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  • March 30, 2021 1:40 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from AAM

    We are a profession of some of the most brilliant thinkers, scholars, educators, artists, scientists, and revolutionaries from almost every background and way of life. Most of us working in and with museums approach the work with passion, acquired skill sets, and determination to change our communities through the history and culture of humankind.

    Rarely, however, do we think about theories. And on the occasions that we do, we usually consider them the luxuries of academia. Yet, theories can offer solutions for informing our best practices. Theories are developed from a set of principles based on observation and research. They explicate and predict conditions and phenomena and help us 1) augment our knowledge and 2) achieve a base unit of understanding.

    I began writing about and using theory in 2010 as a mechanism for interrogating legacies of exclusion in museums. I wanted to challenge the statements that were accepted as truths about why Black people and people of color did or did not visit museums. I wanted to challenge assumptions accepted as truth about leisure-time activities and museum-going in correlation to what I understood about race and racism. Specifically, I have employed critical race theory as a method of inquiry to interrogate the role and function of race in museums.

    Why Theories Matter for Museums

    When I started investigating race within the museum context, I found that all of the research on visitors recognized that Black people and people of color were overwhelmingly not attending museums at the same rates as their white counterparts. However, no studies accounted for or articulated race, racism, or historical oppression in their research. It was as if there was no existing knowledge of race or racism.

    How could we not account for institutional and systemic racism when we know for a fact that there were museums that would not allow Black visitors? How could we not account for the pseudo-science of eugenics in our natural history museums and its impact on collections and taxonomies of knowledge? How could we continue to argue that implicit bias was not a factor when white artists are glaringly over-represented in the permanent collections of our most beloved art museums?

    As an activist-scholar, I was acutely aware that existing knowledge was being egregiously bypassed, and the existing museum-going data was missing vital information. How could our internal and external behaviors be labeled best practices, codes of conduct, or standards when the field was overwhelmingly white and did not account for Black and Indigenous ways of knowing? What have our standards been based on? What theories prove that the ways in which we are working in museums are the best ways for the times that we live in?

    I began to search for a theory that could offer reasonable and inquiry-based answers to these questions. While many scoff at theory as merely an intellectual exercise or academic jargon, I recognized that theory informs praxis and vice versa. Theory and application are gradients of the same hue. Praxis is literally defined as shape-making and world-changing. That is, praxis is informed, committed engagement toward problem-solving a situation as intentional thinking and acting.

    Theory provides meaning to what we see in our daily application and work practices. It is a framework for taking what we know and applying principles for relevance, fine-tuning, new applications, and installing new modes of conduct. We can use theory to make predictions, develop best practices, and guide new territories of exploration from research and observation. The systematic set of interrelated concepts, definitions, and explorations help us uncover how and why things work as they do.

    Theories are used across disciplines to advance conversations, illuminate cross-disciplinary dialogue, and provide a conceptual framework for resolving a conundrum through shared language. In the museum field, we tend to focus purely on accepted codes of conduct created through professionalization, established best practices, and hit-or-miss risk-taking.

    “The core credo of CRT is that racism is pervasive, and even with legal preventions in place racism will never be fully eradicated because of the ubiquity of Whiteness.”

    What are the advantages of applying theory to assist us in solving some of our most complex and challenging issues in museums? How can we apply theory as an informative framework to address issues such as social injustice and systemic and institutional racism? How can theories help us think about the ways in which code words, such as “community,” “diversity,” and “invitation,” signal exclusion to our visitors even as our intended outcome is participation and welcome? These were the key questions that I used to approach the topics of diversity and inclusion in our field.

    What Is Critical Race Theory?

    Critical race theory (CRT) was developed in the 1970s from the writings of legal scholar Derrick Bell to respond to legal reversals of key legislation passed during the Civil Rights Movement. CRT was a way to trace the roots of racist legislation going back to the harsh Black Codes that restricted Black Americans’ freedom after the Civil War while providing a legal and political framework for challenging racial inequality within the law. Other scholars, such as Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, augmented CRT by implementing cross-disciplinary theories with fields such as cultural studies, critical legal studies, postmodernism, and feminism.

    The core credo of CRT is that racism is pervasive, and even with legal preventions in place, racism will never be fully eradicated because of the ubiquity of Whiteness. Originating in the 17th century, Whiteness was created by white Christian and English settlers to distinguish colonists from African and Indigenous peoples. Whiteness became a recognized legal term that also distinguished class. Within the context of the United States, Whiteness was specifically designed to establish legal and social hierarchy and to utilize skin color as a legalized privilege.

    In our contemporary times, critical race scholars have identified additional tenets of the theory to better define Whiteness and how it functions in today’s society. Whiteness includes the proximity to the rights, values, beliefs, and experiences of Whiteness in relation to the impact of racism that elevates and distinguishes white people over people of color. Whiteness, like race, is a social construct.

    CRT—now used in disciplines such as education, women and gender studies, American studies, queer studies, critical white studies, and more—critically examines constructs of race, specifically, as it relates to eradicating racism and restoring justice. CRT is a set of inquiry-based principles designed to:

    • illuminate inequality,
    • name the inequality,
    • establish new protocols for creating/restoring justice, and
    • eradicate engineered privileges experienced as racism.

    Advocates of CRT utilize it to practice activism and scholarship. CRT activist-scholars, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality,” employ CRT as a mechanism for addressing systemic inequality and advocating for justice. In addition to the notion that racism is pervasive and unable to be fully eradicated, CRT encompasses the following three key tenets:

    1. Counternarrative or storytelling—using the narratives of people of color to illuminate racialized experience to counter a dominant narrative of white norms. Storytelling is viewed as an accepted and legitimate way of knowing.
    2. Interest convergence—that white people will eschew racism only until their interests no longer converge with those of people of color.
    3. Critique of liberalism—that social transformation is only possible when “Band-Aid approaches,” such as affirmative action, color blindness, and merit principles such as respectability, are rejected. Liberalism as an ideology destabilizes conscious effort and language that centers on race and race-consciousness.

    It is important to note that CRT is not:

    • a political agenda;
    • a scheme to make white people feel guilt or shame;
    • a mechanism for revising history such that one race is pitted against another or demonized; or
    • something that can be “taken down,” needs to be “fought,” creates harm, or disturbs the fabric of society.

