Reposted from Fortune

The next time people visit the Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum in Canada to see World War II–era tanks and artillery, a virtual avatar named Master Corporal Lana will welcome and screen them for COVID-19.

It’s part of the museum’s plan to open to the public on Saturday after having shut down since mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic. After all, Lana, who is purely digital, can’t spread COVID-19.

As Jeremy Blowers, the executive director of the museum, in Oshawa, Ontario, explained, the chatbot helps protect staff and volunteers from COVID-19 as well as give a glimpse into the future of how cutting-edge technology can be used for education.

The Ontario Regiment RCAC Museum has more than 140 operational military vehicles including tanks and cargo carriers used in the 20th century up to recent conflicts like the Afghanistan War, he said.

Blowers noted that the museum had been developing Lana before the coronavirus outbreak as a way to stay up-to-date with technological trends like augmented reality that could help attract visitors, particularly younger people. After the coronavirus pandemic hit, forcing the museum to close on March 15, Blowers had a eureka moment, deciding to use Lana as a greeter when the museum finally reopened.

He said Lana has a “welcoming and cool factor” that he suspects visitors will enjoy. 

“And youths don’t want to sit at a kiosk,” Blowers said about using a more conventional check-in device.

The museum partnered with business software startup CloudConstable and Intel to develop and operate Lana, which users will interact with via a 3.5-foot digital screen. Cameras that are connected to the screen help Lana recognize and respond to people when they walk up and talk to her.

Lana isn’t the most realistic looking digital avatar; she resembles a character from a mid-2000s video game who has slicked-back brown hair and wears military fatigues. But she gets the job done when it comes to asking basic COVID-19-related questions.

During a typical Lana interaction, which Blowers said will last 54 seconds, the chatbot asks visitors six COVID-19 screening questions, such as whether they’ve left Canada during the past 14 days or whether they or someone in their family have experienced coronavirus-related symptoms.

Unfortunately, Lana can’t pick up on whether someone is lying to her. But Blowers said a human staff member will be near Lana, behind a glass panel, ensuring things go smoothly and that no one is “taking stuff off the walls and leaving.”

Additionally, people talking to Lana will have their body temperature checked as an additional COVID-19 safety measure. Museum staff will follow up with anyone who fails their COVID-19 screening. 

Although Blowers is excited about the museum’s reopening, he expects only a fraction of the number of visitors who typically come to see the institution’s collection. The museum normally has 200 visitors on a Saturday or Sunday, but he thinks there will be only about 40 people, who have already bought their tickets online.

And despite the precautions the museum is taking, such as requiring people to wear masks and socially distance, as well as providing hand sanitizer, he’s concerned about contracting the virus.

“It’s frightening,” he said. 

But he feels an obligation to be at the museum to let the public in. 

“I wouldn’t be in the industry and gone through the trouble if I wasn’t at heart a history nerd and a teacher,” Blowers said. “I love sharing knowledge with the public.”

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Reposted from Artnet News

The FBI estimates that art crime is multi-billion-dollar-a-year illicit industry, and while much of it is made up of low order theft, the plundering of a museum never fails to steal headlines. 

Earlier this summer, an opportunistic thief stole a Van Gogh painting from a Dutch museum in an audacious smash-and-grab. News reports widely noted the work’s $6 million value on the legitimate market, but what is the true worth of a stolen masterpiece? Who buys a work that can’t be publicly shown?

We consulted experts on what actually happens to a work of art once it has been stolen. Here are the five pathways that thieves tend to take to cash in on their larceny.

1. Theft to Order

When we hear about a museum heist, we might picture a wealthy billionaire presiding over a vast trove of the world’s most wanted art.

Indeed, there have been a few people caught stealing art for their own private collections, such as the notorious French art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who made off with some 239 artworks from museums. Or the seemingly innocuous Tucson couple, who were discovered to have had a $160 million stolen Willem de Kooning hanging in their bedroom for decades. But art crime professor Erin Thompson, who works at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, tells Artnet News that this is rare. “We’ve busted plenty of reclusive, unscrupulous, powerful art lovers, from dictators to drug lords, but we haven’t found stolen masterpieces on their walls,” she says.

While an elaborate heist of the Mona Lisa on behalf of a villainous art buff might make a good Hollywood movie, the reality is often much more prosaic. More often, thieves spot a vulnerability in a museum’s security system, steal the art, and find out later that it is harder to move than they previously thought.

Thompson says that the most successful thieves have actually targeted objects for their raw materials rather than the object as a whole. For example, it is less conspicuous to break off a valuable horn from a taxidermy mount, or to melt down an object for the value of its precious metals, or break up jewelry to sell as individual pieces (which was most likely the fate of the diamonds stolen from Dresden’s Green Vault). But outside of an investment in a co-ownership scheme, one square inch of a Van Gogh painting isn’t worth a whole lot to anyone.

2. Cash Out From the Museum

Christopher Marinello, chief executive at Art Recovery International, who has been working in the field of lost art for 30 years, tells Artnet News that thieves will often try to sell a work back to the museum that it was stolen from. In 80 percent of cases, Marinello says that criminals will either try to hold the work for ransom, or wait for the museum to announce a reward for the return of the work. 

But this doesn’t always work. Some museums will refuse to negotiate with criminals, and the risk of getting caught in a sting operation while collecting on a ransom or a reward is high. There is currently a $5 million reward out for information leading to the recovery of 13 priceless masterpieces that were stolen in the infamous 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, but the paintings have never been recovered. 

3. The Insurance Gambit

Other times, thieves will go directly to the insurance company, as ownership of the work often passes to the insurer after it has paid out for losses. Marinello, who has several art insurance companies as clients, says it is not uncommon for thieves to try and ransom work to the insurance company directly.

Sometimes, thieves have inside knowledge of museum’s insurance policies, but other times they just mike a wild guess—which doesn’t always pay off. Insuring irreplaceable artwork against theft is sometimes prohibitively expensive for museums; the Gardner paintings, for example, were not insured against theft. But Thompson says that if there is theft coverage, insurance companies generally offer a no-questions-asked reward for return. “So, you can steal a painting and give it to your girlfriend to hand over to the insurers—she’ll say she found it in a bus stop and you’ll get around 10 to 15 percent of the value of the art,” Thompson says.

4. Try to Sell It Legitimately

Thieves who fail to cash out from museums or insurers may attempt to sell their acquisition on the legitimate market, such as through auction houses or dealers.

This is easiest when the objects have not yet been reported as stolen, which is why Thompson says that smarter thieves will target objects that aren’t currently on display, preying on the weaknesses of underfunded museum storage facilities or library stacks.

In cases where the missing work has been reported, the thief will be hard pressed to find a reputable art dealer today who neglects their due diligence. There are several databases of stolen artworks, from the Art Loss Register to the FBI and Interpol that dealers can easily cross check before committing to a purchase. All it takes is a couple of clicks from a prospective buyer to land a criminal in the clink, as was the case in the Transy Book heist, when thieves tried to have Christie’s appraise more than $5 million worth of rare books, or the fate of a pair of knuckleheaded art thieves who tried to flog a group of stolen paintings to an art dealer in Bucharest.

