MMF: Publications | In Conversation
July 7, 2025
Hannah Heller and Gwendolyn Fernandez, authors of “Museum Workers Reflect on Their Visions for Museums ‘Post’ Covid: I love museums, but…”
Alyssa Greenberg, co-founder of Museum Workers Speak
Nizan Shaked, author of “Listening to Museum Workers Speak”
Discussion via Zoom moderated by Liz Levine, MMF Head of Programs
Liz Levine (MMF) Let’s begin with Museum Workers Speak (MWS). I’m struck by your origin story as a “rogue” session about labor issues in museums at the American Alliance of Museums’ (AAM) annual conference. Why do you think labor issues—especially related to money, pay, and class—are so difficult to talk about in the museum field? How has the field received your advocating for these issues?
Alyssa Greenberg (AG) When I saw that the call for participants for AAM 2015 was about the social value of museums, I was struck by a cognitive dissonance. Here was an opening to talk about social value, but I knew it would be frowned upon to expand that discourse to labor justice. As predicted, AAM rejected the session my colleagues and I proposed, which we felt demonstrated how critical the session was.
A colleague found us a gallery space we could use for free, and we organized this “rogue” session during the conference. We publicized it on social media, and the momentum was explosive; it felt like it was all anybody at the conference could talk about. I remember thinking at the time if AAM had just given us an 8 am Saturday slot, we’d have had our little session, five people would have shown up, and it would have been over. But because they denied us, and we got fired up, we turned it into this whole event that completely eclipsed other things going on at the conference.
Gwendolyn Fernandez (GF) I was watching the fire on Twitter from afar, and it was clear there was this burning desire to hold space for this critical dialogue at the same time as holding immense care and love for the others in the space.
MMF It’s interesting; I was a speaker at AAM this year and our panel discussion covered topics explicitly related to pay, class, and the unionization movement in museums, grounded in the data that MMF has collected. So exactly ten years later, at AAM, we were invited into the room. To me, that speaks to the work that you all have done to socialize these topics, that we’re able to talk about them more openly now. I’m curious about your reflections on how the conversation has changed in the last ten years?
AG Opening up that dialogue is one of the main impacts of MWS. I think we helped rupture the code of silence that was being exerted by leadership.
GF It would be fascinating to see a timeline of how these conversations about labor have played out. I know it’s still not something everyone’s comfortable talking about, but it is more of the moment now, and I would love to see what else was happening that helped push that shift.
Nizan Shaked (NS) I love that idea of looking at a timeline. I constantly return to Amanda Tobin Ripley’s writing about this because we are part of a larger movement right now. So there’s the timeline for unionization in museums, which is quite recent and has its own trajectory. Then there’s what’s happening with labor in general, which is now this front of resistance and represents a shift in the identity of the worker as they recognize where they have power.
MMF I read a tension in both of your pieces: we can’t change museums until we change how they are funded, yet workers need money to live right now. Can you talk more about this tension and its urgency—the need for funding to pay workers living wages and the obstacles to radical change imposed by some of these funding sources—and how you wrestle with it in your work?
GF I’m now a member of a senior leadership team for the first time in my career, so I’m at the table for some of the big conversations about pay, and I’ve grappled with some of these things by being vocal about the issue. When I was negotiating my salary, I very blatantly said, “this offer is really not acceptable, and the only way I’m able to take this is that I have a partner who makes enough money for us to live on.” I later spoke to a board member about the salary we were offering for the first role I got to hire. She then raised the topic in board meetings, which began to change the institutional conversation. So while I don’t have an easy answer for the larger question or an immediate solution, I’m in this space where I am working from the middle.
NS Part of the strategy is to first have the conversation expose these things, like in the 2019 Art + Museum Salary Transparency Google Sheet.1 It’s not that they can’t pay—someone at most institutions is making big money. I’m interested in shedding light on these dynamics because these institutions have relationships to huge wealth. If we understand where that wealth comes from and how it gets distributed, we have power to demand change and say, “we are making this institution money.”
MMF I remember a conversation I had with someone when I was an organizer, where they said even calling the museum a “nonprofit” is flawed because it sounds like there is no profit when in fact some people profit quite a bit. So it’s really about pointing out where that profit is going. All four of you have been doing that work in your own ways, and maybe that’s not a complete answer to the question, but it does help us better understand the problem.
Moving onto the MWS Relief Fund, I’d like to talk about the theory and practice behind your mutual aid campaigns. Why was mutual aid necessary? What can workers do for each other that institutions cannot or will not do?