    Combating Racism and Anti-Blackness in Museums

    Museums are rooted in colonialism and imperialism. As such, CRT is a necessary tool for evaluating the ways in which white supremacy culture exists in our cultural heritage institutions. In our field, Stephen Weil notably shifted our attention from the object-centered museum to the human-centered museum when he wrote “museums should be about people, not objects.” Yet, which people? Whose culture? Whose cultural heritage objects?

    In museums, our attention has been focused on “diversity’’ and “diversity initiatives” as a means to hegemonically continue our “best practices” and status quo allegiance to Whiteness as opposed to practicing inclusion and intentionally destabilizing and de-centering Whiteness. CRT allows us to focus on structures of power and privilege, thereby transforming our communities in new ways. It is a tool for identifying the impacts of our collective implicit bias that is rendered as professionalization.

    The Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping—issued on September 22, 2020, to end so-called “divisive concepts” covered in federal workplace trainings—is a key example of the ways in which Whiteness is allowed to determine what is harmful, and whether or not one is able to claim that harm and demand reparations for being harmed. It is a deepening of the white master narrative that there is a single American history.

    Our American history is complex, riddled with heroic feats, savage instances of oppression, social and cultural behaviors that demand sameness and not diversity, and more. It is reductive to think that individuals with the most power and the least ability to experience harm are the same entities that can emphatically declare that implicit bias does not exist, racism is imagined, and white privilege is false.

    “CRT allows us to focus on structures of power and privilege, thereby transforming our communities in new ways.”

    CRT is a liberatory framework for providing the language tools, theoretical frameworks, history, and legal contexts to organize our thinking so that we can address access, diversity, inclusion, and equity in museums. In addition, it augments our commitment to sharing the full depth and breadth of information that material culture affords us. Furthermore, it allows us to use research, rubrics, toolkits, and other tools to eradicate systemic racism in our practices as we continue to adhere to standards of excellence, thereby redefining and transforming our field by committing to anti-racism and combating anti-blackness.

    Museums are the most trusted institutions in our nation. If we adhere to standards set upon us by those who do not invest in scientific and academic rigor, reason, and standards, we forfeit that trust.

    The practical — making judgments       

    People begin with a situation or question which they consider in relation to what they think makes for human flourishing. (the good)

    They are guided by a moral disposition to act truly and rightly.  (Phronesis)

    This enables them to engage with the situation as committed thinkers
    and actors.  (praxis)

    The outcome is a process. (interaction)

    Source: Mark Smith, Local Education: Community, Conversation, Action, 1994

    Do I Need to Incorporate CRT into My Museum Work?

    Whether you are in a structural leadership position, a board member, a volunteer, or a casual/part-time worker, racial equity is part of everyone’s work. Below are some actions you can take today.

    1. Do you understand the basic language tools for racial equity? (Do you have mechanisms in place to ensure that this language is not being co-opted by the values being employed?)
    2. Do you apply trauma-informed and healing-informed care to your daily museum work?
    3. Do you know your museum’s racial history?
    4. Is your board still predominately white?
    5. Are your collections still predominately lacking complex, multilayered narratives/representation?
    6. Is your social media still only speaking to your “base/core”?
    7. Is your development department still only targeting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color as beneficiaries of donations instead of donors/philanthropists themselves?
    8. Do you understand what anti-blackness is and what it looks like in your decision-making approach?
    9. Do you believe that race and/or racism has nothing to do with museums or museum-going and doesn’t impact the work that you do?
    10. Has your museum created spaces, opportunities, advisory capacities, and more to elevate the presence, power, and voices of historically marginalized communities in your institution in a tangible, visible way that shares authority and ways of knowing?

    See Original Post

  • March 30, 2021 1:37 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from The Art Newspaper

    Museums across Poland and in parts of Germany have been forced to close again as a third wave of the pandemic engulfing much of Europe prompted authorities to tighten lockdown restrictions. 

    In Poland, where museums reopened on 1 February, the government ordered them to close again until at least 9 April, as daily numbers of new cases reached levels not seen since November. In Germany, Hamburg’s Kunsthalle and Museum of Applied Arts were forced to close just days after reopening because of an increasing number of new cases in the city.

    The German government had allowed museums to reopen from 8 March after four months of forced closure. But the plan approved by the federal government and states also included a so-called emergency brake for the event that new infections begin to rise more steeply. In Hamburg, the rate of infections reached that level last week. The Kunsthalle had reopened on 9 March with an exhibition featuring Giorgio de Chirico that is only scheduled to run until 25 Apr. The Museum of Applied Arts had reopened on 12 March.

    German Health Minister Jens Spahn warned on Friday of “challenging weeks ahead” and the possibility of a stricter lockdown instead of the looser measures the government had hoped to announce this week. “There are not enough vaccines in Europe to stop the third wave of the pandemic with vaccinations alone,” he said. “We need to be patient.”

    In Germany, museum openings are tied to the rate at which the disease is spreading in individual regions. In regions where the average number of new coronavirus cases per day over the past seven days is below 100 per 100,000 residents, museums can open. However, if a region’s seven-day average for new cases rises over 100 per 100,000 inhabitants for three straight days, then it must revert to a stricter lockdown, including museum closures, two days after that. 

    With a number of German regions now above that limit, it is likely more museums across the country will be compelled to close in the coming days. Some have not even reopened after the four-month lockdown in force until 8 March.

    A similar system linked to regional rates of contagion is in operation in Italy, where the Uffizi in Florence has been closed since 15 February. Last week, Italy declared 11 regions, including Rome and Milan, as red zones, in which all museums and other non-essential shops must shutter. 

    The French authorities also tightened lockdown rules in many regions including Paris, where museums have been closed since last October. The French public health authority said on 20 March that the number of new cases had risen by more than 35,000 in the previous 24 hours and that pressure on hospitals was “critical in some regions.”

    See Original Post

  • March 30, 2021 1:34 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Security Management Magazine

    The decisions you make today will have significant impact on your operations for quite a while. With that in mind, taking measures today to mitigate the potential spread of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is necessary to ensure not only the continuation of effective operations today but resiliency for years to come.

    Like many natural disasters, infectious diseases such as COVID-19, Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the reemergence of tuberculosis can have harsh impacts to safety and security operations—and the global economy.

    For these reasons, it’s time to integrate communicable and infectious diseases into business continuity strategies as an emerging natural hazard. Aggressive measures to ensure a safe, sanitary, and secure working environment are necessary to create a foundation for health, safety, and protective service professionals.

