The Museum Does Not Exist

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. The former Tenement Museum chief program officer, Michelle Moon, also keeps count in a public spreadsheet: as of mid-April, over ten thousand US museum workers have been laid off or furloughed as a result of decisions made by museum executives.

This likely excludes people who are rarely considered “employees” to begin with: temporary, contract, and gig workers. The Guggenheim, whose endowment was valued at $92 million in 2017, chose to pay regular staff but not those known as “on-call” when the museum first closed. Online, the Guggenheim Union shared a letter from a member pleading with executives for fair compensation during the crisis. “I’m asking you, mother to mother,” She wrote. “I have 3 small children. Your actions to not pay us for the same duration that you pay yourselves is unfair and cruel.” Meanwhile, at The Shed, an arts institution that cost $475 million to build—and directly benefited from $1.2 billion in public funds redirected to Hudson Yards from low-income Manhattan neighborhoods—nearly eighty unionized visitor experience workers have been furloughed. Art handlers at the Shed, who are not unionized, were abruptly forced to forgo anticipated pay.

At the end of March, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles laid off ninety-seven part-time workers in visitor engagement and the bookstore, and education, as well as exhibition installers, most of whom were without health benefits. “Our department was the most vulnerable and expendable,” a worker, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. A week later, MOCA, which had an endowment of $134 million as of 2018, announced that all full-time staff would be furloughed or receive undisclosed salary cuts.

At MoMA, where five different unions represent a majority of the non-managerial employees, many workers will be paid through June. Eighty-five workers—many of whom had been hired through an outside firm, Forrest Solutions, which keeps them out of any union’s bargaining unit—were laid off. MoMA’s endowment was $870 million in 2014. Yet the museum is unable or unwilling to continue paying its most precarious employees, some of whom will be ineligible for unemployment benefits. Stewart Stout, a facilitator in the education department who lost his job, described the museum’s mission as progressive. Still, as he told me, “When it comes down to it, they sort of throw their workers to the streets.”

MoMA’s exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photographs was recreated online in late April. The show features Lange’s images of the devastation wrought by racial capitalism: chattel slavery and Japanese internment camps, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. One photo, from 1938, depicts a dusty air pump at a rural gas station: “THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY,” the sign reads. “DON'T LET THE BIG MEN TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU.”

I was furloughed from the New Museum on April 2. I was told I can expect to return to my job as an editor when the museum reopens, so I will refrain from editorializing and stick to the facts. I was one of forty-eight employees who were either furloughed or laid off. Of these, thirty-one were members of the New Museum Union. Seven members of our eighty-four-person unit remain. The all-staff email about the cuts was not sent to part-time art handlers, registrars, and teaching artists. Those of us who were furloughed or laid off did not receive it either, because our email access was cut off around noon that day.

A number of New York museums closed to the public as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, or what directors call “these uncertain times.” In addition to the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art closed. The twenty-one Smithsonian Museums in New York and Washington, DC, shut their doors on the 14th. Many of these institutions have moved some of their programming online, gathered under the hashtag #MuseumFromHome.

Critics have lamented the lack of tactility—of presence—in digital exhibitions. But not everyone was able to be present in the gallery in the first place. Well before COVID-19 prevented anyone from going almost anywhere, disabled and chronically ill people were pushing for alternative forms of access to exhibitions and programs: livestreams, transcripts, audio and video documentation. The ease with which many institutions and galleries have transitioned to digital formats because of the coronavirus crisis, despite their previous resistance, has been “a shock,” the artist Josephine Shokrian, whose work deals with issues of access, told me. “People just don’t care,” she noted, “unless it affects them.”

I called my friend Lily, who was my former colleague at the New Museum before she was laid off. She told me she saw the staff cuts coming—and not just because of recent news stories like one in The New York Times, with a headline claiming that the Met’s projected revenue loss would make “painful layoffs likely for every cultural institution.” We wonder: Painful for whom?

I am not interested in asking what art looks like in these uncertain times. I want answers to other questions. What does art look like when you can’t pay rent? What does art look like when you’re too sick to get out of bed, and too broke to go to the hospital? What does art look like when “uncertainty” reveals the systemic insecurity of the workers who make, install, and help us understand art?

Emergency grants are being distributed now, and mutual aid initiatives abound. Workers at MOCA, the Tenement Museum, and San Diego’s New Children’s Museum are all crowdfunding to support their out-of-work colleagues. As of this writing, the NYC Low-Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund, organized by artist-administrators Shawn Escarciga and Nadia Tykulsker, has raised over one hundred thousand dollars for $150–$200 emergency grants. “If you say you need money, we’re trying to give you money as fast as possible,” Shawn explained to me. Unlike some official efforts, there is no gatekeeping: the only requirements are that recipients live in New York and provide an email address. So far, people have used the money for “groceries, medical supplies, rent,” Nadia listed. “Someone was able to get a nebulizer.”

Alongside crowd-funded initiatives, art workers have come together to source and distribute personal protective equipment to healthcare workers or deliver groceries to neighbors. Artists, art workers, freelancers: as the working class, we take care of each other. Nadia tells me she and Shawn don’t think of this fund as a solution—it’s a stopgap, a way to provide for people’s survival in the immediate future. Mutual aid is not charity; it is movement-building, networks of survival and solidarity. How can we build a different kind of art world, one in which our lives and livelihoods are not dependent on millionaire directors and billionaire donors? For many of us, times were uncertain long before this moment. For institutions that claim both scarcity and radical politics while funneling more money into executive salaries and endowments, the pandemic reveals the depths of such contradictions: visible on the surface, empty underneath.

Dana Kopel is a writer and the former senior editor and publications coordinator at the New Museum, where she helped organize the New Museum Union. Her writing appears in Art in America, Frieze, Flash Art, Mousse, X-TRA, and several exhibition catalogues. She lives in New York.