Resources for Academic Art Museum Professionals
Congress is moving extremely quickly on consideration of economic relief and recovery packages in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact across many industries.
Now is the time to contact your legislators to let them know what the museum field is facing and urge them to provide critical support for museums. [AAM]
CAA’s Cali Buckley was able to attend Museums Advocacy Day as a RAAMP and CAA representative from February 23 to 25th, 2020. Spearheaded by the American Association of Museums (AAM), Museums Advocacy Day brings museum professionals, supporters, and graduate students together to learn how to advocate for museums and ask for funding from the congressional leaders in charge of their state and others. Alongside museum advocates from the American Association of Museum Directors (AAMD), the Museum Assocation of New York (MANY) and others, CAA was able to visit the offices of senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer and congressman Jerry Nadler.
For resources to help advocate for museums, see: https://www.aam-us.org/programs/advocacy/advocacy-resources/
For more information on Museums Advocacy day, see: https://www.aam-us.org/programs/museums-advocacy-day/
Useful museum facts for advocacy:
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The three-year-long Arches Project had 200 people with disabilities help design technologies to help with visitors. [The Art Newspaper]
A class assignment became a large-scale installation showing the names of local opioid victims in a building named for the Sackler family, who has manufactured and refuted the harm of Oxycontin. [Hyperallergic]
A public forum will be held at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University on the exploring the impact of lead pollution. The discussion will happen alongside the current exhibition “Flint is Family: LaToya Ruby Frazier and the student-organized The American Dream Denied: The New Orlean Residents of Gordon Plaza Seek Relocation,” which also explores pollution and community. [Tulane University News]
Artforum has rereleased a 1975 introduction to its issue on museums and unions by Lawrence Alloway and essays on the subject. [Artforum]
The Feminist Art Coalition includes many museums and non-profits presenting events in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. [The Art Newspaper]
In the year leading up to the 2020 election, the Feminist Art Coalition will present a series of exhibitions and programs featuring feminist artists and themes. Forty-nine other museums across the country will also develop programming for the year as part of a consortium.
The current list of participants is as follows:
“Working together through an unprecedented cooperative partnership, the Feminist Art Coalition will generate a cultural space for engagement, reflection, and action, while recognizing the constellation of differences and multiplicity among feminisms,” said Apsara DiQuinzio, a curator and member of the steering committee. [e-flux]
To learn more about what is to come, check the Feminist Art Coalition website.
PEN America has created a “Campus Free Speech Guide” for students and faculty members on how to respond to hate speech on university campuses. [Hyperallergic]
On Tuesday, September 24, at 3 PM (EST), our Coffee Gathering featured Meredith Lynn, Assistant Curator at Florida State University, and Claire L. Kovacs, Curator of Binghamton University Art Museum. To better understand the range of job descriptions and promotional review criteria that apply to those who do curatorial work at academic museums or galleries, Lynn and Kovacs created a survey to gather information from their colleagues in academic museums and galleries. They presented their findings at AAMG in 2019 and again last week in the Coffee Gathering.
Meredith Lynn is an artist, curator, and educator based in Tallahassee, Florida. In her art practice, she frequently explores the historical, political, and social issues surrounding land management and ownership. Her curatorial specialty is contemporary art, with a particular focus in interactive and new media art. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Minnesota State Arts Board, Northern Lights, and the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs and most recently shown at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Arcata, California and the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan, Alabama. She is the curator of the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University where she also teaches in the Department of Art.
Claire L. Kovacs is the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at Binghamton University. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Case Western Reserve University – all in art history. She has curated exhibitions at the Figge Art Museum, Coe College, Krasl Art Center, DePaul University, and at Augustana College, where she was (until recently) the Director of the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art. Her strategies for curatorial work and programming emphasize the ways that academic museums explore contemporary issues, foster interdisciplinary inquiry, create space for a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and function as a site of dynamic community engagement. She underscores intersectional equity, diversity, accessibility, and inclusion in her curatorial work. Her research practice grapples with ways that art historical research can support ‘The Common Good’ (to borrow a phrase from the NEH), using curatorial practice and writing as a mechanism by which to amplify under-told stories.