AG During the pandemic, so many people went through the experience of losing their museum jobs—their livelihoods—while at the same time losing their identities as museum workers. We felt connected to our colleagues, and that feeling wasn’t defined by a paycheck. When we started the Relief Fund, it felt like a political statement or a gesture of solidarity, but something I came to realize was that it was also a means of direct support—helping people pay rent and put food on the table.
Hannah Heller (HH) We came to the idea of mutual aid because we were inspired by its principles. Our institutions didn’t have our backs, so we had to be in solidarity with each other as individuals. We were continually shocked by how generous people were; it was beautiful and also unfortunate how needed this support was.
GF One of the things we’ve seen is a yearning among workers to be seen for the value of the work that they do. I think one of the powers of mutual aid is the visibility of it—“I see you and what you need”—and that the money is coming from somebody likely in your same field and in a similar situation. The charity model has distance built into it because it’s about “others” who need help. With mutual aid, the community care element is really powerful because we are supporting each other directly. This model also allowed us to be more nimble and responsive than a traditional charitable institution. It gave people a chance to say, “I’m doing something immediately to help,” even if that something was giving $10.
HH Mutual aid is a lot of work, and one thing that helped at the time was that nobody was working their day job. To keep a project like this going after the initial urgent moment is a lot of work. Any kind of organizing can be really hard, and it’s a challenge to maintain that stamina once life resumes, and you have to go back to work and take care of your kids. The solution to that is an open question that I don’t think we’ve answered.
AG We also had to learn a lot about how to build a nonprofit organization, how to find fiscal sponsorship, and people with the necessary tax experience to ensure we were setting up the fund in a way that minimized liability. When I was working in museums, I learned that many board members were in the business world. It’s so important for people who do this work to gain that kind of business knowledge and expertise so we can use it in a way that’s in line with our values. That became part of what we did with the Relief Fund.
MMF Let’s talk more about this idea of solidarity. One key distinction that Dean Spade draws in his book, Mutual Aid, is that mutual aid is solidarity not charity—a word that Gwen and Hannah use in their conclusion. Nizan, as someone who has studied the role of philanthropy in the museum sector, why do you think that distinction is important? How does solidarity fit into your vision of the future of museums?
NS Charity is really deeply anchored into the law. If you look at legal history and the relationship between museums and the market, you have to ask who has the power to legislate? Who wrote the legislation, and what part of society was it intended to serve? It has evolved to seem organic, and like workers are being given something by the people who made the wealth, but that’s a myth. Wealth relies on our labor, so we have the power to create a supportive base for ourselves. I think that’s where mutual aid comes in. Like Alyssa and Hannah said, it teaches people to organize and gives them a skillset that was previously unavailable. So it’s not that we need charity or to be given something that someone else made; we made it. By understanding that—that workers generate the wealth themselves—we create the foundation for a solidarity network, which can be used during moments of crisis for mutual aid. When the crisis passes, we can use this foundation to build the infrastructure to replace the current system of wealth extraction and exploitation. In the process, we can replace the narrative that tells workers this wealth was never theirs to begin with. Solidarity is a strategy to help us to band together and refuse the myth that we have to be given that which is already ours.
GF I’m struck by the sense that solidarity ends up being something that happens at a grassroots level rather than an institutional level, and I’m wondering what solidarity at the institutional level could look like. How do you push up the ladder of change? What would it look like if organizations that have successfully organized and created equitable institutional structures start to work together to share that knowledge and build that capacity?
HH We’re experiencing a turn towards community and local communication and protection that happens during times of need. Some of the other things that are going on now—working with our neighbors when people are being picked up off the street by ICE, for instance—make the conversations about museums feel less urgent. Our struggles are related to and tied up in the mechanisms of capitalism we’re talking about, and the same money that’s funding art is also funding Alligator Alcatraz. I know it’s all related, but sometimes it’s hard to feel as much urgency about museums in that broader context.
NS The reason I care is because I feel like we’re closer to the choke point. Museums have a front row seat to these relationships between money, power, and culture, and I think they can mediate between these levels right now. I’m thinking on the level of legislative and infrastructure change, and you’re actually doing it on a grassroots level. There’s all this room in between where we can build a solidarity power group of all the workers that sustain these institutions that are “art-washing” people’s reputations. Museums and culture are and always have been adjacent to power and money, and museum workers have all these insights into how the machine works, but it’s not something that can be addressed individually; we have to think and work together.
HH You just helped me figure out how to connect those threads. Maybe people are waking up to the idea that these conversations are way more intimately related than we realized.