That said, there are still some places—Marinello singles out Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—where buyers tend to be less scrupulous about the origins of objects.

5. Try to Sell It on the Black Market

One possible trajectory for the Van Gogh painting that was stolen earlier this summer was revealed more recently when a photograph of the stolen work surfaced as an ad in the criminal underworld.

According to the experts, the black market is the last resort for art thieves hoping to monetize their stash. There, criminals are hard pressed to find a legitimate buyer and, as FBI art crime specialist Christopher McKeogh tells Artnet News, there is risk associated with the sale. “Individuals have been known to create fake versions of well-known stolen works,” McKeogh says. “If a stolen artwork is discovered on a black market, there’s a good chance it could be a fake and completely unrelated to the original theft.”

This is why art sells for a fraction of its true value on the black market, as the infamous Dutch thief Octave Durham found out, much to his chagrin, when he unloaded two Van Gogh paintings that he had stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 to an Italian mobster for less than $400,000.

Once circulating in the criminal underworld, masterpieces take on a whole new currency and trajectory that has far less to do with aesthetics than with their value as collateral.

Drug traffickers have been known to use stolen artwork for loan security, and artwork can be traded for weapons. In these cases, McKeogh says, “it is always hoped that the thieves know how to stabilize or care for what are usually fragile items.”

Often, works end up in the hands of mobsters who use them as “get-out-of-jail-free” cards, turning over information on their whereabouts in exchanged for reduced sentences. That is often the case when works mysteriously turn up, as it happened with a Gustav Klimt painting was discovered in an alcove in the museum’s garden. Ultimately, Durham’s stolen Van Goghs ended up in the hands of an Italian gangster used them to negotiate a lesser sentence for drug trafficking.

One can only hope for such an ending for the Van Gogh that was just stolen this summer from the Dutch museum—for the sixth and final pathway for stolen art is much more tragic.

It is an “investigator’s greatest fear,” McKeogh says, that a thief may panic or grow frustrated and destroy a priceless work of art. This has been the case for many an ill-advised heists, such as the five Modernist paintings stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and dozens of Breitwieser’s stolen Old Masters, which ended up in the bottom of a canal.

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This week, Trident Manor Limited (TM) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection (IFCPP).

Thanks to this strategic partnership, the two organisations will jointly:

• Deliver specialized cultural property protection learning programmes that are certified or bespoke in nature.
• Provide an effective platform for the delivery of any cultural protection messaging.  
• Increase mutual support for the protection of cultural heritage globally.
• Raise public awareness on topics and events related to cultural property protection through the dissemination of information and materials.

“If provided with guidance and advice on how to recognize and respond to threats, staff can act as an additional layer of security to cultural venues and their collections. I am extremely pleased to collaborate with the IFCPP as it represents an important step in helping the international community in protecting our cultural heritage for future generations.”

Mr Andy Davis, Managing Director of TM

Trident Manor's Training Academy (TMTA), and the International Arts and Antiquities Security Forum (IAASF) an independent risk, security, and crisis management consultancy with years of experience in the field of cultural property protection. Its training programmes have been delivered internationally to more than 700 attendees. The activities of Trident Manor are supported by the Trident Manor

“One of our missions is to empower cultural heritage professionals around the world in protecting their cultural heritage. This strategic agreement with the IFCPP is a tremendous opportunity for both organisations to maximize the benefits from our mutual interest in educating others on ways of protecting cultural property and heritage more broadly”, said a spokesperson from TMTA.

The International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection is a membership-based non-profit organization that provides resource information, professional development, certification, and education for persons responsible for the protection of cultural properties.

“We are keen in developing and maintaining professional standards and ethical guidelines for the performance of protection-related services. For this reason, we look forward to collaborating with Trident Manor in order to benefit all our members worldwide, and for sharing of industry best practices and expanded outreach and experiences.”

Mr Robert N. Layne, Executive Director of the IFCPP

Reposted from Artnet News

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests, museums across the country began making pledges to initiate change within their walls. In emails and social media posts, institutions impugned racism and acknowledged their own complacency in systems that perpetuate it. They preached solidarity and inclusivity. They vowed to take a good hard look in the mirror, to reject silence, and to listen and learn.

Important though those statements were, many wanted even more to see action. Some institutions offered concrete plans, including, for example, staff trainings, inclusivity committees, and more diverse programming goals. But many also appeared content to rely on platitudes, or only delivered tangible plans after being called out for their passivity. 

Below, we’ve collected various institutional pledges and checked in with them to see what progress they’ve made so far.

New Orleans Museum of Art

In late June, an open letter penned by six former employees of the New Orleans Museum of Art accused the institution of propagating “a plantation-like culture behind its facade” and for having a homogenous, mostly white staff. The letter, which began with the words “DISMANTLE NOMA,” cited a permanent installation called “The Greenwood Parlor” as an example of the museum’s insensitivity to racism. In response to the letter and public outcry, the museum posted a statement with both short- and long-term goals.

Commitments:

• Institute facilitated staff conversations
• Develop an internal task force for inclusivity 
• Improve hiring practices with a commitment to expanding diversity 
• Hire an independent, outside ombudsperson for employee relations
• Increase the representation of BIPOC on board membership to 25 percent in each year over the next three years
• Commit the rest of the museum’s 2020 art acquisition funds to acquire works by BIPOC artists
• Close the “Greenwood Parlor”
• Issue regular progress reports 

Where things stand: The museum has brought on an organization to facilitate diversity and equity training with staff that began this month and launched new systems for visitors to share questions and feedback. The institution is currently reaching out to community stakeholders and partners for “broader input on ‘The Greenwood Parlor,’” and implementing a new process for employees and individuals in the community to provide input on museum projects through an external group of advisors.

San Francisco Museum of Art

Former employee Taylor Brandon accused the museum of deleting a critical comment she made on an Instagram post that pictured the artwork of Glenn Ligon. In her comment, Brandon called out the museum for not supporting Black employees and mentioned specific names of upper managers, which SFMOMA claims violated Instagram’s terms of service. After a public outcry, the museum re-enabled posts to the original image and apologized. Following the incident, Nan Keeton, deputy director for external relations, left the museum, as did the recruitment staffing manager, and the director of human resources.

A month later, senior curator Gary Garrels resigned from his position after a former employee complained on social media that Garrels had said that, despite a recent push toward collecting work by artists of color, SFMOMA would continue to acquire works by white men, because not doing so would amount to reverse discrimination. Former employees created a petition calling for his resignation, and Garrels stepped down shortly thereafter.

