Purpose STATEMENT

Readying The Museum is a collaboration between artists, arts workers and museum directors working to prepare museums to upend the multitude of systemic issues that prevent them from meeting their missions in equitable and accountable ways. We are designing methodologies and practices to help break apart and dismantle the foundations of whiteness, colonialism, patriarchy, anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigeneity, amongst others factors, that shape our institutions. This website acts as the RTM cohort’s proof of concept, outlining a process of interdependent relationship building, equitable financial distribution, and personal and organizational transformation. Our work is two fold. First it is to reorient the structures of accountability that organize museums and the sector. Second, to design a methodology for institutions, individuals and the sector to follow that holistically builds and supports new forms of relationality from within.

We believe that most museums have a primary responsibility to the communities they serve. As nonprofit institutions with cultural, civic, and educational missions, often with art collections that are held in the public trust, museums are tax exempt. As nonprofits they are accountable to the Internal Revenue Service. As charitably exempt organizations they are governed by an invited board of trustees who hold fiduciary responsibility. Neither financial nor governance sufficiently measure the museum's adherence to its mission, for what purpose it exists, or who it serves.

Museums do not have adequate frameworks for accountability. Few systems and structures of accountability exist to ensure museums are serving the most marginalized members of the community and even their own staff. (See our grievances page to engage some of the many outstanding concerns continuously not being met.) Instead, museums operate from a top-down model of influence and information. The communities they do serve are often external to the institution, not well represented within the institution’s workforce and board, and often featured for the benefit and paternal social power of philanthropy, funders and trustees. In this way, the museum can become a tax-beneficial mechanism for social privilege and power, to which its legal, social, and programmatic forms are truly held to account.

To build a methodology for change to the sector’s fundamental framework of accountability, the Readying the Museum (RTM) cohort engaged facilitators who offered an interpersonal process of learning, critique and feedback based on Indigenous, Black and Brown feminist theory and community organizing principles. Organizing into a series of sub-cohorts, we pursued a process of learning around complex issues facing the field. We spoke with artists, arts workers and community activists in the sector, listened to their critiques and experiences in what we called Base Groups. We commissioned writings and cataloged grievances made by workers across the sector.

White-identifying and male-identifying members engaged in facilitated processes of personal and interpersonal unlearning, and spoke with white museum directors working to dismantle whiteness, patriarchy, and other forms of supremacy. This work is in the whiteness and patriarchy sections of this site. Throughout this work we built a lexicon around which we sought shared meanings and cataloged ongoing resources that guided us in our work. And at every step we tracked our own processes, including the creation of our budget, and the questions, critiques, and feedback we received to ensure that we were practicing our own methodology of accountability. Our work is not perfect, nor do we strive for perfection. Instead, with concerted effort, concentration, authenticity, directness, vulnerability, and care we moved through this process and began to shape a methodology that we believe museums can adopt to shift their accountability and build healthier organizations.

The nature of this work calls us to continuously center those most marginalized and most often invisibilized. Essential work has been accomplished by the cohort and we are ready to embark on the distribution of this project seen in this website deliverable. In Phase 1, the cohort engaged activists, culture workers, community organizers, scholars and others via interviews, writings and on-site visits and retreats. We would like to continue our relationships with these individuals and invite those we are in the right relationships with to join our cohort’s goals.

There are several museum directors, curators, members from our journal writer’s community and culture workers who have also expressed a desire to be more involved in the workshops, zooms and retreats. We will engage this community. For Phase Two of this work we will bring the expanded website deliverable enclosed to policy makers, philanthropists, unionizing arts workers and others who are ready to navigate the logistics of Readying The Museum.

Our work is labor intensive, interpersonal, intersectional, often uncomfortable, and done inside and outside the museum through sustained relationships with local community members, artists, arts workers, staff, executive leadership, boards, funders and policy makers. This process can build trust, it did for our cohort, it can also provoke ruptures and pushback, as it will for museums readying themselves. The RTM methodology works to move museums toward more sustainable and healthy ecologies.