A 20/20 Vision for Art + Museum Transparency for 2020: Sharing, Analyzing, Moving Forward
It’s almost the end of the year, and so it’s a good time to reflect on the momentum we’ve all built around worker solidarity in arts and museums this year and plan for 2020.
There are plenty of movements inside and outside the arts and culture sector that last long enough to put a petition or a public program together that highlights a problem, but don’t last longer than a singular grant, a Twitter cycle, or an ephemeral action. We understand the obstacles that stymie or kill movements, perhaps better than most. One-off or short-lived campaigns may have their value, but we are not that movement. That’s not why you bravely and generously entered your details on the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet or Internship Spreadsheet. We are all working to implement substantive change.
In the last six months alone, we have witnessed a proliferation of new unions and union drives in our field. We have seen the impact of the Salary Spreadsheet manifest in significant individual and collective conversations about fair pay and salary transparency. Institutions have, in some cases, upgraded entire department salary bands to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. And others have stopped posting egregious unpaid “opportunities” and rethought practices of salary cloaking. Progress is being made. And there’s much more to be done.
We’re treating December 31, 2019 as the end of the first stage of activity for Art + Museum Transparency. Like any good meeting, we have an agenda. Here are the next action steps for 2020:
— We will close entries to both the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet and the Internship Spreadsheet on December 31. Beginning January 1, 2020, we will share an editable copy of the Excel documents with anyone who asks for it as long as they allow us to publicly and safely link to direct contact information (or an anonymized contact vetted by us), provide their reason for accessing the data, and make a commitment to publicly sharing any data that they crunch from it. Requests can be made by emailing us at artandmuseumtransparency [at] gmail.com. We’ll list the recipients on the spreadsheet (on a new tab) and tweet out results to the community following us on @AMTransparency. We decided to close the spreadsheets to new entries because the spreadsheets capture salaries and internship information at a specific moment in time, the year 2019, and will become out of date as we move into the new year. The Salary Transparency Spreadsheet was originally open, editable, and downloadable but we closed those functions when it went viral and created a submission portal. Since the submission portal has been in place for much of the last year, we wanted to give everyone notice well ahead of time of our intended changes so that they could email us if they had any questions or concerns. We hope that closing the spreadsheets and making editable, sortable, crunchable versions available for research will allow the data to have a continued afterlife and relevance. One of the first folks to dig in will be Amy Whitaker, a professor at NYU whose work investigates the relationship between art and labor. After December 31, the spreadsheets will be archived and read-only versions will remain at the current links: rebrand.ly/salaryspreadsheet and rebrand.ly/internshipspreadsheet.
— We will continue to push for salary transparency, paid leave, ending unpaid internships, and other labor reforms on Twitter. We invite you to continue sharing anything you come across that you think we should see, particularly those concerning, or surprisingly thoughtful, job postings (we love to celebrate positive action, as well as call out problematic practices!). You can follow us @AMTransparency.
— Our most recent spreadsheet highlights resources for forming unions in the art and museum world. We realize that while the will to organize is surging, many of us lack the information, resources, and networks for doing so. This project gathers a set of resources in one handy toolkit, including: a contact list for national labor organizers who have expressed interest in organizing arts and museum workers; a resource list with links to organizing tips, a growing list of existing museum and art unions and ongoing campaigns, and relevant books and articles; and a glossary of unionizing terms customized for those of us working in museums and arts organizations. We plan to continue building out this toolkit, so please contact us with any ideas or resources that we could add. You can access and share the spreadsheet at: rebrand.ly/unionsforall.
— Finally, the Walker Art Center invited us to contribute our Top 10 moments of 2019 to their annual year-in-review. Look out for this longer reflection on the year — coming soon to the Walker Reader https://walkerart.org/magazine.
Follow us @AMTransparency for updates on the above and for information on other projects we are planning but not yet ready to announce. Thank you to everyone building this movement for arts and museum labor in 2019. We’ll see you in the New Year!
