Jessica Helfand, Ellen McGirt|Audio
May 25, 2021
S9E2: Melanie Keen
Melanie Keen is the director of Wellcome Collection
Before she interviewed for the job, Keen visited the permanent exhibition and noticed a set of ethnographic photographs:
They’re sort of hidden in a corner discreetly, but the images themselves aren’t discreet at all. I found them offensive, you know. In no other space in that building where the images of naked black women, of semi-naked black men, and the person that was attributed was a white male photographer. They were attributed as being from a particular community or tribe of people.
And when I started the job, I walked around one with one of the curators and I was like, “That’s just got to go. It’s got to go. It’s not — until we can find out more about those people that are represented in the photograph. It has to go.”
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This season’s theme music is from Solar Echoes, by Nigel Stanford.
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By Jessica Helfand & Ellen McGirt
Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.
Ellen McGirt is an author, podcaster, speaker, community builder, and award-winning business journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Design Observer, a media company that has maintained the same clear vision for more than two decades: to expand the definition of design in service of a better world. Ellen established the inclusive leadership beat at Fortune in 2016 with raceAhead, an award-winning newsletter on race, culture, and business. The Fortune, Time, Money, and Fast Company alumna has published over twenty magazine cover stories throughout her twenty-year career, exploring the people and ideas changing business for good. Ask her about fly fishing if you get the chance.
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