    COVID-19 is the most recent in a round of threats from emerging highly infectious disease, and it highlights the need to continually plan for and exercise strategies to assure readiness to respond and maintain resiliency. Having a plan is essential to ensure the health and safety of employees and stakeholders of any organization.

    Build and Exercise Your Plan

    If you have not already done so, now is the time to pull out your pandemic preparedness plans and business continuity strategy. Be sure to review the policies and procedures to confirm that they are still current for your organization.

    Managing the response to any threat requires understanding the threat characteristics and profile. Mitigating the threat of emerging infectious diseases requires planning and resources to assure that systems are in place for operations, as well as for decision making.

    Everyone, from organizations to the local government to public safety professionals to the community, must be part of managing the threat. If there is a state or federal declaration of an emergency or major disaster, security professionals must examine the emergency orders to ensure compliance.

    Many federal and municipal governments across the world are implementing social distancing mandates to manage the threat of spreading COVID-19. In response, some companies and organizations are requiring—or encouraging—employees work from home. Some, however, might not have the technology infrastructure in place to support this kind of work style. For example, employees may not have high speed Internet for video conferencing and meetings.

    To prepare for this organizational change, conduct a workshop or tabletop exercise with leadership so everyone understands the expectations and responsibilities of their function—even while working remotely. Workshops are an opportunity for everyone to walk through a discussion on the policies and procedures that are no longer valid or may have changed in the organizational dynamic since the plan was last updated.

    Updating Your Plan

    Many agencies consider communicable illnesses public health incidents instead of slow onset disasters that require activation of crisis management systems. Similar to natural hazards, a pandemic will threaten organizational normalcy by disrupting day-to-day business operations and community activities. For this reason, private sector business continuity and public sector emergency planners need to consider emerging infectious diseases as part of their Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) and Business Impact Analysis process.

    Community mitigation strategies for pandemics may include social distancing and isolation of exposed individuals, along with quarantine of those who are infected or ill. These strategies require activation of jurisdictions’ emergency operations plans to cancel public gatherings and events, and to create points for monitoring residents.

    Traditionally, preparedness for pandemics has included the need for discussions on how to be prepared for up to 40 percent of your organization unable to report to work. This may be because of social distancing requirements, infection, or the need to provide care to someone who is infected. Organizations need to think through how they will handle employees who cannot report to work while continuing to effectively operate.

    To help make these decisions on staff, organizations should review World Health Organization (WHO) and national health sites—like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—for best practices. They should also be familiar with, and routinely monitor, recommendations and guidelines from state and local health authorities.

    In areas with high exposure risk or isolation orders, organizations should limit facility access to only essential personnel necessary for operations. Organizations should also consider creating a safety parameter for monitoring entry. For instance, the White House has begun conducting temperature checks before allowing reporters into the press briefing room.

    Additionally, all personnel should be advised not to report to work if they are sick or experiencing flu-like symptoms. All staff who routinely come into contact with the public or surfaces exposed to the public should wear exam gloves on site.

    Communicate with Your Stakeholders

    All organizations mut have a strategy to keep employees, stakeholders, and regulatory authorities informed—as appropriate—through consistent, concise messaging. Communication systems and processes are the essential tools to tell your story and manage perceptions about how you are handling the coronavirus pandemic.

    Organizations should provide information across multiple platforms, exercising and evaluating each to determine what works best for messaging. It is unsettling when information is not available. The lack of information can cause emotions to run high. Providing validated information will go a long way towards preventing gossip and speculation.

    Exercise your organization’s communication plan. Stay on message and provide accurate, credible information to media outlets and Intranet services.

    See Original Post

  • March 30, 2021 1:29 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from AAM

    At Thanksgiving Point Institute—a farm, garden, and museum complex in Lehi, Utah—we’ve been wondering how visitor agendas are changing during the current health crisis. Understanding visitor motivations informs our efforts to be inclusive and relevant, and we believe the current social, political, and pandemic conditions are creating new paradigms that call for a reevaluation of visitor needs and how we serve them.

    Several large national studies have been conducted to understand museum visitors in the time of COVID, such as those by LaPlaca Cohen and Slover LinettMorey ConsultingIMPACTS Experience, and Wilkening Consulting on behalf of AAM. These studies are important resources for understanding national trends, but at the same time, each museum, and each community it serves, is unique. COVID case rates, mandates, and attitudes toward safety precautions differ regionally within the US (Desmon, 2020) and will necessarily inform when we open, how we open, and what communication strategies we use around opening. With that in mind, at Thanksgiving Point we have felt it is important to supplement the lessons from the national data with local data on our specific visitors.

    Building on our work over the past eight years to track our visitors’ motivations and agendas on an ongoing basis, we have been using three different tools during the pandemic: a pre-opening survey of visitor needs, a weekly exit survey, and observations of visitors in galleries compared to parallel data collected pre-pandemic.

    The findings have been surprising. While we expected there to be significant differences in visitors’ behavior and motivation pre- and post-pandemic, we have discovered that they are interested in reengaging with familiar places and in familiar ways, perhaps to find a sense of connection and normalcy in an abnormal time. Some of our findings stand in contrast to assumptions and even findings in national discussions, emphasizing the need for local data to understand local needs.

    Pre-Opening Surveys

    In preparation for reopening in April 2020, we sent a survey to membership holders and a random sample from our general mailing list. The goal of the survey was to explore pandemic-related needs our visitors might have that Thanksgiving Point could contribute to meeting, and thus position ourselves to support healing and thriving in the community.

    The more than seventy-five hundred responses confirmed that our visitors highly value Thanksgiving Point as a place to spend time with others, and that having a place to deepen relationships with family and friends was the most important role they needed us to play—more than providing a place for conversation and dialogue or offering structured wellness programs.

    Later in the survey, we provided visitors a space to tell us “anything else” on their mind about reopening. From these, a clear pattern emerged confirming the appeal of having a place to deepen relationships with family and friends. Here are a few examples:

    “It would provide peace for my family to walk through the gardens and enjoy the outdoors.”

    “We really have gained a new perspective on the important things we do together as a family and we really miss the experiences we have shared and the venues that we get to explore at Thanksgiving Point. I know this has been a crazy time for everyone and we are excited to feel some sort of normalcy again and can’t wait to visit. Especially the gardens.”

