Franklin Vagnone Interview
For those with a background in historic house museums, Franklin Vagnone’s Anarchist's Guide to Historic House Museums is a ground-breaking treatise or a call to arms. As a self-described "domestic-archeo-anthropologist" Franklin’s text takes a transdisciplinary approach to invigorating the staid reputation of historic sites. Franklin is also the founder of the museum consulting firm, Twisted Preservation, and currently serves as President & CEO of Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His most recent project, Gay in the Gilded Age, for the Staatsburg State Historic Site is the first LGBTQ themed interpretation for a NYS site. Franklin is also a visual artist and sculptor who translates his queer experience into an abstract domestic vernacular through assemblages. Although not strictly related to craft, Franklin's experience in queering domestic spaces, provides valuable insight into the potentially subversive quality of domestic objects when viewed through a queer lens. Enjoy!
On your website, you list yourself as a “domesto-archeo-anthropoligist,” which speaks to the transdisciplinary approach you use. Can you describe what set of experiences lead you to develop your unique perspective?
My background, which I think is pretty standard, is a degree in architecture and anthropology during undergrad. In my master’s program at Columbia University, I went on to study architectural design. I’ve always been a sculptor, painter, and collage artist. Even when I was doing architecture, it was primarily work to domestic structures. I was always drawn to small, intimate spaces. I’m also drawn to small, intimate objects in the things that I collect, or things that I create. My sculpture could be pieces of furniture related to site specific rooms or small sized curio mirrors. There’s always been this overlap between the making part of me and the thinking part of me. The continuity between these sides is that I’ve always been interested in the domestic realm and more intimately scaled things. For example, I’ve never been interested in designing a big, tall, skyscraper. That has never been one of my interests. So that to me is the overlap. When you take that design background and you start to overlap it with my involvement in the museum profession and heritage sites, primarily managing domestically scaled heritage sites, you can start to see why my interest starts to overlap with management. I’m managing Old Salem right now which is a very large heritage site with 450,000 visitors a year and 90 buildings. Most of them are domestically scaled buildings. Most of my research and writing has been about the visitor experience in these small domestically scaled buildings and spaces. That’s where it comes from. That weirdness, that in-between fuzzy zone, of where my life has taken me.
That “in-between, fuzzy zone” you mention seems like queer experience, which brings me to my next question. Through your consulting business, Twisted Preservation, you recently unveiled “Gay in the Gilded Age” the first LGBTQ interpretation for a New York State historic site at Staatsburg. Can describe how this came about and what we can look forward to through this collaboration?
It’s a great project and the first-time New York State has ever investigated this narrative at one of their state run historic sites. We were lucky enough to get the commission to do this. Twisted Preservation and my team of researchers have been working on this since December or January. We’re looking at this Gilded Age mansion and we’re investigating the larger issues of what it means to be gay during this time period. But not just this type of wealthy gay, we’re studying people of great wealth, the fabulous four hundred, to their servants, their delivery men, theater people. One of the interesting things about Staatsburg, is that the Mills had four or five homes, they had them in New York, Newport, Paris and all over the place. Their relationship with the domestic realm was quite large, which is standard for the Gilded Age. One thing we’re interested in is how people on the marginal properties of culture, lesbians, gays, transgendered, theater people or drag queens, or however they were labeled. That’s what makes it difficult to talk about today, because the labels were so different. How those influenced and were tastemakers for the other. Even though gays and lesbians were marginalized, they were also fully absorbed into society. It was perfectly acceptable to have a gay man married to a wealthy woman. It was perfectly acceptable to have a fashion designer, or a chef, or a flower designer, or party decorator, not to mention the possibility of bisexual architects like McKim, Meade & White and the issue of whether they had same sex liaisons. There’s all this overlap, and I say it again: the messy, the marginalized, the fuzzy parts of life. That’s what Gay in the Gilded Age is about. We’re not looking at the stereotype of the Gilded Age, but we’re looking at how these marginalized populations managed to be dead center of this style making at the same time as they were ostracized. The thesis of Gay in the Gilded Age is that Staatsburg was added onto by McKim, Meade & White. It went form this provincial house to a massive mansion. When we visited we found all these weird hallways, stairs, and awkward rooms between the McKim, Meade & White honorific spaces, like the grand ballroom, and the living spaces of the original house were these marginalized spaces. We’re taking that as a concept and saying that the very behaviors of the tour and the rooms you go through are representative of the marginalized experiences of gays in the gilded age. I know that sounds very high level and conceptual, but when you go there and you see this wonky stair hall with wings and this odd boudoir room, you can clearly see how these rooms would make incredibly interesting gay spaces. Spaces of liaison and overlaps where the man of the house could get a quick cop from one of his servant men in the hallways. That’s what Gay in the Gilded Age is becoming.
