On June 16, an Instagram account called @changethemuseum created its first post, a black square with the text “a blog post title was changed because the white curator thought ‘it sounded too black power.'” Since then, the account has shared over 70 anonymously submitted stories of instances of racism and sexism within the museum world.
@changethemuseum was created by an anonymous New York museum worker in the wake of the protests over the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. The worker said that the protests led them to consider racism within their own workplace.
“Through many conversations with colleagues across the US, it became apparent that museum administrations were not truly reflecting on their own roles in shaping toxic, racist working cultures and public spaces — there seemed to be a refusal to accept complicity, and, more telling, a palpable lack of urgency to develop strategies, goals, and timelines for combating instances of racism, severe inequity, and colonialism inherent in the collecting/art history narrative,” they told Hyperallergic.
While the posts do not include the identity of the submitter, many directly name museums complicit in perpetuating institutional racism. Many of these stories include institutions in the Mid-Atlantic region. One post shares the experience of a woman of color employed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to the post, a female department head told the submitter that “you are replaceable. I gave you your job, and I can take it away,” after gossip emerged about the department head’s favorite employee. Another post discusses how MoMA PS1’s 2014 exhibit on artists who protest, held shortly after the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, did not initially include any works by Black artists.
Hyperallergic did not verify the stories shared on @changethemuseum, and institutions that the website reached out to for comment did not respond.
The account’s creator says that over 100 stories have already been submitted and plans to continue sharing these testimonies daily. Taken together, @changethemuseum’s creator says, these stories reveal that museums are ruled by predominately white boards and that human resources departments “don’t protect individuals, they protect the institutions they serve.”