A Museum Attempts to Reimagine Itself
Utsa Hazarika
As art institutions rush to embrace the language of social justice and inclusion, it has become apparent that the structural obstacles that prevent meaningful change and community engagement within these institutions have remained largely intact. This dissonance, created by a hierarchical institutional culture that reproduces much of the same harm that its public-facing statements and programming advocate against, has led to a widespread recognition that the hypocrisy prevalent in contemporary art museums has brought them to a moment of “crisis.”
Despite this recognition within the museum sector, almost none of the institutional responses to this crisis have proposed specific solutions that would create structural change, choosing instead to repeat targets for diversity in hiring and programming – which by itself will do little to address the deep-seated legacies of colonial practices embedded within institutional operations. As sites that are built on these legacies, and are currently embedded within capitalistic structures of labor and non-profit funding, the largely white directorships which implement top-down decision-making processes within art institutions invite the same critiques of neo-colonialism leveled at international aid and “development” organizations.
There are many critical parallels to be drawn with this “white savior” approach that has generated global criticism and internal upheaval in the international aid and development sector. Like these international organizations, museums have attempted to position themselves as justice-oriented “community” organizations. Often the demographics of the community they serve do not reflect the leadership of the institution. More urgently, while these organizations use their proximity to communities in need to raise funding and publicity, there is a significant absence of any mechanisms to generate community discussion, input, and feedback, leaving unrepresentative people in power to make decisions for the communities they claim to serve. For museums, a similar structure has also applied to its workers, where reports of union busting by institutions publicly invested in “social justice” are all too common, despite an unprecedented wave of unionizing efforts across the industry.
These mechanisms are especially crucial for museums that are also public institutions, who receive nonprofit status and taxpayer money, and should therefore be expected to serve their constituents; and for their constituents who are also postcolonial communities, on whose extraction and erasure Western museum culture has been built. Despite the fact that
these institutions operate through large sums of public money, it is striking that there are almost no independent mechanisms for institutional accountability or public oversight on how they operate, and on what terms they serve, or fail to serve, their communities.
A similar moment of institutional failure and non-responsiveness to community concerns led to the formation of a previous wave of “community museums” in the 1960s and 70s. In her analysis of El Museo del Barrio, Moreno describes how these community museums were born out of the Civil Rights Movement and activism for racial and economic equality, and aimed to represent marginalized artists that had been omitted from mainstream art institutions. Despite their origins in community organizing and education, as these organizations professionalized and attempted to assimilate to the wider museum sector, and the non-profit status, accreditation and access to funding that this implied, they came under increasing conflict with the communities that they had originally been founded to serve. A central concern of the conflict at El Museo del Barrio came from community members, who opposed the institution’s use of non-profit power structures, such as a board of directors, to lock the community out of decision-making processes; and the resulting lack of transparency and accountability.
While contemporary art museums are turning to the language of “community” to signal an outward interest in social justice, these histories illustrate that the more “museum” a space becomes, in the current understanding and practice of the word, the less “community” it can be. The current “crisis” that contemporary museums find themselves in, is in this inverse relationship, where the phrase “community museum” is a contradiction in terms.
“Reimagining the institution” and the demand for a Community Board
Following the start of the Covid pandemic, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor highlighted a series of brutal incidents of systemic state violence. The vast public anger in response to the widely broadcasted footage of George Floyd’s killing resulted in millions breaking out of social isolation to protest on the streets. Art institutions, which have long been the subject of anti-racist critique, scrambled overnight to signal that they were responding to a national moment of crisis. They did so largely by embarking on a range of programming and public statements.
As part of this effort, artists were invited to apply to participate in a long-term residency in a public art institution that is renowned for its history of working with social practice and community-engaged art. The program was advertised for artists to initiate a collaborative process with the museum, to help “reimagine the institution.” Along with community organizations, writers, artists and designers, I was part of a cohort of artists-in-residence who were invited to work with the museum on strategies that would connect the institution to its communities and constituents. Crucially, the institution proposed opening its internal processes up to this public programming, committing space and resources for the research and collaboration that would seemingly lead to new models of engagement with its communities.