That’s fascinating. Is there any documentation of the residents of Staatsburg being LGBTQ?
The answer is interesting, and I think you’ll appreciate this. The only real relationship that’s documented is a friend of Mrs. Mills called “King Lear”. King Lear would visit the Mills’s mansion, was pretty fabulous, would go to all the parties, but we don’t know which parties. He was one of the four-hundred and all of that. One of the reasons New York State came to me was because they know I believe in conjecture, gossip and rumor. The only way we can tell these stories, is to not have this absolutely documented history on these things. As you and I both know, gay history as not been documented or has been destroyed, like Alice Austen’s letters to her partner, Gertrude. As long as we’re open that we are coming about this from a conjectural way and we’re bringing in actual histories of the being gay in the gilded age, and we’re using the architecture of Staatsburg to put us in an environmental state that helps us understand the marginalized experience of gays and lesbians, we are on to something. The direct answer is there is no documentation, except King Lear. But as we go into it, we assume maybe a chef, or flower arranger, or interior decorator or McKim, Meade & White, and as Twisted Preservation, I go in and say, “That’s good enough for me that our history is not documented and the best we can do is a conjectural understanding of our relationship, or place within this larger history.”
I think it’s interesting to juxtapose that with the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, that you helped to make more overt with its queer history and documentation through your work with the Historic House Trust of New York. How was her queer identity articulated through the objects in that space?
I hope you see a big smile on my face, because when started at HHT, Alice Austen House did not openly interpret Alice as a lesbian or her fifty-year relationship with Gertrude Tate. Also, they interpreted the photographs she took of her bawdy parties as typical Victorian playacting. One of the newsletters from the Twisted Preservation includes a photoshoot from when we reenacted Alice Austen’s photographs with contemporary Brooklyn people that we interpreted openly as being gay and lesbian. That was the first time, openly, that this issue was addressed, from HHT’s perspective. I really pushed the house to reconsider the history they were telling. I have to say the most proud way and give credit to Janice Monger and her board, that they’ve just received a NEH grant to reinterpret the house based on Alice and Gertrude’s relationship. They walked in the Gay Pride Parade in New York City. One of the reasons the house felt so comfortable doing this was that I took Janice down to Washington to sit in the audience when the National Park Service announced their initiative to landmark more gay and lesbian specific sites. At this point, Alice Austen House is now reinterpreting their house through the landmark process as a gay and lesbian site. The reason I’m smiling is because when I got there, they did not talk about it, but now, ten years later, this is very clearly a stop of the gay and lesbian landmarks. I don’t know how it is being interpreted on the ground, but I’ve very happy they moved in this direction.
Now to get to your current position as Director of Old Salem, you began during the time that HB2 was still amid its fury. What is your perspective on how the state’s museum community has responded to this situation?
It’s been fascinating to watch and its something I’ve gained a lot of perspective on just through the process of this job search. I also taught at UNCC with Deborah Ryan, my co-author of Anarchist’s Guide, and when HB2 came about, I formally resigned from my position and sent letters to the chancellor, the governor, the attorney general and the dean of the College of Architecture at UNCC. I cited clearly why I was resigning. When Old Salem came to me, about nine months later, I first said, “No, I’m too radical, and by the way I’m a gay partnered man in NYC and I think that HB2 is an incredibly divisive and poor bit of legislation.” And they said, “We agree and as an organization we formally wrote a response to it.” They embraced that I was a homosexual and that I was partnered. I told them that any consideration of me as President and CEO would absolutely have to consider my partner. From that moment on, they invited Johnny to interviews, took him around to lunch and to look at real estate. From the very beginning, it was an incredibly welcoming spot. Winston-Salem is a blue in the middle of a state that’s purple leaning to red. If you go twenty-minutes outside of Old Salem, you’re deep into red territory. But Winston-Salem itself and Old Salem itself is incredibly open to progressive, marginalized narratives, so I felt very comfortable with that. I have open, political conversations with my staff, with funders, with individual contributors. I’ve found that moving down here has expanded my understanding of a political situation that would have been impossible if I had just stayed in New York City. I’ve found that I can be close friends with a log cabin Republican gay man who fully supports Trump and the conservative party. Before I could never fully reconcile those two, and now he’s become one of our closest friends. I could never have grown in this way. I always joke with people, “Be careful North Carolina. You’ve got two homos who’ve moved to a swing state, and you know which way we’re going to vote.” We’re here and we’re welcomed, but we’re also going to vote as progressive liberals.
