The Indianapolis Museum of Art in Newfields apologized for a job list that was looking for a new director to maintain the museum’s “traditional and central white art audience”.
The text was a bullet point in a six-page job description that also said the museum was working to attract a more diverse audience.
Museum officials removed the word “white” at the weekend after the outrage, including guest curators from a display on a Black Lives Matter mural in Indianapolis.
The museum’s director and chief executive, Charles Venable, said the decision to use “white” was intentional, to show that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as it works for more diversity.
“I think the fact that you can read that sentence and now read it as a single sentence or clause, I can certainly understand and regret that it can be interpreted that way,” he told the Indianapolis Star. “It certainly wasn’t the intention.”
Malina Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon, curators invited to an exhibition called Drip: #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural by Indy, said they would give up because of the post and asked the museum to apologize to other black artists. They run GANGGANG, an art incubator for color artists in Indianapolis.
Another critic was Kelli Morgan, a former black associate curator who was hired to diversify galleries, but resigned last summer, alleging a toxic and discriminatory work environment.
She said the words illustrate an incorrect feeling that raising art by African or indigenous artists would somehow exclude whites and that words like “traditional” and “central” were also substitutes for white.
“The entire job description is full of diversity language, but it is completely disconnected from what that language really means because if you invested, if you cared, right, if you had knowledge about all this DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] language you got and through this job description, that phrase would never have been there, ”Morgan told the newspaper.
“You can’t do both.”
The description, first posted in January to a nonprofit research firm with listings from around the world, now says “target audience of traditional art”.
Newfields is the 152-acre campus of the Indianapolis Museum, which includes gardens and a natural and art park.