The Times, They are a Changing?
A Reflection from Maxine Gaiber, Board Member
When I began as a full-time museum educator in a large, Midwestern museum in 1972, the education department was literally and figuratively in the basement, with its staff in the smallest offices and receiving the lowest salaries of all the museum’s professionals. Museum directors were mostly male and white, often the “black sheep” of wealthy families who eschewed family businesses and more highly regarded professions; curators, from similar backgrounds, most generally worked their way up to these coveted positions. Educators that I knew, on the other hand, were largely from middle class families and were familiar with challenging the “establishment” from their college day protests against the Vietnam War. Museums were “first and foremost a repository of works of art” (quoted from a Metropolitan Museum of Art’s document published in 2000), whose purpose was to collect, preserve, and interpret. Serving the public was listed as number six on the Metropolitan Museum’s list of goals in that document.
But the times they were “a changing.” The Art Workers' Coalition, an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff that formed in New York City in January 1969, principal aim was to pressure the city's museums into implementing economic and political reforms. The group also called upon all museums in New York to close on May 22, 1970, as part of the protests against the Vietnam War. MOMA’s staff unionized in 1971 and other museums soon followed suit. The Education Committee of the then American Association of Museums (now the American Alliance of Museums) fought hard throughout the 1970s and 1980s to improve the status of museum education (and educators).
By 1991, the tide had shifted. The scrappy educators, many of whom had by then become Deputy Museum Directors and later Executive Directors, became key members of the AAM Taskforce on Museum Education that developed a report that was published under the title Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. Their report was based on several key ideas, foremost among them that “the commitment to education as central to museum’s public service must be clearly expressed in every museum’s mission and pivotal to every museum’s activities” and “Museums must be more inclusive places that welcome diverse audiences, but first they should reflect our society’s pluralism in every aspect of their operations and programs.”
Stephen Weil, a highly regarded author and museum director, wrote in 1999 that museums were now focusing outward, that they were “transitioning from being about something [their collection] to being for someone,” that servicing visitors was becoming more central to their mission and operation. He talked about them becoming “entrepreneurial,” that they needed to “earn their keep.” I think his choice of words is telling. Personally, I believe that this shift was predominantly economic rather than philosophical and that is why everyone bought into it. It became clear that museums that merely exhibited their permanent collections couldn’t attract the numbers of visitors or the types of grants that were needed to keep their doors open. “Blockbuster” exhibitions were expensive to produce and costly to maintain and they didn’t bring back visitors after they closed. It was “educational programming” that brought in the crowds of visitors, on a repeated basis, that we enjoy today.
In the end, we have come a long way regardless of the motivation. Today’s museums reflect my own values -- the centrality of audience and importance of education in every aspect of a museum’s activities, the improved status of educators as valued members of the museum team, and the importance of inclusiveness in each museum function -- far more than they did when I started my career.
Do we still have a long way to go? Yes, indeed. When the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art feels obligated to issue a public statement in 2020 that “Nothing is more important to all of us than ensuring that the museum is a safe, welcoming, productive place, free from misconduct of any kind, where all voices are heard, and where there is no fear of coming forward to report any kind of concern” in defense of its recent behaviors, it reveals that we still need to look internally and treat our own staff members with dignity, respect, and compassion before we can truly, as the Excellence and Equity report so eloquently stated, “serve a rapidly changing world in a meaningful way.”
About Maxine
Maxine Gaiber is an independent consultant and most recently served as the Interim Executive Director of Carpenters Company at Carpenters’ Hall. Prior to her tenure at Carpenters’ Hall she was Executive Director of the Gershman Y and Executive Director of the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts (now Delaware Contemporary). Previously she had been a leader or member of education departments at a variety of museums in California and the Midwest. She has served on a number of boards and has been a peer reviewer for local and national organizations; she has an MA in Art History and Museology from the University of Minnesota and has completed the Getty Leadership Institute program for museum executives.