Q&A with Ben Garcia, former Deputy Director at the San Diego Museum of Man

I had the chance to meet up with Ben Garcia at this year’s American Alliance of Museums Annual Conference in New Orleans.  Garcia was the deputy director at the San Diego Museum of Man for five years. During our conversation we discussed the importance of museums working with descendant communities to better understand our collections. Here are some excerpts from our conversation:

AR: What are you reading right now?

BG: I’m re-reading Lord of the Rings. 

Q: What was your first job ever at a museum?

BG: Gallery educator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  

Q: How is the Museum of Man engaged in decolonizing its collections? 

BG: One of the things that we’re really focused on in San Diego is thinking about how the objects left their communities of origin, and not just how they entered the collection. By that, I mean a clean provenance is not enough. We need to ask if the museum has a moral claim and not just a legal claim to the objects. That can only be answered in consultation with descendant communities.

Q: Why are you doing this work?

We recognize that museums hold the trophies of genocide and oppression. We think it’s our responsibility to go back to those descendent communities and make sure that the objects that left under questionable channels — certainly inequitable situations — belong here. And if they don’t, we want to work with those communities to get their items returned home. 

Note: Ben Garcia co-authored an article on this topic in the May/June 2019 issue of Museum Magazine. https://www.aam-us.org/2019/07/01/ceding-authority-and-seeding-trust/