Reposted from Artnet News

The Oakland Museum of California was born in the shadow of racial division and protest. We opened our doors in 1969 amid the demonstrations to free Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, who was on trial in the wake of a violent exchange with police. His trial took place across the street from the museum, at the Alameda County Courthouse.

In this context, the museum’s founding director, Jim Holliday, attempted to form a community advisory committee amid calls to better incorporate community members into the project. He was fired for insubordination six weeks before the museum opened; other museum leadership resigned in protest of his ouster. 

The commitment to equity, which is baked into our DNA, is also compelled by our location in one of the most diverse cities in the country, defined by a history of social justice and activism. Over the past decade, we have worked to live up to those values. We have diversified our board, our staff, and our audience, and have begun to measure the impact we are having on the well-being of our community beyond traditional measures of attendance or financial benchmarks, which tend to reinforce the way things have always been done. 

At the same time, our external research—and, even more importantly, the internal reckoning we’ve confronted in recent weeks—have revealed how much further we have to go. I present some of the steps that we’ve taken with humility, acknowledging that we have many more steps to take collectively as a field and within our own organization as we work toward justice. 

Inside Out

We know, especially now, that a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access begins at home. Over the past several years, we have worked to increase the diversity of our staff and board, to develop tools for greater intercultural understanding, and to place engagement with our community at the core of our work. This involves not only setting benchmarks, but also making sure we are measuring the right things. 

On the board level, we set a specific goal for people of color to comprise 40 percent of the members; we met that goal in 2016 and have sustained it since. Seven years ago, we established a community engagement committee to help design internal training specifically for trustees related to equity and inclusion and to champion our work with community partners. We are now one of 50 museums across the country participating in the American Alliance of Museums’ Facing Change initiative to increase board diversity, a two-year effort that involves training, the compilation of a diversity and equity plan, and the recruitment of at least two new trustees of color. 

On the staff side, we restructured our entire organization in 2011 to place the visitor at the center and to dismantle some of the silos that typically exist in museums. We created new positions to serve as visitor advocates and established an evaluation department so that we could hold ourselves accountable. While introducing these functions into a museum may not seem significant, incorporating the perspective of visitors and community members into discussions about planning exhibitions and evaluating success has been transformational. We now launch most major projects with a convening that includes community members with lived experience in the topic to help us shape the content. And every major exhibition concludes with a full debriefing led by our head of evaluation so that team members can hear directly about visitors’ experiences. 

We’ve also created new teams and initiatives to cultivate leadership at every level of the organization, including a paid internship program. Beginning in 2013, we put in place new processes for recruiting, hiring, and compensation designed to reduce bias and promote equity. For example, we created new job description templates for positions to eliminate barriers for hire, including education level, and developed a compensation structure that does not factor in degrees or tenure. We also implemented a rigorous hiring process that includes panel interviews for all staff openings, which aims to counterbalance individual biases.

A commitment to equity must also extend beyond the staff. Last year, we began shifting our approach to investing in order to incorporate sustainable and responsible practices that align with our social impact priorities. While we have not yet formalized a new investment policy or divested in specific sectors, we have engaged the staff and board in discussions to consider how all our investments, including vendor relationships, support our mission. Our current context will surely influence these discussions.

The journey to make equity and inclusion a central aspect of every person’s job—as well as a fundamental responsibility of governance—has taken years and significant commitment from every level of the organization. It’s also taken investment. This has sometimes required us to make difficult choices—such as the decision to focus less on technology and digital engagement in recent years. These are choices that, as with everything right now, we’re having to revisit as the museum remains closed to the public. And yet our sustained focus on equity positions us to move forward now with even deeper work around anti-racism. 

Outside In

This commitment is inextricably linked to our relationship to our community—ties that have been strong since the beginning, as the museum served as a department of the city of Oakland for most of its history. Since the 1970s, we have worked with advisory councils and volunteer groups to connect the museum to the particular needs of Oakland’s diverse communities. Two of our active committees today include our Dia de los Muertos Committee, which leads an annual community celebration now in its 26th year, and the Native Advisory Council, which provides expertise and guidance on issues related to Native collections, programming, and cultural practices. 

Over the past few years, we have doubled down on this commitment. We have collaborated with community members in co-creating programming with deep local resonance, such as All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, RESPECT: Hip-Hop Style and Wisdom, and Queer California: Untold Stories. Our Friday Nights at OMCA, a weekly festival of music, dance, food, and art-making, has been a game-changer for our institution, attracting some 200,000 people annually. Together, these programs have made OMCA much more than a museum. We are now seen as an indispensable community resource and a gathering place for all of Oakland and the East Bay region. 

We’ve been able to measure our success because of the investment we’ve made in evaluation. Our highly local audience (90 percent from a 50-mile radius) is more diverse culturally (56 percent people of color in 2019 compared with 46 percent in 2017) and economically (58 percent are low and middle income) as well as younger (62 percent under 45 in 2019 versus 58 percent in 2017), with many more families attending with young children. These shifts make our audience a closer reflection of the local population of Alameda County, which comprises 60 percent people of color. 