Commitments:

• Create a diversity, equity, and inclusion plan by December 2020
• Hire a director of employee experience and internal communication and a director of diversity, inclusion, and belonging
• Investigate employee complaints of discrimination and harassment, and conduct a review of past employee complaints
• Begin anti-racist and implicit bias training for all staff
• Revise exhibition review process through a “DEI lens” 
• Launch a paid internship program with three historically Black colleges
• Build gender neutral restrooms in staff spaces and, eventually, the entire museum
• Develop long-term programming partnerships with Black arts organizations in the Bay Area
• Share a breakdown of the racial and gender diversity of museum staff, trustees, and collection

Where things stand: The museum is currently interviewing candidates for the two director positions and, this week, is speaking with consultants to oversee anti-racist and implicit bias training for staff. Administration has begun investigating complaints of discrimination and harassment, past and present, and is in the process of revising its exhibition review system. The staff’s administrative bathrooms are now gender neutral. Two paid interns from historically Black colleges and universities are working remotely with the curatorial team this summer.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

When the Met’s new director, Max Hollein, sent a letter declaring the museum’s commitment to diversity and support of Black Lives Matter, it was accompanied by a reproduction of Glenn Ligon’s artwork Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored). In an Instagram post, Ligon called out the museum for not asking his permission to use the work, writing, “could y’all just stop, or ask me first?” Hollein apologized personally to the artist. 

The Met’s chairman of European paintings, Keith Christiansen, was also the subject of public criticism after he posted an image of a French archaeologist on Juneteenth with a caption decrying “revolutionary zealots” who tore down monuments during the French Revolution. The underlying message—that contemporary protesters dismantling monuments to racist historical figures are comparable zealots—prompted outcry from staff and the public. In response to internal demands, the museum issued an institution-wide 13-prong anti-racism and diversity plan, including a $3 million fund to support the effort. 

Commitments:

• Assess the institution’s own history and present practices
• Require anti-racism training for all staff, volunteers, and trustees
• Hire a chief diversity officer within four months
• Commit to hiring BIPOC candidates to department head and senior leadership roles
• Invest in recruiting, hiring, retaining, and advancing BIPOC candidates and staff across the institution
• Provide resources for community building and staff mentoring
• Diversify the collections and its narratives
• Implement new policy for working with LGBTQ-, BIPOC-, women-, and veteran-owned suppliers by the end of fiscal year 2021.
• Increase the number of minority- and women-owned investment firms that manage the museum’s investment assets
• Increase the representation of BIPOC individuals on the board of trustees
• Carry out annual diversity audits

Where things stand: The Met has completed anti-racism training for department heads. Thanks to a recent gift from Adrienne Arsht, all Met internships will also now be paid. According to a spokesperson, “many other activities are in progress as reflected in our Commitments.”

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

In late June, 70 former staff members at MOCAD wrote a letter to the board calling for the removal of chief curator and executive director Elysia Borowy-Reeder, citing multiple instances of racist behavior. The writers of the letter, who chose to remain anonymous, claim that they had seen Borowy-Reeder commit “various racist micro-aggressions, mis-gendering, violent verbal outbursts, and the tokenization of marginalized artists, teen council members, and staff.” 

The letter followed the departure of three Black curators from the museum in the previous eight months. Borowy-Reeder was suspended by the board before being fired outright on July 29. “We have no tolerance for harassment, discrimination, or abuse in any form,” the museum’s board wrote in a letter following the move.

Commitments:

• Working on “concrete actions and initiatives to deliver on our mission of being representative of the entire community”
• Considering “suggestions that have been made for changes in how we operate”

Where things stand: Elyse Foltyn, the chair of MOCAD’s board, said in a statement to Artnet News that the museum has established a special review committee to propose ways to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. It is “pursuing immediate and necessary actions to increase the diversity of the nominating committee, executive committee, and board,” and “assessing how the employee voice can best be heard by the board.” The institution is also in the process of updating the MOCAD bylaws to revisit all protocols, including those that say employees can render complaints “related to the museum and its management.” It is also amending its employee handbook and benefits to assure employees are treated equitably. The museum has recently begun offering its employees parental leave. 

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney is no stranger to controversy. In 2017, a firestorm of criticism ensnared its biennial for its inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of lynched teenager Emmett Till in his coffin. At the next biennial, in 2019, protesters and participating artists boycotted the show in opposition to board member Warren Kanders, who owns Safariland, a producer of tear gas. (He eventually resigned.) Then, when the George Floyd protests engulfed New York streets, the Whitney boarded up its High Line-adjacent building, at a time when other local museums were offering their lobbies to aid protesters. 

To celebrate Juneteenth, assistant curator Rujeko Hockley partnered with Instagram for a virtual exhibition celebrating Black artists, telling The Cut, “Art and protest, both, help us do this ‘freedom dreaming.’” In late July, the museum commissioned American Artistto create a digital work, part of an ongoing series titled “Looted,” which virtually “boarded up” the very artworks posted online.

Commitments:

• Re-examine exhibitions and programs to ensure they address the art and experiences of people of color
• Review staff and organizational structures “through a lens of racial equity”
• Institute additional anti-racism and unconscious bias training
• Board of trustees will add greater diversity and review its governance

Where things stand: “A process is underway to develop a plan that looks at all areas of our work (staff, program, audience/community, and patrons/board),” a representative for the museum told Artnet News. “The plan will highlight important steps already taken over the past few years and set a path forward for the institution to achieve the goals outlined by [director] Adam Weinberg in his letter. Over the next 14 months we will debut 10 exhibitions largely devoted to the work of BIPOC artists. In addition, we’ve made progress in working to identify and engage the best partners to facilitate anti-racism and unconscious bias training sessions for 100 percent of our staff, which we expect will begin by early fall.”

The Getty Museum

After the museum posted a vague message on social media stating its support for “equity and fairness,” followers quickly sounded off on the lack of a more meaningful statement that explicitly mentioned George Floyd or Black Lives Matter. In the wake of the criticism, Getty CEO James Cuno issued an apology that expressed remorse for its previously bland words, and promised a more responsible stance in the future. An open letter to the Getty’s board addressed the systemic racism and underlying inequities that exist within the institution, describing the newly created DEI council and task forces as lacking funding or support. Signatories also noted the overwhelming majority of white people holding senior positions and asked that the Getty ensure its own community adheres to the values it claims to espouse. 

Commitments:

• Recruit, hire, mentor, promote, and retain BIPOC staff
• Senior leadership will work with Getty’s DEI Council, task forces, and ideas and actions team
• Provide diversity, equity, and inclusion report at every board meeting
• Tie progress against goals to the annual performance evaluation of senior staff
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion work plans with goals, strategies, timelines, and resources will be shared with Getty staff on an ongoing basis, starting with the Board’s September meeting

Where things stand: The institution had no updates on progress made, noting that the “Getty board of trustees meets in mid-September” and they “anticipate having something to share around that time.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art

LACMA was one of the few institutions that participated in the #blackouttuesday social media initiative on its website, and went dark for a week to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The message was posted on Unframed, LACMA’s blog, and echoed broad sentiments opposing historical injustices and standing against violence. 