How do you find the museum community outside of Old Salem? Do they adopt the same progressive ideas and welcoming stance?
I just last week gave a keynote address to all the historic sites owned by the State of North Carolina through the Department of Cultural Resources. It was their annual continuing education conference, so I also gave a workshop on anarchist guide principles for historic sites. In those presentations, everything you and I talk about was presented to them and it was favorably reviewed and discussed. My experience is that this level of museum professionals was very open, very welcoming, and very willing to consider marginalized narratives as necessary for a full, community based cultural organizations. When they came to me, my first reaction was again that I’m too radical and it wouldn’t make any difference, but that’s precisely why they wanted me to speak with them. So did I, as a resident of New York City, as have a viewpoint that is too generalized about North Carolina cultural institutions? Surely one of the most progressive institutions anywhere in the country is the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. I would put that museum against any New York City or San Francisco cultural organization in the way that it engaged marginalized populations. I’d put it up against the Brooklyn Museum because its doing such an excellent job. I’ve received the same embrace from Old Salem, knowing that I’ve already started an investigation of the enslaved population. I’m already considering doing LGBTQ programs, and we’re starting a program about the Moravians’ relationship with the Cherokee Indians and the Trail of Tears. All of these things is historically appropriate, everyone is on board and jumping right in.
That’s fantastic! Could you tell me some more about your work with the slave dwellings at Old Salem?
In December, the first program I started was Hidden Town. The goals are to locate every single enslaved dwelling spot in the town of Salem, and then archaeology, contemporary art, and historic interpretation to fully immerse the experience of the slave population into the present day interpretation of the Moravians. The second part is to track down the descendants of the enslaved and form an advisory committee of the help guide the interpretation. Because of the size of the site, the scale and breadth of the research, I feel like this is a national model. It combines archaeology, historic documentation, photographic evidence. You’re going to see an amazing work come out of Hidden Town because of the scale of the project we’re talking about. We’re doing mapping exercises where we go to the original maps and historic documentation, and if they confirm we put a red dot on the site plan. We have this town recorded beginning in the Civil War era, through Reconstruction, through the Jim Crow Era, and gentrification where the African American communities were pushed outside of Salem. The scholarship on this end is just amazing, and the goal is to get to the human qualities. It’s not unrelated to everything we talked about in the beginning. I’m interested in humanity, the domestic, the intimate. I’m not just interested in the slave dwelling as an archaeological site, I’m interested in the slave dwellings as an intimate expression of what it meant to be enslaved in Salem.
The scale of what you’re talking about sounds formidable. What is your projected project duration?
Well, forever. I told my staff that this is a project that will never end. I would say within a month of two, the larger public rollout will occur and I know we’ll be doing some national think tanks in Old Salem with scholars of African American heritage, not only for Old Salem but for other national sites so you’re learning about it sooner than anyone else.
Thank you! I feel quite honored. Seward House, where I worked previously, was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and we did some interpretation around that but we weren’t able to fully realize it due to the time constraints to running a small historic site. I want to return for a moment to something you mentioned earlier in our conversation. It hadn’t occurred to me that you are a maker as well, which is a very interesting angle. The makers I’m focusing on incorporate their LGBTQ identity into their work, through process, materials, iconography, etc. Have you found a desire to express that part of yourself in your work?
I would say absolutely. Everything that you see on my website, www.franklinvagnone.org, related to my situation of being bisexual, being married to a woman with three children for the first half of my life, and for the second half of my life, being partnered with a man, and being marginalized. I have this unique perspective where the first half of my life, I was in the room when the gay person leaves and everyone makes fun of them. Then on the second part of my life, being the gay person and knowing that they’re making fun of me. This subversive, voyeuristic quality is the foundation for my sculpture. They’re also found objects, which also overlaps my archeology, anthropology, and preservation. Remember, I like intimate, small things, so my sculpture is about this grouping together of small things that speaks to this voyeuristic understanding of what society thinks of me as a bisexual. Without a doubt, when you look at my stuff, without a doubt everything is related back to me being a gay man.
