The following blog post was written by UHPer and SURE Award winner, Jessica Layton.
In 2019, museum media coverage centered labor. With a call to action to end unpaid internships, the collective Art & Museum Transparency circulated a spreadsheet wherein museum employees shared details from their experience, like salary or workplace atmosphere. Activist groups Decolonize this Place and Sackler Pain organized mass and repeated coordinated actions from the Whitney to the Tate to draw attention to the criminal actions of those financially supporting these institutions. Museum employees of cultural institutions like the Guggenheim, MoMA PS1, and at least 10 more cultural institutions ranging in mission, size, and scale began an unprecedented public fight for unionization in 2019.
That summer, I, in a much smaller way, began thinking about the daunting task of my senior thesis. As I became more in tune with the realities facing artworkers and increasingly aware of my impending graduation, after which I will likely share these same realities, my research topic became increasingly clear to me. This year, in 2020, the nature of activism in museums has transformed and escalated in different ways. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass layoffs and furloughing of art workers ensued. In early April, MoMA fired the entirety of its education department and the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced plans to shrink its staff by 20 percent. The New Museum made similar staff cuts and laid of nearly a third of its staff, 31 of whom were members of the museum’s recently formed union, UAW 2110, which was only just settled upon in the previous October of 2019, after many months of ugly, public facing negotiation.
Situated in the broader context of the American art museum in New York City, my research focuses on the history of labor at the New Museum. I am specifically interested in the conflict between the institution’s founder, Marica Tucker’s mission to establish a museum unique in its egalitarian approach to internal affairs and the recent conflict between management and employees over their struggle for unionization. There is little to no recorded literature on the history of labor in art museums and so my primary research focus has been collecting oral testimony from anyone tangentially related to my research topic, particularly those with experience working in NYC’s art world. With funding from the SURE award, I am currently continuing to interview and transcribe these conversations for my own reference in writing my thesis, but also, more importantly, to create a public archive. I am excited by the potentialities of creating an accessible record of conversations that could serve the public, academics, and art workers thinking about collectivizing in important, previously unaddressed ways.
