This is not a statement.
In the recent history of museums, there have been many statements on equity written, but questionable progress towards real change in this direction. There was Excellence and Equity in 1992, Museums Respond to Ferguson in 2014, MASS Action in 2016, and most recently in June 2020, an unprecedented number of statements by museums denouncing racism and aligning themselves with Black Lives Matter. I would venture that another statement is being written somewhere right now as I type this.
Woven between and among those statements and movements over the last 40 years are hundreds, if not thousands, more statements, blogs, publications on the topic of diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility. Millions of hours of thought-work by colleagues across the country. We’ve held conversations, convenings, conferences, protests, and interventions. Multi-million-dollar grants have been awarded.
In the meantime, while statements are being written, conversations held, diversity grants awarded, somewhere a museum worker of color is leaving the field. Somewhere a museum worker of color is sharing their experience in an exit interview, which is dutifully recorded and disregarded as its own statement on the state of the field.
How many statements will it take before we begin to see real change?
The number of statements is, perhaps, unimportant. The essential question remains: What needs to happen to affect substantive change in our field? This is, of course, not to undermine the efficacy of statements. It is important to make your position known, to make a stand of solidarity with communities who are hurting and grieving. But more than words, we must see action. And even more, we must commit ourselves to transparency and accountability around those actions.
Over the coming year, MASS Action is committing itself to holding our institutions accountable to the statements they’ve made committing to racial justice. We are holding up a mirror to our organizations to generate alignment between their words and their actions, and collaboratively working towards the abolition of racism and all its manifestations in our institution. Below, we are sharing a brief timeline of events that have transpired this summer—because to understand where we are going, we have to understand where we have been.
What happened? An annotated timeline of museum responses to the murder of George Floyd.
In the days following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25th, as a global uprising began in protest of the systemic violence against Black bodies, companies and organizations of all types began to post statements of solidarity. On June 2, via the enigmatic social campaign #BlackoutTuesday, a large number of museums—institutions which had previously been silent on social justice issues—waded in with statements expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter. This was a curious phenomenon, particularly for those of us in equity and justice-related movements in the field who remembered the silence from museums after Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, which catalyzed Aleia Brown and Adrianne Russell’s work around #MuseumsRespondtoFerguson.
But now six years later, on this day in June, 2020, there were all kinds of statements from museums. Some statements read as an earnest wake up call. Some recognized their need to “do better”. Some were empty--quite literally, just empty black squares with no accompanying text. Some read as virtue signaling, while others as a safety cue to Black staff or patrons. Many expressed outrage and solidarity, pointing fingers outside their walls at the culprits of racism and white supremacy (but forgetting what many of us learned in elementary school that when you point a finger, three point back at you). In several instances, museums posted statements and then days later returned to social media to post another statement clarifying or apologizing for their previous statement.
On this same day, this day-of-museum-statements, the American Alliance of Museums’ Director of Inclusion Andrew Plumley posted an article on AAM’s website, cautioning museum leaders:
Do not consider making a public statement without making an internal one first. In our experience, organizations have often released public statements about current events without addressing the issues internally with staff, leading to many staff members of color feeling oppressed within their own organizations. Your museum’s public commitment to DEAI must align with its internal one.
His words would immediately ring true. In the hours and days following the tidal wave of museum statements, audiences and staff alike were already calling foul. Social media responses were coming in from the public, while heated discussions were happening internally among staff.
On June 5, in an essay entitled “Enough Already with the Statements of Solidarity, Arts World” Kaisha S. Johnson, Founding Director of Women of Color in the Arts, stated it plainly: “There’s no room for solidarity in white supremacy culture.” Advocating for more than expressing platitudes and sentiments, she goes on to say, “[This] isn’t about ‘changing hearts and minds,’ … [it’s] about systems change.”
By June 7, the New York Times picked up on the growing tension between the statements and their public reception, observing that to many staff and audiences, museum statements of solidarity and posting black boxes on Instagram were “judged insufficient”; museums instead needed to address their own institutional racism. “It’s not enough to issue these toothless statements,” #MuseumsRespondtoFerguson’s Russell was quoted from a tweet earlier that week, “and that’s why I wish museums would just be quiet unless they’re going to tell the truth.” Pointing to the systems of white supremacy baked into museum structures, the NYT article’s authors observe that, “Such efforts to meaningfully contribute to the conversation are especially sensitive because many of the institutions are led by white executives who answer to boards largely made up of wealthy white trustees. That composition has long fueled suspicion that arts organizations are inherently resistant to — or incapable of — real change.”
