Essay by Badir McCleary

These days, it seems like everyone. My experience with museums has been a roller coaster ride. As a curator and art consultant, breaking through the cultural barrier has not been easy. I have worked with museum curators and directors on ideas for exhibitions and potential collection acquisitions, but there is always the fear of the whole thing crumbling due to  uncontrollable bureaucracy.

Museums have long been the deciders of what is preserved in our society. But when did we give the institution authority over what the public should perceive as beautiful? These fortresses house and preserve some of the world’s most important cultural creations. For visitors, museums are places of prestige, provenance, beauty, and achievement. However, for many employees, the work environment has been downright depressing. When it comes down to it, the museum might be the most abusive entity in the world. How can that be?

A History of Racist Practices and Stolen Objects

Museum collections contain some of humanity’s most abhorrent objects and representations in our history. Artist Fred Wilson’s 1992 installation Mining the Museum at the Baltimore Museum of Art (1) is perhaps the closest the art world has ever gotten to an inventory investigation into one of our nation’s museum collections. After experiencing Wilson’s display of findings, I now see the museum as an accomplice, an accessory, and a reminder that there was a time when a slave’s whipping post was an acceptable object to put on display, if not outright own.

Wilson’s project drastically shifted the way I saw museums. For me, the museum used to be a place of discovery, enlightenment, and opportunity. I thought of these buildings as large visual libraries, where smaller institutions and galleries could borrow from the collections in support of educating, understanding, and advancing the practice of art—an idea that Dr. Albert C. Barnes had in mind while establishing the Barnes Foundation in 1922 in Merion, Pennsylvania. 

I would be hesitant to search through many museum collections, especially in the southern states of America, for fear of what I may find. What would it take for museum leadership to deeply analyze the items in its inventory? Could we trust these institutions to police themselves and remove or return items that may have been acquired through nefarious modes of collection?

Globally, museums house treasured objects, human bodies, symbols, and statues extracted from various nations through war, manipulation, and colonization. The requests for repatriation by these host nations have been a hot topic in museum circles. Many debates for and against the repatriation of objects and documents have accused the receiving institutions of “cultural vandalism.” Historically, many of the ways institutions acquired property have been deemed questionable. This conversation has finally piqued the attention of the general public through programs like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, which revealed many disparaging attitudes toward the return of these items during an episode that aired on October 2, 2022. Could the widely-broadcasted revelations in this episode be a driving force for expedited repatriation? Time will tell.

As researchers analyze the actions of these institutions throughout history, one could argue that these practices are counter to growing and preserving culture. Maybe Dr. Barnes saw it this way as well, since he established his collection and foundation “for art education, not commercial display,” which stood in defiance of the Philadelphia aristocracy. During his lifetime, Barnes was vocally opposed to the art establishment, and in his will he requested that no artworks be lent, sold, or moved. However, after Dr. Barnes’ death, it was the Philadelphia aristocracy that ultimately gained possession of his collection and moved it from the quaint town in the suburbs to downtown Philadelphia. According to the 2009 documentary The Art of the Steal, the possession of the collection was obtained through questionable backroom deals and scandals.

(1) Mining the Museum was an exhibition held from April 4, 1992–February 28, 1993, at the Maryland Historical Society. The purpose of the exhibition was to address the biases museums have, often omitting or under-representing oppressed peoples. By taking the existing museum's collection and reshuffling it to highlight the history of African American and Native American people, this reassembly positioned a new viewpoint of colonization, slavery, and abolition through the use of satire and irony.

Inequitable Labor Conditions and Pay

Because of this history of questionable collection practices, leaders of art institutions across the globe have created a culture of submission through scarcity, discrimination, intimidation, and cultural extraction. In an effort to become more transparent, since November of 2022, the American Alliance of Museums now requires that museums and institutions disclose salaries on their job listings. As that floodgate is opened, new conversations and critique will certainly arise.

The inequity in pay came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, when museum employees across the nation lost their jobs as institutions started to make cutbacks. Entry-level workers were most affected. This prompted many to mention how the salaries of the museum’s highest officials could and should be slashed to retain and assist these underpaid employees. The advocacy group National Emerging Museum Professionals Network was at the head of these conversations. With momentum building even before the pandemic, on May 31, 2019, NEMPN created a collaborative document supported by research and data inputted from museum workers across the sector that showed the drastic distance in ranges of compensation. The project was archived on December 31, 2019, but goes to show the efforts taken to bring transparency to the issue.

Museum Worker Unionization Efforts

In 2020, institutions received a rude awakening as employees pulled back the curtain on hiring practices, work environments, salaries, and discrimination in museum culture. Museum workers in cities and countries across the globe have decided to push for a better work environment and equality of pay.

