Back in 2018, having just graduated from the University of Illinois with my BFA in Painting and Art History, I took a summer day trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I had just completed my thesis, where I had reimagined paintings from art history from a contemporary female context. I remember walking through the gallery of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills and being so inspired by her ability to morph into different tropes of women while maintaining artistic license as photographer, model, and director. I then remember walking across the hall to another gallery in which a larger than life display of Richard Prince’s Untitled (girlfriend) portraits were hung. Richard Prince’s women were all topless and standing next to various motorcycles. I remember feeling annoyed by the whole exhibit. I felt like Richard Prince’s art was reductive while Cindy Sherman’s was progressive. With the two exhibitions right next to each other, it felt as if Sherman’s work was being mocked. The two artists were given similar amounts of square footage in the museum, so they must see them as equally important? I kept walking and made my way to the wonderful Post-Impressionist part of the museum.
One of the things I love about museums are the labels next to the artwork. I began to read a label next to the painting Portrait of Jeanne Wenz by Lautrec and saw that they mentioned Suzanne Valadon, one of my favorite post-impressionist artists and a huge inspiration behind my self portrait thesis painting. However, they mentioned her in the label as a “friend/sitter” for Lautrec. While this is true, she was also a renowned artist of her time. There must have been a mistake. I found another label that went more in depth on her. It read, “Suzanne Valadon, a former circus performer, model, and aspiring artist, with whom Lautrec would have a nearly three-year relationship.” A quick google search of Suzanne Valadon will tell you she was inspirational, not aspirational. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (wikipedia). Why would the Art Institute erase this history?
Similarly, as I went searching through the museum, I found one exhibit by a black artist in a small back gallery room of the museum. If square footage tells you anything about value, topless white women trump a black artist in a museum almost every time. So, I concluded, this was by design. Museums are meant to be reliable and trusted cultural institutions with accurate information. However, until we acknowledge that museums are built on white supremacist ideals, we will never have true inclusion and representation.
White men dominate the art world and museums were built on white supremacist doctrine due to their “historic ties to the Atlantic slave trade,” that “have remained embedded in institutional and individual practices,” (The White Supremacy Elephant in the Room). Until museums recognize and actively work to combat inequality and racism within their institutions both internally and externally, systematic inequality will remain.
Let’s take a look at some facts. “According to a survey published by the Mellon Foundation in 2018, 16% of curatorial staff are people of color (the term used in the data). Those figures don’t come close to reflecting the demographics of the U.S. — which is about 40% people of color, according to recent census estimates. And it certainly doesn’t come close to reflecting the diversity of U.S. urban areas, where many major museums are located,” (LA Times, Are Art Museums Still Racist?).
“A 2017 survey conducted by AAM shows that 89.3% of museum board members in the U.S. are white.” In an article by HypeBeast, they cite a study done in 2019 by Williams College spanning across 18 major US museums. They found that at these museums, “85% of the works were by white artists and 87% were by men. Black artists had the lowest share of any racial group, with just 1.2% of the works, while 9% were by Asian artists and just 2.8% were by Hispanic and Latinx artists. The four largest groups represented across all 18 museums in terms of gender and ethnicity were white men (representing 75.7% of works in museums across the country), white women (10.8%), Asian men (7.5%) and Hispanic/Latino men (2.6%).”
Thinking back to my experience as a woman at the Art Institute, I am forced to recognize the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. I am able to walk into a museum and see people that look like me hanging on the walls (granted most of them are nude women painted by white men, but I still have representation). One of the things during the Black Lives Matter movement that stood out to me the most was the emphasis on white women being complicit in systematic racism because it benefited them. In order to not be part of the problem, one must be part of the solution. This is exactly what anti-racism means.
According to an article published by the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “Being antiracist results from a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily. These choices require ongoing self-awareness and self-reflection as we move through life. In the absence of making antiracist choices, we (un)consciously uphold aspects of white supremacy, white-dominant culture, and unequal institutions and society. Being racist or antiracist is not about who you are; it is about what you do.”
It is not enough to put diversity and inclusion in your core values, you have to actively combat racism through internal and external changes. Museums need to admit they are part of the problem and recognize their part in systemic racism and injustice. Self-reflection on an individual and institutional level are required to fight against a predominantly white museum staff, artists, and museum visitors.
In the LA Times article titled, “Are Art Museums Still Racist?” they speak with Nizan Shaked, a professor of art history and museum studies at Cal State Long Beach, who says, “‘There are two uprisings against museums,”...“One is around economics and the ethics of wealth, and the other is around issues of race and historical discrimination, and they meet at the infrastructural level.”’
One issue that needs to be dealt with at the economic and board level of the museum is art acquisition. Oftentimes, “acquisitions can be driven by board members who are also collectors and therefore have an interest in promoting the work of the artists they collect,” (Are Art Museums Still Racist?).
Another issue is that of museum staff, with diversity of staff decreasing as you move up the chain of command. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement many museums are making hiring decisions with diversity in mind. The Bronx Museum of the Arts recently created the role of Social Justice Creator and hired Jasmine Wahi to fill the position. When asked why she thought this position never existed before, she answered, “‘To borrow from one of my favorite social theorists, Bell Hooks, it’s because of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. The lack of recognition that there has been a longstanding need to decolonize and diversify is evidence of the insidious and systemic entrenchment of White hegemony in institutional space.”’ (HypeBeast).