How did you come to work in the medium of assemblages?
There’s one work, MS 1080, that’s a memorial for Matthew Shepard. The 1080 is the minutes he remained alive after he was gay bashed. It all relates to that experience of him being tied to that rural fence, the relationship between numbers and time. You’ll see it here with the oil and the hair, I’ll almost always have some component that’s phallic, which relates back to me being a homosexual man, and that a portion of identity to who I am. It’s not in a sexualized way, but in a more symbolic way that defines part of who I am. I just used the Matthew Shepard one as an example. For some its very symbolic, and for others, it’s very straight forward. There’s another one, called Male. That is a self-portrait. The picture of the little boy is me. At the time, my father knew that I was gay, brought it to me in the back yard, wanted me to play with it while taking Polaroids. He took the Polaroids back to work to show all his workers his strong, butch boy. At the time, I remember feeling the pain of knowing that I wasn’t what my dad wanted. You can see it in my face and I took all of the items and put them in a box and never played with them again. Even though it assemblage, there’s a level of symbolism with me being a gay man, trying to deal with the social and the cultural, at the same time I’m just trying to grow up and be a human being. You’re looking at someone whose sculpture is tied to a political, cultural, social, situation.
That comes through with the artists I’m working with as well. In their cases, it comes through in a more domestic manner, through depictions of interiors, domestic objects.
When I first started sculpting, there were elements of the domestic in my work as well. I have a few pieces called, “Conceptual Furniture”, that are direct reference to my love of the domestic realm. Its furniture that I designed as part of a room I called “the closet” and so these pieces all represent aspects of that exchange I mentioned earlier. They’re all pieces of furniture, so when I’m at the sink and that mirror is there, I am actually washing my hands. Furniture is where this thing started and as an overlap between architecture, anthropology and my love of the domestic realm. For me, all of these things are simultaneous in a way.
Your transgressing the lines between domestic and public spaces through these sculptures also becomes a queer statement, this liminality of not quite belonging in either place. I see it in the works of other queer artists, and it mimics coming out.
I would say, for me at least, given my age and my own path, it’s a kind of “fuck you.” I’m not I the closet, I’m a gay, partnered man, and I have feelings, emotions, and thoughts about the world around me that I’m not going to suppress because they make someone uncomfortable. My job is to not make you comfortable. For the first part of my life, I felt like it was all about making other people comfortable. This sculpture is a kind of acknowledgement of how I feel. You engage this sculpture, you move this mirror, you become me.
Those of us who are threated to being your friend on Facebook, get wonderful glimpses of your domestic space and the way that you assemble rooms. Is there a correlation between your experience of gender and sexuality and the way you conceive of your domestic living spaces?
The answer is yes. When I designed these conceptual piece of furniture, you could damn well take any of them, plop them in my library, and they would look utterly correct. My environment is directly tied to my identity as a queer person. My art is directly tied to my identity as a queer person. When you come to my house I want you to understand my perspective on the world. My perspective is decentralized, its marginalized, its chaotic, constantly moving. All of these things that define what it means to be a queer person. The traditional notion that marginalized populations have less of a center than the normative model. I play with that. You come to my home and on the first level, its decentralized. There’s all kinds of shit everywhere, it doesn’t look like a normal living room. Its eclectic, with every style you could possibly want. But at the same time it’s really cozy. So from an interior design standpoint, I’m playing with someone’s feelings from thinking they’re in the tornado of the Wizard of Oz with all the furniture twirling around them, and at the same time, sitting by a fire, drinking tea, and feeling cozy and warm. Next time you look at any pictures of my place, I bought a really large, Gilded Age rug that would have been in a front parlor. After getting Ulysses to tell me its ok, I cut it up into strips and made them runners throughout my house. It took me weeks to make fringe on the end because it was so well made. At one point you’re aghast because somebody cut this beautiful rug, and then you look at it and its done in a beautiful way so there’s a comforting element about it that makes you feel like you’re at grandma’s house. I find that interesting to put to put us in that place between being the normative and the queer. Queering that rug was cutting it up, taking weeks to put fringe on it, then putting it down in the floor as if I just found it at a flea market. I think you would find the same thing about my sculpture as well. Everything is normative, everything is comfortable, but its slammed together in a way that makes you question, “What the fuck is that about?”
