Keeping Knowledge or Face?: Activated Spectatorship, Site Specificity, and Performativity
Mason Dols
Instructor’s Introduction
In WR120: Contemporary Art in Boston, we explore how recent artworks are made and displayed in conversation with the city’s landscape, histories, institutions, and communities. We try to look closely at how such objects communicate within and beyond the sites in which they appear. For Mason, exploring Indigenous artist Alan Michelson’s recently installed public monuments at the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) led him to write this nuanced discussion about how a Boston art institution responds to its own colonialist past and present. Mason’s essay beautifully embraces the complexity of Michelson’s artworks and the sites of the MFA, the region, Indigenous visibility, and institutional responsibility.
Focusing on The Knowledge Keepers (2024), Mason brings together theoretical frameworks of site specificity and activated spectatorship to illuminate how meaning is produced through place, social politics, and viewer participation. This integrated approach reveals not only the timeliness of Michelson’s installation but also the political and social dimensions of how the museum constructs its public image. Mason ultimately prompts readers to reconsider flattened binaries and to engage in sustained, meaningful dialogue about what, and whom, we see.
Caitlin Dalton
From the Writer
Power structures across the globe are increasingly being called upon by the public to confront their historical roles in the exploitation and exclusion of minority communities. In the art world, many institutions have begun implementing efforts to give more exposure to artworks made by minority artists. However, as these reparative efforts become (rightfully) more visible and even expected by their visitors, questions arise as to whether such efforts reflect bigger institutional change or possibly function as a form of strategic branding.
In this essay, I investigate the danger of “performativity” by analyzing two related yet contrasting monuments at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Alan Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers (2024) and Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909). I argue that although Michelson’s contemporary, Native-led work engages viewers and emphasizes Indigenous voices, its impermanence and placement next to Dallin’s permanent, stereotype-perpetuating work at an institution with a history of minority exclusion complicates its impact. Thus, the MFA’s commission and embrace of The Knowledge Keepers risks seeming like a performative gesture that doesn’t necessarily redistribute institutional power to the communities it showcases.
Keeping Knowledge or Face?: Activated Spectatorship, Site Specificity, and Performativity
Upon first impression, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston may just appear to most as a grand building that preserves and displays a collection of the world’s art to the Boston public and beyond. Yet by digging deeper past that initial impression, one can uncover a longer and more complicated history of the MFA that is largely shaped by colonial collecting practices and the exclusion of Indigenous voices. This controversial context is exactly what makes the MFA’s recent installation of The Knowledge Keepers (2024) by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson feel simultaneously powerful and uneasy. The two life-sized bronze-and-platinum figures are positioned on podiums surrounding the museum’s Huntington Avenue steps to immediately greet visitors. One depicts Aquinnah Wampanoag artist Julia Marden, and the other depicts Nipmuc activist Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. Their gestures, with Marden raising an eagle-feather fan and Gaines speaking mid-speech, directly confront the MFA, a space that has historically silenced Indigenous perspectives (fig. 1). What makes the installation of these sculptures even more charged is their proximity to Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909), a century-old sculpture representing a stereotyped image of Native identity (fig. 2). Because the neighboring works will be viewed in tandem, Michelson’s contemporary “countermonument” and Dallin’s “romanticized” figure transform the MFA’s entrance into a conversation between past narratives and present realities and representation. But within this dialogue, there is also a deeper question about whether the museum’s embrace of Michelson’s work signals that it is genuinely reckoning with its colonial past or strategically staging a performative gesture to make itself seem like it is enacting institutional change. Seen through the lenses of Claire Bishop’s “Activated Spectatorship” and Miwon Kwon’s “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” this tension becomes central to understanding how The Knowledge Keepers operates both within and against the very space that hosts it to create a site of both possibility and constraint.
Although neither art historian Bishop nor Kwon writes specifically about Indigenous representation, the ideas in their respective works help to clarify the political stakes of how museums present and manage it. In “Activated Spectatorship,” Bishop argues that contemporary art gains meaning through the viewer’s physical, ethical, and emotional involvement. To put it simply, the viewer’s movement, attention, and how they converse about the work’s meaning with others are of utmost importance to the work’s political effects.1 Meanwhile, Kwon’s “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” emphasizes that site-specific art is inseparable from the power structures and institutional histories that shape the site itself. A site is not merely a location but rather a vast network of discourses that frame how the work is interpreted.2 By bringing Bishop and Kwon’s lenses together, The Knowledge Keepers can be seen as a work that relies not only on its viewers’ engagement but also on the MFA’s institutional authority that frames and constrains it. Bishop’s framework helps illustrate how Michelson’s work requires audiences to directly confront Indigenous presence, while Kwon reminds us that this confrontation occurs in a space whose architecture and history still embody colonial power. Together, their theories highlight the central paradox of the MFA’s presentation: the museum can showcase Indigenous visibility in ways that feel politically meaningful, even while it protects itself from the deeper critiques that such visibility might invite.
