I began working in the museum field in 2016, during the summer after my junior year of high school. Today, as a Black woman, a practicing artist, an aspiring art historian, and a rising curator who has worked in the museum field for several years, my desire is to affect meaningful change in the ways that museums develop exhibitions, execute community outreach, and approach the issues behind racial equity, access, and inclusion—and that is my driving ambition for Hidden Stories.

Across the United States, Black and Brown lives continue to be negatively impacted by society’s unjust systems, in which the roots of oppression grow deeply. This inequity, in turn, has shaped our art and history museums. Too many of these so-called beacons of civil society and communal knowledge sustain racial inequity, recontextualizing history for their own means by upholding artistic, literary, and historical canons that are unfair and incomplete.

Within our museums, systemic oppression continues to harm Black and Brown people, who are shamefully underrepresented in collections and whose voices are too often left unheard in curatorial projects. Knowing that I am entering the field of curation as a Black woman, I especially feel that it is my obligation to change the status quo. With this Chipstone curatorial initiative my goal is to help decolonize the museum world by prioritizing themes of racial equity and social justice first, to provide a museum voice for those who have for too long been unrecognized and underappreciated.

– Jordan Q. Johnson