In a conversation hosted by AAM on June 9, Lonnie G. Bunch III stated that if museums wanted to respond to this moment, they should be turning the lens inward, and “getting their own house in order” to ensure that “your house reflects the world that we think we serve.”
On June 10, in a powerful call to action, wrapped in an elegant cartography metaphor, Dr. Porchia Moore underscored this disconnect between the statements and lived experience. She describes how museum professionals (often those with less access to structural power, and often BIPOC) have been creating “maps” for institutions to use to drive systemic change, and yet most of these efforts have been silenced--or perhaps even worse: tolerated enough to survive but not supported enough to thrive. [See the definition of repressive tolerance in the MASS Action Toolkit, page 41.] “By these solidarity statements,” she writes, “one would assume that museums were using our maps. While in fact, Black lives are the very ones which have been negatively impacted by the current furloughs, lay-offs, policies, and practices of museums.”
Throughout the month of June, in another remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, occurrence, large numbers of former and current museum staffers began sharing personal accounts of racism in their institutions via a series of open letters, petitions, newly-created websites, and social posts, each detailing how the externally-facing statements made by their museums did not match the experiences they have had internally. These accounts challenged the tactic of museums that “focus on symbolic and temporary gestures to appear inclusive and diverse, while avoiding real structural change.” They demanded the cessation of “performative allyship and virtue signaling” and instead called for a commitment to action and accountability. Almost all of them shared robust lists of recommendations—or what Dr. Moore identified as “maps”—for what museums can do now to move forward to become more racially just spaces.
So many open letters and petitions were distributed that an Annotated Bibliography of Institutional Callouts was created by Dirt in collaboration with Art + Museum Transparency to serve as a digital resource for documenting and archiving this material in order to “highlight the power of collective, community-oriented response to such a lack of accountability and deep inequities.”
These open letters and petitions were pulling at loose threads of the curtain, unraveling it to reveal a pervasive culture of white supremacy within our institutions. In several instances, the letters and public actions were effective in creating action from institutions who might have otherwise repressed or ignored the requests from staff had they stayed internal:
On July 6, in response to the demands enumerated by the NYC-based museum workers collective For the Culture, the Met announced thirteen commitments to anti-racism in an effort “to align words and deeds, to bring meaningful change through systemic improvement in our policies, practices, and priorities” with a pledged $3–5 million fund to support the initiatives.
And on July 11, a senior curator resigned from SFMOMA after a petition circulated calling for his resignation due to white supremacist language. Another staff person, the director of external communications, resigned after deleting a comment on the museum’s instagram by a former Black staff member, which sparked the No Neutral Alliance collective (which is also calling for the resignation of the museum’s director).
Notably, and painfully, several staff of color have also resigned from their museum posts in the past few months, citing oppressive work environments. This bears repeating: In the middle of a pandemic, in the midst of layoffs and a global financial crisis, several staff of color chose to leave their institutions because it would be less traumatizing to face financial uncertainty than to stay employed at that institution. Let that sink in for a minute.
In an essay entitled “No longer in extremis,” one such museum worker, Andrea Montiel de Shuman, announced her resignation from the Detroit Institute of Art and shared a series of incidents ranging from disappointing-to-traumatizing at her former museum. She implores both her former employer and the field at large to consider how it negatively impacts both staff and visitors of color. She challenges the reader with the following questions:
“How can we believe in the transformative power of [the museum] and yet so blatantly ignore or even deny its potential to inflict severe pain and trauma? Why do we deserve the support of our diverse communities if we do not do our best to respect them and incorporate their diverse perspectives?”
Dr. Kelli Morgan, a curator at Newfields, resigned from her position describing a toxic work culture that fails people of color. In an essay entitled “To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today” (written and posted a few weeks before her ultimate resignation), she references the “disingenuous statements of solidarity that have flooded social media and museum websites in the last few weeks,” many of which read as “flagrant hypocrisy in the face of deliberate institutional obstruction, hostility, and erasure of Black curators and employees.” She goes on to share the unjust paradox many Black museum employees experience: “What we do not speak honestly enough about are the very distinct ways in which racism and sexism are utilized to traumatize us and oftentimes undermine our work—the very work that our respective institutions claim they want—and often recruit us to do.”
