Tag Archives: COVID

Inclusive Practices, Writing in a Time of Crisis

Refocusing Museums on People: my dreams for museums in a post-COVID world

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Written by Isabel Singer

Reposted with permission from American Perceptionalism, a site dedicated to examining how museums are reinventing themselves in a changing world.

As I watch museums lay off thousands of highly qualified underpaid staff during this pandemic, I have been asking myself why I keep investing in museums.

Museum staff are overwhelmingly white, straight, and able-bodied, and museum leaders are overwhelmingly male. For centuries museums have told stories about a diversity of people, presenting these stories from the perspective of those in power. Thereby, museums have bolstered white supremacy, sexism, colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, and a lot of other icky isms. The pandemic layoffs are only exacerbating this situation. 

In fact, museums were explicitly designed to reinforce these icky isms. In a blog post for the SuperHelpful newsletter, I wrote about the book Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge by Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, relaying her argument that:

“our modern museums are based on the model of early nineteenth century French museums. The French government invested in these museums to mold French people into ‘good’ citizens. They empowered experts (curators) to organize collections and tell visitors what to think about the world (interpretation). Through their interpretation, the experts encouraged individuals to obey societal norms, such as those around dress, communication style, physical gesture, family structure, sexual ethics, gender presentation, and more. They marked people and objects that strayed outside of these norms as disruptive or dangerous. The French model spread throughout Europe, leading to many of the best practices and physical infrastructure of nineteenth and twentieth century museums. Although the way we structure museums has significantly evolved over the past two hundred years, much of our practice is still rooted in this public museum model.”

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I don’t want to live in the world that museums have helped to create. 

I want to help create a world where…

  • Every person matters equally. Everyone is needed. No one is disposable. 
  • “Normal” is not venerated. Difference is just different, not disruptive or dangerous. 
  • Empathy is the most venerated trait. Not intelligence. Not wealth.
  • Individuals and organizations are judged by how well they live their values. Feelings and statements are not enough. 

Maybe I am crazy, or hopelessly naive, but I believe museums could become a nursery for a better world … if they make a lot of changes.

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Museums were designed to tell stories about the world; we can change what stories they tell and how they tell them. As Hooper-Greenhill reminds us in her conclusion to Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge:

“the radical potential of material culture, of concrete objects, of real things, of primary sources, is the endless possibility of rereading.… because meanings and interpretations are endlessly rewritten, we too can seize the opportunity to make our own meaning, and find our own relevance and significance” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992, p. 215).

However, telling new stories about material culture and primary sources is as much about who tells the stories as it is about the content. We need to empower historically marginalized groups to tell their own stories in our spaces. In the book Emergent Strategy, the social justice organizer adrienne marie brown describes the type of storytelling I dream of more eloquently than I ever could. “We are in an imagination battle,” brown states.

“Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous.… Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free…. We have to ideate – imagine and conceive – together. We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers and Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is a time-travel exercise for the heart. This is collaborative ideation” (brown, 2017, pp. 18-19).

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In order to create space for real “collaborative ideation” in museums, we need to transform our view of audiences; instead of seeing passive visitors, we need to invite active co-creators. We need to transform our storytelling process by becoming participatory cultural institutions. In The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as:

“a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. Create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other. Share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they make during their visit. Connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors—who share their particular interests. Around content means that visitors’ conversations and creations focus on the evidence, objects, and ideas most important to the institution in question.” (Simon, 2017)

I believe that when participatory cultural institutions facilitate collaborative ideation, they help change who holds power in our society and how that power operates. Tony Bennet argues in the introduction to his essay collection Museums, Power, Knowledge that historically, when museums changed the stories they told, they served “as a prelude to the production of new regimes of truth” that “in turn, produce their own distinctive power effects.”

For example, before the British Great Exhibition of 1851, museums told stories that made “royal power manifest and, accordingly, the pinnacle of representation governing the ordering of things was the prince or monarch.” The Great Exhibition told new stories centered around capitalism and industrialization. Following the Exhibition there was a huge boom in the development of public museums. The new approach to storytelling fostered at the Exhibition helped shape these new museums into places that produced and reinforced governmental and biopolitical power, instead of the older system of sovereign power (Bennett, 2017). When we democratize storytelling in museums, we help produce a more equitable distribution of power in our society.

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The most effective way to make museums participatory is by pivoting our primary focus away from the institutions and their stuff and towards investing in relationships and people – custodians, security guards, ticket takers, docents, educators, exhibit developers, registrars, project managers, co-creators (formerly known as visitors), board members, executive directors, and other stakeholders. As the Cooper Hewitt toolkit for transforming the museum experience states, “people, not objects, are the vital spirit of museums” (Brackett et al., 2021, p.10).

