Disrupting the status quo at MuseumNext

As the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), Nina Simon gave a keynote talk whose themes dominated the event. In fact, it echoed many of the ideas that came up at AAM conference that we recently attended in Phoenix. She described the dramatic change that her institution has undergone in the last seven years to become more representative of the communities they serve. This is a challenge that most cultural institutions we work with are facing. The MAH, faced with dwindling budgets and audiences, began by asking themselves a difficult question:

As a result of this questioning, the MAH underwent significant changes: namely, the staff, board and content are now representative of the diversity of their community. The museum has become a museum "Of By and For" their community. This change has impacted the entire institution, increasing their number of visitors x 8, tripling their budget and growing their staff x 4. The trend is beginning to grow as other museums executive get on board with this philosophy. Simon sums it up well:

Another important factor in MAH’s success is their collaboration with community partners. They went from working with about 50 partners to about 2,000. This 40 x increase in partners was needed in order to generate an 8 x increase in attendance. She emphasizes that through this work, they’re not only engaging partners, but their friends and communities as well. People attend because they know someone involved. She stated that 90% of their programming is co-created by community partners and stresses the importance of doing this authentically.

For example, when organizing a Día de los Muertos event, they discontinued their former practice of having white staff organize it, and began a fruitful partnership with Senderos, a local Oaxacan cultural organization, resulting in a continuous collaboration and multiple events throughout the year. Many organizations are seeing the value of this approach. This is something that we have witnessed in our work with Julie Decker at the Anchorage Museum, where Native Alaskans are on staff and involved in the creation of community programming and exhibition content throughout the year.

In line with the idea of authenticity, it's important that institutions assess the diversity of their teams. In the MAH’s case, their staff has gone from 90% to 50% white, while the board went from 100% to 70% white. Nina Simon has also launched the inspiring Of, By & For All platform to help other cultural institutions struggling with similar challenges of relevance and audience renewal. It features a self-assessment for cultural organizations to fill out—preliminary results show that although most institutions think they are a welcome place for people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, their audiences don’t seem to reflect this. She invited everyone to get involved, although stressed that her call to action is much stronger if your organization is working with marginalized or oppressed communities. In this case, she believes applying an OfByForAll approach is a must, otherwise you're contributing to their continued oppression.

Although the contexts of our organizations around the world are unique, this framework can work in different environments. We were inspired by Nina Simon’s message and ambitious goal of creating a more inclusive world. In our work, we’ve noticed over the years that accessibility and diversity used to be considered simply boxes to check, or something to do out of obligation, it is now turning into something much greater, an opportunity to make cultural institutions more relevant to wider ranges of people, and hopefully affect positive social change in doing so.

This idea of inclusion and community involvement, while very inspiring, clashed with a noticeable theme amongst participants at this London conference: Brexit. There was a palpable sense of uncertainty and nervousness around the possibility of the loss of cultural funding, and the fact that organizations such as Foster + Partners have decided to relocate to the continent, as a barometer of things to come. In this context, the work being done at institutions such as the MAH to create more diverse teams and projects that bring communities together seems increasingly vital. While we can’t predict the future of U.K. cultural institutions, we do hope that our work with museums contributes in some way to the creation of more inclusive spaces and communities, countering this rise in nationalism that we’re seeing all around the world.