More Portfolio
exhibited: CouRage, Pro Arts Member's Exhibition, Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, CA, 2012
title: Coming Soon! ...to the staff of your local art museum, 2014
Artist Statement:
In 1998 as a museum employee and student in a museum studies program I did a study of the Oakland Museum and its community and discovered that the museum only had one African American employee (not a curator) above the level of security guard, and more than half the museum’s operating income came from the City of Oakland which has a 75% non-white population. I also found that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art only had two African American employees (not curators) out of 200. Most of the employees at SFMOMA are women, dress in black, and therefore I chose a photograph from an online Nordstrom’s dress catalog of someone who might seemingly be acceptable to staff & board.
A 2011 article in Art News profiled the annual meeting of art museum directors, none of whom were African American, and the article speculated that it may already be too late to achieve racial equity in American art museums.