A project to challenge and re-imagine institutional policies and systems that perpetuate oppressions in museums.
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Happy May, y’all! It’s been a minute since we’ve posted, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. We wanted to drop a note about what we’ve been up to and what we’ve got coming up this year, and we’re hoping to connect with some of you this next year in person and online.
Over this past year, multiple organizations have reached out to us to support them in their anti-racist journey and to help make concrete structural changes. We’re happy to share that we’ve used the Museums & Race Report Card to forge a community of practice. In partnership with Brooke Hutchison, we facilitated a course at Bank Street Graduate School of Education for current and future museum professionals. The course focused on organizational change and implementing racial equity practices.
In partnership with Brooke Hutchison and Enrich Chicago, joined in examining the overlaps of caste, race, and white supremacy, and providing a systemic context for exploring the dynamics of each. Attendees explored these oppressive systems and their cultural contexts through the lens of racism in arts and culture.
We’ve also met with multiple museums to address how they can integrate the Museums & Race Report Card into their strategic work. Later this year in this space, you’ll be hearing the stories of a couple of these organizations and their process towards implementing a more radical future. We’ll also be at the ASTC conference with representatives from those museums to share their perspectives and lessons learned from engaging in this work with us. As the year continues, we look forward to finding other places to connect with people throughout the museum field about our work whether that’s at conferences, online, or through new relationships.
And yes, we will be at AAM later this month. We’ve carefully considered our participation and despite some of our misgivings from past interactions, AAM remains the largest gathering of museum professionals in the country This is another example of the power imbalance between organizations and individual professionals, but the conference is one of the few ways we can find this level of community together. Our presence at the conference allows us to find like-minded professionals who are committed to forging equity and organizational anti-racist practices.
We also remain cognizant of the fact that there are many people within AAM who are themselves working to implement a more equitable system. Much of AAM’s communications recognize this work. We hope that AAM will hold itself to a greater practice of accountability as they transition between leaders. We will continue to encourage AAM and the museum community at large to make meaningful change.
Finally, as our work continues to grow we’re looking to add new people to be directly involved in our work, later this year. Museums & Race is a non-hierarchical space, and we are mindful of the differences in each members’ time commitments. Depending on their time availability, incoming new members have the option of joining the steering committee, helping with our website, putting together conference events, or coaching sites on ways to use the Report Card. If you’re interested, keep an eye out for announcements in the space and let us know on our contact us/support us page.
We were asked about our accessibility efforts last year at one of the conferences. One of the things we’ve learned is just how inaccessible pdfs can be. We’ve got a few more improvements planned for later this year based on feedback from y’all, but we wanted to get the current version (3.0) of the Report Card up and out right away in a new format.
Presenting the Museums & Race Report Card in both easy to read .docx format and pretty .pdf formats! You’ll find it in both English and Spanish. The Word doc is saved in a read only format. As always: Use it. Share it. Cite it.
We’re always listening, so if you’ve got feedback on how to improve the report card, please let us know!
As a reminder, we are all volunteers and we are busy with day jobs to pay the bills. And we cycle through membership to keep folks from burning out during their careers, so some of the skills we’ve had in the past, we need again. If you’ve got the time and inclination to help out, let us know. Do you have design skills? Maybe you are a native Spanish speaker? Drop us a line!
At our professional gatherings, the Museums & Race team has been committed to making sure there is a space for marginalized voices. While our beginnings in 2015 were humble, our intentions have remained the same. Our presence at annual meetings and conferences have served to disrupt conversations that often completely ignore or co-opt the labor of museum practitioners of color, especially those who claim additional marginalized identities. Our lounge at the AAM annual meeting was our flagship space for three years: a space for people to gather in solidarity, to have tough conversations, to rest, to find joy in meeting up with colleagues, and to lift up artists from local communities surrounding the conference location. Many of these things are counter to the pace and goals of professional meetings, which encourage high-intensity, often transitory interactions, and making as much profit as possible while ignoring the communities surrounding the conference location. Every year we have participated, we receive feedback on how valuable and important our lounge space has become to AAM Annual Meeting attendees. For many, AAM is the only conference they attend for professional development, and can only do so because their institutions sponsor their attendance.
The existence of our space at AAM has been contingent on a good faith partnership with AAM’s annual meeting planning team. This partnership ended abruptly and without notice in 2020. M&R reached out to AAM staff to ensure everyone on their end was aware of our continued interest in and intention to produce a lounge space in 2020. The response we received was incredibly disheartening and disturbing. After a direct conversation with AAM staff, the M&R steering committee was informed that Museums & Race would not receive a dedicated space within the Expo Hall at the 2020 Annual Meeting. Instead, AAM selected Museum Hue as the sole partner for DEAI programming in the Expo Hall, and any activities M&R proposed would need to be cleared through them. No one at M&R had been informed or consulted prior to AAM moving forward with this plan, and no one within AAM appeared to have taken note of our past MOUs or lounge activities as evidence of our interest in continuing the partnership. We came away from this initial discussion with the sense that AAM views all of the equity initiatives and organizations like M&R as interchangeable.
AAM’s decision to exclude M&R from initial planning conversations put both groups in an extremely awkward position, leaving little room for M&R to negotiate or find solutions to ensure our presence beyond our session during the annual meeting. This is a common tactic, an age-old game of pitting marginalized groups against each other to fight over the meager resources, while the institutions themselves continue to uphold inequitable power dynamics. For DEAI work, this is especially true. However, we refuse to engage in scarcity-mindset behavior and we believe there is room for everyone in this work. We support the important and valuable work of Museum Hue as well as our colleagues in other equity coalitions working for change.
Over the last decade, the museum field has been fortunate to witness the growth of several independent equity coalitions. Each of them has provided frameworks and perspectives for challenging dominant institutional narratives, which have been the foundation of this industry. By assuming the work of our colleagues at Museum Hue is interchangeable with that of M&R, AAM has inadvertently perpetuated the institutional paternalism and white supremacy culture which it claims to challenge. How does AAM continue to square its vocal support of change and inclusion—plastered throughout its social media and website since 2020—without considering the ways in which it might be a part of the problem?
It has become clear to us and others within our equity sphere that AAM does not find it necessary to invite the widest range of perspectives to share space at the annual meeting. We want to highlight that this is not simply a one-off incident, but part of an ongoing trend in which M&R and other equity groups have been slowly silenced or pushed out. This trend ranges from severing existing good faith partnerships, to consistently scheduling DEAI sessions on the same day (and usually the last day) at conferences, to publishing the work of dominant voices on AAM’s platforms without critical examination of the source(s) of its content.
For the foreseeable future, we are disheartened to say there will not be an M&R lounge space at the AAM Annual Meeting. We hope this changes in the future, as the AAM conference is a place from which many museums across the country draw their cues. We hope AAM—and the wider museum community—understands that the field of equity work is expansive and constantly evolving. Our professional organizations should be supporting museum practitioners in growing their capacity to grasp the nuances of these varied perspectives and organizations, not encouraging false, binary choices. We would encourage anyone who is a member of AAM and a supporter of M&R to express their concerns, or ask AAM staff about the exclusion of M&R.
The Museums and Race Lounge at [the 2018] AAM Conference made me feel at home. It quickly became my “HQ” during the conference. I’m grateful for the roundtable sessions at the Lounge and the opportunity to start an important dialogue with other museum professionals on mixed-race identity in the industry—it was a moving experience to have this conversation (a first at AAM, as some attendees told us) in a space challenging and confronting issues on race.
Andrea Neighbors, Asian Pacific American Center
We don’t want to go back to “normal”, but we are ready to see you all in person again! We made an appearance at AASLH in Little Rock last fall, and we’re planning more open discussions at conferences later this year. Right now, we are getting ready for AAM 2022 in Boston. As always, there’s a lot to talk about. The same old stories with new twists keep happening, so join us to move beyond talk and take some action!