I can see that within the conceptual furniture especially. It has all those recognizable elements but there is that destabilized, queer sense. I know you’ve got a hectic day ahead of you so I’m going to let you go. But thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Your insight touches on many of the things I’m studying and have experienced myself.
If there’s anything I can do to help further with your research or thesis, please let me know.
On your website, you list yourself as a “domesto-archeo-anthropoligist,” which speaks to the transdisciplinary approach you use. Can you describe what set of experiences lead you to develop your unique perspective?
My background, which I think is pretty standard, is a degree in architecture and anthropology during undergrad. In my master’s program at Columbia University, I went on to study architectural design. I’ve always been a sculptor, painter, and collage artist. Even when I was doing architecture, it was primarily work to domestic structures. I was always drawn to small, intimate spaces. I’m also drawn to small, intimate objects in the things that I collect, or things that I create. My sculpture could be pieces of furniture related to site specific rooms or small sized curio mirrors. There’s always been this overlap between the making part of me and the thinking part of me. The continuity between these sides is that I’ve always been interested in the domestic realm and more intimately scaled things. For example, I’ve never been interested in designing a big, tall, skyscraper. That has never been one of my interests. So that to me is the overlap. When you take that design background and you start to overlap it with my involvement in the museum profession and heritage sites, primarily managing domestically scaled heritage sites, you can start to see why my interest starts to overlap with management. I’m managing Old Salem right now which is a very large heritage site with 450,000 visitors a year and 90 buildings. Most of them are domestically scaled buildings. Most of my research and writing has been about the visitor experience in these small domestically scaled buildings and spaces. That’s where it comes from. That weirdness, that in-between fuzzy zone, of where my life has taken me.
That “in-between, fuzzy zone” you mention seems like queer experience, which brings me to my next question. Through your consulting business, Twisted Preservation, you recently unveiled “Gay in the Gilded Age” the first LGBTQ interpretation for a New York State historic site at Staatsburg. Can describe how this came about and what we can look forward to through this collaboration?
It’s a great project and the first-time New York State has ever investigated this narrative at one of their state run historic sites. We were lucky enough to get the commission to do this. Twisted Preservation and my team of researchers have been working on this since December or January. We’re looking at this Gilded Age mansion and we’re investigating the larger issues of what it means to be gay during this time period. But not just this type of wealthy gay, we’re studying people of great wealth, the fabulous four hundred, to their servants, their delivery men, theater people. One of the interesting things about Staatsburg, is that the Mills had four or five homes, they had them in New York, Newport, Paris and all over the place. Their relationship with the domestic realm was quite large, which is standard for the Gilded Age. One thing we’re interested in is how people on the marginal properties of culture, lesbians, gays, transgendered, theater people or drag queens, or however they were labeled. That’s what makes it difficult to talk about today, because the labels were so different. How those influenced and were tastemakers for the other. Even though gays and lesbians were marginalized, they were also fully absorbed into society. It was perfectly acceptable to have a gay man married to a wealthy woman. It was perfectly acceptable to have a fashion designer, or a chef, or a flower designer, or party decorator, not to mention the possibility of bisexual architects like McKim, Meade & White and the issue of whether they had same sex liaisons. There’s all this overlap, and I say it again: the messy, the marginalized, the fuzzy parts of life. That’s what Gay in the Gilded Age is about. We’re not looking at the stereotype of the Gilded Age, but we’re looking at how these marginalized populations managed to be dead center of this style making at the same time as they were ostracized. The thesis of Gay in the Gilded Age is that Staatsburg was added onto by McKim, Meade & White. It went form this provincial house to a massive mansion. When we visited we found all these weird hallways, stairs, and awkward rooms between the McKim, Meade & White honorific spaces, like the grand ballroom, and the living spaces of the original house were these marginalized spaces. We’re taking that as a concept and saying that the very behaviors of the tour and the rooms you go through are representative of the marginalized experiences of gays in the gilded age. I know that sounds very high level and conceptual, but when you go there and you see this wonky stair hall with wings and this odd boudoir room, you can clearly see how these rooms would make incredibly interesting gay spaces. Spaces of liaison and overlaps where the man of the house could get a quick cop from one of his servant men in the hallways. That’s what Gay in the Gilded Age is becoming.