While the Social Justice Creator position will bring forth change at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, some say this effort only supports “symbolic efforts to be inclusive to members of minority groups, which creates the impression of diversity rather than actual systemic change.” “The danger with tokenization is that it gives everyone else a pass — it alleviates the responsibility from the rest of the curators and the institution at large from doing the necessary decolonial and social justice work across the board,” Wahi says. “Institutions should be interested in doing this type of work across the board — and some have already been doing this kind of work for years. You don’t need a ‘social justice curator’ to do the work. Just do it.”
The reality of the situation must be recognized before it can be rectified. Laura Lott, President & CEO of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), wrote a letter that was published in Museum Magazine in 2021. In it she cites a 2020 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers conducted by Wilkening Consulting which found that “nearly 70 percent of museum-goers felt that museums should take a position on social justice issues.” She writes how this report “provides a framework” for museums when taking a social justice position. “The framework calls on museums to use evidence and show their work, make the link to their mission explicit, explain why objectivity or neutrality is impossible, and display an openness to dialogue and mutual respect.”
Being anti-racist is not neutrality, it is continued and purposeful action within an institution. One of the things that needs to happen across all museums and cultural institutions is a strategic plan to combat racism. By creating a strategic plan and implementing it internally and externally, museums can interweave notions of equity and inclusion into their exhibitions, collection, programs, and people, including the board of trustees, staff, and volunteer groups.
The Tucson Museum of Art (TMA) in Arizona is doing just that with their implementation of their IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) plan. Back in 2016, TMA began the evaluation process where they assessed their outreach to traditionally underserved communities, identified disparities in exhibition development and artworks in their collection, and addressed internal challenges, such as diversifying the museum board. (A Roadmap for Equity). Then, in 2017, “the museum created a Department of Community Engagement to integrate a broad range of community stakeholders within TMA’s collections, exhibitions, and programs through bidirectional collaborations and community partnerships.”
In order to avoid the historical challenges of tokenism on museum boards, “TMA established new committees, including the community initiatives committee, which serves as a bridge between the institution and local Indigenous tribes, Latinx, and communities of color.” Finally, in early 2018, TMA drafted their three-year strategic IDEA plan, which was adopted in December 2019. Clearly museums cannot become centers for inclusion, equity, and anti-racism overnight, but doing meaningful evaluation and having a strategic plan in place can allow cultural institutions to do it the right way.
The AAM published an article titled, “The White Supremacy Elephant in the Room,” in which they discussed what can be done at the institutional level to combat racism. Among the things they mention are learning your institution’s history (and owning it), building awareness, reviewing, assessing, and changing, creating a group of champions for DEI work, revisiting your organization’s value statement, and allocating significant funds for internal DEI initiatives.
So when will museums be fully inclusive? The answer is never. In her AAM article, “A Totally Inclusive Museum,” Cecile Shellman writes, “The point of inclusion—from the standpoint of becoming increasingly culturally responsive, responsible, aware, and competent—is to do less harm than we and others have done in the past—ultimately to do no harm”…”Inclusion starts with self-reflection, with introspection…and it never ends.”
There has been significant and notable progress made in the last 10 years, and most recently since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. After a 2017 survey, done by AAM that encompassed around 850 institutions, found that almost half of US museum boards (46%) were totally white, the AAM launched Facing Change, “an initiative supporting board diversity at 51 museums in Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi and Minneapolis-St. Paul. It is backed by $4m in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alice L. Walton Foundation and the Ford Foundation,” (Survey: What Progress Have US Museums Made on Diversity After a Year of Racial Reckoning).
In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art deaccessioned seven works by white male artists and raised $16 million to purchase works by under-represented artists. Other museums have made diversifying their collection a top priority. “Among the 24 artists whose work Whitney has acquired since last June, it says that 23 identify as people of color or female.”
Another avenue museums have tackled is adjusting the labeling and interpretive strategies for their collections so they can tell more diverse stories. “ The J. Paul Getty Museum’s antiquities department, for example, is revising its online descriptions of Greek, Etruscan and Roman artifacts depicting Black Africans. Many of the descriptions “overlooked issues of race, gender, violence, and enslavement”, the curators wrote in a blog post. “This silence is dangerous, as it leaves space for anachronistic assumptions and stereotypes to flourish.” These few examples are among many changes to cultural institutions that have been spurred by the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the MeToo movement.
If museums truly want to rectify the situation and create solutions that make museums more welcoming for people of color, they need to first own up to their histories. Hiring a diversity coordinator isn’t enough. There needs to be representation at all levels from marketing to curating to education and programming. There needs to be a staff and a board of trustees that are representative of the culture surrounding them. In order to make meaningful changes rather than empty symbols of diversity and inclusion, museums need to create worthwhile evaluation methods and develop critical action plans that put equity, inclusion, and anti-racism at the forefront. And museums do not need to reinvent the wheel. They can look to people and organizations that have been working on this for years. This might mean a complete re-evaluation rather than a reshaping of best practices, especially since museums were built on colonialist values.
SOURCES
https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/01/the-white-supremacy-elephant-in-the-room/
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-10-22/art-museums-racism-covid-reset
https://hypebeast.com/2020/9/art-museums-steps-to-address-racism-exclusive-interviews
https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/being-antiracist
https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/01/from-the-president-and-ceo-museums-and-racial-equality/
https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/01/a-roadmap-for-equity/
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/05/25/exclusive-survey-what-progress-have-us-museums-made-on-diversity-after-a-year-of-racial-reckoning