Over the past several years, we’ve also worked to identify our social impact—how successful we have been in building greater trust, understanding, and connection between people and communities. As of 2019, we’ve developed specific metrics to regularly measure (and share) our social cohesion outcomes. This examination has led to a fundamental change in how we define success. Attendance statistics, financial metrics, and audience demographics are the outputs and outcomes of our work, but we are now called to prioritize our impact—the real difference we are striving to make in the world. 

So Now What?

In many ways, our museum has been seen as a leader in the field of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access and is looked to for best practices in community engagement. But as with museums across the country, we now have to take stock like never before. Since our founding, we’ve been known as the “Museum of the People.” But like most museums, we have never fully realized the vision to be of, by, and for all of the people. 

Last week, even as I was honored to speak to colleagues across the country about diversity and equity at our virtual American Alliance of Museums conference, I was also called upon by our staff to see, acknowledge, and be held accountable for the inequities in our own institution. These inequities include a lack of black people in key roles, particularly within the curatorial ranks. We’ve heard as well a call for greater transparency and participation by broader staff in decision-making, and respect for roles and expertise that have not been typically valued within museums. Beyond critiques of our institutional practices, I’ve listened to the pain, exhaustion, and despair of black people and people of color with whom I’ve long worked. And I’ve walked the streets of my city and seen murals that appear on the plywood boards that cover broken windows paying tribute to black lives lost and calls for reparation and justice. 

As we move through quarantine, we’ve begun to consider how to reinvent our institution when we’re able to reopen our building. That reimagining has become a cry for action from the inside out and the outside in. 

So, our journey continues. I know it will take every bit of training and learning and all the tools we’ve developed in recent years. But mostly I know it will require listening with self-awareness, taking a stand with compassion and courage, and reimagining what a museum of, by, and for the people can truly be. Black Lives Matter. Black Thoughts Matter. Black Stories Matter. 

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Reposted from Artnet News

Authorities have arrested six people in connection with the theft of a Banksy mural dedicated to victims of the 2015 Paris attacks. The work was recovered in a farmhouse in Italy, near the Adriatic coast, earlier this month.

On a visit to Paris in 2018, Banksy installed the stenciled mural of a somber-looking woman with a veil on a steel door outside of the Bataclan theater to commemorate the 90 lives lost. It had been at large since last January, when hooded thieves removed the piece with an angle grinder.

Now, six individuals have been placed in custody in connection with the crime, which caused widespread anger throughout France, while they await trial. Two have been put under investigation for organized theft and four others have been accused of concealing the theft. While the identities of the suspects have not been revealed, Euronews reports that the local French departments of Isère, Haute-Savoie, Var, Rhône, and Puy-de-Dôme were involved in the investigation.

The work was in good condition when it was found by French and Italian police. The art-adorned metal had been stored in the attic of a farmhouse occupied by Chinese nationals who appeared unaware of the valuable artwork hiding in the uppermost floor.

According to the Evening Standard, one of the French police officers who had intervened during the Bataclan theater attack was also on the scene when the door was rediscovered and “was overcome with emotion.”

When the work was shown to the public this June after its recovery, the French embassy expressed its relief. “It belongs to the Bataclan,” said Christophe Cengig, a liaison of the French embassy, at the event. “It belongs to all of France, in a sense.” He added that the Bataclan theater owners “were thrilled, very happy” that the work had been recovered.

This isn’t the only Banksy to be targeted by thieves. In May, an opportunistic thief in a hazmat suit was caught attempting to steal a Banksy work from a hospital in Southampton, UK, mere days after it was installed.

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Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance

For many Colorado businesses, now is the right time to update their hazard communication program to ensure compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Hazard Communication Standard, 29 CFR 1910.1200. 

The standard requires employers with hazardous chemicals in their workplaces to label all containers, obtain safety data sheets (SDSs) and train exposed workers to handle the chemicals appropriately.

The COVID-19 outbreak has prompted lots of businesses to purchase new, stronger chemicals to disinfect high-touch work surfaces, equipment and tools to prevent the spread of the virus. Businesses using these new products more frequently and for longer durations need to ensure they comply with the OSHA standard. 

Companies could use the refresher. In fiscal year 2018, hazard communication ranked as OSHA’s second most frequently cited standard.

Keep your employees safe by reviewing these tips and tools.  

Tips for hazard communication

Add any new cleaning chemicals used for coronavirus disinfection to your chemical inventory list. 

Inform and train employees on the hazardous chemicals in their work area before their initial assignment and when new hazards are introduced.

Train employees on the hazards of the new chemicals, appropriate protective measures, and where and how to obtain additional information. 

Ensure that all containers of hazardous chemicals in the workplace are labeled. 

