Michaela Blanc and the Pérez Art Museum Miami: Intergenerational and Multicultural Encounters

In March, we talked with Michaela Blanc (b. 1989, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro) as part of our series of interviews with gender organizers for the Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality. Michaela is a curator with a background in art history and museum studies; originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she now lives in the United States. For the last three years, she has been a Wikimedian-in-Residence (WiR) at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she leads a powerful initiative based on the museum’s collection that connects artists from South Florida and a group of teens through Wikimedia projects.

Although her position at PAMM is not limited to gender topics, Michaela sees herself as an “advocate for gender issues.” She first became involved with Wikimedia in 2019 through Art+Feminism – the global user group dedicated to improving coverage of cis and trans women, gender, and the arts through organizing in-person training and editing events. According to Michaela, the gender gap on Wikimedia and in museum collections is a concern that never leaves her mind. 

The first thing she did when she started at PAMM was to organize a Wikipedia editing session with all museum employees, so everybody got their username and learned the basics of editing. She wanted to make sure that everyone at the institution learned about Wikimedia and her work. Then, she started to delve into PAMM’s collection, comprising nearly 3,000 items, and quickly noticed that many important artists who had solo shows at the museum were not documented on the Wikimedia platforms: no Wikipedia page, no Wikidata item. When she tried to fill the gaps, she often found little information in the museum archives. She ran up against the notability criteria, an issue familiar to many Wikimedians, especially those focused on minorities. It was hard to find useful information in reliable sources.

To address this issue, Michaela envisioned a series of interviews with artists from the collection. She found that the right people to help with this proposal were already at the museum: PAMM’s Teen Arts Council (TAC), an after-school training program for high school students interested in all things creative. They meet weekly to work on museum projects, and PAMM provides them with a stipend. Together, Michaela and the teens, with support from PAMM staff members that includes colleagues from Education, Library, Marketing, Curatorial, and Web Development & Technology departments, designed a series of 30-minute conversations in which the teens interview the artists. The teens were excited, as many of them are training to become professional artists themselves. After a pilot phase, the interviews began, and by now, more than fifteen artists have spoken with the team. The conversations are recorded, transcribed, edited, and will be published on the museum blog, starting this Summer. There are plans to turn the talks into podcast episodes in the future, considering the PAMM InConversation podcast, produced by the Education’s Interpretive Media Content team. These conversations will then feed not only the museum archives but also the Wikimedia platforms, such as the artists’ biographies that were previously missing or incomplete.

They also take advantage of these intergenerational encounters to address a major obstacle when documenting content at the Wikimedia platforms: the lack of images available under an appropriate publishing license. Tech-savvy teens help artists upload their portraits to Wikimedia Commons, which results in a positive outcome for the artists, who can choose an image they like, which often ends up being reused in press releases and other media pieces.

One special aspect of Michaela and PAMM partnership is its multicultural character. Everything they produce is multilingual, as most, if not all, teens in the project speak more than one language; they come from the same Latin American and Caribbean diasporic communities as many of the artists interviewed. The presence of immigrants in local edit-a-thons is not unusual; in fact, when we spoke with Flavia Doria, Co-coordinator at Wiki Editoras Lx and Leadership Advisor at Art+Feminism, she brought this to our attention. Safe spaces such as Wikimedia encounters, especially in person, appeal to migrants looking to build communities in their new homes.

Michaela told me that PAMM has offered her freedom and support since the beginning of the initiative. And because the museum is open to her input, this relationship is not one-way: the initiative has expanded curatorial projects, including an interview series with artists featured in the Intertidal biennial exhibition on PAMMTV, PAMM’s free streaming platform for video art, with the interviews also published on the museum’s blog. She also pointed out that we should broaden our understanding of Wikimedia projects beyond biographies, an impression that often comes up in our conversations with gender organizers. Although it makes sense to focus on bios when thinking about gender-related initiatives, we can contribute by writing articles on broader themes – for example, female abstract painters or LGBTQIA+ songwriters in a specific country. She also emphasized the importance of structuring data on Wikidata, a topic that is gaining prominence in discussions on gender equality.

Challenges

Michaela’s partnership with PAMM is a great example of how the WiR program can be beneficial both for the GLAM institution and for Wikimedia. However, although she acknowledges that her time at the museum has been extremely positive and she feels “fully part of the institution,” Michaela knows that there may be challenges. The Wikimedian in Residence might not feel integrated into the institution and may have the impression that the GLAM has hired a third party to just complete wiki tasks. After their one- or two-year period, the project might end once they leave. However, Michaela pointed out that the GLAM institution is not solely responsible for the success of these partnerships. As she put it, “GLAMs and Wiki don’t speak the same language,” and therefore they must learn from each other, building a middle ground where both their knowledge and their interests can meet. This goes back to the idea of “mirrored learning” proposed by Filipa Barros at the Belém Library in Portugal, during one of the first conversations for the Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality project. For Michaela, it’s of fundamental importance that the Wikimedian in residence becomes familiar with the institution’s mission, their values, projects, and everyday work. The fact that she was already interested in museums is an indicator of the success of this collaboration. 

Lessons learned

Although this case was not specifically gender-focused, there are many aspects of Michaela’s project at PAMM that can inspire gender organizers working with GLAMs. Some points have already been made in our previous interviews, such as involving everyone (or as many people as possible) at the institution, and another is the need for mirrored learning. But we also learned new things:

• Think about involving immigrants or migrants in local events. Newcomers are often looking for opportunities to build community and can help with language diversity. Immigrant women and other gender minorities might be even more willing to participate in a gender-related event in a safe space.
• Consider a wider age spectrum. Few people are more eager to do good than committed teens. This time of life is challenging for a lot of people, but it can be even harder for girls, non-binary, and other gender-diverse teens. Gender-related work might be a great opportunity to get them involved in the Wikimedia movement.
• Consider focusing on Wikidata, where the gender gap is even wider than on Wikipedia. Focusing on Wikidata is a move championed by gender-focused organizations such as Art+Feminism and Whose Knowledge?. By working with structured data, it becomes possible to surface and amplify the knowledge and contributions of women and gender minorities that are often overlooked, an approach that is especially relevant in the age of AI, where structured data increasingly underpins how knowledge is modeled, retrieved, and reused.
• Finally, consider creating comprehensive Wikipedia articles on broader topics. Advanced users, or people with specific knowledge, may be interested in getting together to co-write a longer Wikipedia article about a gender-related topic.

Join us!

Want to learn more about GLAM partnerships for gender equality? Join our Telegram channel or send an email to wikiglamgender@gmail.com to learn about our next events.

Learn more 

This is the third blog post in our series for the Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality project.

• Read about the WELx and the Belém Library partnership in Portugal.
• Read about Wikiesfera and their GLAM projects in Spain.
• Find out about the project Wiki and GLAM : Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality.