Reposted from WAMU
D.C. is full of free museums, but the Phillips Collection isn’t one of them. The modern art museum a private institution, and it costs $12 to get in. But from Memorial Day through Labor Day, visitors who are 30 and younger can get in for free.
The promotion isn’t just a fun summer perk, however — it’s part of a much broader effort to diversify both the institution’s audience and staff. According to a spokeswoman for the museum, the Phillips has a dearth of visitors under 30. It’s a fairly common problem for museums around the country.
Makeba Clay, a longtime museum consultant in D.C. and, as of last month, the Phillips’ first Chief Diversity Officer, is in charge of this initiative. The Phillips is the first museum in D.C. to hire someone in such a role at the executive level.
Investing the resources to hire a senior staffer to focus solely on diversity and accessibility is a growing trend in tech and higher education, but the Phillips is one of the first art museums in the country to do so. Clay can count on one hand the number of people she knows with similar jobs in the museum world.
As Clay sees it, she has more than enough work to do already. Art museums have a conspicuous and well-catalogued problem with diversity.
“Within the art museum world, I think in the last three or four years, people have started talking about the need to have a strategic focus on inclusion and issues of access and accessibility,” Clay said.
A 2015 study by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation found a severe lack of racial diversity in the staff ranks of art museums nationally. Twenty-eight percent of museum staff are from minority backgrounds, but the majority work in security, facilities, finances or human resources. In the directly arts-related fields, which include curation, conservation, education, and leadership, that number drops to 16 percent.
Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski believes these findings are at odds with the inclusive and progressive identity that many arts organizations project.
“Art is a vanguard industry that takes pride in its role to represent progressive ideology and risk-taking, yet the management lacks the representation from different life experiences that are a vital part of the arts’ dynamism,” Kosinski wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “The survey catalyzed a major movement toward a more diversified art and museum world.”
It will take more than talk alone to fix the problem. Clay said that one of her first priorities is to partner with more community colleges, historically black colleges and local educational organizations to expand their pool of internship and fellowship applicants. She’s already working with the University of the District of Columbia and the Rotary Club, of which she is a member.
Clay was born and raised in upstate New York, where she grew up frequenting museums and performances with her family. She’s been living in D.C. for about two decades, and has, she said, “been to almost every cultural institution that exists here.” She consulted for the Smithsonian Institutions and suggested they hire for a role like her current one, but as far as she knows, they haven’t followed her advice.
“The Phillips is just a gem,” she said of her new home. It was founded in 1921 by Duncan Phillips, making it the oldest modern art museum in the country. The museum is still housed in Phillips’s Georgian Revival home on 21st Street Northwest near Dupont Circle.
While Clay has big plans for improving institutional diversity and accessibility, this summer’s special 30-and-under admission offer is, in her eyes, a solid first step. Staff will survey the young visitors who take advantage of the offer about their interests and expectations.
“There are few institutions that have really thought about this in a very comprehensive way,” she said, “which is how the work needs to be done.”
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