Viewfinder Issue 11—Accountability: Letter from the Editors
Hannah Heller, Hallie Scott, Kabir Singh, Viewfinder Editorial Board
From Art + Museum Transparency’s salary transparency spreadsheet to Kanders’ departure from the Whitney Museum board, museum workers, especially educators, made an unprecedented push for institutional accountability in the second half of 2019. Museum educators are in a unique position to bring to light concerns directly affecting our audiences and to engage our institutions in Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI) work. This issue of Viewfinder explores the question of how we, as museum educators, can best hold our institutions accountable.
The four essays in this issue explore this question in a range of ways — challenging museums as sites of colonialism, examining whiteness and antiracism in gallery education, breaking down institutional hierarchies and silos, and demanding fair and equal pay for museum workers. These articles together demonstrate just how interwoven and interdependent accountability is to various constituents — the public, our colleagues, and ourselves.
Hannah Mason-Macklin presents a case study of an installation of a new institutional gift of 18th–20th century West African art in her essay, “Museum in Progress: Change and Social Healing at the Columbus Museum of Art.” Through this case study she suggests that collaborative museum interpretation and engagement can be a vehicle for institutional accountability.
Amanda Tobin explores practitioner self-accountability in her essay, “When the Staff is All White: Building an Anti-Racist Curriculum for Part-Time Gallery Educators.” She discusses various techniques and considerations when implementing anti-racist gallery teaching trainings as a white person, for other white people.
In her essay, “We the People: Towards a Self-Recognizing Museum,” Yohanna Tesfai uses the concept of self-recognition to inspire all museum departments as well as board members to think how we might “co-travel” in our work. She advocates for regular meetings between museum education staff and board members, as well as interdepartmental meetings, to ensure throughlines of communication and mutual respect for each other’s work.
Finally, in a brief essay, “Accountability Demands Transparency,” the anonymous collective Art + Museum Transparency shares their motivation for creating the now well-known Google spreadsheet and their stance that pay transparency is a necessary step in institutional accountability.
For this issue, we also announce some changes to our team. After four years of service, Founding Viewfinder Editor Sara Egan has stepped down from her role on the editorial board. After two years of service, Keonna Hendrick, the 2019 NAEA National Museum Education Art Educator award winner, has also stepped down. We are so grateful to them both for the contributions they made to Viewfinder and the contributions they continue to make to our field.
We are excited to have Hannah Heller and Hallie Scott join our team as new editors. Returning Viewfinder editor Kabir Singh now serves a new role as Viewfinder Editor-In-Chief. To support accountability and sustainability, we are interested in a new model that would expand the editorial board. If you are interested in joining our team of editors, we will be accepting applications or letters of interest on a rolling basis throughout spring 2020. If you are interested in writing for Viewfinder, please look out for a call for abstracts in March 2020.
We also wish to acknowledge and appreciate Gwendolyn Fernandez, who continues her service as our social media liaison.
—The Viewfinder Editorial Board
Hannah Heller (she/her)
Hannah Heller is an NYC based freelance museum educator, and has taught and worked on research and evaluation projects in several cultural institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo del Barrio, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Art & Art Education program at Teachers College, and holds a MA in Museum Education from Tufts University. Her current research focuses on anti-racist pedagogies and ways to mitigate the effects of whiteness in gallery teaching practices. Follow her on Twitter @museum_matters!
Hallie Scott (she/her)
Currently the Specialist, University Audiences at the Hammer Museum, Hallie is committed to facilitating programs that center young people and generate exchange and learning between educators. Her previous experience includes overseeing teen programs as an Education Specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum; working as the Education Director at the Wassaic Project, a contemporary art center and residency in Dutchess County, New York; and teaching art history courses as a Teaching Fellow at Brooklyn College. She has a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Art History from City University of New York, Graduate Center, and wrote her dissertation on artists, architects, and dancers who developed experimental education initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s. She is currently the Community Engagement chair on the board of Museum Educators of Southern California.
Kabir Singh (he/him), Editor-in-Chief
Kabir Singh is an educator and writer based in Los Angeles. He has been teaching in art museums since 2008 and is dedicated to working towards greater equity in education and the arts. Kabir is a VTS Trainer for the organization Visual Thinking Strategies, where he leads professional development for educators nationwide in a constructivist pedagogy that teaches thinking through conversations about visual art. He also regularly teaches in the galleries of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California and supports teacher professional development at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. Kabir serves as the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Museum Education Division Pacific Regional Representative and is the Editor-in-Chief of Viewfinder, the division’s online journal that examines the intersection of museum education and social justice. Kabir holds an EdM in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA in Art History from Columbia University. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter @singhkabir.
