John Hanc

On a warm August morning, the piece that he intended to display in the lobby of this 35-year-old ceramics museum had not yet arrived, but he could already envision how it would be lit, and where the piece — about 15 feet wide and 15 feet high — would be hung for maximum visibility.

He gestured across the museum’s 1,450-square-foot lobby to the glass doors of the main entrance from Queens Park, a busy thoroughfare in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood.

“You’ll be able to see it from the street,” he said. “This is a way to make her presence visible.”

The “her” he referred to was a tintype image of an indigenous woman who stares at the camera with an expression that Miller called “serene, but resolved. A little mournful, but also resilient.”

The image, created by Kali Spitzer, a photographer of native descent, the image — titled “Sister” — is part of a larger work called “Every One” by Cannupa Hanska Luger, an artist who was raised on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

By displaying the piece (which Spitzer and Luger say was created “in solidarity”), the Gardiner hopes to bring visitors face to face with a horrific issue known by variations of MMIW: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

In June, the Canadian government released a report after a nearly three-year inquiry that found that 1,181 indigenous women were killed or had disappeared across the country from 1980 to 2012. Estimates by indigenous women’s groups have put the number much higher.

The problem is not unique to Canada: Although the issue has attracted less attention in the United States, the National Crime Information Center reported that in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls. Only 116 of those were logged in the U.S. Department of Justice’s missing persons database, the report said.

In both countries, many of these unsolved cases are said to have been the result of indifference and lax law enforcement in their communities. “Whoever is doing what they’re doing, they think they can kill all these women, and nothing will come of it because they’re just ‘Indians,’” the brother of one murdered woman said earlier this year.

The crimes prompted Luger to create “Every One,” which after a few brief showings at other museums is at the Gardiner through Jan. 12.

The piece consists of more than 4,000 individual ceramic beads that are hung like a veil and give Spitzer’s already haunting image the appearance of being pixilated. (The subject of the original photograph is anonymous, but Spitzer has confirmed that she is an indigenous woman whose sister was murdered.)

While “Every One” is not the only artistic response to the murders, its display in the lobby of a museum better known for Wedgwood china might seem curious.

“A lot of people presume that elaborate teapots are all we’re about,” said Miller, a native New Yorker who came to the Gardiner in 2018 from Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in art history.

The Gardiner’s collection of thousands of ceramic objects, from many cultures and time periods, is extensive. But this venture into what might be called “museum activism” is part of a larger trend.

“There’s been a lot of discussion in the museum world about this kind of thing,” said Susie Wilkening, a Seattle-based museum consultant. “Some feel that they need to bring forward in their exhibits these more inclusive stories from the past or today that deserve to be heard. But making sure to do so in a way that audiences will be thoughtful in their response, and that won’t alienate people.”

What is particularly notable about “Every One” is that audiences were involved in the creative process as well. The idea, Luger said, came as he contemplated the statistics on the murdered and missing women. “I was trying to figure how to humanize that data,” said Luger, who lives in Glorieta, New Mexico. “That number of 4,000 is really impersonal.”

He came up with the idea of creating 4,000 clay beads upon which Spitzer’s photograph could be represented as one large image. But after rolling and creating a few dozen of the beads by himself, he had a brainstorm — get others involved, particularly those who had been affected by the tragedy. He shared his thoughts with some museum and gallery owners he knew.

“I thought it was a brilliant idea,” said Della Warrior, director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Luger had appeared on a panel.

When Warrior heard about his concept for “Every One,” she and her staff decided to invite the public to help. They took out advertisements and publicized the bead-rolling in local news media. On a Saturday in February 2018, about 120 people — many of them of Native American descent — showed up to spend the day at work stations arranged in the museum’s auditorium to create the 2-inch-by-2-inch clay beads to Luger’s specifications.

“I had to order 300 pounds of clay,” said the Indian Arts museum’s special projects director, Jhane Myers, with a chuckle. “We had a big dry erase board set up in the front of the auditorium to keep a running count on how many we’d done. Our goal was 1,000.”

By the museum’s 5 p.m. closing time, the group had created 1,385 beads, which were fired in kilns and incorporated into the finished piece. Others were created by small groups and individuals in the United States and Canada — many of the makers were directly affected by the murders — following the instructions Luger recorded in a widely distributed video.

