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Column: Are art museums still racist? The COVID reset

Carolina Miranda, L.A. Times, Oct 22, 2020

“Are art museums racist?”

That is the question asked by curator and critic Maurice Berger in a famous essay that bears that fraught yet simple inquiry as its title. He then laid out the ways in which white-led arts institutions had excluded and misrepresented the voice of Black artists over time.

“Who are the patrons of art, the museum board members, the collectors?” he asked. “Who is the audience for high culture? Who is allowed to interpret culture? Who is asked to make fundamental policy decisions? Who sets the priorities?

“Is the art world merely mirroring social changes or can art institutions actually play a role in challenging the conditions of institutional racism in America?”

Berger’s essay was published in Art in America in 1990. It might as well have been written yesterday.

The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the uprisings in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, led to a summer of turmoil that in this fraught election season has not only revealed the fragile financial foundations on which many arts institutions rest (especially small ones), but laid bare the institutional inequities embedded in their structures.