Instruct your receiving department to review labels on incoming products to ensure all incoming containers of hazardous chemicals have labels that include the following information: 

• Product identifier
• Signal word
• Pictograms
• Hazard statements.
• Precautionary statements
• Name, address and phone number of the responsible party.

Review the format of SDSs.

Get the SDS for each new chemical and make all of them readily accessible to employees.

‍Resources for hazard communication

Want to know more about implementing or updating your hazard communication program? Try these tools: 

• Consult Pinnacol’s hazard communication guide, including our sample hazard communication program. 
• Learn more about the GloballyHarmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals.
• Listen to the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates’ April 3rd webinar, which addressed hazard communication and COVID-19 cleaning. 
• Review OSHA’s guidelines on preparing workplaces for coronavirus, including hazard communication rules.

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

The autistic teenager who threw a six-year-old boy from the tenth-floor viewing platform at Tate Modern last summer has been given a life sentence and jailed for at least 15 years. Jonty Bravery picked up and threw a six-year-old boy at the Bankside gallery on 4 August 2019; the victim, a French tourist, suffered bleeding to the brain and fractures to his spine, legs and arms.

In her summing up in court, judge Justice McGowan said: "I cannot emphasise too clearly that this is not a 15-year sentence. The sentence is detention for life. The minimum term is 15 years."

Bravery, 18, who has a personality disorder, was charged with attempted murder after being arrested at Tate Modern; he admitted the charge at the Old Bailey in December. The court heard Bravery had approached a member of Tate Modern staff, saying: "I think I've murdered someone, I've just thrown someone off the balcony."

Justice McGowan added: "You went to the viewing platform, looked around and spotted the victim and his family and went to the boy and threw him over the railing. The fear he must have experienced and the horror his parents felt are beyond imagination.” The judge added that Bravery may never be released.

In a recording obtained by the BBC and the Daily Mail, Bravery told his care workers about a plan to kill someone late 2018 when he was in the care of Hammersmith & Fulham council. In the recording, he says: "In the next few months I've got it in my head I've got to kill somebody." Bravery has been held at Broadmoor Hospital since mid-October.

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Reposted from AAM

As of May 7, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is officially reopened to visitors. The BBCW is a massive AAM-accredited facility located in rural Wyoming in the Yellowstone National Park gateway community of Cody, with a budget of around twelve million dollars. We employ around eighty year-round staff, with an upswell in the three months of summer season when 80 percent of our 170,000 annual guests typically make a visit to us.

Knowing that many other museums have yet to reach this milestone, and may be wondering what reopening is like, I wanted to share what the experience has been like. While I am not a diarist, a diary format is the best way I can think to do that. Before I go on, I should say that we are all different both in the nature of our museums and our communities. My suggestions and timing reflect only my experiences and would need to be modified for anyone who might want to use them.

Day 1

We knew a closing was coming. While our town had a single case of COVID-19, fear was everywhere and the store shelves were empty. In the span of about twenty-four hours, the governor shut us down, along with other museums, rodeos, schools, and so on. Thankfully, we had a memo in the hopper to send to staff already vetted by outside counsel. I use our attorneys on all staff memos now regarding COVID-19, since I have found these memos have lives beyond our walls. We also had begun work to create signage that addresses our closing in as positive a way as we can. Big “CLOSED!” signs or yellow hazard tape on our playground is the stuff of bad social media postings. So, we opted for softer language noting that it was for the public and staff health that we closed. Messaging is truly important.

Day 7

Okay, so we have had to figure out a strategy for this. Talk about nailing Jell-O to a wall, as events change hourly! Our framework for survival is thus:

• Focus on our donors, which in this case begins with our board and advisors. So, bi-weekly emails go from me to them all. Development starts making calls to everyone else, just to let them know we are concerned about them. Open the floodgates of email and phone calls!
• Focus on our virtual presence. For us, this means figuring out how to excite cabin-fever-bound folks excited to come to Wyoming. (Interesting that our Google Analytics seems to show that the age of our web-visitors dropped significantly during this period.)
• Get ready to reopen. We start stockpiling supplies and working on plans for sanitizing stations. Those cannot be built in a day, so it will take us some time. In the meantime, I embed the CDC guidelines in every communication we send.
• Start the process of figuring out what we financially cut, since even with PPP, the impact is going to hurt. Insurance, equipment upgrades, and a host of other topics are on the block. Does a ten-year-old truck need full collision coverage?

End of month one

Cripes…talk about lonely at the top. The senior management team is alone working in the building, and despite the huge size of the structure, we see each other probably too much. We are watching every press conference with the governor together in our giant empty conference room. There are myriad opinions about how we should handle everything from previously approved vacation time to recoding the time clocks. The positive in this is that it does force us to make sure our processes and procedures are really tight. Making it up as we go is not the way!

The board is remaining focused and upbeat, and checks are coming in from trustees who want to help. I am thankful, though, that our key trustees have lined up to support retaining all the staff. My messaging has been twofold about the staff: 1. We cannot gut our programs so that when we reopen we are unable to serve our audience. 2. Finding qualified replacements for staff in rural Wyoming, particularly for specialized jobs, is nearly impossible in many cases.