Investing in relationships is the best path towards change because, as adrienne maree brown taught me, change happens in fractals. “The patterns of the universe repeat at scale,” she said.

“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system… transform yourself, transform the world. This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation and alignment with each other and the planet.” (brown, 2017, p. 52-53)

In short, if we invest more in the people who make museums, we can make museums work for more people.

Most of the museum people I know, especially emerging professionals, are smart, idealistic, hardworking, thoughtful, and care about making our society more equitable. I am asking myself “how might we advocate to get museum people the resources they need to transform museums into nurseries for a better world?” – resources like training in facilitation techniques for collaborative ideation, the time to build strong relationships with prospective co-creators, the freedom to be more creative, and the salaries they deserve for their expertise and experience. I am brainstorming ways can we better support each other. Will you brainstorm with me?

I have a few small ideas to start us off:

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Sources

Bennett, Tony. Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays. London ; New York: Routledge, 2017

Brackett, Shanita, Isabella Bruno, Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, Alexandra Cunningham-Cameron, Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, Marie Foulston, Rachel Ginsberg, et al. “Tools and Approaches for Transforming Museum Experience.” Cooper Hewitt Interaction Lab. Accessed March 25, 2021. https://www.cooperhewitt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Tools-and-Approaches-for-Transforming-Museum-Experience-v.1.0.pdf.

Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992.

Morgan, Kelli. “To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today,” October 24, 2020. https://burnaway.org/magazine/to-bear-witness/.

Munro, Jeremy. “Why Do We Keep Working in Museums?,” March 24, 2021. https://itsfreerealestate.home.blog/2021/03/24/why-do-we-keep-working-in-museums/.

Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Published by Museum 2.0, 2017.

Singer, Isabel. “Museums Are Perfectionist Control Freaks.” SuperHelpful Letters. Accessed February 8, 2021. https://letters.superhelpful.com/p/museums-are-perfectionist-control-freaks.

About the Author

ISABEL SINGER (she/her) is a content strategist, experience designer, and museum blogger. Located in Chicago, Isabel is a Senior Exhibit Developer at Luci Creative and a Chairperson of the Chicago Museum Exhibitors Group. Her blog, American Perceptionalism, explores how museums can reinvent themselves in our changing world. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where she researched the history of slavery in the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In her free time, she enjoys hosting big Shabbat dinners and searching for good Queer representation on television.

Field Notes

COVID-19 Has Taken a Toll on Museum Education

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Written by Juline Chevalier

I keep thinking of the start of this post like the set-up for an uninspired stand-up comedy routine.

Me: Wow, it’s been a bad year for museum education!

Audience in unison: How bad is it?

Me: We did a survey to find out … let me tell you about it.

Not much of a punchline, I know.

We all know it’s been bad, and I am so sick of the use of phrases like “unprecedented” and “difficult year for everyone.” Because it hasn’t been equally difficult for everyone in the museum field.

This snapshot of findings from a survey by AAM and Wilkening Consulting showed that the staff positions most affected by layoffs and furloughs due to COVID19 were Guest Services/Admissions/Front of House/Retail (68%) and Education (40%).

So, how bad is it?

In the spring of 2020, Stephanie Downey and Amanda Krantz from arts and culture evaluation firm RK&A reached out to me in my role as Director of the Museum Education Division of the National Art Education Association (NAEA). They offered their services pro bono to document the impact of COVID19 on the museum education field. Stephanie and Amanda worked with the Museum Education Division on the Impact Study of Facilitated Single-Visit Art Museum Programs on Students Grades 4–6 and are truly committed to the field. Stephanie has written on this blog  reflecting on the impact of COVID19 on museum relationships with K-12 teachers, students, and programs. Amanda has similarly cautioned that reducing education staff in museums weakens connections to community.

Stephanie and Amanda helped us create a digital survey that we distributed via email, social media, and listservs. Responses were collected in from August to October 2020, with most of the responses collected in September. Amanda analyzed the results of the quantitative questions, and Gwendolyn Fernandez and I analyzed the responses to a few open-ended questions. Gwen is the Pacific Region Representative-Elect for the NAEA Museum Education Division.

We shared an overview of the results in a webinar that you can watch a recording of here.

Of the 330 people who answered a question about change in employment status from the end of 2019 to the time of the survey, 66% said their employment status did not change. 30% reported some kind of negative impact such as being furloughed, pay or hours being cut, or being laid off. Percentages can gloss over the human beings impacted by these huge changes in their lives. 30% of 330 is 99. So 99 people who responded to the survey had to deal with the stress of a global pandemic plus decreased income or job security.