Commitments:

• Create a series of “Racism Is a Public Health Issue” programs 
• Looking at every exhibition to expand the “representation of women-identified artists and artists of color and clarify embedded colonial histories”
• Organize a series of internal discussion groups, reading groups, and lectures around the “umbrella theme of decolonizing the museum”
• Reinstall the permanent collections in the David Geffen Galleries considering the “narratives and objects of art history in terms of the values we hold in the present”

Where things stand: “For LACMA, there is a renewed urgency to our efforts to move quickly to diversify the collection—and to make those efforts visible,” a representative from the museum told Artnet News. The institution has held two programs in its ongoing “Racism is a Public Health Issue” series so far: “Addressing Prejudices Against Asian Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic” on May 7 and “Examining the Impact of Police Brutality on Black Communities in the Age of COVID-19” on July 21. The next program is set for September. The institution is planning a year-long series of programs showcasing recent acquisitions, with a “majority of the works shown created by BIPOC artists.” The programs will be accompanied by “discussions among curators and guest speakers,” the representative added. “The Black Lives Matter movement and efforts to end structural racism are sure to be recurring themes.”

The Guggenheim

In June, 22 members of the Guggenheim’s 23-person curatorial team sent a letter to the institution’s leadership demanding action in addressing what they called an “inequitable work environment that enables racism, white supremacy, and other discriminatory practices.” They also asked leaders to apologize to Chaédria LaBouvier, who in 2019 became the first Black curator to organize a solo show at the Guggenheim. “Working at the Guggenheim w/ Nancy Spector & the leadership was the most racist professional experience of my life,” LaBouvier wrote on Twitter. (Spector is currently taking a three-month sabbatical.) The curator’s letter goes on to castigate the museum for failing to “respond adequately—whether through statements or programming—to the global protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd.” 

“We recognize the importance of developing inclusive programming, deepening community engagement, and diversifying our collection and exhibitions, staff, and board of trustees,” the museum’s director Richard Armstrong said in a statement on June 9—two weeks after Floyd’s murder. Armstrong pledged to create “paths that lead to a more inclusive and diverse museum and workplace,” but was otherwise largely devoid of concrete goals. Since then, the museum has made its full Diversity, Equity, Access and Inclusion (DEAI) plan publically available.

Commitments:

• Launch Connection Groups to allow staff of shared backgrounds and interests to come together, discuss relevant topics, and share resources
• Develop antiracism and culture statement for the museum
• Expand paid internship program and recruit first-generation college students, students receiving financial aid, and BIPOC students
• Hire cabinet-level position to advance the work of the DEAI Action Plan
• Train hiring managers and review hiring procedures to remove biases
• Promote job opportunities and internships with historically Black colleges and universities
• Develop new organizational structure and procedures to review grievances and complaints
• Set goals for diversifying board composition
• Reassess requirements for joining the board
• Establish a special committee to oversee an independent investigation of LaBouvier’s accusations
• Examine exhibition history over the past 25 years and acquisitions history over the past 10 years through the lens of racial equity and diversity
• Acquire work by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous artists, especially including those of marginalized ethnicities, gender identities, and sexualities
• Identify a list of artists, artworks, and movements to be prioritized for acquisition
• Dedicate a percentage of the Library and Archives acquisition budget to publications featuring BIPOC artists, curators, and scholars
• Provide training for all staff in the American Disabilities Act and Universal Design for Learning
• Increase BIPOC artists, scholars, and other presenters within public programs
• Schedule ongoing training for frontline staff on implicit bias, cultural competence, accessibility, museum de-escalation scenarios, and trauma-informed practice
• Increase the visibility of BIPOC curators, artists, and educators on social media channels and website

Where things stand: The museum has established a DEAI committee and created and shared its DEAI plan with the public. 

“We are proud of the progress we’ve made while acknowledging that we have much work to do,” Armstrong said in a statement to Artnet. “The board of trustees has expressed their support of and commitment to working together with me and our staff to realize the plan.

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Reposted from Artnet News

After months of lockdown that have resulted in severe cutbacks, museums in New York can plan to reopen once more according to a statement today by governor Andrew Cuomo.

“Low-risk cultural activities, museums, aquariums, [and] other low risk cultural arts can reopen in New York City Aug. 24 so they can get their protocols in place,” Cuomo said on a conference call with reporters, according to CNBC.

Operations will be far from normal: strict social distancing measures, such as operating at 25 percent capacity, will be enforced. In his Tweet about the reopening, Cuomo also mandated timed ticketing and “pre-set staggered entry.”

Still, the news was a relief for beleaguered institutions.

“I’m walking on air! We’ve been waiting for weeks with bated breath,” Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg told the New York Times, following the news.

In a statement to Artnet News, the Whitney gave a picture of its post-lockdown procedures: “The Museum also announced that pay-what-you-wish admission will be offered to all through September 28, 2020. Due to limited capacity and to facilitate contactless entry into the Museum, all visitors and members will need to reserve timed-entry tickets in advance on whitney.org.”

Museum directors and staffers were caught off guard last month when Cuomo announced that museums would not be allowed to open as part of part of the Phase 4 comeback that started July 20. Now, with New York state seeing less than one percent of all coronavirus tests come back positive for seven consecutive days, lockdown is finally being eased.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had previously announced a reopening date of August 29, though it said it was awaiting further instruction from state authorities.

Now other museums are rolling out their planned reopen dates. The Whitney plans to open on September 3. Members will get earlier access, starting August 27 and continuing through August 31, according to the Times.

Meanwhile the Museum of the City of New York is planning to open August 27. The American Museum of Natural History had already announced a September 2 opening for members, followed by a September 9 opening for the general public.

In addition to timed ticketing and limited occupancy rules, temperature checks and face masks will also be mandated by the state.

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Reposted from AAM

Watching people of all ages, races, religions, and nationalities stand up for equality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, my thoughts have drifted back to my time at the Cincinnati Museum Center. In 2001, just after I joined the CMC as Vice President of Museums, civil protests broke out in the city over the police shooting of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed Black teenager, and the number of African American men who had been shot by the Cincinnati police in the past six years. “Fifteen Black men!” was the rallying cry of the protestors, who were fed up with the perceived indifference of the Cincinnati Police Department to the multiple deaths of African American men by their hands.

Cincinnati has a long history of segregation and poor race relations, and the municipal government has done little to effectively address the problem over the years. For example, after protests and riots broke out in 1968 over the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the city made only a few cosmetic changes before going back to things as usual. After the protests of 2001, many Cincinnati residents felt that more had to change in order for the city to heal and come together. The city had to address the root of the problems, not just gloss over systemic racism because the subject was uncomfortable. But few institutions at the time were stepping up to respond to the community discord, including the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a place built for racial reconciliation. The Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) decided to fill that void, making a conscious decision to become a place where people could come, meet, and become active participants in finding solutions to racism and its impact on the community.