    “I have missed the gardens during this time. They are a place I go for my own emotional wellbeing as well as taking family and friends. I have missed going and life will definitely feel more normal once we can go back.”

    The social nature of museum visits has been well studied, and considering the isolating impact of COVID-19, it is no surprise that relationships are at the center of hopes for a visit. At the same time, these visitor responses suggest another trend: Thanksgiving Point venues provided a place of refuge and escape even before the pandemic, and visitors yearned for that now more than ever. This trend is also appearing in our ongoing exit surveys.

    Exit Surveys

    Since 2012, Thanksgiving Point has conducted a monthly exit survey of visitors to our five venues. This ongoing practice provides us with a dashboard of what’s going well and what needs attention—perhaps more important now than ever to know.

    One question we use explores visitor motivations for coming, with response options inspired by Falk’s (2009) identity-related motivations. Among the various identities, rechargers—visitors with “the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment” (Falk, 2009, p. 64)—have historically been common at Thanksgiving Point’s gardens, but minimal in our other venues. However, since reopening after COVID-related shutdowns, we have seen a significant upward trend in this motivation across all venues.

    The chart below compares responses from our first two months of being reopened to the same two-month period in 2019 across all venues combined. (Understanding that motivations can be multiple, even during a single visit, visitors can select up to two identities in the survey question. As such, the sum of percentages in the chart will exceed 100 percent.)

    While visitors still most commonly have the goal of providing a meaningful experience for the children they bring, that rate did drop slightly. We speculate this is because of the interactive nature of many of our exhibit spaces and concerns about surface transmission of the virus.

    Most interesting to us, though, is the 400 percent increase in visitors with the goal of recharging physically, emotionally, or spiritually. From May 18 to July 18 of 2019, 6.1 percent of visitors selected this response, but over the same period in 2020 that number jumped to 24.4 percent. As we might expect, visitors appear to be looking for ways to find relief from the stresses of current events and are hoping that museums can provide that.

    Gallery Observations

    As a final approach to understanding visitors during re-opening, we conducted tracking and timing studies in three different galleries. We wanted to know if visitors’ behaviors were different in COVID-related conditions, and how limitations might be impacting their experience.

    We had conducted timing and tracking studies prior to the pandemic as part of regular efforts to understand stay times, visitation patterns, and learning behaviors. With that data in hand, between May-October 2020 we conducted the studies again to explore how these might differ under pandemic conditions. Considering the unobtrusive nature of observations, we did not need to adjust our methods.

    We conducted these comparison studies at two Thanksgiving Point museums: in a paleontology exhibit hall at the Museum of Ancient Life and in the Kidopolis Gallery at the Museum of Natural Curiosity. We thought visitors might spend more time at the exhibits, because it had been a while since they had been able to attend a museum, they were looking for “escape,” or because museum admission was limited and there would be fewer people in the galleries. However, we found no significant differences, despite adjustments and safety precautions imposed by the pandemic. Visitors are staying similar amounts of time, making a similar number of stops, and engaging with the exhibits similarly to how they would at any time. In surveys visitors expressed a desire for “normalcy,” and their gallery visits suggest they are behaving accordingly.

    Implications

    As we adapt to rapidly changing conditions, museums are asking, what role can we play to support healing in our community? Understanding visitor agendas can shed insights on that question. In a December 2020 “Data Story,” Wilkening Consulting concluded that, on a national scope, respite is not a straightforward thing that museums can provide in this moment. Yet findings from these three approaches in visitor studies at Thanksgiving Point suggest that our local visitors are turning to our museums for much-needed relief from the stress and challenges associated with COVID-19. The responses to the open-ended survey questions, and the unchanged behavior during gallery observations, lead us to believe the “normalcy” of a museum visit is part of that relief. With this in mind, we have tried to welcome visitors with an extra measure of warmth and service that shows even through masked faces. We have also used our findings to advocate for staying open—we feel we are providing needed relief for our visitors during this challenging time. While we rely on national data to guide us in best practices for a safe reopening and inspire us with innovative approaches, local data helps us stay relevant and responsive to our visitors’ needs.

    In a recent special issue of the Museum & Society journal focused on museums’ first responses to COVID-19, editor Amy Levin noted that almost none of the more than fifty submissions received focused on COVID-19 as a physical disease. Instead, she says, most “explored the epidemic as a social, psychological, economic, and cultural phenomenon in the context of a simultaneous popular uprising against racism” (Levin, 2020). In some ways, the emotional repercussions of the pandemic and concurrent social fractures have been equally as notable as the health crisis itself, even for those who have not contracted the disease.

    Connecting and recharging are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the relationships we form with other people are vital to our mental and emotional wellbeing, and really, our survival (Northwestern Medicine, n.d.). Even during times of isolation, we must commit to helping each other. We suggest that museums everywhere can provide this kind of critical respite to visitors navigating their way through current social, political, and pandemic issues.

    See Original Post

  • March 30, 2021 1:24 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Town & Country

    When Emily Cooper breezily bypassed the Louvre in favor of Atelier des Lumières’ digital reproduction of Starry Night on the Netflix series Emily in Parisart lovers everywhere cringed from their couches. A room filled with digital renderings of famous artworks—oversize, animated, set to music, and sometimes even scented (quelle horreur)—hardly compares to the real thing. Or does it?

    Already a fixture in Europe and Asia, digital art spaces are sprouting up across the U.S., promising immersive experiences that can transport viewers. The expansive, room-wrapping format of these shows riffs on an experience created by teamLab, an art collective based in Tokyo. In 2001, they debuted their landmark digital art technology, creating interactive rooms that grew into an eponymous museum in Tokyo, which opened in 2018. It had 2.3 million visitors its first year, the largest attendance for a single-artist institution in the world.

    Aside from one-off exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama's Mirror Rooms or Random International’s Rain Room, the most established of these digital-first spaces in the U.S. is Artechouse in New York’s Chelsea Market (it also has outposts in Washington, D.C., and Miami Beach) which commissions digital artists to create specific digital installations. But it's not the only game in town anymore: Superblue, opening this spring in Miami, is taking things up a level by including installations from teamLAB and James Turrell.

    Museum curators are reckoning with the fact that these destinations, once dismissed as Instagram fodder, could also be the way forward in the world of classical art. Dwindling museum foot traffic is a real issue that was exacerbated by Covid-19 restrictions.