Two weeks later

Huzzah, so it looks like we may have a re-opening date. We had already begun meeting with the health officer and set up an internal working group to get us ready. Our strategy is easy. We want to not only meet but exceed both the requirements and the recommendations of the health department. So, we review the minimums and then get creative on how we can take that up a notch. As a result, the first and last thing visitors will see in our building is someone sanitizing. To my mind, public perceptions about cleanliness will be as important as anything we do. I call in extra cleaning staff. We spend hours on signage ensuring that we have clarity on our operations. The hard work has paid off, and in anticipation of an announcement from the governor, we put in place a seven-day countdown to get us ready to open.

Staff is back!

Well…I thought this would be a joyous day for everyone, but I sure misread that one! Most of the staff is happy to be back, and they have now disappeared into their offices. But for a small number, there is fear about the reopening, and even fury about being called back to the building. Their anger is manifesting in a campaign to pick holes in all our safety precautions, including suggesting that our cleaning and security staff should force visitors to wash their hands after using the bathroom, which seems impossible to enforce.

Then I have a countermovement from another group of staff who find the sanitation concerns to be excessive, with some even making fun of those wearing masks. It got nasty very fast between the two sides, and I had to intervene and remind everyone that teasing and bullying are not part of our values.  My hope is that after we are open that emotions will calm down and we can focus on our guests.

First day open!

It has been a long week running up to this. I had the exterior of the building cleaned up so that we would look good if we had media coverage. Then the day came, and we had, drumroll please…all of about twenty-five people! In a normal year, we should have had five hundred on that day, but this is the first COVID-19-era opening for us. Still, those twenty-five not only paid to come in, but eight of them bought memberships and four of them bought raffle tickets. I saw a smattering of shopping bags leave with them as well. Half were local and half were tourists. Will their generosity hold?

15 days open!

So, the numbers are slow to rise. The reopening of the National Park has helped, for sure, but we are not tracking well. To date, we are down about ten thousand for the year, but that of course considers the eight weeks closed. Interesting that we are still selling memberships, raffle tickets, and having solid store sales. What is the story there? I think the folks who are coming in are cognizant of us being a charity and being open in tough times, and as a result they are supporting us. It is a little like giving an extra big tip to a server after seeing them for the first time in months.

Lots of lessons learned here. For us, being back open to the public is central to our mission and existence. We don’t have the luxury of staying closed for protracted periods. Right now, our draft budget (July 1–June 30) has scenarios that all include lots of fundraising, and a few that contain staff reductions. I fear the latter more than anything. Having seen the effects of wanton cuts in a prior job, I know the destructive force of death by a thousand cuts. Being back open, I can at least fight to keep us intact.

The Grateful Dead were right that this is a long, strange journey. While I’m not sure Jerry and the boys were anticipating COVID-19, I think it certainly applies to what we have been through. Like all of us, those strange days when this began will forever be etched on my memory. When my grandfather died in the 1970s, we found ration stamps from World War II in his wallet. I suspect that when many of us age out, they will find cloth masks in our pockets we’d been holding on to just in case.

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Reposted from The Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles County may have announced that museums can reopen as early as Friday, but of more than a dozen institutions responding to Times inquiries, not one said it was prepared to begin welcoming visitors so soon. Most won’t open for weeks, if not months. 

Southern California museums are navigating complicated health and safety protocols while also seeing to the regular work of preparing new exhibitions, caring for art, managing employees and communicating with the public. 

Many museums said they need time to carefully review and implement the county’s guidelines, which include limiting the number of people allowed on the premises, checking for COVID-19 symptoms such as coughing and fever, and instructing guests to use hand sanitizer and wear face coverings. Markers should be placed throughout exhibition spaces to promote social distancing, and footpaths should be arranged to promote one-way pedestrian flow, reducing crossflow. The guidelines call for more regular sanitization of frequently touched surfaces and a plan for gathering guest information for contact tracing in the event of an outbreak. 

One recommendation — contactless online reservations with timed entry tickets — alone will pose a major technological and logistical challenge to institutions that don’t have such a system already in place.

Among the museums that said Thursday they have not yet settled on a reopening date: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Getty, which said it expects galleries to open on a phased basis, although no specific timeline has yet been made public. The Broad said it is aiming for midsummer, and the Skirball Cultural Center said it plans to remain closed at least through June 30.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and its sister operation at the La Brea Tar Pits have targeted late summer, relying on timed tickets to help regulate the flow of visitors. The Norton Simon in Pasadena estimated reopening in late summer or early fall; the Palm Springs Art Museum, October or November. 

In response to The Times query, Craft Contemporary (formerly called the Craft and Folk Art Museum) simply said it is going into planning mode this week. 

Both of the University of Southern California’s museums, the USC Fisher Museum of Art on campus and the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, hope to open in tandem with the first day of fall semester, Aug. 17. But a spokeswoman cautioned, “Everything is dependent on the virus.”