That’s fascinating. Is there any documentation of the residents of Staatsburg being LGBTQ?
The answer is interesting, and I think you’ll appreciate this. The only real relationship that’s documented is a friend of Mrs. Mills called “King Lear”. King Lear would visit the Mills’s mansion, was pretty fabulous, would go to all the parties, but we don’t know which parties. He was one of the four-hundred and all of that. One of the reasons New York State came to me was because they know I believe in conjecture, gossip and rumor. The only way we can tell these stories, is to not have this absolutely documented history on these things. As you and I both know, gay history as not been documented or has been destroyed, like Alice Austen’s letters to her partner, Gertrude. As long as we’re open that we are coming about this from a conjectural way and we’re bringing in actual histories of the being gay in the gilded age, and we’re using the architecture of Staatsburg to put us in an environmental state that helps us understand the marginalized experience of gays and lesbians, we are on to something. The direct answer is there is no documentation, except King Lear. But as we go into it, we assume maybe a chef, or flower arranger, or interior decorator or McKim, Meade & White, and as Twisted Preservation, I go in and say, “That’s good enough for me that our history is not documented and the best we can do is a conjectural understanding of our relationship, or place within this larger history.”
I think it’s interesting to juxtapose that with the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, that you helped to make more overt with its queer history and documentation through your work with the Historic House Trust of New York. How was her queer identity articulated through the objects in that space?
I hope you see a big smile on my face, because when started at HHT, Alice Austen House did not openly interpret Alice as a lesbian or her fifty-year relationship with Gertrude Tate. Also, they interpreted the photographs she took of her bawdy parties as typical Victorian playacting. One of the newsletters from the Twisted Preservation includes a photoshoot from when we reenacted Alice Austen’s photographs with contemporary Brooklyn people that we interpreted openly as being gay and lesbian. That was the first time, openly, that this issue was addressed, from HHT’s perspective. I really pushed the house to reconsider the history they were telling. I have to say the most proud way and give credit to Janice Monger and her board, that they’ve just received a NEH grant to reinterpret the house based on Alice and Gertrude’s relationship. They walked in the Gay Pride Parade in New York City. One of the reasons the house felt so comfortable doing this was that I took Janice down to Washington to sit in the audience when the National Park Service announced their initiative to landmark more gay and lesbian specific sites. At this point, Alice Austen House is now reinterpreting their house through the landmark process as a gay and lesbian site. The reason I’m smiling is because when I got there, they did not talk about it, but now, ten years later, this is very clearly a stop of the gay and lesbian landmarks. I don’t know how it is being interpreted on the ground, but I’ve very happy they moved in this direction.
Now to get to your current position as Director of Old Salem, you began during the time that HB2 was still amid its fury. What is your perspective on how the state’s museum community has responded to this situation?
It’s been fascinating to watch and its something I’ve gained a lot of perspective on just through the process of this job search. I also taught at UNCC with Deborah Ryan, my co-author of Anarchist’s Guide, and when HB2 came about, I formally resigned from my position and sent letters to the chancellor, the governor, the attorney general and the dean of the College of Architecture at UNCC. I cited clearly why I was resigning. When Old Salem came to me, about nine months later, I first said, “No, I’m too radical, and by the way I’m a gay partnered man in NYC and I think that HB2 is an incredibly divisive and poor bit of legislation.” And they said, “We agree and as an organization we formally wrote a response to it.” They embraced that I was a homosexual and that I was partnered. I told them that any consideration of me as President and CEO would absolutely have to consider my partner. From that moment on, they invited Johnny to interviews, took him around to lunch and to look at real estate. From the very beginning, it was an incredibly welcoming spot. Winston-Salem is a blue in the middle of a state that’s purple leaning to red. If you go twenty-minutes outside of Old Salem, you’re deep into red territory. But Winston-Salem itself and Old Salem itself is incredibly open to progressive, marginalized narratives, so I felt very comfortable with that. I have open, political conversations with my staff, with funders, with individual contributors. I’ve found that moving down here has expanded my understanding of a political situation that would have been impossible if I had just stayed in New York City. I’ve found that I can be close friends with a log cabin Republican gay man who fully supports Trump and the conservative party. Before I could never fully reconcile those two, and now he’s become one of our closest friends. I could never have grown in this way. I always joke with people, “Be careful North Carolina. You’ve got two homos who’ve moved to a swing state, and you know which way we’re going to vote.” We’re here and we’re welcomed, but we’re also going to vote as progressive liberals.