    “People are introduced to and engage with art differently now,” says Jonathan Berger, marketing director at Newfields Museum in Indianapolis (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art). “As a cultural institution we have to reflect that, yet even though society has changed, museums haven't.” The Newfields Museum is the first U.S. institution to go all-in on a dedicated space in hopes to increase visitors. It is dedicating its entire fourth floor to a 33,000-square-foot virtual space, entitled The Lume, which will open in June.

    Other classical remixes include both traveling pop-up exhibitions, such as San Francisco’s “Immersive Van Gogh,” which opened March 18 after a residency in Toronto, and standalone venues. Culturespaces, the company behind Paris’s Atelier des Lumières of Emily in Paris fame, is opening an outpost in Lower Manhattan’s former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank this year (date to be announced).

    “Anything that brings people to the fine arts is worthwhile,” says Steven Naifeh, curator and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Van Gogh: The Life. “But at the same time, I think of it like music. As nice as listening to a recording can be, it would be terribly sad to never see a live performance.” 

    Undoubtedly, there is a poetry to standing next to a work of art, the same canvas that a great master touched, to study the brushwork; it just might not be enough alone to sustain the institutions these works call home. The staggering numbers drawn in by digital shows is a tempting lure, one that museums hope will get people in the door and then stick around to explore the collections IRL. 

    For Newfields and "Immersive Van Gogh, the artists serves as a suitable entry to art, and not only because of his popularity. Van Gogh wanted as many people to see his work as possible and even painted duplicates of Sunflowers and Lullaby to send out to friends. If he were around today it is likely he would be impressed by these extravagant displays—and he might even tag himself.

    See Original Post

  • March 30, 2021 1:22 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Artnet News

    An eight-year-long, $2.4 million restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece went viral last year as the 12-paneled painting’s central figure, a sweet lamb symbolizing Jesus himself, was made to look like the kid from the ”Trying to hold a fart next to a cute girl in class” meme

    People online promptly compared the effort to Monkey Christ and any number of other famous restoration fails—even as researchers proved that this is what the lamb originally looked like when Flemish painters Jan Van Eyck and Hubert Van Eyck first created the work at Belgium’s St. Bavo’s Cathedral in 1432.

    But you needn’t rely on memes to weigh in on the painting anymore. Today, St. Bavo’s Cathedral welcomed the famed painting home after its run in a once-in-a-lifetime Jan van Eyck exhibition, and in doing so they unveiled a new €30 million ($35 million) state-of-the-art glass structure for its display, as well as other updates.

    The 20-foot-tall case boasts bulletproof glass and a 1,000-square-foot climate-controlled interior. The painting was moved from the cathedral’s Vijd Chapel to the Sacrament chapel, where, according to the Guardian, it will hang from pneumatically controlled steel supports above an altar. Meanwhile, extra large security doors have been installed nearby, in case of an emergency. 

    For another painting this might seem like overkill, but not for the Ghent Altarpiece, which, over the course of its 588-year history, has been stolen on more than a dozen occasions—Napoleon and Hitler were among those desperate to take it—and nearly destroyed by fire on numerous others.  

    “Jan Van Eyck was a genius who has been astonishing the world for more than five centuries with his innovative techniques. Both the magnificent restoration and the circumstances in which the Ghent Altarpiece can now be admired are astonishing,” Jan Jambon, the Flemish Prime Minister, said in a statement. “The splendor of colors, the details, the lighting: everything is perfect. That makes us proud.”

    With the installation of a new display for the Van Eycks’ masterpiece came a full architectural upgrade for St. Bavo’s—a process that involved the redesign of the Cathedral Crypt and some of the building’s ancient stone walls. With an elevator and extra sets of stairs, the 746-year-old site is now fully accessible. The cathedral has also introduced a new augmented reality experience that will guide visitors through the space virtually. 

    “Religious and Christian heritage is unlocked here in a unique way,” the Bishop of Ghent, Lode Van Hecke, added. “This is not only important for the sake of the past, but even more so for today and tomorrow.” 

    “It confronts us with human’s eternal quest for mystery,” he continued. “I am convinced that many people will find personal resonance here.”

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  • March 30, 2021 1:17 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Texas Monthly

    What happened?

    On Tuesday night, a pair of would-be art thieves in Houston attempted to commit a glamorous crime: breaking into the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Bayou Bend Collection and Garden in River Oaks, with the suspected intent to pull off an honest-to-gosh heist. According to the museum, the duo is believed to have consisted of a man and a woman, who are accused of entering the illustrious mansion in which the collection is housed at around 6:45 p.m. How did they enter? If the words “art heist” mean anything, they mean that the thieves did not attempt to enter through the front door: rather, they squeezed through a grate covering a basement window on the museum’s north terrace.

    What did they steal?

    Alas, nothing. The heist wasn’t meant to be. The museum’s burglar alarm sounded, alerting a security guard to the intruders’ presence. As detailed by the museum’s statement on the attempted crime, they escaped through the main door on the museum’s southern facade, after which the security guard gave chase (!) as they darted through the woods (!!) on their way to a motorized fishing boat (!!!) they had prepared as a getaway vehicle, waiting for them on the nearby Buffalo Bayou.

    Did they get clean away?

    So far, it appears that way. After evading the security guard, the waterborne burglars navigated the bayou to a storm drain, where they abandoned their craft and, thus far, seem to have vanished. Police found the boat, investigated the museum, and explained that “no one was harmed and no works of art were damaged,” and that “nothing appears to have been removed from the premises.” 

    Who were they?

    Nobody knows! That’s what happens when you complete a successful getaway.

    You sound kind of impressed by these burglars?

    I mean, kind of, yeah? Certainly, we don’t wish to encourage our readers to commit crimes of moral turpitude, and stealing valuable things that don’t belong to you is definitely not a good thing. But we are not immune to the allure of certain crimes as being, uh, pretty cool, and decades of heist movies and shows—from The Thomas Crown Affair to The Great Muppet Caperto Ocean’s Eleven to Bonnie & Clyde to Lupin—have worked their magic. We acknowledge the glamour conjured by the words “art thieves.” That’s especially true when the caper A) results in no injuries or material losses, B) was planned elaborately enough that the criminals found a basement window to enter through, and C) was conducted both by land and by sea.

    They still set off that alarm, though.