When the protests broke out, the president of the center, Douglas McDonald, saw an opportunity for the museum to take a leadership role in our community by providing a safe place for community dialogue to help the city heal, and asked me to develop an exhibition on the protests. I assumed I would have a year or two to create it, but McDonald insisted that if we were going to be relevant to the current crisis we would have to develop and open the exhibition in only ninety days. The project consisted of mapping out a thematic approach to the exhibition, researching the history of race relations in Cincinnati, collecting oral histories from protestors and residents, acquiring images and artifacts, creating graphics and video, and writing the exhibition narrative. To make things even more daunting, we had to design and fabricate the 2,500-square-foot exhibition space while raising the funds to pay for it in just ninety days. The board quickly voted to approve the plans for the exhibition, with the exception of one member who thought such an exhibition would glorify the destruction and violence that had broken out in a few areas.

The exhibition had to address several issues that Cincinnati was facing. First, we needed to address the reasons for the protest—the killing of an unarmed Black teenager by the police. Second, we had to look at the history of police brutality in the city and the effects of systemic racism on people of color in Cincinnati. One of our main goals with the exhibition was giving voice to Cincinnatians who had not been able to articulate their grievances and who felt that their problems were not being heard or addressed. We saw this as the first step in helping to bring about racial reconciliation.

My team purposely designed the exhibit to get people to think and to react. To this end, we developed a “whisper tunnel,” a partially enclosed area where recordings played of stereotypes and racist comments people of the same race say to each other but would never say to a person of another race. We had monitors where community individuals could voice their opinions on race relations in the city and the causes of the protests. We created “graffiti” boards so visitors could write their views of race relations and suggestions for improving them. We worked with the National Conference of Christians and Jews to train facilitators to help guide group discussion and provided space for any group that felt the need to talk following their visit to the exhibition. We also provided each visitor with a postcard to write down their personal commitment to bring about change, which we mailed to them six months later as a reminder of their commitment. In publicizing the exhibition, we made sure people understood that it was about them and their place in this city. We wanted to make everyone feel like they had a voice, not only to express their feelings but also to suggest solutions.

In the exhibition, we worked to dispel some of the myths that circulated following the protests. One of these was the idea that only African American people are known to riot. Through research, we were able to establish that people of all races have historically protested and rioted when they felt like their voices had not been heard. As early as 1794, during the Whisky Rebellion, white Americans protested what they felt was an unjust tax, and the protest quickly became a riot characterized by violence and destruction of property. In 1829 and 1845, white Cincinnatians protested the number of African Americans living in the city and fired a cannon down the middle of the Black section of the city, causing mass destruction and injuries. In 1884 in Cincinnati, ten thousand people rioted against corruption in the criminal justice system and local government, and some protesters ended up burning down the courthouse. When African Americans began to riot in the 1960s, it was to protest decades of oppression, segregation, discrimination, inequity, and finally the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The city responded by establishing a commission to examine the causes of the riots and make recommendations for change. The resulting report was sent to the mayor’s office and eventually shelved. No systemic changes were implemented, and the city returned to business as usual while racial tensions and inequality continued unchecked.

The protests of 2001 were different. Three decades after the end of the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans realized that few things had changed. The city was more segregated than ever, poverty in the downtown Over-the-Rhine district was rampant, and police brutality against African Americans continued unabated. But unlike the 1960s, the 2001 protests ended with hope for a real change in city governance and in the police departments. All over the city, churches, community groups, and civic organizations were coming together to talk about the protests and what they could do to improve life for all residents in the city. The local media not only reported on the protests and riots, but also what could be done to resolve the racial inequity problem. Again, a commission was established to make recommendations for improving community and police relations. A corporation called 3CDC (Cincinnati City Center Development Corporation) was formed to develop the Over-the-Rhine area, including market-priced housing, a school for the performing arts, new restaurants, and renovations and expansion to the Cincinnati Arts Institute and Music Hall. In the midst of this, the Cincinnati Museum Center seized the opportunity to play an active role in promoting change in the community and within the museum itself.

The museum changed for the better. The community had long valued the museum primarily because it was housed in Union Terminal, a beautiful historic art deco building. Now, people who had weddings and other events in the museum, or just visited with their children for a fun afternoon, came to value the center as a real resource for community dialogue and social change. The board and staff recognized that the museum could be nimble in its response to a crisis situation and that it could be objective in presenting disparate points of view while encouraging dialogue and racial healing. In turn, CMC changed and became bolder in its approach. It redirected its youth program to make membership more representative of the racial makeup of the city. It secured funding so that teachers could bring students to the center free of charge with transportation provided. It hired African American women to direct the Natural History Museum (whose first curator was James Audubon) and the Children’s Museum. The residents of Cincinnati came to view the museum in a different light: no longer as just a museum but an active member of the community. A few years later, when a multi-million dollar levy was placed on the ballot to restore and renovate the building, the people of the community passed it by 65 percent, a high vote of confidence in CMC.

Now, many museums are in the same position CMC was almost twenty years ago, and have the same opportunity for reinvention. If museums in the twenty-first century are to be agents of change, they must go beyond merely issuing statements of solidarity with Black Lives Matter and look within. Internally, museums must seriously examine their commitment to social change and equality and how that is reflected in their own staffing, programming, and collections. Then they can turn to examining how they can promote change in the larger society. They must reach out to their communities and provide them with opportunities and spaces to come together and create meaningful social dialogue, healing, and solutions. This is the difference between being merely a museum or being an active institution that cares about the community it serves. The Cincinnati Museum chose change from within, and that change reverberated throughout Cincinnati in 2001.

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Reposted from Forbes

The Covid-19 pandemic is triggering layoffs in nearly every business sector. More than 1 million Americans continue to apply for jobless benefits every week. Call it realism or pessimism, but many businesses won't survive, and not just because of the mass shutdowns. As companies lay off thousands of people, they put themselves at risk of losing critical data because former employees can walk out the door with sensitive customer information and private records. 

Tough times require tough measures, and layoffs are one of them. Yet many companies make matters even worse by handling layoffs poorly. Let’s take a look at what companies risk with improper offboarding and how your organization can make proper employee offboarding a priority.

What do companies risk with improper offboarding processes?

1. Data loss: When employees are laid off, the relationship between the employee and the organization can be soured. This could lead to former employees, who still have access to data, intentionally or unintentionally deleting or damaging files they know to be critical to the business. 

If access to your organization’s critical data isn’t properly revoked, data breach events are a real possibility. This can also lead to the next major risk to your business. As an example, a former IT administrator at boot manufacturing company Lucchese was fired and took his frustration out on the system. He shut down servers, deleted files and caused immense damage to the company network.

2. Compliance violations: Regulatory compliance frameworks are an extremely important part of the overall security posture of your organization. Former employees who still have access to sensitive data can leak or destroy it, which can lead to major compliance violations. When you look at HIPAA or GDPR as examples, the cost to your business for a violation can be substantial. For instance, GDPR fines can range up to 20 million euros or up to 4% of your global turnover.