41% of respondents said that there was a decrease in full-time, or full-time equivalent, employees in their education departments between the end of 2019 and fall 2020. 54% said there was no change. Of course, full-time employment in museum education can seem like a luxury to the many folks who work on a contract or hourly basis. 34% of respondents said that the contract/hourly workers at their institution had been completely cut (see chart below).

Education department budgets also took a hit. 22% of respondents said their department budgets were reduced by 37% or more. 24% of respondents said their budgets were reduced between 16 and 35%. See chart below.

Museums have generally not been asking volunteers and/or docents to perform the work of previously employed museum staff. 81% said that volunteers were not asked to do work that had previously been done by paid staff.

Of course, the work shifted to digital and online formats: 91% of respondents said that their work shifted to creating new digital resources, and 72% said they were modifying existing resources for a digital format (see chart below).

Of the 246 responses to the open-ended question “What are you most proud of when it comes to the work you have been doing during the pandemic?” the most responses (110) mentioned digital or virtual programs and resources.

The work is still getting done, just with fewer staff and less budget. For the staff that remain, being stressed and overwhelmed is a common feeling. Of the 245 responses to the open-ended question “What is the most pressing concern you face in regard to work right now?” 52 responses identified increased workload and 44 responses described stress.

Huge amounts of digital and virtual work is happening, but education staff have not been provided the tools they need to complete this work. One third of respondents (see chart below) said that they were using their own technology (laptop, etc.) to work from home. 29% said their museum provided some of the technology they needed, but not all.

Museum educators are an empathic bunch; the chart below shows they reported being very concerned about their own safety and the safety of other staff, volunteers, and visitors. In response to the open-ended question “What goals do you have for pivoting your work through the remainder of the year?” two of the top five types of responses were “internal support” and “self-care” which acknowledge this increased emotional labor.

The category of “internal support” centered on retaining and supporting staff, leading with care, collaborating and communicating well, advocating for the education department, and creating sustainable cultures of productivity. The category of “self-care” is characterized by work/life balance, drawing boundaries, protecting against burnout, and managing expectations. Burnout is a concern for many museum educators in “normal” circumstances, but COVID19 has created a perfect storm of larger workload, decreased resources, and additional stress.

I am especially concerned that when in-person visits are common again that museum education staff will be expected to continue with the extraordinary digital offerings that they’ve developed and bring in-person tours and programs back to pre-COVID19 levels.

How is half the staff supposed to do twice the work? I implore you to start managing expectations of your department and museum leadership now. Consider what your priorities are and ask leadership what theirs are. Create a plan of action that takes into full account the resources you have. You might even compare what would have been possible with the staffing you used to have compared to what you have now.

I will end with the encouragement and reminder to focus on self-care and your mental and emotional well-being. We cannot expect things to go “back to normal,” nor should we want that.

If you are able to join us for the NAEA Museum Education Virtual Preconference on Feb. 23 and Feb. 25, 2021, you can explore the theme of Centering Care in Art Museum Education. Registration for the preconference is $49 for members and nonmembers.

We’re excited to welcome Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry as the keynote speaker. Tricia Hersey is an artist and activist. From the Nap Ministry website:

“Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.”

Writing in a Time of Crisis

So what am I supposed to do now…?

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Written by Zélie Lewis

It’s hard to accurately represent the magnitude with which the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting each one of us and disproportionately affecting black, brown, and low-income communities. Not only are we all worrying about staying healthy and protecting our lives, we have the compounding stress of worrying about our livelihoods and careers as unemployment rates soar. In a report released on Thursday, April 2, the Labor Department indicates that “…there are around 8.5 million more people on unemployment benefits today than there were two weeks ago.” The unemployment rate has been estimated to be at around 13 percent, according to further reports.  This is likely the worst period in history for all of us. 

As a graduate student two months away from earning my master’s in Museum Studies, I find myself circling back to a single, gut-wrenching question: what am I supposed to do now? 

It’s also hard to ignore the impact COVID-19 is having – and will continue to have – on museums and cultural organizations across the U.S. I can’t scroll through Twitter or talk to a museum friend without hearing about more layoffs, teams struggling to generate revenue while closed, or people scrambling to generate something, anything to put out into the world. Worst of all, it’s hard to escape the constant anxiety and grief that surrounds the work that we do.