Situated in the midst of Black, brown, immigrant and working class neighborhoods that disproportionately bore the weight of the pandemic, the museum’s open call seemed like a much needed opening for re-thinking institutional practices at a time of unprecedented crisis and upheaval for the communities it is meant to serve. The artists who took the spirit of this call seriously and initiated a process of questioning, conversation and critique with the museum’s staff and leadership, however, found a top-down bureaucratic structure with an opaque decision-making process that neutralized and dismissed any dialogue with, or critique of, the institution’s approach.
Rather than a year and a half of research and engagement with the communities the museum is meant to serve, as committed to in the open call, we found ourselves funneled into an intense period of working overtime to produce an exhibition that was frontloaded before any substantial research or work with the community could take place. Rather than working through a community-driven process that would provide any meaningful changes to the internal functioning of the institution, we found ourselves in a process and timeline dictated by the strictures of art world production, publicity, and museum “seasons.”
Our attempts to address these basic concerns were met with a stubborn unwillingness to consider our suggestions and questions as a part of the process we were made to work within. Of even greater concern was the near total absence of the community partners’ voices from many of these discussions, as they were restricted by time, resources, and a timeline that made it impossible for artists to find ways to collaborate with them in order to bring their concerns to the table.
In addition, the higher levels of museum leadership, where many of the decisions were made and communicated from, were always insulated from the outcomes and consequences of these arrangements. Instead, lower ranking staff, artists and community organizations’ staff bore the weight of these decisions, putting in vast amounts of labor to make unrealistic production and publicity goals possible. This resulted in a fraught work environment, with tense meetings, tears, and overworked and underpaid lower ranking staff left to pick up the pieces and take responsibility for decisions that had been made by leadership. The museum’s workforce remains un-unionized, with previous efforts to organize reportedly fizzling out after changes in staff, and some workers expressing concerns about the impacts of organizing on their job security.
A culture of silence and fear of questioning leadership’s decisions were confessed to some of the artists who had candid one-on-one conversations with staff members. One senior staffer described leadership as “visionary,” who nonetheless “bulldozed” those below them to get what they wanted; adding, “maybe that is what visionary means.” Needless to say, this approach to institutional structure, strongly reminiscent of a cult of personality in non democratic settings, is directly at odds with an open and democratic decision-making process where communities and constituents are having their voices heard and taken into account.
It became plainly obvious that the institution needed oversight, and that this oversight needed to come from its community and constituents. Within the traditional non-profit structure, the Board of Trustees seemed very much a hierarchical fixture that had almost no contact with employees outside of museum leadership. They appeared to have little to do with the day to day running of the museum and its work environment. There are no mechanisms for employees to request oversight from the Board over work matters within the institution; or to question decisions made by the Board, which are usually communicated directly to leadership and then implemented within the institution.
In response to this structural failure, artists in the program felt that a Community Board would map a new way forward for the institution. As a pilot effort, we proposed an initial Board with a fixed term, drawn from the cohort of community organizations, artists, writers and creative practitioners that the institution had already committed to working with through its open call and resulting program. As our attempts to have productive conversations with the institution had been shut down and dismissed, our dialogue with staff and leadership had begun to disintegrate, with leadership tellingly stating that they had “opened up too much.” The Community Board was one of our last requests to the museum, to make good on its commitments outlined in the open call. It was refused.
Institutional procedures and a request for culturally competent mediation
In her study on contemporary institutions, Tema Okun draws on the work of dozens of organizers and scholars to highlight practices built on “white supremacy thinking.” Under institutional qualities such as “defensiveness,” “perfectionism,” “fear of open conflict,” and “right to comfort,” Okun describes the way institutions prize the image they are able to project over the actual work they are doing to serve communities, and the ways in which they are structured to preserve and protect institutional authority.