3. Breaches of confidentiality: In the highly competitive world of business, companies can unscrupulously poach employees from competitors to get access to confidential contracts, business agreements and other proprietary knowledge. A former employee who still has access to the company’s confidential information can take it with them to a new employer. The consequences can be devastating. 

A real-world example played out in a job jump in the case of an automation engineer who left his position with a clean-energy company in the U.S. to work for a Chinese wind-turbine company. The engineer took the intellectual property in the form of automation code to the competing company and essentially ruined his former employer. 

To protect an employer’s confidential information, there should be clear obligations in the employment contract with regard to how confidential information is to be treated during employment and after employment.

4. Data breach: The example given above details the real threat of another risk that comes from improperly offboarding an employee: stolen data. More than half of the employees surveyed by a Ponemon Institute study admitted to taking information from a former employer, and 40% admitted they intended to use it in a new job. Stolen data is a real security breach that has to be addressed by proper offboarding procedures and steps to prevent data exfiltration.

5. Ruined reputation: The reputation cost due to either data loss or a data breach resulting from a former employee can be significant. Customers can quickly find your competitor for the same goods or services if their confidence in your business’s reputation is lost. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2019, the average total cost of a data breach is $3.92 million. The seemingly minor action of improperly offboarding an employee can lead to major consequences to your business.

6. Wasted spend: Compared to many of the costs I have detailed already, this particular risk is one that may fly under the radar in terms of costs to your business. Wasted spend can happen for your business with former employees who may be consuming licenses or other services in your G Suite or Office 365 environment, for example.

Without a proper offboarding process, services may be left consumed by the former employee, and license costs may continue to be charged for unused services, software and cloud applications. Proper offboarding of employees will allow deprovisioning these services, licenses and overall costs for the former employee. 

Make employee offboarding a priority.

How do you mitigate the cybersecurity risks associated with proper employee offboarding? Make sure your process includes the following:

1. Conduct an exit interview: Aside from the employee being able to leave on a good note, the exit interview provides an opportunity for key security processes to take place. These include discussing company devices the employee has in their possession, company account access and credit cards, as well as getting contact information from them so they can be reached if needed after their last day.

2. Prevent email forwarding and file sharing: As part of the offboarding process, disable methods of data exfiltration. Data leakage could easily happen if former employees are able to access and forward emails and share files outside of the organization.

3. Revoke access to all applications and services: The majority of the risks to your business can be prevented by properly revoking access to applications and services.

4. Reset shared passwords: Passwords shared between groups or for services in the cloud should be reset as soon as possible.

5. Reassign suspended licenses to another employee: To eliminate wasted spend, reassign suspended licenses to another employee who will be assuming the former employee’s roles.

6. End things on a good note: Take a note from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who handled the delicate situation of mass layoffs in the company due to Covid-19, by ending things on a good note. Express the value that employees brought to the company, and recognize them for those contributions in a positive way.

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Reposted from The New York Times

The Guggenheim Museum has approved a plan to address complaints of entrenched racism within its walls. It is one of the first major cultural organizations to provide details of an expanded diversity effort.

On Monday, the museum announced to its staff a two-year initiative to create policies for reporting discrimination and developing diversity programs, according to Richard Armstrong, the museum’s director. New measures include paid internship opportunities for students from underrepresented backgrounds, a partnership with historically Black colleges and universities to promote job openings, and the creation of an industrywide professional network for people of color working at arts organizations. The road map also calls for a top management-level position to oversee diversity initiatives and the establishment of a committee to examine the institution’s exhibitions and acquisitions through the lens of equity and diversity.

“This plan shows a greater sensitivity toward respect,” Mr. Armstrong said in an interview. “It means there will be a bigger front door, providing more opportunities for a variety of people to imagine working in museums as a sustainable career path.”

The diversity plan comes more than a month after the Guggenheim hired a lawyer to independently investigate the circumstances surrounding its 2019 exhibition of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In June, nearly 100 current and 100 former employees, under the name “A Better Guggenheim,” sent trustees a letter claiming that executives had created a “culture of institutional racism” at the museum and mistreated Chaédria LaBouvier, a guest curator of the Basquiat show. The investigation is expected to conclude in the fall.

Along with their recommendations, the writers of the finalized initiative, who include eight employees and an outside consultant, also discussed the Guggenheim’s recent failures to diversify itself. The authors, at least four of whom identify as Black, claim that the demographic makeup of visitors to the museum does not reflect the racial diversity of New York City, citing a 2018 study conducted by the marketing firm Morey Group. It found that nearly 73 percent of museum visitors identified as white; by comparison, the city’s population is about 43 percent white. To better reflect the city’s population, they recommend, for instance, expanding pay-what-you-wish hours beyond Saturday evenings.

And despite a range of initiatives since 2010 that have helped the museum acquire works by nonwhite artists, the authors of the new road map urge that exhibitions include more representation from historically marginalized groups. “Within the iconic space the Rotunda, the museum has never held a solo exhibition of a Black artist, a woman artist of color, an Indigenous artist, or a trans-identified artist,” they wrote in the diversity plan.

They added, “The current moment demands that we reconsider the fundamental role that art museums play within society at large: whom are these institutions for, what are they responsible for, and to whom should they be accountable?”

In June, Ms. LaBouvier tweeted that working with Nancy Spector, the museum’s artistic director and chief curator, “was the most racist professional experience of my life.”

Ms. Spector is on sabbatical from the museum and has declined to comment on the matter.

“What happened six weeks ago brought things to a boiling point,” Mr. Armstrong said about the inclusion plan. “We looked at each other collectively to say, ‘We will accomplish this.’”

But during a tense all-staff meeting last month, employees expressed doubt that the plan would be enough to create lasting change without more input from employees of color, many of whom were furloughed in April.

“Furloughed staff make up the majority of the museums BIPOC employees” — Black, Indigenous and people of color — “yet they were excluded from the development of this diversity plan,” said Cassandra Dagostino, a furloughed member of the communications staff and of A Better Guggenheim.

Another member of the group, Indira Abiskaroon, who is a curatorial assistant, said that the Guggenheim’s plan “feels insufficient without reimagining and rebuilding the museum from its foundation. That means acknowledging the museum’s anti-Blackness and holding leadership accountable.”

In a joint statement to The New York Times about the plan, nearly 30 part-time Guggenheim educators said they were not consulted and they were concerned that 60 percent of the next steps to expand programming and outreach would fall on their shoulders.

The Guggenheim’s reckoning comes at a time of financial difficulties because of the coronavirus pandemic. The museum currently projects it will have a $15 million deficit this year, and has relied on contributions from trustees and reallocated money from its current budget to fund its diversity initiatives. Administrators said the museum will not reopen until at least October.

“We look with empathy and some trepidation at what’s going on inside the museum industry,” Mr. Armstrong told employees in a meeting last month, describing the projected financial losses at the Guggenheim as “quite crippling.”

