How do you build a sustainable mission for your museum?
“Shut up and listen.”
So says Liam Sweeney – quoting Ann Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Sweeney is an analyst at Ithaka S&R, a company that works with universities and museums to spot trends in the marketplace and utilize them for the public good. Among the topics the company studied is how to build a more diverse museum staff and, most recently, how to create more diverse programming.
The latter topic is the focus of a series of case studies by Ithaka S&R, four of which are already available with four more on the way. Though most of the museums studied are in cities like Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit, their missions and size all vary, providing lessons for directors, curators and marketers.
In a recent phone conversation with TeamWorks Media, Sweeney talked about how museums are creating diverse programming, how staff selection factors into it and why sustainability is at the heart of these efforts.
TeamWorks Media: Are there common traits among museums that seek diverse audiences?
Liam Sweeney: The Brooklyn Museum has had a huge amount of success with the first Saturday program, Target First Saturdays. Every first Saturday of the month there’s a series of programming. There’s live music, there’s dancing on the third floor, there are a lot of different talks, and musical performances, and things like that. The program has been bringing diverse audiences into the museum for decades. This February, for instance, the vast majority of the attendants [were] people of color. That’s something that’s been a huge success for Brooklyn Museum.
It’s in a different situation than let’s say LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], which is on Wilshire Boulevard in a ritzy part of LA. I would say that LACMA’s big challenge has been how do we get outside of the museum walls, and how do we reach folks in South Park? How do we reach folks in North Hollywood? Their approach has been, “We’re going to set up satellite locations, and we’re going to model ourselves after a public library system.” That’s another approach.
Start from a place of humility, and start looking around, and try and re-envision and reimagine who your public is.
I would say the thing that is in common is that the leaders of these institutions have decided to stop assuming that they know what’s best, to shut up and listen, as Ann Pasternack put it, to the communities that have been historically disenfranchised and not welcome in the museums, and start there. Start from a place of humility, and start looking around, and try and re-envision and reimagine who your public is. Then the process of specific strategies starts to take form, I think.
TWM: In talking about the strategies of getting outside the walls, does this tend to focus around events, or does digital and social media come up in the conversation as well?
Sweeney: Making the museum collections and resources available through digital means is huge for a lot of accessibility issues, so I certainly don’t want to downplay that. But the museum needs to build trust in communities that have largely been ignored. To do that you need to have a real presence in a locality.
If you do it once, no one is going to care, right? It’s only through repetition, through showing you have an established presence in these communities that people start to trust the institution.”
TWM: How much does having a diverse staff required contribute to these kinds of programs? Does creating these kind of programs require staffing changes?
Sweeney: Thelma Golden said something during the Studio Museum site-visit that I thought was pretty powerful, which was that a diverse program does not require a diverse staff. I’m paraphrasing. In that sense, you can’t wait for the right curator to come along and change your program, which in and of itself can become tokenistic. But I’ve also heard in our interviews that when you do have, a diverse curatorial staff that changes the way people curate. I don’t think these are necessarily conflicting. I think they’re both true, even though they seem contradictory. What I think is if you don’t have diversity and you don’t have people on your staff that have a cultural background connecting to the topics that you’re looking to explore, you have to be really careful.
If you don’t have diversity and you don’t have people on your staff that have a cultural background connecting to the topics that you’re looking to explore, you have to be really careful.
TWM: True.
Sweeney: In those cases, I think it’s important for museums to partner with culturally-specific organizations that know that they’re doing and really listen to people who are from those communities, whether they’re religious communities, racial communities, LGBTQ communities, etc. Look for partnerships and don’t assume that you know what’s best right off the bat. I think a lot of mistakes are made that way. In terms of the other point that diverse curators curate differently, it’s just really hard to do a more diverse program effectively without a misstep, or a clumsy moment, or an offensive moment if you don’t have anyone from those communities on staff. Ultimately, having diverse staff is essential [in that case], I think.
TWM: How do you pitch the benefits to museums? What do you say is the reason why they should adopt some of these kinds of practices?
Sweeney: In a lot of cases the most compelling argument to an administrator at a museum is that of sustainability. That’s not necessarily what I think is the most important reason to be doing this, but I think to people who are interested in maintaining their institutions in perpetuity for the public, I think it’s a very compelling reason because the demographics of the country are shifting really rapidly. We’re going to be majority people of color in America in 2044, I think, it’s projected by Brookings, the last I saw. That’s at a national level, but all of the museums have to also look at their localities.
Trends in philanthropy are revealing that there’s a big push for social return on investment from donors. There’s less federal funding. In a lot of cases, I think donors want to be more involved with their gifts now than they used to be. We’re not in a climate anymore of just donors writing a check and saying, “Okay, you’re the expert. Use this the best way you can.”
We’re not in a climate anymore of just donors writing a check and saying, “Okay, you’re the expert. Use this the best way can.”
I think there’s an ethical question too. These institutions are responsible for presenting the culture of this country, the culture of the world in some cases, and they are making choices about what culture is worth sharing and what culture is not worth sharing all the time, whether it’s explicit or tacit. There’s a huge amount of responsibility there. If you operate a cultural organization that displays art and a whole enormous set of the public can’t see themselves on the walls in your institution, then you’re telling them that they’re not part of the cultural narrative that we have in this country or this city. That’s more of an ethical concern, I think. And my impression after writing these case studies is that that is the primary concern of the eight directors who participated in this project.
Many thanks to Liam Sweeney for sharing his insights. If you’d like to learn more about the value of diversifying your audiences, please check out some of our work with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.