How do you find the museum community outside of Old Salem? Do they adopt the same progressive ideas and welcoming stance?
I just last week gave a keynote address to all the historic sites owned by the State of North Carolina through the Department of Cultural Resources. It was their annual continuing education conference, so I also gave a workshop on anarchist guide principles for historic sites. In those presentations, everything you and I talk about was presented to them and it was favorably reviewed and discussed. My experience is that this level of museum professionals was very open, very welcoming, and very willing to consider marginalized narratives as necessary for a full, community based cultural organizations. When they came to me, my first reaction was again that I’m too radical and it wouldn’t make any difference, but that’s precisely why they wanted me to speak with them. So did I, as a resident of New York City, as have a viewpoint that is too generalized about North Carolina cultural institutions? Surely one of the most progressive institutions anywhere in the country is the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte. I would put that museum against any New York City or San Francisco cultural organization in the way that it engaged marginalized populations. I’d put it up against the Brooklyn Museum because its doing such an excellent job. I’ve received the same embrace from Old Salem, knowing that I’ve already started an investigation of the enslaved population. I’m already considering doing LGBTQ programs, and we’re starting a program about the Moravians’ relationship with the Cherokee Indians and the Trail of Tears. All of these things is historically appropriate, everyone is on board and jumping right in.
That’s fantastic! Could you tell me some more about your work with the slave dwellings at Old Salem?
In December, the first program I started was Hidden Town. The goals are to locate every single enslaved dwelling spot in the town of Salem, and then archaeology, contemporary art, and historic interpretation to fully immerse the experience of the slave population into the present day interpretation of the Moravians. The second part is to track down the descendants of the enslaved and form an advisory committee of the help guide the interpretation. Because of the size of the site, the scale and breadth of the research, I feel like this is a national model. It combines archaeology, historic documentation, photographic evidence. You’re going to see an amazing work come out of Hidden Town because of the scale of the project we’re talking about. We’re doing mapping exercises where we go to the original maps and historic documentation, and if they confirm we put a red dot on the site plan. We have this town recorded beginning in the Civil War era, through Reconstruction, through the Jim Crow Era, and gentrification where the African American communities were pushed outside of Salem. The scholarship on this end is just amazing, and the goal is to get to the human qualities. It’s not unrelated to everything we talked about in the beginning. I’m interested in humanity, the domestic, the intimate. I’m not just interested in the slave dwelling as an archaeological site, I’m interested in the slave dwellings as an intimate expression of what it meant to be enslaved in Salem.
The scale of what you’re talking about sounds formidable. What is your projected project duration?
Well, forever. I told my staff that this is a project that will never end. I would say within a month of two, the larger public rollout will occur and I know we’ll be doing some national think tanks in Old Salem with scholars of African American heritage, not only for Old Salem but for other national sites so you’re learning about it sooner than anyone else.
Thank you! I feel quite honored. Seward House, where I worked previously, was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and we did some interpretation around that but we weren’t able to fully realize it due to the time constraints to running a small historic site. I want to return for a moment to something you mentioned earlier in our conversation. It hadn’t occurred to me that you are a maker as well, which is a very interesting angle. The makers I’m focusing on incorporate their LGBTQ identity into their work, through process, materials, iconography, etc. Have you found a desire to express that part of yourself in your work?
I would say absolutely. Everything that you see on my website, www.franklinvagnone.org, related to my situation of being bisexual, being married to a woman with three children for the first half of my life, and for the second half of my life, being partnered with a man, and being marginalized. I have this unique perspective where the first half of my life, I was in the room when the gay person leaves and everyone makes fun of them. Then on the second part of my life, being the gay person and knowing that they’re making fun of me. This subversive, voyeuristic quality is the foundation for my sculpture. They’re also found objects, which also overlaps my archeology, anthropology, and preservation. Remember, I like intimate, small things, so my sculpture is about this grouping together of small things that speaks to this voyeuristic understanding of what society thinks of me as a bisexual. Without a doubt, when you look at my stuff, without a doubt everything is related back to me being a gay man.
How did you come to work in the medium of assemblages?