When the museum does welcome back visitors, attendance will likely be capped at 800 daily, Mr. Armstrong told staff. It’s a number the director said would allow the institution to “begin to break even.” He also cautioned staff that there was “a strong possibility” of future layoffs.

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

A coalition of international museums and heritage organisations are co-ordinating “cultural first aid” for Beirut institutions affected by the devastating explosions of 4 August.

In a statement of solidarity released on 11 August, 27 signatories including Unesco, the International Council of Museums (Icom), World Monuments Fund, the National Museum of China and the Louvre in Paris pledged to “do all that we can to contribute to the complete recovery of the heritage that has been damaged in Beirut by this blast”. 

An initial assessment found that at least 8,000 buildings concentrated in the historic districts of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhael were affected by the explosions, of which 640 have heritage status, according to Unesco. Around 60 of these historic buildings are estimated to be at risk of collapse. Unesco says it is working with Lebanon’s directorate-general of antiquities to lead the cultural response to the disaster.

The Lebanese national committee of Blue Shield International is now co-ordinating experts on the ground to survey the damage sustained by the city’s museums, libraries, archives and historic buildings, says Elsa Urtizverea, Icom’s heritage protection co-ordinator, who visited Beirut last week. Blue Shield will give the international partners an overview of the priorities for reconstruction as they plan longer-term relief efforts.

According to Suzy Hakimian, the chair of Icom Lebanon and the director of the Museum of Minerals at Saint Joseph University, eight museums were damaged by the blast. 

Located close to the epicentre of the explosions at the port, the Sursock Museum suffered “unbelievable” destruction, Urtizverea says. All the stained-glass windows on the villa’s façade were obliterated and the roof was damaged, leaving the museum exposed to the elements. The architects responsible for the museum’s $15m renovation in 2015 are advising on securing the building. A team of volunteers—museum staff and young cultural professionals—have moved the art works into storage, cleared away the glass debris and covered the broken windows with plastic sheets. 

The Museum of Lebanese Prehistory at Saint Joseph University, 1km away, also requires urgent structural attention. Urtizverea says the “major threat” is a glass ceiling on the brink of collapse, which has been temporarily reinforced with wood to protect the collection.

The doors and windows were “completely blown off” at the archaeological museum of the American University of Beirut, 4km west of the port. There was “some damage” to the collection, including a toppled vitrine containing mostly glass artefacts, which awaits examination by restorers.

Fortunately, Lebanon’s leading archaeology collection is “apparently intact” at the National Museum, although the windows, doors and lifts were all damaged in the blast. The ground floor displays of sarcophagi, statues and mosaics from the third millennium BC to the Byzantine era “will just need cleaning”, Urtizverea says. 

“It’s a miracle the collections were preserved”, Hakimian says. The minerals and precious stones of her own museum are “safe” on a separate campus of Saint Joseph University.

But the challenge for all custodians of damaged historic buildings will be sourcing the materials to rebuild before the autumn season. “I’m sure we don’t have enough glass to replace all the windows and doors” through the local market, Hakimian says. Amid Lebanon’s currency crisis, “the cost will be very high,” she adds, noting that museums must also meet stringent technical specifications.

The recovery of Beirut’s cultural institutions will depend not only on international expertise and raw materials, but also on financial support. Grant-making bodies including the Geneva-based Aliph foundation (International alliance for the protection of heritage in conflict areas) and the Prince Claus Fund in Amsterdam are “trying to identify the most transparent and reliable operators on the ground” to establish a fundraising platform, Urtizverea says.

“We are an ambulance for cultural heritage,” says the Prince Claus Fund’s director, Joumana El Zein Khoury. Its aim is to assist organisations that may be overlooked, such as important private collections and artist residency centres. “We are working with the Arab Image Foundation, whose storage area in the Gemmayzeh neighbourhood was affected, and are helping to protect the [photographic] works against the acid rain that has recently fallen on Beirut,” El Zein Khoury says.

Hakimian, who worked on the restoration of the National Museum after the Lebanese civil war, acknowledges that reconstruction is going to be a “long process”. The cultural world is “trying to unify… to do our best”, she says. “Thank God everybody is helping. We hope to be able to bring back what was.”

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Reposted from AAM

Essential Evaluators seeks to gather evaluators in a common space to dialogue, reflect, and support each other in a world upended by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protest movement. This is a time of uncertain and unknown expectations in our professions, in our institutions, and in our communities. We invite you to join us as we rethink, revision, and ultimately redefine our roles as evaluators and our place in museums.

This week, it is our great pleasure to welcome Michelle Moon, a highly respected leader in museum education and community resilience, as guest blogger. Michelle has spearheaded an important grassroots movement documenting the economic impact COVID-19 poses for museums, particularly as it affects employment and staffing. This work highlights the essential role of evaluators.

There’s a term that describes the difficulty of understanding a crisis in the midst of it: “the fog of war.” Coined in 1832 by Prussian military analyst Carl van Clausewitz, it describes the challenge of assembling a big picture in a chaotic, fast-changing environment. In these contexts, information is essential—yet, Clausewitz wrote, much of it is “contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is of a doubtful character,” of which creates the “difficulty of seeing things correctly.”

COVID-19 surrounded museums with something like the fog of war. Within weeks from its first rumblings, museum workers were engulfed in disorientation, navigating an unclear field of conflicting directives, unknown risks, uncertain timeframes, and invisible guideposts. At first one by one, then in swaths, museums began to shutter—but where? How many? For how long? And what was happening to staff and programs? There was a dearth of comprehensive information. We lacked the situational awareness needed to act with intention and strategy. Never has the essential role of evaluation been more evident.

As the fog dissipated, it became clear that closures would not be short-term and that most museum budgets would be unable to carry the same staffing levels as they had before the disease spread throughout the US. After losing my own job to a COVID closure on March 13, I joined an informal network collaborating to identify strategies for institutional survival. As we sought to benchmark what peer organizations were doing, and found only spotty information, I turned to a tool increasingly used by grassroots organizers: the online crowd-sourced spreadsheet.

The lineage of Google Sheets as collaborative data-gathering tools dates at least as far back as the #MeToo exposures of 2017, and extends right up to tabulations of police violence in Spring 2020. Thanks to an open structure—which allows unlimited collaborators 24/7 access on any operating system and anonymous contribution—they’ve been called “a familiar way station on the road to collective political action” and “the social media of the resistance.” These data dumps have played dramatic roles in the public sphere and are proving no less important in our own field.

Following the precedents of museum activism spreadsheets like Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019, Indebted Cultural Workers’ Calculate Your Salary spreadsheet, and MASS Action’s Accountability Spreadsheet, I created a new sheet: Museum Staff Impact of COVID-19. In its earliest days, the sheet grew hourly, day and night, with updates of people fired, laid off, or furloughed from closed museums. In the absence of any other single source of comprehensive data on COVID’s impact on the field, journalists began citing the sheet in their work.