“The way the community came together that day made an impression on everyone,” Myers said. “It’s a little out of the box for a museum to do this.”

But Warrior said museums are changing. “We used to be static places where people would come and look at the objects and then they left,” she said. “Now they’re taking a more assertive role in their programming and exhibits.”

The Gardiner’s decision to place “Every One” in its lobby, as opposed to an exhibition space inside, speaks to that desire to better engage the public on a hot-button issue — and not just members of the public willing or able to pay the Gardiner’s admission fee.

“Anybody can have access to it,” said Gail Dexter Lord, president and co-founder of Lord Cultural Resources, a Toronto-based museum and gallery consultancy. “That’s important.”

Lord visited the Gardiner to see the work after its installation in late August. She was impressed with what she called the work’s “transformative, spiritual quality.” She said, “Every piece of it is reverential.”

Lord, well known in Canadian museum circles, said she hoped to see “Every One” exhibited at other North American museums next year, including the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

For now, the piece is making its presence known inside the Gardiner’s lobby, and outside it. Miller said he had spoken with several passersby who were, as he had hoped, drawn in.

“You can really see the piece glow from the sidewalk,” he said. “It’s phenomenal.”

This article originally appeared in

Illuminating the Plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

TORONTO — Sequoia Miller, chief curator at the Gardiner Museum, has it all planned.

The path that led Candice Retas from an interest in studying music and the arts to a career in nursing was one that just unfolded.

“I definitely did not map this out,” Retas, 26, said with a laugh. “It was kind of one step at a time.”

Actually, it was one credential, one academic building block at a time.

The first was the associate degree from Nassau Community College that Retas, who is from Elmont, New York, earned in 2012.

“I’d originally wanted to have a career in music and painting,” she said. “But then I took this biology class and really liked it, and did well in it.”

With her interest in medicine sparked by that class and subsequent science courses she took at NCC, which is in Garden City on Long Island, she went on to earn a medical assistant’s certificate from a local campus of the Sanford-Brown Institute, which is now defunct. That led to a job as a medical office assistant in Northwell Health’s Division of Infectious Diseases in Manhasset, New York.

With the encouragement of her colleagues, Retas decided to pursue a bachelor of science degree in science, technology and society at Farmingdale State College. She expects to graduate in December, then go to nursing school — from there, it will be a master’s in nursing and ultimately a career as a nurse practitioner.

“It’s a lot of work, but I’m actually enjoying it,” said Retas, who takes her classes online and at night while working full time at Northwell, a major New York-area hospital system.

Although she stressed that her educational path was not carefully planned, this step-by-step accumulation of credentials — two-year degree, certification, bachelor’s degree — is part of what many in higher education view as an important trend, one that can lead to careers in STEM professions hungry for skilled workers and open doors for older and lower-income students.

“The four-year undergraduate experience is often out of reach for large segments of our population,” said Kemi Jona, associate dean for digital innovation and enterprise learning at Northeastern University in Boston. Moreover, he said, “the idea of getting that one degree and you’re set for life doesn’t really hold water anymore. Then the question becomes, ‘how do we make it easier for working adults and people who need to pick up new kinds of tools and technologies?'”

The answer: stackable credits, which Cassandra Horii, director of Caltech’s center for teaching, learning and outreach, defined as “a more bite-sized piece of education that stands on its own and has value in the workplace.” But “if you continue on your educational trajectory, that piece fully counts towards your next educational step.”

The stackable term itself, noted Jimmie Williamson and Matthew Pittinsky in an article in “Inside Higher Education,” is “clever, invoking the image of Lego blocks and the metaphor of assembly.”

The blocks being assembled, they wrote, are a “series of traditional degree-based and/or nontraditional credentials — certificates, certifications, licenses, badges, apprenticeships and more — that recognize achievements and provide an accurate assessment of knowledge, skills and abilities.”

The more credentials that are accumulated and stacked, the more marketable the candidate presumably becomes.

