The Museum Does Not Exist (Ssense, May 2020)
But the museum is also a place of work: art handlers, educators, curators, and countless others make the contemporary museum function. Since the COVID-19 crisis began, the worker activist initiative Art + Museum Transparency have been tracking museum layoffs on their Twitter account.
New Stimulus Protects Some Union Workers, But Not All (Hyperallergic, April 2020)
Art + Museum Transparency (AMT), an activist group of art and museum workers, believes expanding the provision beyond its limited domain is critical during the public health crisis.
In a Surprise Move, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Is Looking to Its $3.6 Billion Endowment to Cover Costs (Artnet, March 2020)
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is extending staff pay until May 2—a cost that could be covered by the museum’s endowment. Forecasting a budget shortfall of as much as $100 million, the Met is looking into taking the unprecedented step of looking for creative ways to use its $3.6 billion endowment reserves to pay its expenses…
Museums, Unions and Creating a Culture of Transparency (Leadership Matters, March 2020)
Museum leaders and unions are an oil and water combination. Unions and museum boards even more so. When the Guggenheim staff began its negotiations with the International Union of Operating Engineers in 2019 its director, Richard Armstrong, reportedly wrote, “I do not want to work with a third party who has very limited experience in the museum field, and whose membership is largely in the heating and air-conditioning and construction industries.” An unfortunate sentence…
Why Are Museums So Plutocratic, and What Can We Do About It? (Frieze, February 2020)
Michelle Millar Fisher – a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and co-founder of the Art + Museum Transparency collective (which, in 2019, released a crowdsourced document detailing more than 3,000 art workers’ salaries across the world) – speaks to the artist Andrea Fraser, one of the leading figures of institutional critique…
Google Salary-Sharing Spreadsheets Are All The Rage. Here's What You Should Know. (Huffington Post, January 2020)
Word-of-mouth in these fields is very limited, because many of these jobs are quite isolated geographically and because the field lacks standardized job titles and pay bands,” said a representative of Arts and Museum Transparency…
#ARCSChat January 2020: Art + Museum Transparency (#ARCSChat Podcast, January 2020)
Happy New Year and welcome back for January’s #ARCSChat! This month hosts John Robinette and Amanda Robinson sit down and speak with Michelle Millar Fisher, one of the founders of the Art and Museum Salary Spreadsheet, the Internship spreadsheet, and most recently, a Union spreadsheet…
Why a Google spreadsheet was the most powerful tool for labor in 2019 (The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 2019)
The most significant organizing tool of the year was a Google spreadsheet containing thousands of anonymous museum workers’ salaries. Started in May by a group of mostly anonymous museum professionals inspired by burgeoning salary transparency conversations in the art world, the spreadsheet cataloged not only salaries but benefits such as parental leave and factors such as educational background, race, and gender — an implicit nod to the pay disparity between men and women…
Marciano Art Foundation Shutters, Blaming Low Attendance—Former Employees Have Other Theories (Los Angeles Magazine, November 2019)
On Tuesday night, employees of the Marciano Art Foundation received a brief email with some surprising news. Effective Thursday, the email read, all 70 visitor-facing staff members would be laid off, and the museum would shutter indefinitely...
