Ariana Lee and Palace Shaw create The Whitest Cube, an excellent new museum podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or casual admirers. The podcast interrogates the city of Boston and its museums through the lens of race.
In this episode, Lee and Shaw talk about the reasons for starting the podcast, what diversity in museums really means, and how to pressure cultural institutions to change. If you’re interested in museums, you should subscribe to the Whitest Cube on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, or Instagram. You can support their work directly on Patreon.


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Topics Discussed:
00:00: Intro
00:15: “Supposedly, These Institutions Are Trying To Diversify”
00:36: Palace Shaw & Ariana Lee Create The Whitest Cube Podcast
01:14: The White Cube Display Method
01:59: The City of Boston As A Case Study For Talking About Museums And Race
04:09: Palace Shaw’s Experiences Working At Art Institutions
07:17: Art Museums And Other Museums
08:11: “People Believe That Museums Tell The Truth”
09:20: There Are Not Enough Voices Challenging Museums
10:00: Subscribe To The Whitest Cube
10:20: Why We Need An Active Effort To Shift The Culture
11:05: Museum Archipelago’s 50th Episode: Submit Your Audio

This episode was recorded at the PRX Podcast Garage in Allston, MA, USA on August 13th, 2018.


Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 48. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

[Intro]


Ariana Lee: Supposedly these institutions are pushing to diversify. What does it mean to diversify? You could say that if you take stock of all of the museum’s employees it is a very diverse workforce because you may very well have many people of color working in your janitorial services. But they are not at any kind of seat of power.


This is Ariana Lee. Together with her co-host Palace Shaw, she founded the Whitest Cube, an excellent podcast about people of color and their experiences with art institutions as artists, visitors, workers, activists, or simply casual admirers.


Ariana Lee: Hello I’m Ariana Lee, and I’m a cohost of The Whitest Cube podcast.

Palace Shaw: Hello, I’m Palace Shaw and I’m the other host of The Whitest Cube. Each episode we unpack different things we’ve been thinking through, so the first episode is about access to museums from the perspective of race and class and our second episode is about…

Ariana Lee: Beyoncé and Jay-Z and their music video for Apeshit in the Louvre and also their relationship to museums.


The name the Whitest Cube comes from a common art museum display method called the White Cube. It’s a clever name for a podcast that works on multiple levels — and their explanation of the name on the first episode was what got me instantly hooked on the show.


Podcast Excerpt: The method is as simple as it sounds: four white walls and good lighting to act as the void in which we situate art. Prior to the White Cube, museums displayed all of their artwork, not just a select few pieces for your consideration. This created the esteemed position of the curator: the person whose job it was to decide what remained in storage and what was seen by the public.


The White Cube display method was first introduced at art museums in the city Boston. Lee and Shaw live in Boston, and so do I. As hosts of the Whitest Cube, Lee and Shaw interrogate the city’s cultural institutions through the lens of race.


Palace Shaw: We try to bring in Boston as a case study because it is kind of the perfect city to be having this conversation [in] because Boston is a city that is really controlled by its institutions, whether tha