MMF: Publications | Building a Culture of Care in US Art Museums
MMF Editorial Note
July 30, 2024
Liz Levine, MMF Publications & Events Manager
In the past decade, we have seen massive upheaval within arts institutions alongside many promises and proclamations of change, open letters, anonymous posts on the @changethemuseum Instagram account, and union drives that have disrupted the status quo of the museum and garnered both praise and backlash.1 Yet, despite the very public forum—and, at one point, near daily cadence—of these institutional callouts, there is so much that is made invisible through practices like non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), rampant turnover, underutilized workplace culture surveys, and closed-door human resources (HR) or labor-management meetings. The opacity of some of these common practices is often justified through the broad interpretation of compliance, or an organization’s adherence to labor law and legal regulations, as well as their own internal procedures.
In her article and throughout our conversation, Brea Heidelberg problematizes the way that arts organizations use compliance—or, as she emphasizes during our conversation, the “appearance of compliance”—as a shield to justify any number of toxic and discriminatory behaviors. Her argument that care for people is often sidelined in favor of “things that look like the legally right course of action” is given real-world stakes in the first-hand account of the dehumanizing practices used by managers and HR against our anonymous writer,2 which ultimately led to their termination less than a month after their baby was born.
While highly critical of arts organizations and of those leaders who cling to compliance, neither author assigns absolute blame on poorly trained managers or HR departments. Instead, both take issue with the compliance-driven structures within museums that are exacerbated by complacency, weaponized incompetence, and the ways in which nonprofits adopt corporate practices. And, although they both acknowledge the formidable task of changing these structures, I found their visions for a humanizing museum to be both practical and hopeful. As the anonymous author says, a museum is “made up of people, and people can change.” When I ask Brea how she would have brought a care-based approach to the anonymous author's situation, she walks us through a list of actionable and people-centered recommendations. In the end, Brea says, “it’s about making policies and procedures real and workable and flexible and considerate.”
Reading these two pieces side-by-side foregrounded, for me, the two-fold impact of sharing workers’ personal narratives. First, worker stories have the capacity to counteract the culture of silence and non-transparency that permeates many museum workplaces. And second, they serve as a connective force for workers, where they can place their stories within larger structural challenges, rather than believing the problem is them or just one bad manager. I witnessed these impacts at many points during my conversation with the two authors. They trade strategies, commiserate over shared experiences, and validate the importance of speaking out. Very simply, they demonstrate what care can look like in action.
There is wisdom in both articles and our conversation that I believe folks at every level can glean. As you read their work (which can be found in the right-hand table of contents on web or the drop-down menu on mobile), I invite you to consider:
What can you do to demonstrate care for yourself and your colleagues at work?
In what ways can you use your positional power to call attention to the ways in which museums use the language of care while falling back onto compliance practices when conflict arises?
How can you better occupy the role—as Brea calls for and that the other author benefited from—of accomplice: someone who may not be able to change HR policies and procedures, but can be the one to ask a question that someone else can’t or to interrupt bad behavior when they see it?
If you are in a managerial or HR role, I hope you will pay special attention to Brea’s vision for a more care-based approach to the anonymous author’s experience. In what ways can you demonstrate care to your direct reports or be more transparent about the ways you hope to change? If you are already implementing some of these practices, we’d love to hear about them!
Finally, if you have experienced a similar situation to what the author of “Human Resources is Not Your Friend” describes, I hope that these articles offer a respite from any self-blame that you may have experienced. What I learned from my conversation is that when we care for ourselves and others, we demonstrate our capacity to envision and enact new models for institutional care.
Endnotes
[1] Juline A. Chevalier, Gretchen M. Jennings, and Sara A. Phalen, “Nothing can be Changed Until it is Faced: Museum Solidarity Statements as Reflections of Understanding Systemic Racism,” Curator: The Museum Journal 66, no. 2 (April 2023). https://museumcommons.com/pdf/AccountabilityArticlePublished.pdf; Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger, “In Open Letters, Art Workers Demand That Institutions Do More to Fight Racism,” ARTNews, June 19, 2020. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/art-workers-systemic-racism-open-letters-1202691764/; Trupti Rami, “The Instagram Account ‘Change the Museum’ Is Doing Just That,” Vulture, July 15, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/change-the-museum-instagram.html; Liz Levine and Amanda Tobin Ripley, “Art Museum Unions Index,” Museums Moving Forward, 2024. https://museumsmovingforward.com/research/projects/union-organizing/.
[2] This piece has been published anonymously due to a non-disclosure agreement the author signed in conjunction with a legal action they took against their former museum workplace. MMF has verified their identity and employment history.