GF Thinking about that middle space of change that Nizan mentions, and the role played by organizations outside of museums—like MWS and MMF—I’m curious how you, Liz, see the work of MMF contributing to those mechanisms of change?
MMF I see MMF’s philosophy and theory of change as building off the learnings from the work you all and others have done in this sphere. MMF’s remit is targeted: we’re collecting data for the next few years, and then we’re going to sunset in 2030. The purpose of our work is to help the field metabolize the findings from our data so we can take the next step together. The other piece is structural; the way you structure an organization matters, and I think we’ve all internalized this idea that there’s one way to run a nonprofit. MMF is experimenting with the model with structural changes, like separating board governance and fundraising, and having a board made up of predominantly museum workers.
MWS has also operated with radically different structures than a traditional museum: a shared leadership model led by principles of collaboration, transparency, and egalitarianism. How do you think those structures influence your work and its impact? What can we learn from your experiences operating in this way?
GF I think it’s difficult to scale and sustain, but it’s beautiful that the decentralized nature of the organization means it can be responsive. What MWS was doing in 2015 is different from what it was doing in 2020 and what it may be doing in 2030. The decentralization of authority means everyone can have a voice, and working without defined roles in a shared leadership model allows people to step up when their skills are needed and when they have the time and space to do so. There isn’t scrutiny or oversight, just a sense of gratitude for showing up and doing something. And because we showed up and did something together, we gave out $125,000, which is pretty cool.
HH I think our collective leadership model taught me that leadership requires a lot of different types of skills, and one person is never going to have all of them. I learned a lot about myself and what kind of leader I want to be. Maybe a collective leadership team of eight or nine people is a little unwieldy, hard to manage, and unsustainable, but it’s not any less sustainable than a one-person leadership model.
NS I think a lot about changing the way money is put into the field, whether through mutual aid or something like taxing the secondary market. We need to address questions like: how would this work legally? How do we pass legislation? How do we make demands? How do we distribute the money? We need to learn from organizations like MWS and the principles of mutual aid when having those conversations
There’s also an awakening among museum workers who want to be paid fairly for their work, and it’s not just at the grassroots level—it’s at all levels. There are people in curatorial or leadership positions who are now aware of how turnover created by low pay causes problems and inefficiencies. So even people who are well paid want to see change now so their employees will stay and be happy. I was struck by this when I looked at the people who started MMF; these were people who had been in the field for a long time and weren’t at the bottom. It shows this connection is happening at all levels. We need to take that grassroots knowledge and pull it in at all the other levels and points of power within the system.
MMF As we move to close, I want to open up space for each of you to share anything else that you want to leave readers with.
AG In one of our early calls about the Relief Fund, there was a press release circulated about the Seattle Art Museum closing down and redistributing its assets to local organizations led by women of color. Although it later turned out to be a hoax,2 I remember all of us feeling like this is utopia, and in the moment it unleashed something so hopeful that had been with me all along. I want to end with that image. In some ways I’m more jaded than ever, but I’m also more hopeful than ever.
HH We talked a lot in our organizing about how mutual aid would always be needed in this field, and now that I’ve stepped away from museums, I feel less hopeful about the future. But I see a lot of amazing work happening and can’t help but feel that it’s the result of the many incredible individuals in our field who continue to push the work forward. If they didn’t, institutions wouldn’t sustain it on their own. I think that organizing is happening on a local and institutional level, but I wonder if a larger national voice of solidarity representing museum workers is needed or missing.
GF I think the biggest lesson in all of this is that we have much more power than we realize and that you can exercise it in so many different ways. But the mechanisms of capitalism and authoritarianism are all structured for us to forget the inherent power that each person has. The more people that say, “I have this power,” and as they find others who affirm it, that’s how change will happen. I hope for readers to be able to locate, name, and act on their own power in whatever sphere of influence they have. It matters and will lead in directions that can’t always be imagined in the moment.
MMF Thanks, Gwen. Nizan, anything you want to leave us with?
NS I would just repeat Gwen’s words: we all have a lot more power than we realize. That was perfect.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Endnotes
[1] “Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019_View Only,” Google Docs, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14_cn3afoas7NhKvHWaFKqQGkaZS5rvL6DFxzGqXQa6o/edit?gid=0#gid=0.
[2] Naomi Ishisaka, “Seattle Art Museum isn’t dissolving, despite a fake news release — with a point to make — claiming so,” The Seattle Times, June 22, 2020, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/visual-arts/seattle-art-museum-isnt-dissolving-despite-a-fake-news-release-with-a-point-to-make-imagining-so/.