The generic term for this, Pittinsky said in a recent telephone interview, is “credential innovation,” and while he, like many others in higher education, is bullish on the idea, he pointed to one important prerequisite for its success: cooperation. And in the historically and notoriously insular world of higher education, that’s not a given.

“This requires an unprecedented level of cooperation between colleges and universities with credential providers and industry associations and employers,” said Pittinsky, an assistant research professor at Arizona State University and chief executive of Parchment, an educational technology company. “That is ultimately going to be the major pacing factor for this trend.”

“It’s a different way for those of us in academia to think,” agreed Horii, who is also president of the POD Network, a 1,400-member organization focused on improving higher education. “We’re used to looking at a degree as this large monolithic thing.”

Industry seems to be embracing the idea. “Increasing the digital skills of current employees is a critical component of many companies’ digital strategies, and mini-credentials are integral to that strategy,” said Brian Fitzgerald, chief executive of the Business-Higher Education Forum in Washington.

One school well known for its success in helping students compile a string of credits, particularly those from low-income communities, is Pasadena City College in California, through its acclaimed PCC Pathways, which Horri said “has been very successful with closing achievement gaps for students of color and speeding up time to graduate.”

The Pathways program helps students transition from high school to college, and with a number of “articulation” agreements in place with local four-year schools that recognize PCC credits, the two-year college helps make transferring to the next rung on the academic ladder a smoother process.

That is how one former PCC student, Anthony Lopez, began stacking the building blocks of his career.

Lopez and his younger brother were raised by a single mother in a tough neighborhood in Huntington Park, a city in southeastern Los Angeles County. He decided to attend PCC after being rejected by eight schools. “It turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made,” he said.

Originally interested in accounting, he took a class in the college’s Design Technology Pathway — a concentration that typically leads to an engineering degree. Lopez, now 21, found both the professor and the subject so inspiring that he switched his major. He earned a certificate in computer aided-design software and went on to earn two associate degrees from the college — in engineering and natural science.

Lopez is now a junior at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he hopes to earn his bachelor of science in mechanical engineering next year. After that, he said, “I plan on going to grad school for my master’s or Ph.D.”

There will also, no doubt, be additional certifications he might need. But, like Retas, he said he doesn’t have a grand strategy. “I’ve never looked at it as stacking my credentials,” Lopez said. “I’m looking at it as trying to get my family out of Huntington Park and into a better life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/education/learning/stackable-degree-continuing-education.html" id="f07d133d-7c14-3cfa-a4c4-c826cbf8209c">The New York Times</a>.

Building a Career, One Academic Step at a Time

It wasn’t planned.

<h1>OYSTER BAY, N.Y. — Raynham Hall, a historic house museum a few blocks from the bay that gives this hamlet on Long Island’s North Shore its name, has long been known as a nexus of activity during the American Revolution.</h1>

In the 19th century, the home’s owners welcomed visitors in to see some of the relics and hear the tales of that period. For part of the 20th century, it was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who told the story of how the British commander John Graves Simcoe made the house his headquarters while he and his Queen’s Rangers, an elite Loyalist unit, were garrisoned in Oyster Bay, in 1778 and 1779, and again in 1780.

Simcoe’s friend, the dashing British intelligence chief John André, is known to have visited him here. There are also the requisite ghosts said to be wandering around the 22-room house, not to mention a yarn (erroneously perpetuated in a state historic plaque still in front of the building) about Sally Townsend, the daughter of the home’s owner, Samuel Townsend.

The apocryphal story says that while she was serving doughnuts to André and other officers at her family’s house, she got wind of the conspiracy with the American general Benedict Arnold to hand over West Point to the British, and was able to alert Gen. George Washington’s headquarters. (André was intercepted with incriminating papers and hanged as a spy in 1780, doughnuts having had nothing to do with it.)

But the great untold secret of this house wasn’t even known until the 1930s, when historians confirmed the existence of the Culper Ring — an American espionage network that extended from British-held New York, along the coast of Long Island, across the Sound and to Washington’s headquarters in Connecticut.

The man at the center of that ring, Sally’s brother Robert Townsend — code-named Culper Jr. — grew up in this house, and would spend much of his adult life here.

The Culper Ring has been having a cultural moment in the 21st century with the publication of several popular books, and an AMC series based on one of those books, “Turn: Washington’s Spies,” that ran from 2014 to 2017.

André, Simcoe and Robert and Samuel Townsend were all portrayed in the show. While the house itself was not depicted, there’s no doubt as to its significance.

“Raynham Hall plays a central role in the story of George Washington’s spy ring,” said historian Alexander Rose, whose 2006 book, “Washington’s Spies,” provided the basis for the TV series, for which Rose was also a producer. “A lot of the action centered around this house, which is beautifully preserved.”

Yet, while it hosts about 10,000 visitors a year — nearly half of them schoolchildren — the house, which is owned by the Town of Oyster Bay and operated by the nonprofit Friends of Raynham Hall, is relatively obscure.

Like a good intelligence agent, it manages to project its own false identity: When Samuel Townsend bought the house in 1738, it was a two-story, four-room structure. By the time of the Revolution, it had been expanded into an eight-room saltbox. In the 1800s, it was restructured into a Victorian manor with a tower and a stained-glass skylight. When the town acquired Raynham Hall from the DAR in 1947, it removed the tower and rebuilt the facade of the home to resemble its appearance in the 1700s.

While the genuine-appearing Colonial front of the house was actually built during the Truman administration, the rear of Raynham Hall and the floorboards and walls are original. And the home’s rooms feature period items owned by the family — although visiting “Turn” fans expecting to find Robert Townsend’s cipher book or bottles of the invisible ink used by the ring to write messages, will be disappointed. Townsend did much of his snooping from his merchant family’s store in Manhattan, which he managed. He did not leave a paper trail — certainly not one that would lead straight to his family home.

“We were behind enemy lines here,” said Claire Bellerjeau, director of education at Raynham Hall Museum.

Interpreting the tools or products of intelligence work is a challenge for any museum that deals in espionage. “When anything is kept secret, it’s ripe for imagination,” said Jackie Eyl, youth education director of the International Spy Museum in Washington. “We try to fill in the gaps in the imagination.”

That museum tells the story of spying (including the Culper Ring) through many interactive exhibits. While Raynham Hall can’t duplicate that, it does have an inherent advantage over other museums.

“There’s something to be said for the authenticity of standing in a place where a figure of history actually stood,” Eyl said.

But why did these important figures in the Revolution’s clandestine history stand exactly here, in Raynham Hall?

“Long Island was a honeycomb of espionage,” explained Barnet Schecter, author of “The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution.” Besides being an important source of food, fuel (in the form of wood) and forage for the British troops occupying Manhattan, he said, the island “was an interface between two enemy camps.”

Oyster Bay, on Long Island Sound, was a strategic location. Also, Samuel Townsend, Robert’s father and the owner of the house, was an ardent patriot, a member of New York’s Continental Congress who had been forced to pledge allegiance to the king following his arrest after the American defeat in the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776.

“I think the British wanted to keep an eye on Samuel,” Bellerjeau said.

If so, they were watching the wrong Townsend, although Robert, who visited the house frequently during the war, was only one of several spies under this roof: Bellerjeau has found a letter confirming that while he was at Raynham Hall, André also met with a mysterious American agent in the service of the British.

“We had a real nest of spies here,” she said with a laugh — the most famous of them having managed to remain a secret for nearly two centuries.

On her house tours, Bellerjeau shows laminated reproductions of maps, portraits and letters. But perhaps the most striking image is a sketch drawn of Robert Townsend by his nephew decades later.

After the war, the spy lived in this house, quietly and anonymously, until his death in 1838.

Wearing glasses and looking like a contented country barrister, Robert Townsend is shown in his nephew’s drawing at age 59 in 1813. He’s holding a book open to a blank page, a hint perhaps that the real story of his life had yet to be revealed.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f21139c6-7752-439c-a03f-e346871fe0b8" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/raynham-hall-revolution-spies.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Long Island House Holds the Story of Washington's Spy Ring

Simcoe’s friend, the dashing British intelligence chief John André, is known to have visited him here.

A Long Island house holds the story of Washington's spy ring

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John Hanc

Articles written by the author

Illuminating the Plight of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Building a Career, One Academic Step at a Time

A Long Island house holds the story of Washington's spy ring