Negotiation Resources
Association of Art Museum Directors, AAMD Salary Survey, 2019.
Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want. Bantam Books, 2008.
Gender Equity In Museums’ 5 Things You Need to Know
Museum Workers’ Salaries’ Google Sheet
Presentation Sources
AAMG Professional Practices for Academic Museums & Galleries. Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, 2017. https://www.aamg-us.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AAMG-Professinal-Practices-2018-web-FINAL-rev043018.pdf
Bozeman, Barry, and Monica Gaughan. “Job Satisfaction among University Faculty: Individual, Work, and Institutional Determinants.” The Journal of Higher Education 82, no. 2 (April 2011): 154–186.
Campbell, Corbin M., and KerryAnn O’Meara. “Faculty Agency: Departmental Contexts That Matter in Faculty Careers.” Research in Higher Education 55 (2014): 49–74.
Glesne, Corrine. The Campus Art Museum: A Qualitative Study. IV. Challenges and Conditions of Success for Campus Art Museums. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 2012. http://www.kressfoundation.org/uploadedFiles/Sponsored_Research/Research/Glesne_04_Challenges.pdf.
Harris, Michael S., and Matthew Hartley. “Witch-Hunting at Crucible University: The Power and Peril of Competing Organizational Ideologies.” The Journal of Higher Education 82, no. 6 (December 2011): 691–719.
Hermanowicz, Joseph C. “Classifying Universities and Their Departments: A Social World Perspective.” The Journal of Higher Education 76, no. 1 (February 2005): 26–55.
Horton, Susan. “High Aspirations: Differences in Employee Satisfaction Between University Faculty and Staff.” Applied Research in Quality of Life 1 (2006): 315–322.
Jackson, J. Kasi, Melissa Latimer, and Rachel Stoiko. “The Dynamic between Knowledge Production and Faculty Evaluation: Perceptions of the Promotion and Tenure Process across Disciplines.” Innovative Higher Education 42 (2017): 193–205.
Kosteas, Vasilios D. “Job Satisfaction and Promotions.” Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society 50, no. 1 (January 2011): 174–194.
Lawrence, Janet H., Sergio Celis, and Molly Ott. “Is the Tenure Process Fair?: What Faculty Think.” The Journal of Higher Education 85, no. 2 (April 2014): 155–192.
Logan, Dave, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright. Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
Moorman, R.H. “Relationship between Organizational Justice and Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: Do Fairness Perceptions Influence Employee Citizenship?” Journal of Applied Psychology 76 (n.d.): 845–855.
Museum Workers Share Their Salaries and Urge Industry-Wide Reform, n.d.
Ponjuan, Luis, Valerie Martin Conley, and Cathy Trower. “Career Stage Differences in Pre-Tenure Track Faculty Perceptions of Professional and Personal Relationships with Colleagues.” The Journal of Higher Education 82, no. 3 (June 2011): 319–346.
POWarts Salary Survey, n.d. http://www.powarts.org/salarysurvey.
Survey Results: Academic Museum Reporting Structures: Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, 2017. https://www.aamg-us.org/wp/survey-results-academic-museum-reporting-structures/.
Youn, Ted I.K., and Tanya M. Price. “Learning from the Experience of Others: The Evolution of Faculty Tenure and Promotion Rules in Comprehensive Institutions.” The Journal of Higher Education 80, no. 2 (April 2009): 204–237.
Professional Organizations
Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC)
Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD)
Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG)
The Getty Leadership Institute
The Getty Leadership Institute – NextGen
CAA Resources Discussed
CAA’s Guidelines for Retention and Tenure of Art and Design Faculty
108th CAA Annual Conference in Chicago