‘Art Workers Don’t Kiss Ass’: Looking Back on the Formation of MoMA’s Pioneering Union in the 1970s (ArtNews, October 2019)
Amid ongoing calls for more transparency within institutions of all kinds, workers at an array of New York enterprises including the New Museum and Guggenheim Museum have formed much-publicized unions of late. It’s possible that these workers’ groups might not exist if not for the formation of a union more…
Demystifying Museum Compensation: A Look Inside the “Art + Museum Salary Transparency” Spreadsheet (Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia, October 2019)
In recent years, the issue of salary equity has become a crucial discussion topic in the museum field. Low wages—combined with an increasingly competitive job market—have made it more and more challenging for many individuals to sustain a career in the field…
Philly barista spreadsheet inspires coffee shop wage transparency across the U.S. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 2019)
It looks as if Philly baristas started a national trend: “radical" wage transparency among coffee shop workers. A few weeks ago, baristas at many of the city’s locally owned coffee shops began sharing how much they make on a Google spreadsheet. Now, baristas in a dozen U.S. cities and regions have followed suit, as first reported by Coworker.org, an online platform that seeks to help workers "solve problems and advance change in the workplace.” Some have cited the Philly…
A Conversation With Michelle Millar Fisher Of Art + Museum Transparency (Squinch Magazine, September 2019)
Recently I had the fortune of speaking with Scottish curator Michelle Millar Fisher. Formerly an assistant curator of European Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a curatorial assistant at MoMA, she is newly a Bostonian…
How to crowdsource employee data to promote salary transparency (Coworker.org on Medium, September 2019)
In May 2019, a group of art workers and museum workers initiated a crowd-sourced Google spreadsheet where thousands of industry professionals self-reported information about their salaries. Calling their group Art + Museum Transparency, they didn’t stop there…
Crowdsourced List of Museum Salaries Goes Viral, Exposing Pay Inequities (The Chronicle of Philanthropy, August 2019)
Back in May a dozen friends who work in museums and other art-related organizations met up for drinks. Like many happy hours, the talk turned to work — and especially compensation. Without exactly meaning to, the group decided to create a...
Museopunks Episode 37: Experience doesn’t pay the rent (American Alliance of Museums, August 2019)
Unpaid internships are commonplace in the museum world, supported by a culture that suggests “experience” and the chance to get “a foot in the door” are worth the sacrifice of time and lost earnings. This practice necessarily limits the sector’s ability to diversify or become equitable, by ensuring that only those who can afford to work uncompensated can participate…
Inside Hushed Museum Hallways, a Rumble Over Pay Grows Louder (The New York Times, July 2019)
The art handlers at the Guggenheim work under some unusual conditions, having to hang paintings slightly askew and tilted to account for the museum’s sloped floors and curved walls. But this spring, the handlers mounted something never before seen at the Guggenheim: a successful union drive…
U.S. museum officials disclose salary and call for entry in public spreadsheet (CINRA.NET, June 2019)
Disclose your salary on Google Sheets and share it with your peers. Movements are beginning to spread, with museums and museum staff around the world responding to a call from a museum staff. The published spreadsheet “Art + All Museum Salary Transparency 2019” published on May 31, local time in the United States…
A Philly Art Museum curator helped start a crowdsourced list of 2,500+ museum salaries (The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 2019)
…the spreadsheet [went] live on the last day of May. In it, the Philadelphia Museum of Art curator and her collaborators, a group of anonymous museum workers, asked staffers at arts and culture institutions to anonymously share their salaries, family leave policies, and educational requirements…
Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019 - a spreadsheet reveals all (Making A Mark, June 2019)
A spreadsheet Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019 was put online and started circulating amongst staff in art museums and galleries last Friday morning (31 May 2019). It seeks to record the salaries of different workers in art galleries and museums around the world...
Museum workers around the world are posting their salaries on a public spreadsheet to show the industry's glaring pay gap (Business Insider, June 2019)
Transparency (and a Google spreadsheet) might change the art world. Since May 31, employees in museums and art galleries around the world have been submitting their salaries anonymously to a Google Spreadsheet entitled Arts + All Museums Salary Transparency 2019, according to a report by Hyperallergic. And less than one week later, it already has over…
Art Workers Circulate Public Spreadsheet to Promote Salary Transparency, Reveal Pay Gaps (Artforum, May 2019)
Current and former employees of art institutions are sharing the terms and salaries of their employment in a public Google Spreadsheet titled “Art/Museum Salary Transparency 2019.” The document—whose editors have claimed to hold jobs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum…
‘It’s Helpful to Know All Scales’: Online Spreadsheet Discloses Museum Workers’ Salaries (ArtNews, May 2019)
In another sign of increasing demand for transparency at art institutions across the world, museum workers have begun making public their salary rates via a Google Spreadsheet document that began circulating on Friday morning. Titled “Art/Museum Salary Transparency 2019,” the document allows users to add information…