Experienced evaluators can readily identify these spreadsheets as imperfect. Anonymous, user-contributed data is only as accurate and complete as the knowledge of the person who enters it. Bias, from various points of view, plays a role in ways of counting, qualitative notes and the design of the sheets themselves. Cross-tabulation is nearly impossible—meaning we can’t, say, sort out the effects of geography or work experience or museum type on salaries, or make connections between museum budget size and number of COVID furloughs. The data is messy and inconsistent, often incomplete or estimated. To all that, we say “Yes.” These spreadsheets don’t offer us high confidence in accuracy. They’re not an ideal way to collect data. But in the fog of war, they are necessary to developing situational awareness.

These efforts are best seen as indicators of the need for further, deeper research. Each new sheet highlights an area of concern and offers new evidence of patterns and problems. Their creators are working to offer early evidence that may lead toward the more robust insights museum professionals need to develop budgets; solicit funding through grants, federal subsidies, and individual philanthropy; serve their communities; increase equity; or plan their careers. They hold space where not enough formal evaluation with the imprimatur of a leading organization has yet to be done.

The COVID-19 sheet, for example, has revealed patterns not clearly visible elsewhere. It was because of its user-contributed data that we were able, early on, to perceive the disproportionate loss of jobs in education and front-of-house functions as opposed to back-of-house and administrative roles, a finding that implies a potentially disproportionate loss of people of color who are more likely to work in those roles. We were also able to affirm the effects of PPP loans in stanching some of the bleeding, permitting a long hiatus between the first wave of reductions (March and April) and the second wave (beginning at the end of June). Finally, we were able to identify and share best practices in crisis management, such as deploying rolling furloughs, wage and hiring freezes, and salary reductions to help preserve jobs and continue delivering services.

This stopgap method, focused closely on impact to museum employment, worked alongside the excellent evaluation work initiated by AAM and other advocacy entities. Partnering with AAM, Wilkening Consulting connected directly with museum audiences about their responses to COVID-19.  Some of that data, along with research from LaPlaca Cohen and SloverLinett, also informed a special edition of Culture Track, Culture and Community in a Time of Crisis. Americans for the Arts developed a tool for tracking ongoing economic impact of COVID in the arts and culture sector. And in July, AAM released the results of a study performed by Benchmarking Dynamics, including the warning that “without near-term assistance from governments and private donors, hundreds of directors reported their museums may not survive the financial crisis brought on by the pandemic.”

All of these efforts are vital—but they are not enough. To perform at our best, make good decisions, solicit funding, and position our museums to survive this crisis, we need the kind of robust data and sophisticated insights already taken for granted in parallel industries. We need more thorough audience data. We need more internal data about the nature, function, and composition of the museum field, and more comparative data that allows us to observe and learn from different institutional models. Without acting on real insights, we risk making poor strategic choices. An informal poll of directors and consultants resulted in the following list of needs:

• Additional audience insights and message testing on the Benchmarking Dynamics data: The prediction that one-third of museums could dissolve startled many people, inside and outside of the field. How do museum leaders best characterize these findings for local audiences and donors? How do we build on this messaging to increase all forms of support? And, with the public increasingly aware that many museums carry legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, gentrification, and irrelevance to their communities, do we know if financially struggling museums will engender empathy?
• Quantifying employment loss with greater precision: By all indications, the Staffing Impact Google Sheet dramatically undercounts the number of museums that have made cuts to employment. How will we quantify the true impact, more precisely and empirically? If museums do close, how will we track that result? How will we quantify museums that simply go dormant, or shift their purpose? How will we measure budget shrinkage?
• Quantifying and characterizing changes to the workforce: As thousands of museum jobs vanish, employment in our sector is changing, perhaps permanently. We need to understand whether the lost jobs have changed the demographic makeup of our workforce, so that we can meaningfully track the effects of COVID on the diversity of our field. We should ask what types of employees have been lost by length of time in the field, education level, and wage level, to determine how the crisis has changed the field’s structure and leadership pipelines. And we should look at the variable impact on different museum subspecialties, so that we can think about what changes like the widespread loss of education and public engagement staff will mean for audience services.
• Fundraising during the pandemic: As directors and boards work to rebuild budget expectations, they are asking: what fundraising strategies are working now? How are museums making up the loss of earned revenue? What is the funding pool available from public agencies and foundations, and what is the degree of competition in the applicant pool? Are individual donors stepping up more, and if so, who, and how are they giving? Are foundations changing their giving patterns or restrictions? How are museums initiating dialogue with the philanthropy community about multi-year operational funding, race equity, and more transparent dialogue about needs?
• Business model comparatives: Many museums are finding that their old revenue model will no longer sustain their operation, and better data can help them identify possible alternative sources of support. When we break museum funding down into its major categories (government sources, earned revenue, philanthropy, investments), what are the major patterns? How has COVID-19 shifted this mix? Are museums moving to less dependence on earned revenue, changing their operating hours or pricing, adjusting programming, prioritizing fee-for-service programming? How many museums are drawing on endowments to a greater extent? What are the ideal mixes for maximum flexibility and crisis survival?
• Professional development and training: COVID-19 will most certainly mean reduced travel to professional conferences and training program. What alternative models exist to facilitate the delivery of needed professional development? Will we see an expansion of digital education and remote learning options? How will this change progress and inclusion throughout the field?
• Metrics on virtual programming: Almost all museums, to some extent, pivoted to virtual and remote program delivery during spring 2020. What have we learned? How can we evaluate the success of the field in delivering remote learning and virtual engagement? What are the most promising models? Is it all about the internet, or are analog strategies more effective? Can we put together participation statistics, compare examples, and develop adaptable insights?
• Internal policies and procedures: How has COVID-19 prompted changes in internal practices, such as work-from-home policies, childcare at work, performance management, and job design? How will these changes shift best practices for assessment and accreditation?
• Compensation: In addition to the ongoing need for clear and crisp comparative salary data, we also need benchmarks from adjacent fields. How competitive are museums with other nonprofit and cultural organization salaries? How do we assign relative values to functions that are transferable vs. ones that are unique to museums?
• Qualitative data on work experience: We need detail on the experiences of staff members in their workplaces and across their museum careers. In addition to demographic data, personal narratives about exclusion, discrimination, and harassment as they are found in the museum field can help create case studies, snapshots, and detailed reports from which we can build a healthier, more welcoming field. Individual narratives help render abstract problems more concrete and visible, sparking the empathy and compassion needed to make change.

As we reposition ourselves to move through a years-long COVID transition, we call upon AAM to commit to a comprehensive, ongoing research agenda that tabulates the force of COVID in reshaping our field and offers regular insights and analysis for ongoing management. In this challenging and competitive environment, we can no longer afford to make decisions on gut instinct, ad hoc databases, or anecdotal experiences. A new era has emerged, and we need our professional organizations to help us step out of the fog.

Thanks to the many professionals from AAM member organizations across the nation who contributed evaluation needs and ideas to this post. 

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