The Shifting Landscape of Museum Power
May 2022
The museum field in New England and elsewhere is undergoing a profound structural shift in power dynamics. Museums of all types are facing pressure from their staff and society to acknowledge a legacy of privilege and to create more equitable structures that share power with stakeholders. Wage transparency, unionization, decolonization, and antiracism strategies are just a few manifestations that promise major changes for institutions, leaders, workers, collections, and visitors.
Ironically, the shifts in museum power we are seeing today originated a century ago with someone who epitomized the privilege embedded in museum work. Paul Sachs, scion of the Goldman Sachs banking family, in 1922 established the country’s first museum studies course at Harvard. With no prior museum experience except for his philanthropy, Sachs became assistant curator at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum and assistant professor of Fine Art. His innovative course, “Museum Work and Museum Problems,” laid the groundwork for today’s professional class of museum workers.
Today’s museum professionals are far different from the likes of Paul Sachs. Their career paths often entail multiple unpaid internships, minimum wage seasonal jobs, and student loan debt. Because they do not necessarily come from privileged backgrounds, they need and reasonably expect a fair wage for their work, especially here in New England where the cost of living can be extraordinarily high.
After years of struggle to gain institutional power within existing systems, museum workers have forced progress. Aided by national social justice and living wage movements, they have compelled museum leadership to address a number of issues that have profound implications to the future of museums. These include:
- Insisting that museums decline donations or divest from investments involving “tainted money” such as those from the Sackler family due to their culpability in the opioid crisis. This has forced the resignation of board members, renaming museum spaces, and rewriting gift acceptance policies to safeguard against donors involved in livelihoods deemed unethical.
- Demanding that museums share power with a wider circle of stakeholders beyond the traditional board/CEO hierarchy. Decolonization efforts, notably the work of Maine’s Abbe Museum and Tomaquag Museum in Rhode Island, are growing nationally to advocate for shared authority for interpreting Native culture and governing culturally-specific museums. Similarly, staff-led efforts toward reinterpretation, truth telling, and inclusion of nontraditional voices are leading to meaningful changes in the way museums are disrupting white-centered histories, art, and cultural content.
- Challenging museums to redirect finances to improve wage equity, promote a more diverse workforce, secure a living wage for all workers, and provide a more humane workplace culture. Beginning in 2019, the worker activist initiative Art + Museum Transparency encouraged museum staff to share their salaries and those of management in a widely circulated spreadsheet that lifted the veil on compensation in the field. Museum job boards (including NEMA’s) have begun requiring position postings to divulge salary ranges, leveling the playing field between job seekers and employers. Moreover, unionization in museums including the MFA/Boston, Mass MoCA, Worcester’s EcoTarium, Hartford’s Stowe Center, Portland Museum of Art, and Harvard Art Museums is causing rapid power shifts in those New England institutions and beyond.
How will museum power structures ultimately change? I foresee many years of struggle that will force slow, but consistent shifts away from traditional hierarchies and towards more power collaboration with workers and community stakeholders. Systemic change, difficult in any setting, is especially fraught in the cultural arena, which is designed fundamentally to preserve and amplify the narratives of dominant groups. Change in museums is incremental, marked by growing internal pressure from staff confronting pushback from boards and those invested in the status quo.
An example of this dynamic shows up in recent events at Virginia’s Montpelier, the historic estate of President James Madison. A little less than a year after announcing plans in 2021 to share power equally with descendants of people formerly enslaved at the site, the board abruptly canceled the agreement this March. The ensuing backlash from staff, the descendant group, activists, and community members illustrates the reputational risk museums face if they backslide, but also shows how difficult it can be to dislodge entrenched, white-dominated patriarchal power structures.
I foresee continued momentum for reinterpretation and inclusion initiatives. Younger museum professionals are generally eager to challenge the mythologies that often pass as objective history. Increasing numbers of institutions, from large entities such as Historic New England to smaller ones like the Little Compton (RI) Historical Society and Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, are investigating and presenting their connections to slavery, LGBTQ+ stories, and other narratives that have been systemically and historically excluded from the public.
Salary and benefit transparency is having a radical impact on power structures within museums. While museum CEO salaries are nowhere near those in the private sector, the gap between CEO earnings and staff average is roughly 4.5 to one according to 2020 NEMA data, and is much more dramatic in some of the region’s larger institutions. The pandemic has thrown this disparity in high relief, as some notable museums laid off hundreds of workers while top administrators remained with relatively modest pay cuts or none at all. The inequities exposed here are fueling worker outrage, demands for greater salary parity, and more worker impact in institutional power flow. I believe that museums will either voluntarily even out their power structures by adopting more inclusive and participatory leadership models, or will have change thrust upon them through greater worker activism and unionization.
Ultimately these changes will have a beneficial impact on museums and their audiences. Better working conditions and compensation will certainly improve workplace morale and productivity. More importantly, it will help transform the museum field from a traditionally white-dominated, privileged space to one more appealing to a greater diversity of people, which will expand and enhance the universe of museum professionals. The end result will be a much more robust set of skills and perspectives influencing museum programs, collections, operations, and exhibitions, which will better serve museum audiences and their communities.
Dan Yaeger
Portions of this column appear in the May/June issue of Art New England