The legacies of colonial and racialized violence, and white supremacy broadly, express themselves in myriad ways in contemporary museum practice. Internal and external transformation is required for shifting systems of power; interrupting the cycle of abusive museum culture; and healing from traumatic histories. 

Yet, despite decades of advocacy,  we keep repeating the same patterns. Why? What keeps us from taking necessary actions?
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We must face individual and institutional unwillingness in museums to self-educate and the resistance to embed racial equity. We must name the lack of transparency, accountability, and serious commitment to make this work foundational. We must move our field away from performative, so-called DEAI measures that center whiteness towards models that break historical patterns of inequity and harm.

WHO WE ARE:
This Coalition represents the change-making movements Museums and Race, MASS Action, Museum Workers Speak, The Incluseum, Museums Are Not Neutral, Empathetic Museum, and Visitors of Color. Collectively, we believe there is inherent inequity in the existing systems alive in our institutions, and that we must address this foundationally through the lens of racial justice and anti-white supremacy. We are committed to effecting real, substantive, and transformative change in the museum field and seeing the manifestations of this work happen in our lifetime.

Contact [email protected] for more information. 

Although we will be working virtually, we commit to share resources, build accountability partners, and organize within our community, particularly with colleagues across cultural, racial, and ideological spectra.

These are hard and complicated times. We feel it with our families and at work and now, with so many of us tele-working, those boundaries have merged. The Empathetic Museum understands that the process of change can be uncomfortable, especially in times of crisis and uncertainty. The cruel irony of this time of social distancing is that it makes the need for human connection and responses all that more critical and consequential. 

Museum leadership is making important decisions beyond day-to-day operations to respond to an uncertain future. We are challenged to think outside our usual modes of ‘business as usual” because our situation is unprecedented. In this moment, we need to pause and consider how administrative actions impact the community we build with our staff, partners, and audiences. We believe an empathetic response to staff and surrounding communities will have a long-term benefits that go well beyond financial gains. 

We are noticing that many institutions are asking similar questions :

• How can we use this time to refocus what our organization does? What opportunities are there to dream and reimagine our organization's role in the community for the long-term?
• What is the bottom-line for our organization? And what does that bottom-line look like to our staff and surrounding public?
• How can we think creatively about our financing in ways that express our values to the remaining staff?
• How will our actions continue to garner public trust and bring people together in this moment of societal need? 
• How do our actions benefit our invested community partners and audiences during a pandemic?
• How does this state of emergency challenge or change our organization's role within the local non-profit and/or cultural community?
• Which costs will be essential to crafting a longer vision and which will have less infrastructural impact over time?
• How does our organization keep in touch with its community partners (artists, educators, schools, other orgs)? How can we make them part of a team with an investment in the response we are crafting to the current crisis?
• How does our organization's leadership want to connect differently with its staff? And its audiences, donors included, once things get back to "normal?" What actions are we taking now that set the momentum for this new connection?

 
These are just some of the important questions we hope colleagues will consider as we rise up to meet this moment. We want organizations to survive this epidemic with both resiliency and public trust.  ​An empathetic approach to the hard decisions we are currently making may be a way of becoming a more inclusive and responsive cultural institutions moving forward. 

Over the summer and fall of 2018, our merry band of empathetic museum players hit pause for a moment to take stock in the work we had accomplished as a group and in deep collaboration with others across the industry.  Our reflections on the trajectory of recent EDI trends and what comes next are captured in a new article to be published in Curator Journal this fall--The Empathetic Museum: A New Institutional Identity.

In addition, the article contains a printable version of our Maturity Model and a glossary of how we use terms such as “community “ or “white privilege/supremacy.” We’d love to hear what you think of the article in the comments below or via Twitter @EmpatheticMuse

Download a copy here. 
And, thank you for your continued support.