A spokeswoman for MOCA echoed that sentiment: “We are very mindfully and deliberately working through all the steps needed to protect our staff and our visitors. We need to take our time doing this, in order to do it right.”

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens this week announced that it would reopen its sprawling gardens to the public on July 1, with a preview period for members beginning Wednesday. A spokeswoman said the San Marino institution plans to reopen the indoor galleries incrementally beginning in September.

In Orange County, the Laguna Art Museum said it was reopening Friday with limited capacity and timed-entry reservations, among other protocols.

The L.A. County checklist for museums includes five safety categories and more than 60 items that need to be managed to remain in compliance. But executing those protocols is particularly challenging when daily operations have been radically disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which is responsible for nearly 70,000 cases and 2,800 deaths in L.A. County. 

Exhibition schedules are in flux, and touring shows are dependent upon other institutions reopening on a patchwork schedule according to international, state or local mandates. Installing and staging new shows takes longer now that construction workers need to be social distanced. Vendors on which museums rely for online reservation systems and other services also have been hampered by the virus. 

Elizabeth Merritt, vice president of strategic foresight and founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums, wrote in an email that the top challenges facing museums looking to reopen include not just budgeting for, and training staff on, new sanitation and safety procedures, adding signage and installing hand-sanitation stations. It’s also gauging the public’s willingness to return. 

The region’s smaller art galleries, which also were given the green light to open with restrictions, will have an easier time limiting the number of visitors but most remain cautious. Gabba Gallery said it plans to remain virtual through July. Gemini G.E.L. plans to reopen by appointment only. Chimento Contemporary is reopening Friday, but with limited hours. Jeffrey Deitch hopes to open around July 11, but Charlie James Gallery said it is leaning toward appointment-based visits through the end of the year.

Two early test cases for the future of museum-going are Spain’s Guggenheim Bilbao, which reopened in early June, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which reopened May 23. At both places, temperature checks are required for entry, masks must be worn at all times, restroom use is restricted to one person at a time, interactive displays are out and self-guided tours are in.

Although the emerging requirements for museums seem rigorous, these institutions face far fewer challenges than performing arts venues like theaters and concert halls, where social distancing — of not just audience members but also artists — is proving particularly challenging, if not impossible. On Thursday the New York Philharmonic announced that the earliest it will reopen is early 2021.

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Reposted from Artnet News

A monument to Theodore Roosevelt that has stood outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History since 1940 will be removed, the museum announced Sunday, after weeks of protests targeting Confederate monuments and other symbols of America’s racist history.

The bronze statue, situated on the steps of the museum, depicts the former New York state governor and US president on horseback with a Native American man in full headdress on one side and a bare-chested African man on the other. The work, by artist James Earle Fraser, was commissioned in 1925 as part of a larger initiative to honor Roosevelt, who was a naturalist and author of natural history works.

The statue sits on city-owned property and, in a press release, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “The city supports the museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”

That sentiment was echoed by Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the former president and a museum trustee, who said: “The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice. The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy. It is time to move the statue and move forward.”

The decision to actually remove the monument was a long time coming. In 2017, following the deadly white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, de Blasio convened the Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers to address the future of divisive statues of Christopher Columbus, J. Marion Sims, and Roosevelt. In the end, the commission opted not to remove any of the works permanently. De Blasio said at the time, “Our approach will focus on adding detail and nuance to—instead of removing entirely—the representations of these histories.”

In the wake of those instructions, the American Museum of Natural History mounted an exhibition called “Addressing the Statue” that included studies of the preparatory sketches, and a series of responses from academics about Roosevelt’s legacy. Notably, many of the historians who contributed thoughts acknowledged that while Roosevelt was considered a conservationist, the land he was so intent on caring for had been stolen from Native American peoples. In its press release, the museum noted the shortcomings of the exhibition: “we are proud of that work…but in the current moment, it is abundantly clear that this approach is not sufficient.”

In recent years, many groups have actively opposed the statue, staging protests outside the museum. Since 2016, Decolonize This Place has led a march on Indigenous People’s Day culminating at the Roosevelt statue and shrouding it in a tarp. In October 2017, a group called the Monument Removal Brigade splashed red paint on its base, writing in a statement “Now the statue is bleeding. We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.” Though the incident was a self-described “act of applied art criticism,” it was decried by then city cultural affairs commissioner Tom Finkelpearl as vandalism.

The future of the statue is unclear as yet, though the museum announced that its Hall of Biodiversity will be named for Roosevelt as a conciliatory measure. Over the past weeks, activists around the US have continued to rally for the removal of controversial statues, successfully toppling Confederate monuments in Raleigh and Los Angeles. NFL teams are also reckoning with statues honoring former team owners with racist pasts that are stationed outside stadiums in Minneapolis and Washington, DC.

