satellites lining up outside. Dan Brown at Folio is only one who writes about Through Our Eyes.
HOPE: For so long, the Cummer was for people of a certain race, a certain neighborhood, a certain socioeconomic status. When we started building access initiatives, that was ok. Now that our greater audience is more diverse, that’s now not ok. An individual once brought to me an annual report on which they circled all nonwhite faces. They said, “This is not what I want my city to be. That work you do for inner city kids, that’s ok. But I don’t want to stand in line to get a drink with to someone like this.” That happened six months ago! I’ll be honest, I took that report home and counted the faces of different colors. I wondered, have we gone too far? Are we leaving anyone behind? The good news is, we’re not going to change our direction, and that story is a downer, but it reinforces why we need to be doing this work. It’s not a noble “pat ourselves on the back” thing. We do this because we feel we should serve as well as include and celebrate.
NYAH: The reason we find diversity exciting and entertaining is because it’s different, but that comes with the responsibility to understand and care about that difference. We’ve talked tonight about how two institutions are coming together because two individuals chose to come together. This issue is within your locus of control by what media you choose to consume and what art you choose to appreciate.
Q & A
Q: How can we fix divides within the African American/black community?
ADONNICA: I don’t know! I know that if you don’t love yourself, you’re going to succumb to what other people say you should look like or act or be. The problem won’t end there, but you have to be in the place where you love yourself, because you will treat yourself better and treat others better. I know here we aren’t celebrating all [black or African American identities and experiences], but we do our best and I still do this because it’s what I'm born to do.
Q: Can you each talk about your personal motivation for why you believe the status quo needs to be changed?
ADONNICA: We are missing out on change, but we don’t know what it will look like. We are missing out on what we could really be because of divisions of race, class, sex, etc.
HOPE: We forget there was a moment when Jacksonville was less divided, known as the Harlem Renaissance. One of the great losses of not changing, of when we are a community that is not welcoming and people feel the need to flee, there is a ripple effect . Think of the mentorship role so many artists play, and think of artists like James Weldon Johnson and Augusta Savage, and how they felt they had to flee this place. Think of the number of people that didn’t get that mentorship by these artists. We need to change because we are richer from the experience of being different.
Q: What are you going to do to bring youth together?
HOPE: How we [the Cummer and the Ritz together] educate through this is important. We are committed to working with families and youth. The week we will launch Lift is busy, it’s the same week as James Weldon Johnson’s birth; the same week as Juneteenth. We are dedicating a whole day to children and families so we can model that connection we seek. If we simply “connect” by putting each other’s logos on things, we have done nothing. We are trying to do something deeper; to let our communities tell us what they want. We ask ourselves, how do we become relevant to the communities that want to engage with us?
ADONNICA: Kids know when they hear and see greatness, because they go, “Wow, they don’t teach us this stuff in school!” A group of boys once impressed me, I couldn’t believe they were in fourth grade. And anytime a kid asks you what books they should read, that’s a good thing. They showed that today’s kids aren’t all the negative things the media says they are. We have the youth event coming up during Lift week, but stay tuned for more!
Q: Do you have art educators in the museums inquiring about programs?
ADONNICA: Not as much. In the school system, teachers have so much muck to deal with, it’s hard for them to be art teachers. I don’t get those requests as much, but I refer them to artists or even tell them to check out the Cummer, ArtWalk, and Cork.
HOPE: We get 30,000 students a year at the Cummer. Lift will expose educators from the elementary to university level. We’re working with Jeffri Anne Wilder at UNF. She’s a sociologist, she’s brilliant. We will make sure to have Lift seep into what we’re already doing. If we keep it segmented, there’s only so much impact it can have. We’ll integrate lift into everything we already do. For example, for a class on portraiture, we’ll use a Marsha Hatcher portrait from the exhibit.
Q: Around 2000, I was in Springfield and it was a pretty great time – there was a mixed black and white community and we would all create together. Not many others were doing this. Usually if you give some a choice between an all-white or all-black shows versus a mixed show, they’ll choose the black or white show. Shouldn’t we have more places to mix? I’m also the editor of Metro Jacksonville, but have never gotten press release from Ritz. Could you maybe share press lists with each other?
HOPE: We talked about whether Lift should be just black artists, and we answered no, because this song is something we all need to understand and we can all relate to. And the artists should reflect the entire community. There isn’t enough diverse creation, and we should start to blur that line, but without taking away space for a spotlight on black art and black history. [To A] If you don’t have our press list you will tomorrow, but when he says he’ll write about you, hold him to it!
ADONNICA: I’ll make sure you get your press release! What I do [at the Ritz as a black institution] is important because as someone who grew up in the city of James Weldon Johnson and not be taught about him, but to have to go to another city where people know more about to him to learn about him… that needs to change.
NYAH: We want you to be engaged in this conversation because that’s the only way we can change the narrative of this city.
