Creativity Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Twenty years at the Smithsonian should read like a neat career chapter. Bernice Johnson Reagon won’t let it. Her line turns a prestigious institutional résumé into something more honest: a life still in motion, still negotiating what legacy actually feels like from the inside.

The repetition of “still” does a lot of cultural work. It’s insistence and unfinished business, a refusal to be sealed into the museum logic of labels and completed narratives. “Curator emeritus” is supposed to be a ceremonial landing spot, a title that flatters while quietly moving you out of the building. Reagon treats it like a question mark. “I still plan to figure out what that means” is both practical and sly: institutions love to name you, but they rarely tell you what the name is for once the labor stops being convenient.

Coming from a musician who has always treated song as community infrastructure, not just performance, the quote reads like a soft critique of how culture gets “kept.” The Smithsonian is a memory machine; Reagon’s career has been about living tradition, not freezing it. So the subtext is about control and continuity: Who gets to interpret the work once it’s archived? What happens when the person who built the collection is asked to become part of the collection?

There’s also something movingly human here: aging without surrender. She’s not announcing retirement; she’s describing an ongoing relationship with a place that helped define American cultural memory, while admitting that identity after official roles is its own kind of improvisation.