There’s one work, MS 1080, that’s a memorial for Matthew Shepard. The 1080 is the minutes he remained alive after he was gay bashed. It all relates to that experience of him being tied to that rural fence, the relationship between numbers and time. You’ll see it here with the oil and the hair, I’ll almost always have some component that’s phallic, which relates back to me being a homosexual man, and that a portion of identity to who I am. It’s not in a sexualized way, but in a more symbolic way that defines part of who I am. I just used the Matthew Shepard one as an example. For some its very symbolic, and for others, it’s very straight forward. There’s another one, called Male. That is a self-portrait. The picture of the little boy is me. At the time, my father knew that I was gay, brought it to me in the back yard, wanted me to play with it while taking Polaroids. He took the Polaroids back to work to show all his workers his strong, butch boy. At the time, I remember feeling the pain of knowing that I wasn’t what my dad wanted. You can see it in my face and I took all of the items and put them in a box and never played with them again. Even though it assemblage, there’s a level of symbolism with me being a gay man, trying to deal with the social and the cultural, at the same time I’m just trying to grow up and be a human being. You’re looking at someone whose sculpture is tied to a political, cultural, social, situation.
That comes through with the artists I’m working with as well. In their cases, it comes through in a more domestic manner, through depictions of interiors, domestic objects.
When I first started sculpting, there were elements of the domestic in my work as well. I have a few pieces called, “Conceptual Furniture”, that are direct reference to my love of the domestic realm. Its furniture that I designed as part of a room I called “the closet” and so these pieces all represent aspects of that exchange I mentioned earlier. They’re all pieces of furniture, so when I’m at the sink and that mirror is there, I am actually washing my hands. Furniture is where this thing started and as an overlap between architecture, anthropology and my love of the domestic realm. For me, all of these things are simultaneous in a way.
Your transgressing the lines between domestic and public spaces through these sculptures also becomes a queer statement, this liminality of not quite belonging in either place. I see it in the works of other queer artists, and it mimics coming out.
I would say, for me at least, given my age and my own path, it’s a kind of “fuck you.” I’m not I the closet, I’m a gay, partnered man, and I have feelings, emotions, and thoughts about the world around me that I’m not going to suppress because they make someone uncomfortable. My job is to not make you comfortable. For the first part of my life, I felt like it was all about making other people comfortable. This sculpture is a kind of acknowledgement of how I feel. You engage this sculpture, you move this mirror, you become me.
Those of us who are threated to being your friend on Facebook, get wonderful glimpses of your domestic space and the way that you assemble rooms. Is there a correlation between your experience of gender and sexuality and the way you conceive of your domestic living spaces?
The answer is yes. When I designed these conceptual piece of furniture, you could damn well take any of them, plop them in my library, and they would look utterly correct. My environment is directly tied to my identity as a queer person. My art is directly tied to my identity as a queer person. When you come to my house I want you to understand my perspective on the world. My perspective is decentralized, its marginalized, its chaotic, constantly moving. All of these things that define what it means to be a queer person. The traditional notion that marginalized populations have less of a center than the normative model. I play with that. You come to my home and on the first level, its decentralized. There’s all kinds of shit everywhere, it doesn’t look like a normal living room. Its eclectic, with every style you could possibly want. But at the same time it’s really cozy. So from an interior design standpoint, I’m playing with someone’s feelings from thinking they’re in the tornado of the Wizard of Oz with all the furniture twirling around them, and at the same time, sitting by a fire, drinking tea, and feeling cozy and warm. Next time you look at any pictures of my place, I bought a really large, Gilded Age rug that would have been in a front parlor. After getting Ulysses to tell me its ok, I cut it up into strips and made them runners throughout my house. It took me weeks to make fringe on the end because it was so well made. At one point you’re aghast because somebody cut this beautiful rug, and then you look at it and its done in a beautiful way so there’s a comforting element about it that makes you feel like you’re at grandma’s house. I find that interesting to put to put us in that place between being the normative and the queer. Queering that rug was cutting it up, taking weeks to put fringe on it, then putting it down in the floor as if I just found it at a flea market. I think you would find the same thing about my sculpture as well. Everything is normative, everything is comfortable, but its slammed together in a way that makes you question, “What the fuck is that about?”
I can see that within the conceptual furniture especially. It has all those recognizable elements but there is that destabilized, queer sense. I know you’ve got a hectic day ahead of you so I’m going to let you go. But thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Your insight touches on many of the things I’m studying and have experienced myself.
If there’s anything I can do to help further with your research or thesis, please let me know.