We’ll be leading A Museums & Race Report Card Workshop for Reflecting on and Renewing Your Institution’s Journey on Sunday, 5/22 at 10:15am. This will be a practical workshop where you not only learn about the Report Card, but you get to work in small groups, practice applying it to different scenarios, and figure out how you can use it with your organization.Keep an eye out for Museums & Race folks wandering around with our shirts and buttons on. You can expect us to join in any conversation, official or not, about museums and race. Flag us down and chat about how you can help out, talk about issues you’re having at your site, or just shoot the breeze! And hey, if you want your own shirt, you can order one yourself.
how will your museum measure up?
You spoke. We listened.
Museums & Race Report Card 3.0 is your tool for TRUTH, before attempting RECONCILIATION.
The report card still covers the same basic categories (Governance, Funding, Representation, Responsiveness, Resources, and Transparency). AND it now includes a rubric and action steps to help your organization build context for each grade, and then take action to improve and transform.
Take it. Use it. Share it.
And, as always, Cite it.
#CollectiveLiberation
#TruthBeforeReconciliation
#WeAllGetFree
#MuseumsAreNotNeutral
Want to learn more about the Report Card?
#CollectiveLiberation is an opportunity for EVERYONE to shape and wholly transform the future of museums
![Image description: blue background with star border; [collective liberation] disrupt, dismantle, manifest, June 2nd - 4th, 2021; logos for Museums and Race, Visitors of Color, Museum Workers Speak, MASSAction, The Incluseum, Museums Are Not Neutral, Death to Museums, and The Empathetic Museum.](https://museumsandrace2016.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/collective-liberation-title.png?w=960)
Registration is now open for [Collective Liberation]: Disrupt, Dismantle, Manifest!
We are very excited for our lineup this year. By registering for the convening, you will have access to all of the sessions. Attendees will receive an email with session links at the start of each day.
Registration is free with an optional Pay What You Can. Payments will go toward paying speakers and the fund for Museum Workers Speak.
Please note:
For any questions regarding registration, please contact museumequitycoalition@gmail.com
Antiracist Convening Schedule
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 2021
11 am EDT / 8 am PDT
Coffee Chat + Check-in
Join Coalition members for pre-session conversations.
Chat with fellow convening attendees and check-in on what is top of mind for you.
12 Noon EDT / 9 am PDT
The Narcissistic Abuse of Cultural Institutions
Presenters: Andrea Montiel de Schuman and Dr. Kelli Morgan
This discussion between Andrea Montiel and Dr. Kelli Morgan will help identify narcissistic abusive patterns in the museum field, acknowledging the severe psychological consequences of being exposed to such environments for long periods of time. Recognizing that the museum field will not change tomorrow, we will share recommended ways to manage, set boundaries and overcome trauma. It’s going to continue to take time, and the process will continue to be painful.
In the past year, since resigning, Dr Kelli Morgan and I faced extreme emotions of grief, urgency for change. We have experienced the powerful ways in which institutions retaliate and seek to hoard as much power for as long as they can, knowing that their time is up. We have spent time healing and rethinking approaches to face the crisis in the field.
We fully believe that the time is up for those who have enabled and fostered abusive workplaces: this is why they are panicking. But the change/transition will take more than removing directors: it’s going to take dismantling enablers and complex systems & reorganizing power dynamics in meaningful ways. We believe that museum workers need to find ways to heal from trauma in the process, especially since institutions have powerful resources at hand.
2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT
Bigger Than the Internet: Museums and the Digital Colonization of the Web
Presenter: Adriel Luis
Museums increasingly express interest in equity, social justice, and even decolonization, in large part due to their growing investment in online spaces where such topics have risen to the top of public consciousness. This investment has also led to heightened dependence on internet and social media platforms which center profit and gain, often through data mining, invasive advertisements, misinformation, and other behavior which run counter to principles of free and open society, and mutual flourishing. These practices mirror the resource extraction by empire-building campaigns such as the Wilkes Expedition, which helped establish the U.S.’ earliest museums.