These criteria are familiar to those who work in the institutions of the art world, many of which have publicly portrayed themselves as allied with racial justice since 2020. They have done so by publishing statements and publicizing programming on these themes, without pausing to reflect upon how their own internal mechanisms are embedded in hierarchical values, and how the everyday functioning of these mechanisms reproduces the harm that the organizations publicly stand against.
With the failure of a wider structural reckoning, it has fallen to individuals within these organizations, often marginalized and lower down in the institutional hierarchy, to raise these uncomfortable questions in an attempt to hold institutions accountable to their publicly advertised statements. Okun describes predictable institutional responses to these attempts, where she writes, “criticism of those with power is viewed as threatening and inappropriate... when someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to blame the person raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is actually causing the problem.”
The burden of this labor often results in these individuals being scapegoated, adding to their already marginalized status within the institution and the art world in general. These issues take on a specially charged significance in an industry that prides itself on publicly aligning with artists who work in radical politics, while there is a silently acknowledged expectation for these same artists to internally demonstrate institutional obedience. Artists’ politics are expected to function in the abstract, addressing something external to the institution, and quickly become a threat or an inconvenience when those same critiques are aimed at the internal mechanisms of the institution itself.
Sara Ahmed highlights these processes in her work on institutional power, where she examines responses to a range of complaints including harassment, abuse, and instances of plagiarism in academia. Her research shows that despite HR-speak that champions robust complaints procedures that take workplace concerns seriously, it is that very complaints procedure that is used to target those that bring forward criticisms or reports of harm within the institution. Despite these well-documented institutional maneuvers, industry-wide responses in the art world offer no solutions to these structures that replicate and compound harm, repeating instead the same platitudes about robust HR policies – which have repeatedly been shown to fail in practice. In highlighting the ways in which institutions respond to complaints of harm, and those who make them, as instances of “insubordination” that need to be contained, Ahmed’s writing shows that no matter how clear these policies are in writing, they do not “determine the outcome” of the process itself. Instead, those outcomes range across various forms of inaction and retaliation, often leaving those who complain more vulnerable within the institution.
Amid the chaos unfolding within the institution’s programming and its resistance to the terms set out in its own open call, I found myself confronted with these processes when I raised concerns about the plagiarism and appropriation of my work during the museum’s residency. Shortly after my work was installed, I found that a fellow artist-in-residence had installed work nearly identical to mine in a neighboring gallery in the museum. As a fellow resident, the artist had spent months around my in-progress materials in my studio, sitting in on discussions about these models and sketches, and frequently initiating questions about my plans for the physical details of the sculptures – their size, color, and placement within the gallery. Artists in the program were expected to engage in dialogue with each other and the museum staff, and it was in this spirit that I answered the artist’s extensive questions about my in-progress work.
My sculptures were based on the central sundial in the Jantar Mantar observatory in Delhi, which was built in the 1700s, before the official start of British Crown rule in India. I drew from this pre-colonial history to situate the observatory within its contemporary context as a site synonymous with political protest. My sculptures recreated the triangular form of the sundial, and its distinctive pointed dome window common to South Asian architecture, incorporating it into a pair of corresponding structures. The artist’s main modification to the form appeared to be changing the shape of the window, flattening its point to the smooth arch associated with Roman architecture – removing its cultural specificity, place of origin, and my authorship in the process.
My initial attempt to raise the issue with the institution’s curator responsible for both exhibitions was brushed off. As the exhibition continued, I heard variations of the same confused response from viewers, who could not understand why the two neighbouring galleries contained work that was so similar, with no explanation or curatorial text from the institution. Several viewers assumed that the form of the sculpture had been provided to the artists by the museum as a “theme” to work with, further erasing my authorship and its cultural and political context. Each time, I had to defend my work, its cultural legacy, my authorship, and the years of research that had gone into the project.
