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Transcription: [00:06:00]
{SPEAKER name="Sharon Reinckens"}
-is to be responsive to your constituency and constantly re-identify who those people are and why you are there. We try to, in our work, we try to be responsive also to emerging issues in our community. If it's violence among youth, we try to think about that and understand what our role is in that issues and to be responsive to that. So it is constantly knowing what is important to people and using our role as a cultural institution to respond to that. That's what we are here for.
[00:06:35]
{SPEAKER name="Eduardo Contreras (interviewer)"}
If somebody asks you what's, you know, what's the difference in working at Anacostia that working at, you know, a museum in New York City or like a museum of art or something like that?
{SPEAKER name="Sharon Reinckens"}
I would say we are a museum about people we're not a museum about things.
{SPEAKER name="Eduardo Contreras (interviewer)"}
Um-hum
[00:06:52]

{SPEAKER name="Eduardo Contreras (interviewer)"}
That's a difference. We are about working with people to inspire them about their own histories and to have them communicate that to their own children to understand the power of culture in that community and to actively use that. A lot of the work in other museums, either there is a curator or somebody who takes this cultural thing and presents it to the public and there is no empowerment to the people that actually produce it. We try to reverse that.
[00:07:21]

{SPEAKER name="Eduardo Contreras (interviewer)"}
Um [[silence]] What would you say has been the most unusual or memorable thing that has happened to you while working at Anacostia?
{SPEAKER name="Sharon Reinckens"}
[[silence]]I did some work a while ago. I don't know if it unusual, but we did a project called black mosaic. It was looking at black immigrants in Washington and it was an opportunity for us to re-focus on exactly what it meant to be black in Washington, who was part of that and who was not and why. And that was very challenging to-
[00:08:00]