Robert Smith III, Associate Director of the National Public Housing Museum
Interview by Denise Pike and Tianna Odegard

Robert Smith III visited the University of Minnesota in October as a guest of the HSPH program to deliver a lecture titled “From Paradise to Disaster: The National Public Housing Museum in Neoliberal Chicago.” Students Denise Pike and Tianna Odegard took the opportunity to ask him some questions about his life and work in public history.

Q: What skills do you think are important for public historians to develop to be competitive in the job market?

A: Network in your field, know who’s out there and what’s out there. Who do you want to work with? Try to get in front of people and talk with them when you can. Grant writing and communicating value to someone who’s not acquainted with your subject matter. Be a good researcher, nimble with archives, be community centered, and think about all the different modes in which people are working, learn to leverage resources effectively. Digital technology is becoming more and more important to learn. Be able to compromise and negotiate between curatorial visions and audience needs. Also very important is learning to manage your own emotional labor.

Q: As a person of color, I struggle with balancing emotional labor in my work. As a practitioner of color, how do you manage your emotional labor?

A: Think about the potential of being an irritant in the system. Engage in the University as a fugitive. As the person with the privileged access, share resources, catalyze change through your assigned work to create an opening for more change to happen. It is important to acknowledge the mental health stresses associated with being a person of color in the world right now, so find a community of support where you are.

Q: You moved out of the academic world and are now in a professional leadership position; what skills do you see as critical for the position you are in now?

A:  The shift from undergrad to graduate was to move from a passive consumer of knowledge to a producer of knowledge. The major difference between graduate and professional was the ability to manage people and staff as a leader and execute group projects. You have to be visionary while also being practical. Learn to balance being a compassionate manager and a developer of other people’s talent.

Q: How do you approach inviting and challenging those with privilege to think critically about their connection to systemic racism and inequality?

A: What I think is the power of any museum, is that they invite us into a domestic space. It necessitates the visitor to make that comparison. Museums should invite us to think about the systemic causes. One way is to connect the stories of families with the national public policy that shaped their lives.

In the case of the National Public Housing Museum let’s recontextualize what public housing is. It is any dwelling the government is subsidizing. Mortgage interest tax credit is subsidizing home ownership for those who have access to those loans.

In the museum, we want to train public housing residents to be our core docents and tour guides to transform traditional museum dynamics.

Privilege is complicated but there is a limit to the power of evidence. Even with the proliferation of videos showing police violence, police often get off with crimes. Privilege is the ultimate shapeshifter. We have to work hard to undermine the ideological constructs. This is the task of all of our institutions, centering the voices of the people most affected and leveraging them. The museum is about the investment in the public good, but investment in the public has been tainted by race and racism.

Q: Your work with the National Public Housing Museum blends social justice, history, and the art world. How does this broaden your funding or complicate it?

A: It’s really both/and. Social justice broadens our funding as more and more funders want an effect beyond just showcasing artwork, or history, or just educating school groups. But on the other hand, arts administrators are dependent on the whims of funders. Some people are more interested in funding social services properly and we don’t actually house, feed, or clothe people. There are some people who want to narrowly fund art who do not think that we are enough of an art institution. It does complicate the business, how do you find ways to talk about grants and your work when you’re engaged in politicized work. It’s an issue non-profits will have to deal with but non-profits are scared of doing political work. You can’t do electioneering but you can do legitimate things around advocacy.

We are a complicated organization. It’s such a challenge to articulate the work that we do because we are a history museum, art museum, historic house and site, oral history archive, community economic development hub, it’s a lot of moving parts. Public housing has a lot of moving parts has a really dynamic history so it’s fitting but it’s challenging to communicate that to funders. What we do is emphasize what the funders find important.

Q: Can you recommend some examples of public history/creative placemaking that you feel are really innovative?

A: Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation, homes in the Southside of Chicago are purchased and transformed into spaces of archival storage, research, art galleries, artists housing, etc.

Project Row Houses in Houston is another example of purchasing shotgun houses and creating art galleries and different spaces for different kinds of projects.

Museums or historic sites that are sites of trauma often do really interesting work. Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia has shifted from being a site of narrowly told history to now politicizing the history and aligning itself with decarceration. They elevate the voices of people with the experience of incarceration to help change the minds of people who visit the museum.

Amanda Williams is an artist and architect in Chicago. A recent project she did was to source colors of the hood, for example, the color of Pink Oil Hair Moisturizer, or the color that sticks to your fingers after you eat a bag of hot Cheetos. She finds these colors and then wraps abandoned homes in those colors as a bold statement on created value. By using art she encouraged people in power to pay attention to these sites of disinvestment.

The Community Catalysts Initiative through IMLS has produced some great community-driven projects.

Q: What are some artists or exhibits you recommend checking out?

A: Nathaniel Mary Quinn is an artist whose work I’m curating. His latest body of work is of people in his gentrifying neighborhood of Crown Heights, Chicago. His earliest body of work is portraits of folks he grew up around in Robert Taylor Homes. We are showcasing his work because there is this idea that public housing is in the past and we want to make sure that there are contemporary representations of a living and breathing community.

Jarvis Boyland is a painter and does work around black queer domesticity.

Kerry James Marshall is another African American painter whose paintings of public housing developments are important and I would love to show them one day.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Brooklyn Museum is a show of work from 1963 to 1983 from black artists using art as a tool for social change and social justice.

The National Museum of African American History & Culture. Their history show is huge and ambitious. They strove for comprehensiveness looking at 1400 through 2018. It seeks to make what is considered a stable hegemonic black heterogeneous. I’ve seen it twice and I still don’t feel like I’ve absorbed it all.