I requested that the artist credit my work in the documentation of their project, in order to make the origin and cultural history of the structure visible. Upon raising the issue with them, I became aware that despite the roughly 300-year-old history of the sundial, they proposed that it was in fact my work that had been “inspired” by theirs, even going so far as to falsely suggest that my work had been designed by their collaborator as an explanation for the similarities.
This deliberate misinformation had spread so widely among museum staff and audience members, that it was offered to me by museum leadership as a justification for what had occurred, in a meeting where they insisted on it multiple times despite being told that it was untrue. In response, I sent them extensive documentation that showed my engagement with the site through in progress materials, as well as files and emails exchanged with the fabricator, and email conversations with the curator responsible for the exhibitions. In a second meeting, they backtracked on their original claim, and said they were no longer claiming that my work was designed by someone else, and that this misinformation was just “in the air” when they came to the conversation.
I was informed that the museum had begun, and concluded, an investigation since our first meeting. While acknowledging that their initial claim – that the similarity in the works was due to being created by the same designer – was false, they now claimed that there were no similarities in the work to begin with, and therefore no plagiarism or appropriation had occurred. Despite being informed of the existence of written evidence in emails, they refused to accept that the artist had suggested that my work was designed by their collaborator and did not investigate the source of this misinformation.
The curator responsible for our exhibitions did not respond to my requests for a conversation with her about what had occurred. This despite the artist in question inviting me to reach out to her for clarity, while writing to let me know that the curator had been aware of the situation “from the beginning,” – indicating that multiple conversations had taken place between the artist and the curator about my work, without my knowledge, before either exhibition had been installed. Despite being informed of the existence of this written evidence, leadership did not investigate what those conversations had consisted of.
With rising concern about the institution’s fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts of appropriation and artistic authorship, I requested that the museum hire a culturally competent external mediator with a practice in restorative justice, who would be able to engage the museum community on these issues. In a near-perfect choreography of the institutional maneuvers that Ahmed describes, where institutions turn complaints procedures against those who complain, leadership responded to this request by citing how harmed the artist was feeling by the prospect of restorative mediation, and warned that pursuing the complaint would be damaging to my practice.
Despite acknowledging the damaging misinformation that had been spread regarding my authorship within the institution (and likely beyond), leadership informed me that they would not issue any clarifications, or organize an externally mediated conversation because both the artist and the curator had refused to participate. Rather than conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into what had occurred, the museum’s response mirrored those illustrated in Ahmed’s analysis, where institutions are more likely to protect those who cause harm, rather than those who report having experienced it, often deploying the language and process of the complaints procedure in order to shut down complaints.
Ahmed highlights this as a common institutional response where, in addition to being warned about the perceived harm their requests for accountability and redressal are thought to cause, “those who make complaints are frequently warned about the consequences of complaining. If people are warned about complaining, they are being told to avoid complaint as a way of avoiding doing something that would endanger themselves in some way… A concern about the consequences of complaint is often expressed as “thinking about your career.””
South Asian artists have spoken to the tightly restricted space they have historically been allowed in Western art contexts, which still subscribe to a Eurocentric model of art value and appreciation. This is especially true for those artists who work with vernacular forms, which are deemed alien to a contemporary art context still steeped in the limitations of Western art history. Within this context, I was struck by the ease with which South Asian forms could be abstracted and appropriated, and their authorship erased, with no awareness among artists and art workers of the compounded harm that this brings to communities working against centuries of colonial erasure of their cultural and artistic languages.
There has been some recognition in art criticism of the problematic and often disingenuous role that schools of Western modernism, such as abstraction, have historically played in mimicking forms from colonized and non-Western cultures, and erasing their authorship through a refusal to credit these influences and sources. Despite the artist in question claiming a marginalized identity themselves, the appropriation in their practice of abstraction is informed by these Western modes of artistic thought and production, within which contemporary art continues to function. These colonial influences on artistic method play out in the present, with little understanding of these harms within institutions, or safeguards against them.