To understand why this matters, the site’s context must be taken into account. The MFA’s Huntington Avenue entrance epitomizes Western power and permanence; its neoclassical columns, broad granite steps, and symmetrical facade reflect the nineteenth-century ideals of “civilization” that shaped the museum’s founding. In this setting, Indigenous art was historically treated as ethnographic evidence rather than aesthetic achievement, valued for what it could supposedly “teach” Western viewers rather than for its artistic autonomy. The museum’s architecture still stands today as a physical reminder of the hierarchies that determined whose works counted as “art” and whose histories merited preservation. Considering this backdrop, the MFA’s decision to commission and position The Knowledge Keepers on its front steps was certainly not accidental. By positioning the figures at the threshold of the museum so that they welcome all who enter, the MFA can publicly frame for its visitors that it is proactively taking efforts to acknowledge local Indigenous communities and signal its commitment to inclusion. Moreover, because The Knowledge Keepers is part of the recent 2025 Boston Public Art Triennial—a citywide initiative dedicated to community dialogue—the MFA can further cement this idea of how inclusive they are to viewers.3 Yet, Bishop notes that even artworks that appear to “activate” or empower the viewer actually structure this participation far in advance, as institutions and artists determine what kinds of engagement are even possible long before the viewer arrives. In other words, simply involving the audience then is not inherently democratic or transformative.4 The participatory feel of viewer engagement around The Knowledge Keepers can easily be folded into the MFA’s desired self-image of progressiveness without requiring any more significant structural changes.
Temporarily placing Indigenous figures on the front steps may reassure visitors that change is happening, even if the much harder, less public work of decolonizing collections and governance remains largely unaddressed. Kwon’s work emphasizes this tension further. She argues that truly site-oriented practices need to pay close attention to the specific relationships, adjacencies, and distances that shape how one thing sits next to another. Only by cultivating this relational specificity can small encounters turn into long-term commitments rather than fleeting impressions.5 Hence, The Knowledge Keepers’s meaning at the MFA is not just shaped by the artwork itself but also its spatial and historical relationships. The work is positioned beside a colonial facade, a history of Indigenous exclusion, and a juxtaposing work, Appeal to the Great Spirit. These adjacencies are important, as they determine whether the MFA is fostering real structural commitments or merely producing a sequence of seemingly increasingly positive episodic gestures—one after another—without altering its deeper frameworks.
These tensions become especially evident when examining the material and visual contrast between Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers and Dallin’s aforementioned Appeal to the Great Spirit. Dallin’s 1909 sculpture depicts an unnamed Native man on horseback, raising his arms in a gesture historically interpreted as a noble resignation. The work is made of dark-patinated bronze that has since weathered to green, and it reflects an outdated belief that Indigenous people were a “vanishing race.”6 The figure is “idealized,” yet anonymous—an archetype rather than a person. By contrast, Michelson’s figures stand upright and grounded, cast in bronze but coated with luminous platinum. Their reflective surfaces catch sunlight and movement, allowing visitors to see themselves mirrored within the metal. Using Bishop’s framework, this reflectivity “activates” the spectator as their presence becomes inseparable from the work, prompting them to confront their own relationship to Indigenous visibility. Thus, The Knowledge Keepers is able to transform the viewer’s passive act of simply looking at the work into a more active act of recognizing and taking accountability for what they have done and what they can do to proactively uplift Native voices. Moreover, the contrasting physical materials of the sculptures symbolize a stark conceptual shift from the past to the present. While the old weathered bronze of Appeal to the Great Spirit shows distance and mythologization, the new gleaming platinum of The Knowledge Keepers suggests the ongoing presence and resilience of Indigeneity. Now, looking through Kwon’s framework, it is clear how this transformation helps redefine how the site participates in the work’s meaning. Because both works occupy the same plaza area near the Huntington Avenue steps, the MFA’s entrance becomes a contested ground where different interpretations of Indigeneity, power, and history are continuously negotiated. Yet their continued coexistence also reveals that there are, in fact, limits to institutional critique. Appeal to the Great Spirit is a permanent fixture on the MFA’s site, and it is deeply embedded both physically and symbolically in the museum’s identity as a whole. In contrast, being part of the Triennial, The Knowledge Keepers is temporary. Its removal is inevitable, whereas Dallin’s sculpture’s presence is seemingly indefinite. This asymmetrical disparity poses a quite uncomfortable question: what does it mean for a work of contemporary Indigenous presence to be only temporary, while a stereotyped colonial-era depiction remains permanent? In this way, temporality can become a tool for the MFA if it desires to appear reflective and progressive to viewers while still maintaining full control over which structures and narratives will remain visible, and more importantly, which will quietly disappear over time.
