The fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years (https://amzn.to/2udBIYZ). Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation (https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/e5/a3/e5a373f3-697e-41e3-8f17-051587468755/sr-mellon-report-art-museum-staff-demographic-survey-01282019.pdf) found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white.
Stephanie Cunningham (https://twitter.com/stephacunning) has a clear answer for why these white institutions aren’t changing: “When you’ve been practicing exclusion for so long, you can’t change overnight.” That’s one of the reasons why she co-founded Museum Hue (https://www.museumhue.com) with Monica Montgomery in 2015.
In this episode, Cunningham traces Museum Hue (https://twitter.com/MuseumHue)’s trajectory from a small collective to a national membership-based organization (https://www.museumhue.com/join), and spells out why being a well-meaning institution is necessary but not sufficient for equity in the field.
Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/museum-archipelago/id1182755184), Google Podcasts (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubXVzZXVtYXJjaGlwZWxhZ28uY29tL3Jzcw==), Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1182755184/museum-archipelago), or Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/5ImpDQJqEypxGNslnImXZE) to never miss an epsiode.

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Topics and Links
00:00 Intro
00:15 The Ongoing Fight for Racial Diversity in Museums
01:52 Stephanie Cunningham
02:26 The Founding of Museum Hue
03:05 Hueseum Tours
03:52 “Authentic Participation” and Jobs
06:29 Museum Hue’s Membership Model
07:05 Knock On Effects of Resistance to Change
08:56 A Story of the Museum Exhibition Design Company
10:10 The Unchecked Cultural Power of Museums
11:05 Black Visuality
11:25 Museum Hue’s Memberships
12:07 Arts Targeted By Oppressive Forces
13:55 Outro/Join Club Archipelago


Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 60. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.



View Transcript



[Intro]


Stephanie Cunningham: People of color, especially people of African descent, have been fighting for museums to be more inclusive over 50 years ago. It's the reason why institutions like the studio museum in Harlem was created. It's the reason why MOC, the Museum of Chinese in America, El Museo del Barrio, all these institutions came up because of the lack of inclusivity within these institutions.

What we've seen today is not actually a shift in inclusion in a white mainstream museum, but a two-tiered museum, which is still the white mainstream museums and the development of these culturally specific institutions that I mentioned. It's important for us to realize that there has been need for institution building for people of color, but also these white mainstream institutions that hold a lot of our cultural heritage have to also include us into the scope and the framework of their institution and become more inclusive as well.


A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white. This imbalance continues though museum visitorship numbers, even though many museums are within communities of color or within states that have high populations of people of color. Stephanie Cunningham has a clear answer for why these white institutions aren’t changing: “when you’ve been practicing exclusion for so long, you can’t change overnight