Slamming the Door Open

The Diverse Expectations of Renee Brummell Franklin

by D. Amari Jackson

Renee Brummell Franklin is not an artist.

But she sure sounds like one.

“I decided that I would have a chocolate party at my house for about six people that work for me,” recalls Franklin, an art administrator who, several years back, invited her coworkers from the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM). “So when you think of chocolate, you think of sweet candy. But, from the point they got to my house to the appetizers, to the salad, to the main course, to the dessert, to the after-dinner drink, everything had some kind of chocolate in it, from very bitter chocolate to very sweet chocolate, from dark chocolate to white chocolate to milk chocolate.” To this day, notes Franklin, the successful event has “a lot of people asking me, ‘when am I gonna do that again?’ And I tell them, ‘you have no idea how long it took me to research the recipes and cook everything.’”   

Such detail, preparation, and commitment has served Franklin well. For over two decades, the Easton, Maryland native has donned a series of roles and responsibilities at SLAM, all geared toward improving the museum’s inclusion and engagement of diverse communities within the St. Louis area. First joining the museum as coordinator of community outreach programs in 1998, Franklin has consistently championed efforts to expand SLAM’s reach while forging sustainable relationships with the surrounding community. Along the way, she has cofounded or facilitated several successful initiatives at the museum, including the Art with Us youth residency program; the Teen Assistant Program, providing mentorship and summer employment; and the Friends of African American Art Collectors Circle, a collaborative devoted to expanding awareness of African-American art. Franklin also supervises the Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship, a national model for increasing underrepresented professionals working in museums.

Renee front center with Bearden Fellows, 2018

“Renee’s impact is immeasurable,” says Sherri Williams, a 2009-10 Bearden Fellow who now works in education and program administration at the National Gallery of Art. During her Fellowship at SLAM, she was mentored and supervised by Franklin. “Renee is reshaping that museum, internally and externally, setting it on a path to be more relevant and responsive to its constituents,” acknowledges Williams. In addition, “The ripple effect of her work with the Romare Bearden Graduate Fellowship is astounding. She has mentored generations of museum professionals of color who are agents of sustainable and necessary change at their institutions.”

In December 2020, after a year of extraordinary racial tumult on a national level, SLAM promoted Franklin to chief diversity officer, a new position increasing institutional accountability on issues of diversity, equity, and access. Though the position was novel—one created around Franklin from a report on inclusion drafted by the museum’s board of commissioners—the mission was not.

“I have a new job title but the work that I was doing, and continue to do, has not changed,” clarifies Franklin, pointing out that her “job is now institutionalized. In other words, I’ve always been here to help the museum be more inclusive, and it was okay to have me do so as the community partnership person or as the outreach coordinator.” But now, continues Franklin, with “this new title in the director’s office, I feel it’s institutionalized. It’s more systemic and, perhaps, when I bring forth initiatives, there is now the expectation that everyone is on board.”

“So the expectations have changed,” adds Franklin. “My job has not.”

Franklin has expectations of herself. An avid reader, researcher, and world traveler, she holds two master’s degrees—one in education, another in business administration—volunteers on several prestigious boards and committees; is a founding member of the National Alliance of African American Art Support Groups; and has received numerous commendations, including the Grand Center Visionary Award for Outstanding Arts Professional. “I have thought many times about going back and getting an art history degree,” reveals Franklin. “But, actually, since I’ve been here close to 25 years now, I still think what I bring to the art museum is the average, innocent eyes of looking at art. I’m not looking at it as an expert would look at art—that’s what I have curators for—but, rather, to engage the average person who does not have that art history degree,” she stresses, reiterating “they are looking at art like I look at art.”

Franklin’s innocent look at art began as a child in Easton, MD where her father’s hobby was designing and “dressing up” Harley Davidson motorcycles for competitions, and her mom ‘mixed colors’ in the kitchen. “Growing up in a Black household, everything is art as so much of your life revolves around it,” offers Franklin, explaining how her mother coordinated meals by color. “You’ve got too many yellows,” she recounts, with a laugh. “You can’t have macaroni and cheese and corn, you need something green or something orange on that plate, you know?” Franklin further qualifies this homegrown process. “I wouldn’t call it the art of art museums but, rather, the art of life, the art of just appreciating your aunt who’s making a quilt or your aunt who makes all of her clothes. So it was that kind of art.”

Renee 6 years old

It was during her youth that Franklin developed her passion for travel. Upon graduating from Easton High School, where she’d spent many afterschool hours working as a babysitter for a little girl who’d taken a liking to her, Franklin travelled with the girl’s family to France to vacation for five weeks at their chateau outside of Paris. “My parents were not college educated, but they worked so hard, and the only thing I had to pay for was my airline ticket,” remembers Franklin, noting there “was not a several hundred dollars sitting around for Renee to go off to Paris for five weeks. Plus, I always worked during the summer, so that meant I wasn’t gonna be able to work to make any money. But my parents saw that it was important to me, and we figured it out.”

