“Many museums, including my employer, botched their public ‘reactions’ to the protests, turning to the timeworn, disingenuous strategies of tokenism, ‘let’s stay quiet,’ and/or stating the (minimal) things done in the past 5-10 years to create welcoming cultural spaces,” founder told was in part inspired by another account, self-described as “a coalition of current and former BIPOC employees and allies” committed to calling out system racism in cultural institutions. Museums have also been called out for being complicit in systemic racism or putting forth empty statements rather than undertaking actionable change.
He ended the presentation by saying, ‘Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists,’” reads the post.Īs Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations condemning state-sanctioned anti-Black violence continue, a lack of diversity in institutions’ staff and collections has been at the center of the cultural conversation. “At an SFMOMA all-staff meeting, the white senior curator was giving a presentation about a group of new acquisitions by POC artists. However, several posts call out museums that have already been sharply reprimanded for perpetuating a culture of racism in recent months, such as SFMOMA, which was accused of censorship after deleting a comment by a Black former employee. Hyperallergic did not independently verify the accuracy of the dozens of testimonies.
While the names of the senders remain undisclosed, some posts include identifying information about the alleged perpetrators or the name of the institution where the incident took place. “Through many conversations with colleagues across the US, it became apparent that museum administrations were not truly reflecting on their own roles in shaping toxic, racist working cultures and public spaces - there seemed to be a refusal to accept complicity, and, more telling, a palpable lack of urgency to develop strategies, goals, and timelines for combating instances of racism, severe inequity, and colonialism inherent in the collecting/art history narrative,” they said. The account’s founder, a New York City museum worker who prefers to remain anonymous, told Hyperallergic that the international anti-racism protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks prompted them to consider issues of racism in their own workplace. These are only some of the testimonies posted on which seeks to amplify experiences of discrimination in cultural institutions. Last year large signage was installed that showed a painting of an Indigenous person by a white artist with the accompanying text ‘we’re rethinking the ‘American’ in ‘American Art,’” says another. “The Museum I work at is reinstalling out American Art galleries.
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