The Indianapolis Museum of Art in Newfields has apologized for a list of jobs in search of a new director who could attract a more diverse audience, but keep the “traditional and central white art audience”.
The New York Times reports that the Newfields museum director and chief executive, Charles L. Venable, said in an interview that the wording of the job list was intentional. He said the list was intended to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience when seeking a more diverse and inclusive audience.
“I deeply regret that the choice of language clearly did not work to mirror our general intention to build our target audience of art by welcoming more people to the door,” said Venable according to the Times. “We were trying to be transparent about the fact that anyone who applies for this job really needs to be committed to the efforts of the DEI in all parts of the museum.”
The guest curators at the next exhibition “DRIP: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural”, Malina Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon, told the Times that they could no longer remain as guest curators. Simone Jeffers and Bacon are the founders of GANGGANG, an Indianapolis-based incubator that elevates artists of color.
“Our exhibition cannot be produced in this context and in this environment,” said Simone Jeffers and Bacon. “We asked Newfields to revisit this exhibition to include an apology to all the artists involved, the opportunity for the 18 visual artists to showcase their other personal works with appropriate compensation and an intentional Newfields strategy to show more work by more black artists in the perpetuity.”
“Until then”, they continued, “GANGGANG will not continue as guest curators for this exhibition”.
The Times notes that former museum curator Kelli Morgan, a black woman, resigned in 2018 due to what she called a “toxic” and “discriminatory” culture at the museum.
“Clearly there is no investment or attention being paid to what is being learned or communicated in training,” said Morgan when contacted by the Times. “Because if there were, there would be no way that a job advertisement was written like that, much less for a museum director.”
Morgan added that the incident at the Newfield museum was indicative of a major problem in the museum’s culture. As the Times notes, spaces like museums have largely excluded people of color.
“Until the world of museums is black and white and red and purple, and until we collectively deal with responsibility for discrimination, things like this will continue to happen,” said Morgan.
In July last year, amid renewed protests by the Black Lives Matter, several former Smithsonian employees presented allegations of racism for years at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (NMAfA).
In a letter addressed to Lonnie Bunch III, the first black chief of the Smithsonian Institution, former employees described a culture of racism that persisted through several different leadership changes.
“Recent events have brought a deeper attention to systemic racism within museums in our country. In this spirit, we wrote to you to express our indignation about the current state of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, “says the letter. Our community.”