The museum in question is situated amid one of the largest and most historically significant South Asian communities in the United States. Under previous leadership, it was known for its pathbreaking work with South Asian art workers, organizers and artists. There was, however, little trace of this unique history in the current institution, underlining the fragility of this kind of labor, which often disappears without institutional efforts to preserve its impacts. The loss of this history was emphasized to me when a senior curator confessed that they did not think the appropriation of South Asian forms was a problem, and that they had never heard anyone talk about it as an issue until I raised it with the museum.
The museum’s unwillingness to address their failures in protecting artistic authorship, and in creating a restorative dialogue that would enable them to build a culturally competent understanding of these issues, was highlighted yet again the following year when another artist of color had her sculpture re-used by the museum without her permission. Having conceptualized and conceived the structure herself, she was informed by the museum after her show had closed that they would be re-using her structure for a subsequent show that was due to open in a few days. Despite the artist refusing permission for re-use, the museum went ahead with the opening, only to have to close and de-install the work during the exhibition, after multiple letters were written to staff, leadership, and the Board, asking for them to respect the artist’s authorship.
These repeated failures at the museum on the same issues show that the traditional processes of complaints do not contain the level of accountability and transparency needed to push institutions to mitigate and redress harm. Artists have almost no other resources and external bodies to turn to when instances of harm go unheard and unaddressed – making external interventions like culturally competent and restorative mediation a structural necessity for harm redressal within institutions.
Art labor and the impossibility of restorative justice within institutions
As a decentralized and un-unionized workforce, artists’ labor is uniquely precarious in relation to the institutions they work in. When disputes do arise within these spaces, artists are left vulnerable to institutional mechanisms with no bargaining power or ability to negotiate the terms set out by the institution. They are outweighed as individuals within the internal workings of organizations who prioritize evading liability or responsibility in an attempt to keep their reputations intact. Institutional maneuvers that are designed to shut down conversations through silence or denial put those very institutions at odds with their stated aims of justice, inclusion and equality.
Within these constraints, those subjected by issues of race, class and gender find themselves at risk of being marginalized further by the processes Okun and Ahmed describe, when offering institutional critique or advocating for their rights in the workplace. With no bodies for institutional oversight, even for those organizations that receive significant amounts of public funding and support from private institutions with a publicized interest in social justice, the ethics of workplace practices in the art world remain fraught. When instances of unethical practices are raised, institutions typically investigate and absolve themselves, a widely accepted practice within workplaces, despite the clear conflict of interest present in doing so.
With this in mind, structural interventions such as community boards and culturally competent external mediation provide opportunities for the sorely needed oversight that is lacking in art institutions. Moreover, they have the capacity to provide this oversight through an approach grounded in community-focused restorative justice, something that is nearly impossible within the way institutions are currently structured. Mediation along these principles usually involves sessions with all parties involved in an instance of harm, including members of a community or organization impacted by what has occurred. Mediation in this context focuses on acknowledging harm in a community setting, and working towards means of redressal for those affected. Institutional responses, in contrast, focus on isolating individuals and conducting opaque and confused “investigations” that stop complaints from progressing, or harm being addressed.
In a previous instance, regarding yet another complaint for workplace safety at the museum, the New York City Human Rights Commission conducted an intervention due to serious concerns that the museum’s reporting procedures for harassment were not in line with New York City law. In conversations with the Commission about instituting a restorative process at the museum to address the situation and update these procedures, the Commission’s attorney spelled this structural dissonance out by explaining that no institution would acknowledge that harm had been caused and offer restitution on those grounds. Doing so would cause “all kinds of changes” to their insurance; not to mention the fear of being opened up to legal liability, bad press and the possibility of reputational damage, and the effect of this on their prospects of funding.