This session investigates the relationship between museums and exploitive data collection practices, from their colonial histories to their uncertain futures. In order for museums to truly be places for people of color, they must not simply “include” us, but must dismantle their traditions and frameworks that center Western knowledge and perpetually disenfranchise our belief systems.If museums are committed to their “inclusive” engagement of racialized, Disabled, and queer people on social media, they cannot ignore the disproportionate hostilities and exploitations that threaten these populations online. Otherwise, it is an incomplete, ill-informed vision of social justice.
4 pm EDT / 1 pm PDT
Local Contexts: Grounding Indigenous Rights
Presenters: Jane Anderson, Janette Hamilton-Pearce, Maui Hudson, Felicia Garcia, Corrie Roe
Every Indigenous community has cultural and biological collections within archives, libraries, and museums that they do not own, do not control, and cannot govern circulation over. Significant information about these collections, including names and proper provenance information is absent. Increasing digitization across the cultural heritage sector continues to disregard Indigenous rights. This affects cultural memory, the accuracy of historical narratives, and present day Indigenous culture, health, and well-being. It is a critical matter for Indigenous knowledge and data sovereignty.
Local Contexts recognizes the sovereignty that Indigenous communities have over knowledge and data that comes from lands, territories, and waters. Local Contexts is developing a model that addresses the problem of public domain materials and third party owned Indigenous content divorced from local communities. Local Contexts offers a system of digital labelling to intervene in the structural colonial legacy of Indigenous erasure. We will introduce the Local Contexts (localcontexts.org) initiative, including the Local Contexts Hub. This Hub is planned for launch in July. The Hub is a portal that will allow communities to adapt the Labels and researchers and institutions to generate Notices.
6 pm EDT / 3 pm PDT
Let’s Get Real: Skill Building Break Outs
Join us for a set of concurrent sessions to sharpen your antiracism skill building around Accountability Matrixes with members of the MASS Action Accountability Workgroup, Land Acknowledgements with Jaclyn Roessel, and Curating Disability with Camille Bethune-Brown.
Creating an Accountability Matrix | Sara Phalen, Gretchen Jennings, Juline Chevalier
Curating Disability | Camille Bethune-Brown
Land Acknowledgments as Catalysts for Action | Jaclyn Roessel
THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 2021
11 am EDT / 8 am PDT
Coffee Chat + Check-in
Join Coalition members for pre-session conversations. Chat with fellow convening attendees and check-in on what is top of mind for you.
12 Noon EDT / 9 am PDT
Limitations on traditional funding models
Presenters: Camille-Mary Sharp
This moderated conversation addresses the limitations that traditional funding models (specifically: corporate sponsorship and philanthropy, but also board governance) impose on our push for radical change in museums. In particular, this session will examine the case of climate change education and initiatives in museums, troubling the recent push for climate-oriented philanthropy and the rise of corporate-funded exhibitions that focus (problematically) on individual responsibility for the climate crisis. The goal of this session will be for participants to leave encouraged to think “beyond divestment,” since mining-intensive “green energy” industries have shown to replicate the oppressive systems of oil and gas, and re-imagine the future of the field’s funding and leadership structures.
2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is – A Critical Look at Co-Creation and Collaboration Beyond the Buzzwords
Presenters: David Valentine, Choua Her, Robby Callahan Schreiber
When it comes to moving the needle on social justice in the field, museums typically involve Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities as a surface level way to underscore their own progress while changing very little about how they operate. This tendency to center the museum, rather than improving their equity standing, (re)creates patterns of performative and self-serving behaviors that actively harm communities and damage relationships in longstanding ways. We see this often when BIPOC-led or centered orgs and individuals are brought into projects that are already in motion, for what might arguably be called “token inclusion,” and yet are still not given a seat at the table when it comes to decision-making throughout the process. These projects are also often funded externally which points to a lack of institutional investment in the work itself. In other words, it seems that these projects only exist when the cost can be shuffled onto someone else and the work stops when the money stops.