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Reposted from NEH

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $40.3 million in new CARES Act economic stabilization grants to support essential operations at more than 300 cultural institutions across the country. 

NEH CARES grants, awarded across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, will allow the National World War II Museum in New Orleans to augment digital programming around its collections, will help the historic site of the Tulsa Race Massacre prepare a new exhibition and tours in preparation for the upcoming centennial, and will digitally document the history and daily life of Connecticut’s tribal communities in the early nineteenth century. 

“Over the past few months we have witnessed tremendous financial distress at cultural organizations across the country, which have been compelled to furlough staff, cancel programs, and reduce operations to make up for revenue shortfalls caused by the pandemic,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede. “NEH is pleased to provide $40 million to preserve thousands of jobs at museums, archives, historic sites, and colleges and universities that are vital to our nation’s cultural life and economy.” 

In March, NEH received $75 million in supplemental grant funding through the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The agency has already distributed $30 million of that funding to the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils to support local cultural nonprofits and educational programming. Through the regranting of federal support, the councils reach an estimated annual audience of 137 million people. 

For the highly competitive NEH CARES grant category, the Humanities Endowment received more than 2,300 eligible applications from cultural organizations requesting more than $370 million in funding for projects between June and December 2020. Approximately 14 percent of the applicants were funded.

These 317 grants will allow cultural organizations to retain staff to preserve and curate humanities collections, advance humanities research, and maintain buildings and core operations. An NEH CARES grant to the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia, will provide continued employment for 25 staff members responsible for the museum’s public history and interpretation work. Another grant will retain cultural heritage experts at the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation to ensure the protection of the country’s humanities collections. Grants will also sustain publication of academic books by the Ohio State University Press and Gallaudet University Press. The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, will focus on the digitization and transcription of a collection of 10,000 pages of World War I letters, journals, and diaries. 

NEH CARES grants will also enable organizations to prepare buildings, exhibitions, and programs for reopening. The National Willa Cather Center in Nebraska will use an NEH CARES grant to plan for a phased reopening of its historic sites by retraining staff who work closely with visitors, and creating outdoor interpretation spaces to support self-guided tours. Another grant will enable completion of a 3D digital model of Diego Rivera’s monumental 1940 Pan American Unity fresco to make the 74-foot work in San Francisco accessible to viewers across the globe. Additional grants will support staff positions at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Kentucky, and smartphone tours at the Enfield Shaker Museum in New Hampshire. 

Several recipients will use their grants to shift in-person programs and institutional resources online to reach a wider public during the pandemic. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History will help fill gaps in remote learning through online summer seminars and digital programming for K–12 U.S. history educators. The American Writers Museum in Chicago will develop online exhibitions and curricular materials for the public, while Atlanta History Center will create a curriculum and virtual field trips for students in grades 3–12. Grants will provide for the expansion of Lakota language e-learning resources for teachers and schools in North Dakota and South Dakota, and will retain staff at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture to create an online version of its exhibition on the experiences of runaway slaves. 

Other grantees, such as City Lore in New York City, will document the pandemic’s impact on American communities. Radio Diaries will use NEH funding to create a series of first-person narratives, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s humanities center will work on a large oral history initiative documenting biomedical history and pandemic response since 1890.

A complete list of all 317 new NEH CARES grants is available here. 

A geographical breakdown of NEH CARES Act funding for the state and jurisdictional humanities councils is available here. 

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Reposted from The Art Newspaper

A new outbreak of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) in Beijing has dashed hopes of returning the city's art world to full operations after months of nearly zero domestic transmissions.

As of yesterday, 137 infections have been traced to the Xinfadi Wholesale Produce Market in south Beijing’s Fengtai District. All schools in the city have now been closed, and 11 residential compounds near the market have been quarantined. While commercial galleries within the 798 creative park and nearby gallery cluster Caochangdi remain open, several private museums have voluntarily closed. M Woods, which had only reopened on 12 June with Collective Care: A House With Many Guests, closed its 798 location as of today; its downtown Longfu location had not reopened since the initial lockdown closure in February. The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, also in 798, has remained open but at 30% capacity and visitor registration, as has been required since its 20 May reopening with the exhibition Meditations in an Emergency. The capacity restriction has been a condition for reopening at all of Beijing’s private museums.

Minsheng Art Museum Beijing and the newly launched X Museum respectively closed on 15 and 16 June. A spokeswoman for X Museum says it has yet to decide when to reopen. “In this situation the government said that all the institutions should control the visitor flow rate to under 30%, so institutions each have different reactions.” Spaces in 798 also “all need to take good measures to prevent and control the outbreak. If there were an outbreak happening from art institutions, they must all be shut down. There are no [closure] orders from the government at this stage.”