While the U.S. is understandably preoccupied with the worsening health emergency, the last few weeks have underlined the fact that museums and cultural institutions are extremely undervalued in American society (just think about the lack of emergency funding for arts and cultural organizations). Our institutions were not designed to handle a crisis like this – and we haven’t even dealt with the education, job, and economic crises that are yet to come. 

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Source: https://twitter.com/MichelleNMoon/status/1240992082484961280?s=20

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Source: https://twitter.com/AMTransparency/status/1242869675425443840?s=20

One perspective I have noticed is eerily absent from broader discussions about the impact of our current situation is that of the youngest generation of museum professionals. I’d like to create a space where our needs, concerns, and frustrations can be both shared and heard. I guess there’s no better way to do that than to start by sharing my own. 

The last few weeks have brought an onslaught of changes for all of us. Like virtually every other student in the country, I have watched my university close its campus and switch to entirely remote learning and work, tried to prepare my individual research for conferences that might not happen, and watched the museum where I work part-time close to the public before laying me and others off. 

I am tired. I am frustrated. But mostly I am anxious. Ironically, being a graduate student right now provides a certain amount of comfort; I have work to do, I have a community to lean on, and I have a sense of normalcy others may not have. Unfortunately, being a graduate student right now also emphasizes the uncertainty of the job market. I was in the midst of applying to countless positions before museums started closing and now…everything is on hold until further notice. Knowing that it can take several months to a year post-degree to land a full-time job in a museum, seeing the plight of the field unfold is petrifying. As an educator, watching museums announce sweeping layoffs of education and interpretation staff is especially worrisome. Getting a sustainable job as a museum educator was hard enough before COVID-19; if museums cut their education programs and have no plan for reinstating education staff, the outlook seems bleak. 

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Source: https://twitter.com/AMTransparency/status/1244961086048264192?s=20

And I am but one person. There are countless other graduate students and young professionals across the U.S. and around the world in the same position. In speaking with a peer from my graduating cohort, I quickly realized that the feelings of anxiety and fear are widespread among emerging professionals. Olivia Knauss, a second-year Museum Studies student at NYU specializing in development and fundraising, states: 

“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I felt ‘on-track.’ I was working two different paid internships at two different NYC-based museums, while also reaching the final stages of my master’s thesis. I made it to the second round of interviews for three different full-time positions. But as in most industries, everything came to a screaming halt. Early on, I was laid off from one of my paid internships, losing valuable income I need to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. All of my interviews have been suspended or postponed indefinitely. I’m back at square one…it’s hard not to feel helpless.”

Museum Studies students and those in related programs are not the only ones hurting right now. The programs themselves are facing mounting uncertainties. Will more students enroll this fall? Will these programs be able to stay open? What will this pandemic change how we pursue and complete graduate work? It’s hard to know what the next few years will look for professional training and graduate education. 

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Source: https://twitter.com/meglovesmuseums/status/1245147902399389696?s=20

This is not to say that there aren’t incredible things happening in museums right now. More institutions are finally realizing how essential true digital engagement can be. The National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City and the Shedd Aquarium are leading the way with joy-inducing internet content. Leaders in the field continue to share advice on how to navigate this experience and biting critiques of inequity in the field. 

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Source: https://twitter.com/HistoryGonWrong/status/1245421097413197826?s=20

The only way out of this reality is through it, so we must keep pushing forward. I try to remain hopeful, to stay up-to-date on what is happening in the field, and to have faith that this degree will be worth it in the end. 

I try … but what am I supposed to do now? 

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About the Author

Zélie Lewis: As an educator specializing in digital learning and engagement, Zélie is set to receive her MA in Museum Studies from New York University in May 2020. Prior to graduate school, Zélie served as a college advisor in a rural high school where she worked to improve student and community access to post-secondary resources. Zélie began her transition to the museum field as an Apprentice Museum Educator at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York and joined the Brooklyn Historical Society as the Education Administrative Assistant in 2019. Her research focuses on the role and effectiveness of museum-based distance education in serving rural K-12 educators and speaks more broadly to the role of distance ed in providing more equitable access to museum resources for low-access communities.

Inclusive Practices, Writing in a Time of Crisis

Museum as space of opportunity, creativity & care: A perspective from Spain

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Written by Fernando Echarri

In Spain, COVID-19 has caused and is causing sudden and overwhelming social change. Spain is one of the countries in the world that is suffering most from the effects of the pandemic at the moment. Effects that translate into new social and personal challenges, involving many factors including misinformation, manipulation, fear and catastrophism. This situation shakes the foundations of a way of living, of coexisting, of perceiving, of doing, of desiring, of dreaming.