In this session, we explore the do’s and don’ts of authentic community engagement. Moving beyond a list of things to check off and mark as done, and informed by reflections about our NSF-funded RAPID: Advancing Community Conversations that Intersect STEM and Racial Justice project, we will share a resource we’ve drafted for making critical decisions around collaboration and co-creation with community members. This resource will highlight:
4 pm EDT / 1 pm PDT
Creative reckoning: The fall and rise of a BIPOC Creative
Presenters: Britt Oates, Heather Hope Kuruvilla, Kathren Lee, Katie Sullivan, Marlena Matuta, Sarah Olivo
We meet, we have fun, and we get shit done. But not before stumbling through some of it first. This is an open, blunt, and honest discussion of how Agate Creative came together as strangers to refute white supremacy culture in our places of work and reimagine and revolutionize the traditional and oppressive museum structure through transformational experiences, conversations starters, resource share, and beyond. On our path, we realized many of the patterns and practices we were attempting to address within museums had carried over into our own space. We were repeating the “way things had always been done” without question, self-reflection, push-back, or growth. Together, we came to see the toxicity we were attempting to address was also internalized. In this discussion, we will explore how we recognized, named, and worked to dismantle the toxic “norms” within ourselves and our work histories to collectively form a stronger Creative.
6 pm EDT / 3 pm PDT
Art to Action: Capacity-Building Break Outs
Join us for a set of concurrent sessions to investigate the powerful role of art and design in dismantling systems of oppression within the museum and cultural fields.
Art and Inner Shifts | Sabrina Mooroogen
Dismantling through Design Justice | Rina Alfonso, Isabella Bruno
Confinements of Color in the White Cube | Jaime Sunwoo
FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2021
11 am EDT / 8 am PDT
Coffee Chat + Check-in
Join Coalition members for pre-session conversations. Chat with fellow convening attendees and check-in on what is top of mind for you.
12 Noon EDT / 9 am PDT
Conservation alternatives: A structured discussion about what else it could mean to invest in material heritage
Presenter: Ayesha Fuentes
This open, moderated conversation invites conservators, arts practitioners and museum workers to imagine how the field of conservation can be part of the creative reconstruction and decentralization of cultural institutions. This session examines how conservation’s collective identity, methods, standards and vocabularies can and should be destabilized in order to shift intellectual and technical agency away from entrenched eurocentric, exclusionary practices and narratives. In addition to discussing strategies for community engagement and pathways to repatriation, this conversation aims to examine the obsolescence of conservation as an instrument of museological, economic or political authority, and to cultivate a broader arena for conservation training and practice that includes a diversity of material skills and knowledge, and which prioritizes the accessibility of cultural heritage rather than its material integrity.
2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT
Why cultural institutions should advocate for the defunding of local police departments
Presenters: nikhil trivedi, Porchia Moore, Rose Kinsey
In cities big and small, huge amounts of local budgets go to policing. Local advocates are being clear about what alternatives could be if they defunded police, including ending hunger, homelessness, and funding education and healthcare for all. Could arts and culture be part of where this money could go, too?
The pandemic has caused some institutions to shut down for good. Those left standing continue the perpetual cycle of grant writing and membership driving just to stay afloat. Would we each need to be in this rat race fighting over the same resources if there were better mechanisms to fund us? Could ending policing at all levels of government from neighborhood watches to the federal military achieve this?
Join us for a discussion on dreaming about a world without police, and why museums and cultural institutions should join the fight.
4 pm EDT / 1 pm PDT
Museum Unions – Organizing Workshop
Presenters: Amanda Tobin, Maro Elliott, Whitney Stanley, Michaela Flint
Join members of MASS MoCA’s organizing committee and the Portland Museum of Art to learn strategies and information about the unionization process. We will review a timeline, eligibility, strategies, and lessons learned. The conversation will identify how organized worker power can shift traditional priorities and experiences to build a stronger, more authentic museum field.
The recent wave of museum unionization has the potential to fundamentally change the landscape of museum work. Unions can hold their institutions accountable to the promises of racial equity, and ensure they go beyond optical allyship to enact actual policy changes, from hiring protocols to harassment procedures and more. Unions also require transparent communication between leadership and staff. Earlier staff-driven attempts to promote DEAI have proven to be easily dismissed by leadership. Unions provide the legal standing for workers to gain the power needed to effect change.