In other words, the very first step in a restorative process – acknowledging having caused harm and opening up a dialogue to offer restitution in a community setting – is an antithesis to how museums are designed to function, and the networks of legality, finance and institutional culture they are embedded in. This disconnect speaks to the central contradiction between “community” and “museum” discussed above, where the move to institutionalize a space through the structures of non-profit funding and status requires instituting opaque decision making procedures that are designed to lock out, and protect against, engagement from community members and organizations.
We see these mechanics magnified in the present moment in artists and art workers organizing for Palestinian liberation, who have faced widespread backlash across the Western art world for exercising their rights to political speech. Unsurprisingly, this museum has come under pressure from community members and its own workers, who attempted to engage the institution on addressing the assault on Gaza. Museum workers reported being subjected to an atmosphere of intimidation, surveillance and harassment in response, with multiple BIPOC staff members deciding to quit as a result. The repeated failures of the museum’s leadership in creating a safe and equitable working environment for marginalized artists and staff are evident in this continued inability to engage in good faith and transparent dialogue, and a resistance to being held accountable to its claims of care and inclusiveness for its constituents.
External interventions such as community boards and culturally competent mediation can in this context play an essential role by opening up a space for restorative dialogue within institutions. They would provide a concrete way for museums to bring their internal functioning in line with the principles of justice they publicly advocate for, which they are currently structurally designed to work against. They would also create a space for artists and art workers to consider the responsibilities that we have towards each other, providing a mechanism to enact communities based in relationships of care and accountability, in place of institutional isolation and the “individualistic, self-centred” culture that Yinka Shonibare describes as the legacy of Western modernism that contemporary art has inherited.
This museum is not alone in its hierarchical practices. These experiences are part of wider patterns that play out across art institutions, the impacts of which have only intensified in recent months. While recognizing that institutional practices across the arts have set a low bar for equality and fair work environments, industry-wide responses nevertheless fall short of proposing meaningful structural change that would provide safeguards against these practices.
Without this intervention, these approaches are in danger of simply re-packaging the same harmful processes with new language, creating the appearance of change when little has truly shifted. As movements for justice and equality face widespread backlash within the same institutions that publicize their commitment to progressive politics, there is an urgent need for the restorative and community-engaged structural interventions that would help reimagine a truly inclusive and decolonial art institution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmed, Sara. Complaint!, Duke University Press, 2021.
Bhakta, Chiraag. Why You So Negative?, Human Resources LA, 2019
Boray, Vivek. Keeping it “Real,” Why You So Negative?, supporting essay, 2019
Ganesh, Chitra. Chitra Ganesh Responds, ARTnews, May 26, 2015.
Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory, Modernism and Appropriation of Indigenous Culture, Case Western Reserve University, 2004.
Iyer, Vijay. Our Complicity With Excess, Why You So Negative?, supporting essay, 2019. First published in The Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2014.
Jones, Jonathan. ‘Cultural appropriation is a two-way thing’: Yinka Shonibare on Picasso, masks and the fashion for black artists, The Guardian, June 14, 2021.
Levin, Annie. Stunning Sweep for the UAW: Three More New York City Museums Unionize With Local 2110, Observer, August 26, 2021.
Mohaiemen, Naeem. The Whitney Biennial Reminds Us America Is Not Post-Race, Hyperallergic, March 31, 2017.
Moreno, María-José. Art Museums and Socioeconomic Forces: The Case of a Community Museum, Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 36, No. 4, Fall 2004, 506-527.
Museums Moving Forward, 10 Ways to Move Museums Forward, 2019.
- MMF Roundtable: Editorial Committee, March 26, 2022.
Okun, Tema. White Supremacy Culture, 1999. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/ The Editorial Board, Foreign Aid Is Having a Reckoning, Opinion, The New York Times, February 13, 2021. Vikram, Anuradha. Occupying Negative Space, Why You So Negative?, supporting essay, 2019.