    True, yes. These are C+ art thieves at best. Danny Ocean would not accept them into his crew.

    Is art theft a thing that happens often in Texas?

    Depends on your definition of “often,” really, but it happens more often than you might think! Right here in the Lone Star State, there are instances of high-end art, some of which is of immense value, being either taken, purchased despite being of dubious provenance, and/or disputed by multiple owners with claims to the work.

    That’s true of pieces by contemporary artists such as Nicole Charbonnet and Erin Cone, who each had several paintings stolen from a trailer in a Dallas parking lot while in transit from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Louisiana in 2019. (The FBI is still seeking leads in the case, though a possible break came in January, when a mysterious caller reached out to Cone and to Charbonnet’s art dealer, seeking a reward for returning the paintings.) It’s true of a pair of priceless stolen thirteenth-century Byzantine frescoes purchased and restored by Houston collector Dominique de Menil, half of the couple for whom the city’s Menil Collection is named, in the 1990s. After being displayed in Houston for more than a decade, the frescoes were returned to the Church of Cyprus in 2012. Just this month, a similar case in Dallas led to the return of a looted ancient artifact, the Stele of Lakshmi-Narayana, to its native Nepal.

    And then there’s the pair of portraits of the actress Farrah Fawcett, painted by the legendary Andy Warhol, which the actress bequeathed to the University of Texas—but one of which remained for years in the possession of her former beau Ryan O’Neal. (O’Neal’s possession of the work was discovered, naturally, while he was filming a reality TV show, because the camera captured it hanging on his dang wall. After a lengthy legal battle, O’Neal was allowed to keep the painting.) Another recent scandal took place in Houston, where a ring of art thieves targeted the city’s wealthy socialite community—including former mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee, who used the example to argue for “more police on the street” during his campaign. Those burglars were arrested in the summer of 2019, after months of casing their targets via social media.

    Do any of those stories contain the cinematic gravitas of two mysterious villains breaking into a stately mansion that houses nearly five thousand pieces of decorative art created between 1620 and 1870?

    They do not. But neither do they involve anybody splashing around the sewers empty-handed, with their boat in the possession of the police, so we’ll call it a wash. In any case, the bungling bayou burglars did better than the 2014 attempted art thieves who tried to steal an oversized canvas work and escape through Houston’s downtown tunnel system but found themselves stymied by size of the 6-by-6-foot piece, which was too large to fit through the entryway.

    See Original Post

  • March 30, 2021 1:13 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from KGOU

    The head of security at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City took the internet by storm when he was tasked with running the museum’s social media accounts at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the security director turned internet star has an exhibition of his own at the museum.

    The exhibition #HashtagtheCowboy opened March 17 and features the viral social media posts of Tim Tiller, the museum’s director of security. In his endearing posts, Tiller shows off artifacts in the museum’s collection as he learns the ropes of social media. 

    Tiller’s security guard uniform and bolo tie are also included in the exhibition as well as letters and gifts he’s received from fans around the world. 

    Nathan Jones, associate curator of history at the museum, said the exhibition is a physical representation of what has brought people joy online during the pandemic.  

    “There's a tendency to look back on 2020 and just see the bad things,” Jones said. “And while there were plenty of catastrophes going on around us, there were also moments of genuine human connection when we were all feeling very isolated. So this was one of the big highlights for this museum's community and for our online followers.”

    Tiller took on the additional role of assisting with social media since he was one of the few employees allowed in the museum while it was temporarily shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic. Even after the museum reopened, Tiller has remained involved in posting on social media. 

    Seth Spillman, the museum’s chief marketing and communications officer, said Tiller’s social media posts have attracted new visitors to the museum. 

    The exhibition runs through Aug. 8.

    See Original Post

  • March 17, 2021 4:07 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from Security Magazine

    The primary security operations topic in 2021 continues to be the global pandemic – and for good reason. One of the most obvious challenges to achieving herd immunity is vaccinating enough people to keep the virus from spreading.

    As COVID-19 vaccines roll out throughout the country, many organizations and government entities are facing – or soon will be facing – challenges around the logistics, distribution of information and administration of those vaccines.

    How do you communicate vaccine availability to specific groups of people? And how do you effectively communicate and facilitate the logistics for any single person receiving a vaccine?

    The complexity of communicating throughout the process of vaccine distribution is increased by the sheer number of organizations involved in the vaccination process. From government at the federal, state and local levels to health departments, drug stores, retail chains and residents, successful mass immunization requires efficient, targeted communication and cooperation across a wide range of entities.

    Enter: critical communications.

    Though many of us in the security industry are well-versed in the value of emergency mass notification technology, we have entered what is arguably this sector’s most significant era, as it plays a central role in the largest public health initiative in modern times. Now more than ever, organizations need to take a closer look at their critical communications practices to ensure they foster operational resilience and efficiency.

    Whether you are a municipality turning to an emergency mass notification solution to help you distribute vaccine doses, a company looking to safeguard an unprecedently remote and distributed workforce until it’s safe to return to the office, or any other organizational decision maker exploring technology to help solve countless pandemic-related critical event management challenges, here are some best practices to keep in mind in the months ahead:

    Advance your risk intelligence capabilities.

    In instances of a crisis or security risk, every minute counts. Having a system in place that can monitor critical events in real time and quickly identify relevant threats to vaccine availability and accessibility will enable you to make proactive decisions that protect your people, places and property.

    To that end, forward-thinking leaders are leveraging artificial intelligence-driven risk intelligence capabilities to increase the speed and accuracy of how they are identifying and responding to emerging threats. AI and machine learning can ingest thousands of verified data sources, identify the most critical events facing an organization and deliver tailored alerts to the right people at the right time – far faster than human analysts.

    Therefore, complementing your critical communications infrastructure with risk intelligence technology can provide early warning of adverse events, such as the inclement weather that has put further strain on local government teams responsible for advancing immunization while keeping roads open and electricity running.

    Communicate before you execute.

    It’s important to communicate with the right people before there is a need to reach them. To prepare, ensure you are continuously building your database of critical communications recipients. If you’re only truly starting this process as it’s time to press ‘send,’ you’re too late.  

    When it comes to vaccine deployment, successfully sharing the availability of injections and scheduling appointments to get injections in the arms of specific groups is vital to success, particularly when:

    • You are communicating to different demographics with differing levels of technology usage.
    • When it involves the careful cadence of two doses, which requires the support of critical communications technology on a massive scale.   