Unionizing to create a stronger collective voice is highly disruptive to museum operations. When workers unionize, they gain leverage over their bosses. Many of these groups have begun marketing their cause on social media to garner support and widen the awareness of the issues they face in the workplace. One such union formed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has a soft spot in my heart, being both my birthplace and home to the first museum I ever visited.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s stairs, made famous in the iconic movie Rocky, were the perfect backdrop for what seemed to be an unwinnable showdown between the underdog employees and the all-powerful museum. The employees went on strike for 19 days, picketing daily in front of the museum for passersby and their social media audiences. During this time, the museum went so far as to hire replacement workers, commonly known as “scabs,” to install the newest Henri Matisse exhibition that was scheduled to open that month. The strike was eventually called off after the workers secured their first contract as a union. 

This was not as bad as what the Marciano Foundation in Los Angeles did: Talks of unionizing were suddenly smashed as the founders of the museum decided to shut its doors rather than deal with their workers’ rights issues. The employees eventually won a 10-week severance package in a settlement, according to Artnet News.

The Impact of Institutional Power

So, how much power does a museum hold? Well, that depends on the museum. There is a running joke between some contemporaries and myself that the boards of directors in many American museums have a stronger voice than many city and state governments. Museums occupy some of the best and most prominent real estate in their communities, with many newer institutions driving gentrification in neighborhoods.

Ultimately, museums do not manage the national budget or make laws, nor can they solve our homelessness issues or truly affect climate change (as recent protests may suggest), but they do affect the everyday lives of their staff and the opinions of every art lover who comes through their doors. They must be held accountable for the historical abuse they have caused, and their wrongs must be made right.

Without these museum workers, we might never see these works properly to examine how they relate to our world. These workers keep the museums alive. I don’t see anyone taking their kids on school trips to a wealthy person’s Freeport storage unit (2). Or maybe they do, and I’m just too broke to witness it.

(2) The largest museums typically only display 5% of their collection at any time. Most art in museums and private collections remain hidden away in storage. Art collectors who’ve run out of space to show their work in their home often keep art in a storage unit.

Badir McCleary is an independent consultant, arts writer, and street photographer. McCleary holds an MA in Arts Business and Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He also holds a degree in internet computing from Cabrini University. He enjoys working with artists, and considers them crucial to informing his practice. Alongside his curatorial practice, McCleary enjoys covering the lives of artists and current events around the cities he travels to. Using drones to create land and performance art, he explores concepts of land surveying and mass media, providing aerial views and journalistic creativity from the air. Recently, he covered the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter protests this way and captured mural creations from across the world. McCleary hopes to create avenues for learning and presentation alongside documented interviewing.

artabovereality.com | @artabovereality

Works Cited:

"AAM Will Require Museums to Disclose Salaries in Job Ads." Artforum, 24 Aug. 2022, www.artforum.com/news/aam-will-require-museums-to-disclose-salaries-in-job-ads-88972.

"Arts + All Museum Salary Transparency 2019." Google Sheets, 31 Dec. 2019, docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14_cn3afoas7NhKvHWaFKqQGkaZS5rvL6DFxzGqXQa6o/edit#gid=0.

Cascone, Sarah. “After Abruptly Shutting down amid a Staff Unionizing Effort, LA’s Marciano Foundation Must Now Pay a Settlement to Laid-Off Workers.” Artnet News, 23 July 2020, news.artnet.com/art-world/marciano-foundation-settles-laid-off-workers-1896750. Accessed 3 Dec. 2022.

"Equity in Pay + Pay Transparency Accountability Tracker." Airtable, airtable.com/shrnUHFzPpFsGZ0cb/tblMKOpHYllxmT2oJ.

Houston, Kerr. "How Mining the Museum Changed the Art World." Baltimore Museum of Art, 3 May 2017, bmoreart.com/2017/05/how-mining-the-museum-changed-the-art-world.html.

Levine, Pete. “Philadelphia Museum of Art Workers Win Major Victories in Contract, End Historic Strike.” AFSCME, 18 Oct. 2022, www.afscme.org/blog/philadelphia-museum-of-art-workers-win-major-victories-in-contract-end-historic-strike. Accessed 3 Dec. 2022.

Museums: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). (n.d.). Www.youtube.com. Retrieved 3 Dec. 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJPLiT1kCSM&t=755s

The Art of the Steal. Directed by Don Argott, Maj Productions and 9.14 Pictures, 2009.

Velie, Elaine. “Museums Must Post Salaries in Job Ads, Says US Museum Org.” Hyperallergic, 22 Aug. 2022, hyperallergic.com/754852/museums-must-post-job-salaries-in-job-ads-says-us-museum-org/.

Wang, Diamy. “Philadelphia Museum of Art Workers Agree to Deal, Ending 19 Day Strike.” Thedp.com, The DP, 2022, www.thedp.com/article/2022/10/philadelphia-museum-of-art-union-tentative-agreement-oct%20ober-2022. Accessed 3 Dec. 2022.

Recommended Reading:

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in the Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich