When Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announced last year that the organization had received a $25 million gift from Bank of America, he envisioned an initiative that would create safe spaces in communities across the nation where Americans could gather to discuss the country’s racial past.

The result, “Our Shared Future: Reckoning With Our Racial Past,” a two-year series of online and in-person events, will kick off Thursday in Los Angeles with a virtual summit meeting that will focus on income and health care inequality and include subjects ranging from early race science to vaccine distribution. The initial event will be livestreamed at oursharedfuture.si.edu, starting at 7 p.m. Eastern.

“We can’t solve the problems of race in America ourselves,” Bunch said in a phone conversation on Monday. “But we can give the public the tools to stimulate those conversations to help people understand race beyond Black and white.”

The organization is planning conferences, town halls and immersive pop-up experiences in communities across the country to allow people to share their experiences and increase their understanding of the legacy of race and racism. Bunch said the goal is to encourage conversations among people who might not otherwise cross paths.

“We hope the Smithsonian can be a trusted place where people with a diversity of political opinions can engage with each other,” he said.

Museums nationwide are reckoning with race in their collections, including how to diversify their historically white holdings and how to display artifacts of traumatic periods in the country’s history, such as Ku Klux Klan robes, with proper context. But the Smithsonian wanted to take the conversation beyond museum walls, Bunch said.

“In many ways, it’s an initiative about race,” he said. “But it’s also an initiative about the different ways the Smithsonian can do our work moving forward.”

Though arrangements are in flux because of the pandemic, the Smithsonian does plan to dispatch a video team to events including the annual Farm Aid Festival, to be held this year in Hartford, Conn., on Sept. 25, in the hope of gathering oral histories from people about their experiences of race in America.
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“We want to make sure, as we talk about the grand issues of race and wellness, we reduce it to a human scale,” Bunch said.

The former director of the Queens Museum in New York, Laura Raicovich, was celebrated for her political outspokenness. “At Queens Museum, the Director Is as Political as the Art” read the headline of a New York Times profile last October. Less than four months later, Raicovich abruptly announced her resignation. “There are so many big things that art and culture have to contend with that are so wrong in the world,” she told the New York Times. “I just felt that my vision and that of the board weren’t in enough alignment to get that done.”
Raicovich presented the decision to leave as her own; the Queens Museum board later claimed that it forced her, after an independent investigation of her handling of an Israel-sponsored event found that she "knowingly misled the board". Either way, it seems clear that the board did not fully support her activism, including her closure of the museum on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, in step with calls for an “art strike” by prominent artists and critics, to hold a free protest sign-making event instead.

​When the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) first opened its doors, it was considered a “people’s museum,” a place for the city of Oakland to celebrate the art, history, and natural sciences that shape California’s identity. We’ve maintained those deep ties to our community for nearly half a century and have been guided by the belief that when museums are truly welcoming and inclusive, they make a real difference in the lives of people as well as in the health and vitality of a community.

But do we have any proof to back up that belief? Not yet. How can we articulate that proof in a compelling way to our community of stakeholders? We’re not sure. So thus began our work to measure the social impact of the Oakland Museum of California — an exciting but daunting task. As Deputy Director of the OMCA, I lead the museum’s vision for community engagement and social impact. My colleague Johanna Jones is the Associate Director for Evaluation and Visitor Insights and my co-conspirator for this project. We don’t have the answers, but we are interested in sharing our process as we learn our way into measuring OMCA’s social impact in Oakland.