Galleries in 798 say they have been asked to continue following precautions already in place, such as temperature checking and visitor registration. Several dealers report seeing a drastic drop in public visitors to the complex, normally a popular destination for young Beijingers, and so have not had to actively restrict their numbers. The management of 798 today closed the Up&Coming Sector exhibition from last month’s Gallery Weekend Beijing three days ahead of schedule, in response to the situation, but has not implemented other measures beyond the existing temperature and health code checks at the entrance. Galleries in Caochangdi, which only reopened in mid-May, have most of their staff working from home, and visits by appointment-only.

Currently infections linked to Xinfadi have only been discovered in Beijing, but much of the country including Shanghai has implemented mandatory hotel quarantines for visitors from the capital. Travellers from Beijing must have a negative nucleic acid test within seven days, and 70% of flights to and from the city have been cancelled. The city has been testing 90,000 residents per day since Monday. The Xinfadi outbreak is China’s first since gradually reopening since March. It comes just as most of the country has fully reopened (although borders remain controlled), and puts to the test the systems China set up to navigate subsequent waves of Covid-19 infections.

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Reposted from Security Management

Culture breeds conflict. According to the 2020 Workplace Culture Report from workplace education and analytics company Emtrain, workplace culture is how people interact and treat each other in the workplace, and elements of those cultures will influence whether the organization is a positive or toxic workplace.

“We have seen for many years now, as company stakeholders, we have to deal with these bad outcomes that seem to catch us by surprise,” says Janine Yancey, CEO of Emtrain. “The idea was to take these bad outcomes—the tricky culture issues like harassment, bias, ethical mistakes, violence—and map them back to the indicators that are tied to behaviors or situations that, in heightened levels or when combined with each other, produce these bad outcomes.”

The research from a database of responses from 40,000 employees across more than 125 companies traces workplace conflict back to six key indicators: three people indicators (unconscious bias, social intelligence, and preexisting mind-sets) and three organizational indicators (in-groups and out-groups, power dynamics, and norms and practices).

“This is just part of being human—we carry our proclivities into the workplace,” says Yancey. “It’s the human condition, and when not well-understood and broken down into patterns we can all understand and process, then we’re just going to be emotionally reacting off each other, and that’s what breeds conflict.”

That reactive stance can have serious consequences for organizational safety and security, says Steven Millwee, CPP, president and CEO for background screening and investigations firm SecurTest, Inc.

“A lot of misbehavior happens in organizations that have a toxic work environment; that’s the sheer motivation for destruction of property, the theft of intellectual property, stealing, or just becoming abusive," Millwee says.

“If you work in an atmosphere where your manager is extremely toxic, you feel unappreciated, you feel isolated, no one listens to you, no one cares about you, your management team is totally disengaged from you,” he adds. “This oppressive type of atmosphere motivates a person to not do their job—or just do the bare minimum of the job—or it creates a catalyst for the employee to act out because they feel they need to take some action, albeit inappropriate action. This can lead to all kinds of misbehavior as punishment for the way they are being treated. It doesn’t justify their behavior, but it shows you the motivation that generated it.”

Unconscious bias. As employers commit to diversity goals and workforces become more multicultural and multigenerational, these unintended, learned stereotypes come to the fore.

The Emtrain study found that more than half of employees surveyed report working with five or more diverse coworkers of different races, genders, or generations in their teams, although they have yet to see that much diversity among executives.

In addition, although organizations increasingly encourage workers to voice their opinions and “bring their whole selves to work,” the report said, only 32 percent of respondents said they strongly agree they can be their authentic self in the workplace.

On this factor, awareness is an essential first step. But awareness alone will not decrease the effect of unconscious biases. Most employees don’t see the processes that organizations can use to mitigate unconscious bias, such as role modeling, consistent employee evaluation, and equal division of support tasks.

Social intelligence. This is the ability to recognize and negotiate the social dynamics of the workplace, and these skills vary widely across the workforce. Only 46 percent of employees surveyed by Emtrain said their coworkers understand the impact their words or behaviors have on those around them, and just 23 percent said their coworkers can accurately pick up on the mood in a room.

The study found that 86 percent of employees strongly agreed empathy is important at work, but only 42 percent strongly agreed that they see it from their colleagues. The study also found that when employees experience lower levels of social intelligence from their colleagues, they also experience lower levels of trust and respect. In addition, employees are less likely to feel safe speaking up.

Preexisting mind-sets. “Employee expectations and perceptions about what constitutes respectful behavior are informed by life experience,” the report said. “As our workforce diversifies, employee perspectives will likely diversity as well.”

Employees carry different perceptions of experiences and conflicts with them, and they often see their perspective as the correct one—amplifying the potential for conflict and misunderstanding. They bring similar diversity and preconceptions about how to resolve conflict. In a scenario where employees were asked how they would address a significant conflict between people with different life experiences, the majority (60 percent) would re-
engage their manager later to discuss what happened, but 26 percent would go to HR or a senior leader to discuss or complain, 7 percent would do nothing, and 7 percent would consider job hunting or changing teams at work.

“Teaching healthy conflict resolution skills could make the difference between keeping and losing top talent,” the report said.