Even within this constrained setting, though, Michelson’s collaborative process with Indigenous keepers to help create the work pushes back against institutional authority from within. Both figures portrayed in The Knowledge Keepers are based on real people—Julia Marden and Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., respectively. Michelson invited these two to choose their own poses, clothing, and gestures that would appear in the piece. Marden’s raised eagle-feather fan, which is a symbol of blessing and defense, comes directly from her own cultural practice. Gaines’s mid-delivery speech references his activism, community work, and personal history.7 Their grounded stances resist Dallin’s vision of passive supplication and instead embody agency and present voice. This collaborative process resists the anonymous “Native type” long perpetuated in Western art (like in Appeal to the Great Spirit)8 and instead replaces it with real, lived specificity.
The installation is indeed a powerful corrective, finally placing contemporary Indigenous people in a position of visibility and authority. However, skepticism still exists about whether placing Indigenous presence outside the museum in fact redistributes power or, more so, allows the MFA to borrow Native voices without making internal change. This tension underscores the issue that museums can display marginalized communities without committing to the structural shifts those communities demand. Once again, Bishop and Kwon allow us to clarify what is at stake. Bishop’s model of activated spectatorship emphasizes that art should involve viewers in ways that deepen political awareness and spark debate between them, not simply generate feelings of engagement and utopia.9 Michelson achieves this through the reflective platinum surfaces and assertive gestures of the sculptures that compel viewers to see themselves and others present implicated in the histories the work confronts. But Kwon reminds us that viewer activation alone does not guarantee that institutional transformation will happen.10 Though it represents progress, a site shaped by colonial history cannot be fully redefined through a single installation (or even multiple exhibitions), especially one whose temporality reinforces the institution’s power to decide what remains visible and what does not. Thus, the interplay between activation and containment, and between the transformative potential of art and the structural limits of institutions, becomes central to understanding the impact and limitations of Michelson’s intervening countermonument. This does not necessarily make the MFA’s installation of The Knowledge Keepers insincere, but it does make it necessary for viewers to consider how easily decolonial gestures can become absorbed into an institution’s branding. Therefore, in the context of museums, performativity is dangerous not because it is visible, but more so because it can replace real accountability. When inclusion becomes aestheticized rather than genuinely practiced, museums risk seeming like they use marginalized communities as symbols of progress without transferring any actual decision-making power to them.
Ultimately, through The Knowledge Keepers, the MFA’s colonial entrance becomes a space of dialogue where old misrepresentations are confronted by living Indigenous presences. Bishop’s theory of activated spectatorship and Kwon’s theory of site specificity help us see how the work is both sincere and constrained: it is a genuine collaboration rooted in Indigenous agency, but it is still influenced by the very institution it critiques. Moreover, Michelson’s countermonument replaces Dallin’s notion of Indigenous supplication with one of power and demand; however, the MFA’s ongoing control over how the work is presented reveals how difficult it is to decipher between real inclusion and mere performance. While we cannot truly know the intent of those in power behind closed doors, The Knowledge Keepers still reminds us that meaning goes beyond the museum or the artist. We, the viewers—the people who walk up those granite steps and see ourselves within the glowing platinum—become responsible for how we interpret, respond to, and act upon what we see. Whether The Knowledge Keepers becomes a symbol of genuine transformation depends not only on the MFA but also on our willingness to question, reflect, and demand accountability. In this way, its impact lies not only in confronting the museum’s past but also in activating our agency in the present.
Notes
1. Claire Bishop, “Activated Spectatorship,” in Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 102.
2. Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” October 80 (Spring 1997): 91.
3. “Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission: The Knowledge Keepers,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, n.d., https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/huntington-avenue-entrance-commission-the-knowledge-keepers.
4. Bishop, “Activated Spectatorship,” 127.
5. Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 110.
6. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Plaque Text), Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909).
7. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Plaque Text), Alan Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers (2024).
8. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Plaque Text), Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909).
9. Bishop, “Activated Spectatorship,” 119.
10. Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 92.
Works Cited
Bishop, Claire. “Activated Spectatorship.” In Installation Art: A Critical History, 102-127. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Kwon, Miwon. “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85-110.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission: The Knowledge Keepers,” n.d. https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/huntington-avenue-entrance-commission-the-knowledge keepers.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Plaque Text). Alan Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers (2024). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Plaque Text). Cyrus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit (1909).
Figures
Figure 1: Alan Michelson, The Knowledge Keepers, 2024. Bronze and Platinum. Photograph by the author.
Figure 2: Cyrus Dallin, Appeal to the Great Spirit, 1909. Bronze. Photograph by the author.
Mason Dols is a rising sophomore from Woodbury, Minnesota, studying Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is on the pre-med track and aspires to become a psychiatrist, with a particular interest in Autism Spectrum Disorder. While primarily focused on science courses, he has always been interested in all parts of STEM, including the arts. In his free time, he enjoys drawing, watching TV and movies, and spending time with friends and family. He thanks his WR 120 professor, Dr. Caitlin Dalton, for not only introducing him to Boston’s public art scene but also for being deeply committed to ensuring all her students feel validated and cared for.