What happens now? An invitation for Accountability.
Throughout all of this, the MASS Action collective—comprised of museum staff from across the country—had been convening over the summer to talk about what we had been witnessing in museum responses to Black Lives Matter, and the staff and public responses to those statements. It is evident that in the intervening years between #MuseumsRespondtoFerguson and the current moment, there has been enough of a shift in museum positioning that more institutions felt called to step forward in solidarity. But why, then, does it feel like in many ways nothing has changed? As expressed in the articles and letters cited above, many of the statements ring hollow, absent of real commitments to action and accountability.
We were curious, after the carefully-crafted social media posts were made, and the audience’s responses dutifully monitored and managed, what is happening inside these museums? Are institutions still engaged in the anti-racism solidarity work that they signaled on social media?
With these questions in mind, we launched a campaign exploring how we might narrow the gap between institutional positioning and institutional accountability. Over the past two months, the MASS Action collective has been aggregating data from the 1,088 AAM-accredited museums in the US. [We chose AAM-accredited museums as a starting point, wanting a representative sample of type of museums, geographic area, and budget size.] We have been cataloguing statements made in the wake of the uprising, and in the coming weeks, we will share our framework and points of analysis from this data. Our ultimate goal is to support museums, as public institutions, holding themselves accountable to their publics in their articulated anti-racism work.
This work is not about calling anyone out for the sake of it or public shaming. We consider each statement, or lack of statement, issued by a museum on the topic of racial justice as a public record, and as such, it is an invitation for the public to engage in further dialogue on the topic. Further, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi states that being anti-racist requires “persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination." So, we are proposing an open and ongoing mechanism for institutions to self-examine through the lens of anti-racism and make their learning visible to their publics.
If your museum didn’t write a statement because you don’t see it as your role, we encourage you to reconsider what it means to be a museum, a public institution, and understand how your silence in the face of racialized violence is complicity. If your museum did not make a statement because you knew it would ring hollow because you could not back up your words with actions, we recognize this tension and encourage you to continue learning and realigning yourself with anti-racist practice. If your museum made a solidarity statement for optics, but your institution does not yet fully understand what it means to undertake anti-racism work, we appreciate you opening the door to this conversation, and encourage you to do the self-examination requires to align your public-facing words with your actions. If your museum made a statement, is openly, transparently, and fully committed to a longitudinal process of anti-racism work, we thank you for creating a model of possibility.
In undertaking this project, we are grounding ourselves in radical hope--that is, a commitment to the possibility of something that transcends our current ability to grasp it. We may not yet know the path to the future, but to borrow Dr. Moore’s cartography metaphor, we wouldn’t be making maps if we didn’t have hope that it was possible to get there. Quoting from adrienne maree brown, she writes that this a “healing behavior”—the ability to “look at something broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.” As a Critical Race Theorist, Dr. Moore states that she interrogates museums “not because I abhor them or because I want to see them die; but because I want to witness and be a part of their necessary rebirth. I love museums, deeply. I just don’t like where they appear to be headed.”
In “Enough Already with the Statements of Solidarity, Arts World,” Kaisha S. Johnson quotes James Baldwin: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” On one of our recent MASS Action calls, Janeen Bryant also picked up this thread, pointing us to the words of Che Guevara who said, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
Because this work is grounded in revolutionary love and radical hope, what we are proposing is not about making incremental “diversity” reforms. Reforming an oppressive institution only serves to make the oppression less visible, but no less visceral to the people experiencing it. The anger that people are feeling about museums posting empty statements is justified. We are talking about real violence here, real lives lost. The idea that an organization could post a black square on June 2, and then go back to business as usual on June 3 is not okay. Museum “normal” has not been okay for museum staff of color, ever. So returning to normal is not an acceptable path forward.
In their transparent and detailed Anti-Racist Commitment statement, Capacity Interactive points to the viral essay on the Covid pandemic by Arundhati Roy. Substitute the words “social uprising” for “pandemic”, and it equally applies to this moment:
"Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging...dead ideas....or we can walk through lightly...ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
There is an urgency to this moment, and we must be willing to fight for it. We must stay watchful, hold ourselves and our institutions accountable for our words, and push towards transformative action and the abolition of racism. We hope in the coming weeks you will join us in this movement towards racial justice in our institutions and beyond.
A luta continua.
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