lastplantationonthenationalmall.wordpress.com

We write to ask the National Gallery of Art how it can exist, contented, to be known by its own employees as the "last plantation on the National Mall."

Standing in solidarity with #ForTheCulture, #DismantleNOMA, and the Akron Art Museum, We, the people, representing current and former employees—Black, POC, and allies—at the National Gallery of Art, present a united front on the museum’s institutional misconduct.

We write to express our outrage at the museum's exploitation and unfair treatment of employees identifying as BIPOC, LGBTQ, or womxn. The NGA is the so-called nation’s art museum and the steward of this country's "culture." The NGA arguably defines what domestic and international visitors understand as American history and art. It sets the standards. It reflects our humanity (or what the museum has arbitrated as our humanity). It is an institution paid for with taxpayer money and held in the public trust; it is high time that its management acts with the responsibility that has been gifted. Its existence is not a given.

Employees, former and current, have already approached museum leadership with their concerns.

Of information that is already available to the public, we refer to the three articles by the Washington Post published naming the museum's hostile culture of harassment, racial and sexual, and retaliation against employees for speaking out. We refer to horrific Glassdoor reviews. We refer to the EEO cases at the NGA used as examples for other agencies. The NGA has failed even to provide a safe space for visitors.

We write to demand the museum’s accountability to complaints regarding racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia at the Gallery, both from employees and visitors. And if the Board or museum leadership cannot do this work themselves, we ask members of the U.S. public, who fund this institution with their own taxes, to read up on not only allegations against the NGA, but also the Gallery's repeated attempts to suppress these allegations. We ask for the public to get curious about where their money goes, and to step up in advocating against the museum's culture of abuse.

---

The current Director, Kaywin Feldman, is advancing efforts to make the museum relevant to all, but this needs to include museum employees. It seems like the strategic plan that has been developing in light of the uprising against the murder of George Floyd is rightfully focused on equity in curation and changing the administrative culture, but the museum’s structural dependency on, apathy toward, and abuse of a majority Black, veteran labor force, has gone unaddressed. There has been no institutional response to those who saw quitting as their best and only opinion, the same individuals who have been accused time and again of harassment in the security and facilities departments in particular have not been fired. The cyclical, short-term employment in those fields is just allowed as a fact of life, as some kind of a given, as if this is the quality of life that Black veterans are entitled to. There has been no comment on whose labor keeps a museum standing, on the efficacy of the Gallery's veteran pipeline, on how cultural institutions across the country fulfill the diversity quotas they need to meet to receive funding.

There is no institutional acknowledgement of Andrew Mellon’s crimes and corruption, nor his racist and classist beliefs that shaped the founding of this museum. There has been no objection to a mission of collecting art from Europe and the US, to preserve Western culture. This question of what the nation's art museum is committed to--the nation, or colonialism--is long overdue.

The museum has had years to question and change all these realities; it shouldn’t have taken an uprising. There is no institutional acknowledgement by former Directors, who are responsible for the damage that the only-recently-appointed Kaywin Feldman is now having to clean up. Where is Rusty Powell's response? This millionaire continues to get paid by the Gallery for “consulting,” does he have no commentary on the abuse he allowed for the entirety of his tenure? What about those managers quietly slipping away into retirement in reaction to the “changes” they can’t handle? Why are they allowed to keep their pensions intact, with no consequences for the abuse they perpetuated, while the employees they mismanaged are forced to quit, facing no other option to preserve their health?