    Therefore, governments and public health authorities need to build a sophisticated database of residents they may need to engage, as well as multiple ways for those residents to sign-up for communication. This can be accomplished by proactively sharing sign-up information with the prospective message recipients via email, social media, press releases, including it on the website and mentioning the solution during public hearings and forums.

    There is also an increased need now to manage these databases more closely and share sign-up information on an ongoing basis. Given the pandemic, people have made permanent and temporary moves from their original residences to avoid more populated cities and areas with greater COVID-19 risks. As people move away from or to different areas, having accurate information on who is where can help ensure that the right people receive the right messages at the right time.

    Prepare for a dialogue. 

    In addition to having an accurate database of notification and alert recipients well in advance, organizations can achieve resiliency amid evolving COVID-19 challenges by proactively preparing communications messages in anticipation of common scenarios. Build templates for these likely situations with simple and clear messages that can be ready when needed.

    Some of the specific messages you may consider preparing are those related to COVID-19 exposure. New laws in California are requiring companies to notify their employees and subcontractors if they have been exposed to COVID-19 at a worksite. Having concise communications ready that trigger engagement from the recipient can help protect the safety and well-being of your organization and its people. 

    For COVID-19 vaccination and infectious disease mitigation efforts in particular, messages should also encourage two-way communication between public health authorities and citizens, such as prompting residents to confirm their scheduled vaccine and come back for their second dose. This feedback loop will help maximize the choregraphed deployment for both rounds of vaccination. Organizations also need a system that encourages two-way dialogue to keep employees informed about the benefits of vaccination; collect feedback from employees on pre- and post- appointment check-ins, as well as potential side effect reports; and even engage with staff surrounding vaccine hesitancy.

    Test, test, and then test again. 

    It is simply too late to test your critical communications systems when a critical event hits.
    Teams should regularly test critical communications software to ensure it works as expected. Just as risk intelligence is used to foresee the unexpected, proactive testing can mitigate problems prior to your messages being sent.

    A key part of testing includes encouraging recipient participation and confirmation they received your test alerts or notifications. Not only does proactive testing ensure your messages are reaching the right people and your infrastructure is in order, it also helps familiarize the recipients with you, so they don’t dismiss important alerts as spam or some unwanted communication. Fostering this trust between the sending party and receiving party is vital to the success of any critical communications framework, particularly in the context of public health imperatives.

    Leverage integrated critical communication technology platforms.

    As COVID-19 challenges continue to evolve, organizations need to be prepared to react quickly and communicate to a growing number of internal and external stakeholders in real time throughout these events.

    There is a growing need for critical communications solutions that streamline this process. Software that integrates risk intelligence, critical communications and incident management in one platform and connects with your other business continuity solutions can help ensure your organization is safe, informed, and connected when it matters most.

    From aggressive vaccination efforts across the U.S. to mitigating new COVID-19 outbreaks, leaders must equip their communications functions to anticipate, mitigate and resolve these threats more efficiently than ever before, as speed, relevance and usability within critical event management will directly save lives during this time.

    In summary, not only is it important to optimize your messages and databases so that your communications are reaching and engaging the right audience, but it’s also imperative to have a central, trusted platform that can accomplish three pivotal objectives: 1) quickly identify threats to your business; 2) communicate information and instruction to mitigate the threat; and 3) build a two-way dialogue between your organization and message recipients to resolve risk.

    Now is the time to optimize critical communications to maintain resiliency through new COVID-19 challenges and beyond.

    See Original Post

  • March 17, 2021 4:03 PM | Anonymous

    Reposted from ArtNews

    For the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the reckoning followed a field trip gone awry. In the spring of 2019, a group of middle schoolers, all students of color from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy in Dorchester, Massachusetts, were treated to a visit to the museum as a reward for good grades and good behavior. There, they were allegedly greeted with racist invective and profiled by museum staff and fellow visitors alike. According to Academy teacher and chaperone Marvelyne Lamy, a museum employee told the children that “no food, no drink, and no watermelon” were allowed in the galleries. In an impassioned Facebook post uploaded after the visit, Lamy also described in detail how the students were harassed by fellow museumgoers and tailed closely through the galleries by museum security, who reprimanded them disproportionately compared to white students visiting from another school. She swore she would never go back to the MFA.

    Within days, the incident had been picked up by national news outlets. A week later, the museum issued a public apology, staking a claim for the future to be “committed to being a place where all people trust that they will feel safe and treated with respect.”

    In the next week, two museumgoers who had made derogatory remarks to the students were banned from the premises. A range of reforms was promised, including new training sessions for all front-facing docents, guards, and staff. Meanwhile, internal investigators grappled with how to overhaul a museum culture that had allowed for a hostile environment and ensure that changes would be made.

    The Massachusetts attorney general also launched an investigation that culminated in an agreement between the museum and the attorney general’s office. As part of the arrangement, the MFA appropriated $500,000 to launch a new fund for diversity and inclusion initiatives, such as internships for students of color. It also developed a more direct system for processing complaints regarding discrimination and implemented new anti-harassment and discrimination training for museum staff.

    Four months after the agreement was finalized, the museum also announced a new hire: Rosa Rodriguez-Williams, who took the newly created position of senior director of belonging and inclusion. At the time of her hiring, MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum said in a statement that Rodriguez-Williams would be “integral in reimagining how we welcome and engage historically underrepresented audiences, truly reflecting the communities we serve.”

    The position was developed within MFA Boston’s Division of Learning and Community Engagement rather than under the banner of human resources, with an understanding that the work would be fluid and determined by the demands of the audiences the museum wants to reach. In Rodriguez-Williams’s own terms, one of the most important aspects of her job is “fostering visitor experience” from inside and outside the institution.

    Born in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez-Williams assumed the post in early September, after more than a decade at the helm of the Latinx Student Cultural Center at Boston’s Northeastern University. Her job there focused on recruiting and retaining Latinx and Latin American students, with a particular focus on establishing a sense of belonging among those from marginalized communities. With her background, she was quick to recognize that educators had been working on issues related to equity and inclusion for much longer than museums had—and that change owes less to institutions than to the people who support them.

    “My day-to-day is working alongside the departments and providing the tools they need to prioritize inclusion within their own work,” she said in an interview in November, two months into her tenure. “Museums and organizations are about people, so helping people—staff and visitors—engage with a sense of belonging is where I come in.”

