“I only really rock with Jo-Anne,” Grammy-winning hiphop artist Ishmael Butler told me this past spring, and his comment stuck, because Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, an older white Australian woman, had to earn his respect and loyalty.
She did it in the way that she ran the Frye Art Museum.
She handed over power to artists like Butler (of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces), not treating them like they were commodities to be packaged and presented but allowing them to organize their own programs.
Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu created their own discussions for their exhibition Your Feast Has Ended, and Birnie Danzker told me she was their student. The “feast” in question was the feast that white colonizers have been enjoying for centuries.
The height of her success was a show she didn’t even curate (Alley-Barnes did), but it wouldn’t have happened without her. This April, the Frye opened the large exhibition Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum, the first museum survey of the extraordinary paintings and films of two brothers who grew up in Seattle.
That same week, Beyoncé released Lemonade, and when Kahlil Joseph was revealed to be its filmic muse and codirector, audiences of all ages and races flocked to see the Frye’s exhibition that by then every museum in Seattle wished it had.
After seven years spent finishing the transformation of the Frye into the city’s most relevant museum—the one that other museums are now copying—Birnie Danzker is leaving.