In-groups and out-groups. Most people can easily recognize in-groups from their school days: cliques, popular groups, the “it crowd.” At work, these groups can form around race, gender, political beliefs, or other factors. People in out-groups receive less trust and support from their managers compared to members of in-groups. For example, 63 percent of in-group employees surveyed said that if they report something, they are confident management will take the complaint seriously. Only 40 percent of out-group employees said the same.

These groups also color how an employee’s actions are perceived by their peers and coworkers. For example, when shown a video scene of harassing behavior, employees were less likely to classify the behavior as misconduct when the perpetrator is a person in power or a member of a perceived in-group, Yancey says. Members of more marginalized out-groups were met with less empathy and compassion.

“This research proved out that certain demographics really do have second-class experience,” Yancey says. While the separate treatment does not reach the level of a legally actionable different experience in the workplace, it’s very subtle—and it adds up—she notes.

Power dynamics. The use of hierarchical power by managers can range from coercion to influence to empowerment. “The reason power dynamics are so important in understanding the health of workplace culture—where a manager has discretion over the daily activities, career progress, and livelihood of other employees—is that the consequences of employees’ speaking up in an unhealthy situation can be so, well…consequential,” the Emtrain report said.

While the majority of managers are not tyrants—most survey respondents said it is rare for people to get away with disrespectful behavior because of their authority—nearly one-third of survey participants identified power disparity as causing the greatest level of conflict at work. More common than tyrant managers are clueless managers. Only three in 10 employees said they are unlikely to say no to a boss’s inappropriate request, but employees say only one in five managers understand that employees have a hard time refusing.

“The result: managers do not get the feedback they need when they misstep and employees tolerate disrespectful behaviors they would not accept from others,” the report said.

Power dynamics can shift in a toxic direction, especially when combined with one or more of the personal cultural factors. If a manager has power but weak social intelligence skills, employees may feel uncomfortable or underappreciated, but could be unwilling to speak out for fear of repercussions.

Imbalanced power dynamics can also be expensive for the organization.

According to July 2019 research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), workers consider culture and managers to be closely connected. The report, The High Cost of a Toxic Workplace Culture: How Culture Impacts the Workforce—and the Bottom Line, found that 58 percent of American employees who quit a job due to workplace culture say their managers are the main reason they left. This turnover, SHRM reported, cost employers $223 billion over a five-year period.

Norms and practices. These are the spoken and unspoken rules that govern what is and is not appropriate workplace behavior. Deliberate, positive norms are the strongest predictor of healthy culture, and they can counterbalance negative effects from the other cultural indicators, the report said. Norms and practices are essentially a guide to “the way we do things here,” the report said.

“We all as humans have our own peccadillos—we all have our unconscious biases, our social intelligence is strong or not so strong, our preexisting mind-sets from our last job or experience. We bring all that with us into the workplace. The way to balance that out is having strong norms and practices,” Yancey says.

However, only half of employees see strong norms and practices at their companies. Out of the 125 companies included in the report, the healthiest organizations’ employees said they were guided by strong norms and practices, Yancey notes. Among employees who see strong norms at their workplace, 75 percent said their organization is healthy, compared to 32 percent of employees who do not see strong norms.

Without strong norms, however, “it’s a vacuum. Anyone’s behavior can basically set the culture,” she says. “You’ll have a culture, it just won’t be one that is intentional or proactively set. It’s one that is created by usually the worst behaviors and worst elements of the organization.”

Strong norms can be built in a variety of ways, including leaders’ role modeling, training, skill building sessions, constructive feedback structures, and compelling change stories, the report said.

Security professionals can influence company culture by serving as eyes and ears within the organization and reporting on misconduct—even outside the security department, says Millwee. This helps to spread the burden of reporting outside a manager’s direct reports, who may not feel comfortable coming forward.

Security practitioners can also understand where their organization’s cultural hotspots are and serve as a cross-department collaborator to help address them, she says.

One rapidly emerging hotspot, especially in the United States, is politics, she adds. With a contentious election on the horizon and increasingly polarized political factions, workplaces could face heightened tensions. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a wrench into many employees’ long-term financial plans and ratcheted up health concerns. Altogether, these are ingredients for an explosive situation that could affect overall workplace culture as well as security, Yancey says.

However, “we’re going into a rough business climate, both economically and civically, because of healthcare. Culture can either really help be the rudder that steers the organization forward, or it’s toxic, which means there’s no rudder and the organization’s spinning,” Yancey says.

“On one positive note,” Millwee says, “the challenges that employers are going through right now, just with the COVID-19 pandemic, really create an opportunity for a reset of where their cultures need to be refined.”

“Employees working from home or not working at all may be very anxious or worried about what the future looks like. Sometimes we tend to minimize what others are thinking or feeling, but really their feelings and thoughts are just the same as ours,” he adds. “By showing a sense of compassion and mercy—not shooting the walking wounded—you can engage your people and let them know that they can feel safe in your workplace. That can do more for your culture in today’s situation than almost anything else.”

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