    When protests swelled over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last spring, many predominantly white-led art institutions wrestled with how to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement as layoffs and furloughs disproportionately affected BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) employees. Amid the unemployment crisis, open letters penned by museum workers condemned leadership at major institutions—among them the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Getty Trust in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—for legacies of racial bias and institutional inequity.

    Full-time positions promoting inclusivity have been instated with growing frequency since. Last August, the Seattle Art Museum tapped Priya Frank for the new role of director of equity, diversity, and inclusion. In September, the Milwaukee Art Museum named Kantara Souffrant its inaugural curator of community dialogue, and SFMOMA appointed Kenyatta Parker director of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a high-profile move in hiring Lavita McMath Turner—who had done similar work for the City University of New York—as its first chief diversity officer; that same month, London’s Serpentine Galleries announced the appointment of Yesomi Umolu as director of curatorial affairs and public practice.

    Responsibilities differ in the job descriptions, but among the common goals are diversification in terms of curatorial programming and museum staff, as well as aims to connect with communities of color. In Boston, Rodriguez-Williams leads a voluntary group called Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) that has launched affinity groups for those less well represented, including BIPOC and LGBTQIA+. Such measures, she said, are “a good way to support the incredible diversity in the museum.”

    In all of her work, Rodriguez-Williams collaborates closely with Makeeba McCreary, who in 2018 was appointed MFA’s first chief of learning and community engagement. A Boston native, McCreary came to the museum from the Boston Public Schools, where she worked as managing director and senior adviser of external affairs. Describing her role as “amorphous,” McCreary now works in a role whose official responsibilities, as per MFA’s own language, include “integrating diverse perspectives into the museum’s programs and educational offerings” and fostering “a better understanding of the issues of today through the lens of art.” Outside of that, she thinks of her job as an interpretive process. “When I came here, I found myself in a dramatically outward-facing role—I was figuring out how to reach out to the public and say ‘Come,’ ‘come,’ ‘come,’ ” McCreary said. “But then I realized that you had to worry about what would happen when you do find them at the threshold. The question is: what gets them over that threshold and willing to explore?”

    McCreary and Rodriguez-Williams are currently working to create what they refer to as “tool kits” to help their colleagues in various departments reduce barriers between the institution and its audience. In the museum’s Art of the Americas Wing. wing, for example, an effort was initiated in 2020 to provide translations for every wall label. And new initiatives were enacted around special exhibitions including “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” a show (running into May) anchored by Jean-Michel Basquiat but expanded to illustrate how the barrier-breaking hip-hop movement was the cumulative vision of Black and brown communities of artists.

    Writer and musician Greg Tate, who co-curated “Writing the Future” with MFA curator Liz Munsell, said McCreary was “essential” to the exhibition’s success. Before the show opened, McCreary invited members of the community—artists, business people, musicians—to gather and respond to questions about it. Did the exhibition speak authentically to their lived experience? What does Basquiat mean to people living and working in his wake? The exhibition opened in October and, by December, attendance averaged around 2,000 people a week—a “remarkable” figure, Tate said, given the circumstances, the pandemic keeping so many people at home.

    “It would be pointless to have this show while not being able to crack those castle walls, that alienation that exists between the community and the institution,” Tate said. “People said that they had actually avoided the museum because they felt like nothing in there spoke to them. Those talks were an icebreaker to a frozen relationship.”

    Considering such changes in the context of what an institution can and can’t do, McCreary quoted Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem: “Bricks and mortar does not create culture—people create culture.” That is to say, the museum suffers if it is not representative of its entire community. According to the MFA, 79 percent of visitors in 2015 identified as Caucasian, and 75 percent were age 45 or older. That same year, around 20 percent of the institution’s 700-plus staff identified as nonwhite. Of that segment, 14 percent occupied “professional” positions in conservation, education, and curatorial departments. Today, 29.5 percent of MFA staff self-identify as BIPOC—an improvement, though clearly there’s more work to do.

    The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2011, offers a blueprint for what equity-minded work can achieve. In 2016, the museum’s board of directors named Rod Bigelow its first chief diversity and inclusion officer—a mantle added to his lead role as executive director. The position was created in response to a damning survey commissioned by the Mellon Foundation in 2015 whose findings included that, among the ranks of U.S. museum staffs, 84 percent of “professional” positions were occupied by workers who identified as white. Only 4 percent of those occupying such roles were Black, and 3 percent were Hispanic.

    Recognizing similar points of disparity at Crystal Bridges, Bigelow pledged to make a change. “We had every opportunity to create an organization that was representative of the people of this country, and we didn’t do a great job of that,” he said, of an institution founded just a few years before the survey was conducted. Since then, he and the museum’s board have worked in what he called a two-prong approach: execute short-term solutions and sustain long-term initiatives. “From hiring diverse staff to deciding who makes up an advisory committee to what’s in the galleries—everything must be done to make sure we retain momentum in the long term,” Bigelow said. “That means, firstly, educating the team on what it means to be anti-racist and what racist systems exist that we contribute to.”

    The Early American galleries at Crystal Bridges were reimagined early in the process to include contemporary artwork in an effort to add context, such that visitors are now greeted by Nari Ward’s monumental We the People (2015), a 27-foot-wide wall sculpture presenting the opening words of the Constitution’s preamble with each letter outlined in shoelaces. As of this past November, 28 percent of Crystal Bridges staff and 32 percent of museum leadership are people of color. (The board of directors remains predominantly white, with the exceptions of Thelma Golden and artist Hank Willis Thomas.)

    In the past year, Crystal Bridges has held more than a hundred sessions with the public to learn about what people feel are the most pressing issues, among them immigration, accessibility, power, and process. “We need to ask the right questions of our community over and over again to ensure real change,” Bigelow said. “Too many times have these issues come up and then faded away.” 

    In Boston, McCreary shares Bigelow’s concern that attention can be all too fickle. She expressed fear over the prospect of fading awareness as media interest cools and unemployment declines with the pandemic’s hoped-for abatement.

    Bigelow, for his part, hopes matters of diversity won’t get too entangled with issues of finance. “Not all of this work requires funding—it’s about changes in procedure and process,” he said. “Too often there’s a default to slowing the work or stopping the work because there’s a perceived lack of funding. But this isn’t entirely about funding—it’s about will.”

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