This change has happened practically from one day to the next, when the Spanish Government declared a state of alarm. The change meant the closure of many public and private equipment, including all educational centres and museums. We work at the Museo Universidad de Navarra, located in the north of Spain. It is a recently created university museum of contemporary art (2015). With structures and procedures still being established and, therefore, also with the power of flexibility towards new scenarios. The museum’s closure has been very sudden, with the exhibition “Universes” by the artist David Jiménez just opened in March. It has taken place at the same time that the University has stopped its face-to-face activity, so that university students and other visitors from other segments of the population cannot physically visit the museum or carry out their various cultural and educational programmes.

And how does a university museum of contemporary art adapt to a situation that prevents the public from seeing its exhibitions and carrying out the rest of its cultural programme?

We try to raise 5 criteria that can help answer this question :

1.  It must be faced with a positive mind, which sees this situation as a generator of personal and social change that provides a new space of opportunity.

2.  Learn to work with uncertainty; with a continuous and changing uncertainty that the situation itself generates. Uncertainty that affects everything from the biology of the virus and the evolution of the disease to the political and regulatory measures that are taken and the social perceptions and new forms of behaviour that are being generated in real time. These new forms of behaviour will probably include a new emotional and affective state in terms of the relational aspect between people. And in this new generation of new forms of behaviour, the museum cannot be alien. It cannot miss this train, in a challenge that we do not know where it is going, but in which the museum has to be assembled, to travel together with society, to accompany it in the different situations and contexts that are being generated.

3.  Space for creativity. The uncertainty generated provides in turn a great ally, usually forgotten: creativity. Creativity can be a lifeboat when the waters are turbulent and the known capsizes. The undefined space is built with enabling bricks that are linked to the creative cement. New products are thus generated, at this time digital, that respond with contemporary art to the needs of the users.

4.  To focus on the value Care. This value is not usually the focus of most education programmes, and is not usually one of the main values considered in a transversal way in the programmes of museums. However, this word is currently one of the most mentioned in the media and has become one of the key words generated by COVID-19 and which people are taking into account the most. Personal, family and social care is now a trend topic. Perhaps this value has surpassed the value of respect, which is the one most often used in social work. The respect value has fallen short in this situation. If we understand the value respect as the consideration for others, the value care implies respect, but it is more than that value. It also implies concern, protection, solidarity and love.

We could simplify by considering that care = respect + love. In this situation generated by COVID-19, it is clear the numerous evidence of care that is being generated in society. Neighbours who previously did not speak to each other are now wondering how they are doing, how they are handling the situation, if they have any sick relatives, if they need anything. Anonymous people who help other anonymous people. It’s not a minor change. COVID-19 is possibly making society better, more humane. Or maybe it already was, but there were no opportunities to make it so obvious. In order to adapt to this situation, museums should integrate this value into the relational possibilities offered by their various programmes.

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5.  ‘Stay at home’. This is the communicative message that the Spanish Government is promoting during this period of confinement. This message has forced the Museo Universidad de Navarra to change its communication, dissemination and educational strategy. This new situation is a challenge for the University of Navarra Museum. It means devoting all its efforts to off-site activities. If the visitor does not come to the museum, the museum will look for the visitor. It means taking the museum to the people’s homes. That is why it has created the ‘MUNENCASA’, with the intention of providing artistic, cultural and educational support to the various people and groups that are currently confined.

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This impediment to living physically in the museum has made it possible to develop a parallel, virtual museum, which offers users programmes, activities and tools such as virtual visits to the exhibitions, multimedia videos, digital gamification, a blog with recent history and current affairs, and classes for university students and the rest of the population. It also pays continuous attention to the different social networks, publishing not only news. The world of social networks has increased its volume of traffic these days and we must redouble our communication efforts. In record time, digital materials are generated that adapt existing analogue resources. Programmatic resources are generated, both exhibition and educational, which help people through art and culture.

This is what we have to do at this time: to approach each home and accompany, help, and care for our users as much as possible.

Society expects nothing less from us.

Header Image: José Ortiz Echagüe, “Tenura”

About the Author

FERNANDO ECHARRI IRIBARREN holds a degree in Biological Sciences (University of Navarra, 1989) and a PhD in Museum Education (University of Navarra, 2007). He is an associate professor of the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) and teaches in the following areas: “Art Education”, “University Master’s Degree in Higher-Education Teaching” and “University Master’s Degree in Curatorial Studies”. Since 2014, he has been Head of the Education Department at the University of Navarra Museum. His interests include meaningful learning and significant learning experiences.