“It really was a turning point for me because I now travel internationally all the time,” acknowledges Franklin, who has journeyed to numerous African nations, Brazil, Spain, Italy, and Cuba, among others. “So I think that just seeing there was something beyond my small town really did make a difference in my life.”  

Renee Egypt, 2015

Franklin initially attended Hampton University in Virginia before transferring to Towson University in her home state and graduating with a BS in marketing and business administration. She began working for the Gillette company, and then Johnson & Johnson before getting married and recognizing that her relatives who were teachers had summers off to be with their kids. “So I told my husband, I think I’m going to get my master’s in education and go back and teach,” says Franklin, who taught for a short period before realizing that the traditional teaching process and its associated bureaucracy was not for her. She ended up working for a small children’s museum in St. Louis where she helped expose kids to cultures from around the world. There, she engaged with a representative from SLAM who told her about a new position at the museum that “seemed like a great combination of education and marketing.” Franklin followed up and, in 1998, became SLAM’s first Outreach Coordinator. “Basically, it was a position to engage community for the museum, as the job was predominantly to connect the outside of the museum to the inside of the museum.”

Franklin has been making such connections ever since.

“Renee has helped a lot of artists in St. Louis and all over,” offers artist and educator, Lamerol Gatewood, a friend and colleague of two decades. Through a mutual friend, the painter first encountered Franklin while she was doing audience development for SLAM two decades back. “She was all over the community, north, south, east, and west St. Louis, so that’s how I met her. Over the years we’ve built a very good relationship,” reports Gatewood, pointing out how Franklin has “really assisted me in regard to how to maneuver inside the museum.”

He cites Franklin’s role in facilitating the recent publication of his book, “Lamerol A. Gatewood” The Energy Series and The Abstract Energy Of Sound – 2009-2019, and her pivotal part in getting late collector and St. Louis native Ronald Ollie and his wife, Monique, to give SLAM a collection of 81 works by Black abstractionists in 2017. “That’s how vital she is to our community,” stresses Gatewood, further characterizing Franklin as “very approachable. You know how some individuals that are in institutions are not approachable, but I don’t find it in her, and I’ve been around for a while, trust me.”

Renee, Museum Diversity Conference, 2005

The historic Ollie donation was largely due to Franklin’s innovation, desire to educate, and tireless networking. The Friends of African American Art Collector’s Circle she started was featured by the International Review of African American Art on their educational trip to New York and, in that same edition, was a piece by Ollie who lived in New Jersey and was a board member at the Newark Museum. Ollie reached out to Franklin. “He said he didn’t know that his hometown of St. Louis was doing so much with art,” she recalls of the conversation two decades back. “We just kept in touch” over the years and, “ultimately, some 20 years later, he gave us 81 works of art by African-American artists, the largest donation we’ve ever had by a Black collector. So it’s about connecting the dots and you never know where those dots are going to take you.”

When it comes to the complex dynamics of race, diversity, and inclusion, Franklin acknowledges that she does not know where the future is going to take us. “I kind of wonder what this field will look like five years from now,” she offers, promoting that “my hope is that museums and organizations see the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’m not convinced of that yet, but I see the glass as half full, not half empty.”

“My mantra has always been the same, that we’ll be a much better institution when we’ve become more inclusive,” continues Franklin, on SLAM. “But I think it was always program-focused, and the big difference now is that staffing has moved up as a priority. I’ve always believed that, you change your board, you change your staff, then you’re going to change what’s on the walls because you’ve got a diversity of people around the table making those decisions.”

Given her impact on SLAM and the St. Louis community thus far, Franklin’s ongoing actions and decisions will certainly play a part in the institution to come.

“I think what I am most proud of, over my 20 years at the museum, is that colleagues seek me out for my advice and expertise and that has allowed me, both internally and externally, to keep my mantra going,” reveals Franklin, advancing that “there’s a better way to do this. Or, I won’t say a better way… but there’s a different way to do this.”

“And, perhaps, we might try it a different way.”

Renee with Bearden Fellow, Asmaa Walton, 2020

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AMARI JACKSON is a creator, author, TV/web/film producer, and award-winning journalist. He is author of the 2011 novel, The Savion Sequence; creator/writer/coproducer of the 2012-2014 web series The Book Look; writer/coproducer of the 2016 film Edge of the Pier; and current writer/coproducer of Listen Up! on HBCU GO/Roku TV. He is a former Chief of Staff for a NJ State Senator; a former VP of Communications & Development for the Jamestown Project at Harvard University; and a recipient of several writing fellowships including the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the Independent Press Association. An active ghost writer, song writer, martial artist, and journalist, his writings have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional publications.

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