6 pm EDT / 3 pm PDT
MANIFEST!
Our goal is collective liberation. Join us for a convening wrap-up and tactical conversation about what comes next. How will we hold one another and the field accountable for the changes we want and need to see? Let’s work together to disrupt, dismantle, and manifest this journey towards collective liberation.
WHO WE ARE: This Coalition represents the change-making movements Museums and Race, MASS Action, Museum Workers Speak, The Incluseum, Museums Are Not Neutral, Empathetic Museum, Visitors of Color, and Death to Museums. Collectively, we believe there is inherent inequity in the existing systems alive in our institutions, and that we must address this foundationally through the lens of racial justice and anti-white supremacy. We are committed to effecting real, substantive, and transformative change in the museum field and seeing the manifestations of this work happen in our lifetime.
UPDATE: Call for proposals extended to end of day April 20.
The legacies of colonial and racialized violence, and white supremacy broadly, express themselves in myriad ways in contemporary museum practice. Internal and external transformation is required for shifting systems of power; interrupting the cycle of abusive museum culture; and healing from traumatic histories.
Yet, despite decades of advocacy, we keep repeating the same patterns. Why? What keeps us from taking necessary actions?
We must face individual and institutional unwillingness in museums to self-educate and the resistance to embed racial equity. We must name the lack of transparency, accountability, and serious commitment to make this work foundational. We must move our field away from performative, so-called DEAI measures that center whiteness towards models that break historical patterns of inequity and harm.
We are calling for a radical reimagining of possibilities around what a museum can be for its publics when racial justice is at its center.
Call for proposals closes April 16, 2021.
Selections will be confirmed by May 1, 2021.
PRESENT A CYPHER
Complete this form to propose your idea for a session, dialog, or poster presentation or send us a video or audio recording answering the questions.
JOIN US IN JUNE
Stay tuned for registration details. Follow:
@MuseumsAndRace
@MuseumAction
@MuseumWorkers
@EmpatheticMuse
@incluseum
@VisitorsOfColor
#MuseumsAreNotNeutral
WHO WE ARE:
This Coalition represents the change-making movements Museums and Race, MASS Action, Museum Workers Speak, The Incluseum, Museums Are Not Neutral, Empathetic Museum, and Visitors of Color. Collectively, we believe there is inherent inequity in the existing systems alive in our institutions, and that we must address this foundationally through the lens of racial justice and anti-white supremacy. We are committed to effecting real, substantive, and transformative change in the museum field and seeing the manifestations of this work happen in our lifetime.
Contact MuseumsRace@gmail.com for more information.
Although we will be working virtually, we commit to share resources, build accountability partners, and organize within our community, particularly with colleagues across cultural, racial, and ideological spectra.
Download 2021 Equity Coalition Convention one-sheet
Many of you are grappling with how to address the events of January 6th, personally and professionally. We charge you with the following 5 questions for reflection and action:
1. What is a reasonable response to unreasonable behavior & speech?
There’s Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground
2. What is a truth that wasn’t apparent to you before this week?
3. What would authentic repentance look like, and who should take on acts of repentance?
Does America Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
4. What are we doing to recognize and address white supremacy in real-time–make visible the invisible & confront denial–within our own spheres of influence?
5. How can we counteract statements like “This is not America” or “This is not what American is about” that have inevitably followed the events of Jan. 6?
The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration
Denial Is the Heartbeat of America
We are past the need for tolerance–the old go along to get along mentality. Now what?
Have you heard of or used the Museums & Race Report Card?
We would love to hear how.
Have questions you want to see addressed with leadership and colleagues?
We would love to dialog with you.
Have other resources that are inspiring you at this moment?
We would love to share them.
We miss you!
Come kick it with the M&R crew! You’ll have the opportunity to learn about who we are and how we want to reshape the museum field! Visit the following link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ee5PFfI4TG6wUjILYGeihg
#MuseumsandRace #MR2020 #MuseRace #ImagineARadicalFuture
Museums & Race 