[MUSIC PLAYING]
JAMES STEWARD: In the early weeks of COVID,
not a day went by that we didn't hear
about museums that were laying off almost
the entirety of their staffs.
How does a museum come back from having laid off
97% of its people?
What are the societal impacts of doing that?
INTERVIEWER: Hello, and welcome to We Roar.
As coronavirus continues to challenge our lives
and communities, we're asking Princetonians everywhere
to share how they're working through the crisis, how
their world looks different in its shadows,
and what new insights have emerged.
In this episode, we hear from the museum community,
which faces financial devastation from the pandemic.
JAMES STEWARD: I'm James Steward and I'm
director of the Princeton University Art Museum.
So the simple reality is that there are tremendous numbers
of cultural nonprofits that operate
on extremely thin margins under the best of circumstances.
The average museum charges an admission fee,
is therefore dependent on the numbers of visitors that enter
that institution.
When you go from whatever the number of visitors
might be under normal circumstances
to effectively zero in and all but overnight turn of events,
it has meant, of course, that many museums are facing,
frankly, existential crises.
It's been estimated that as many as 30%
of the museums in the United States
won't survive this crisis.
In the early weeks of COVID, not a day
went by that we didn't hear about museums
that were laying off almost the entirety of their staffs.
How does a museum come back from having laid off
97% of its people?
What are the societal impacts of doing that?
Their capacity is going to be significantly diminished
for a very long while.
Out of this comes for me a question that I'm asking myself
daily, which is do our responsibilities change
in the face of that landscape?
Do we have new moral responsibilities, as well
as perhaps practical responsibilities, because we
do come from a place of privilege,
a place in which, yes, even though we are undergoing
financial stresses without question,
we are sheltered from the most severe forms of those stresses.
If other museums in our region, for example,
that have traditionally served a really important community
engagement purposes are less able to do so,
do we need to evolve our practices?
Do we need to platform the wider capacity
that Princeton University affords in different ways?
We are a museum that has I think been profoundly
committed to increasing access, overcoming access
challenges, being a museum that honors equity and diversity.
And it of course is clear in the wider COVID environment
that COVID is a disease that does not attack
with equity, shall we say.
And so it has reminded me that I think we
as a museum have to grapple with the equity
question in a somewhat different set of ways
then we might have imagined six months ago.
One very specific example of I think an equity challenge
is the simple fact that the museum community does not
look like the population of the United States
in the 21st century.
It skews very white.
It skews towards privilege for a host of reasons,
including the fact that historically museum jobs have
paid badly.
People who need to make a living wage
have sometimes not seen the museum sector
as viable for them if they don't bring
other resources to the table.
These are issues that I'm happy to say the museum community has
really begun grappling with, though, aggressively only
in relatively recent years.
But if museums are now shrinking rather than growing,
how do we help assure that there are early career opportunities
for people who might not traditionally
have had access to careers in the arts and humanities?
One very pragmatic step I'd like to take
is to create a new corpus of early professional roles
within our museum that would be paid professional jobs that
afford early professional experience for individuals
of color, for first generation college students,
for others who are maybe not fully represented
in the museum field writ large.
Is this going to address the scope of the national problem?
Obviously, not.
But I think we have to live our values at a time
when, frankly, many museums that are deeply committed
to those values will struggle to do so because
of the kind of financial reckoning
that this moment represents.
Absolutely, there are silver linings.
I think that COVID in the lockdown
has had the effect of clarifying our core sense of mission
and vision.
I think another silver lining is the opening out of audience.
The onset of the coronavirus caused
us to have to pivot very quickly to, frankly, becoming
another kind of museum.
And I think that's been true of the museum field writ large.
Most of us that are collecting institutions
really privileged the experience of works of art
in the original.
You know, that's at the core of our understanding
of our mission.
And when it became quickly clear that we were going to not be
able to allow visitors to come into our galleries--
and I'm now saying this in a national and international
way--
we had to pivot very quickly to thinking about what
alternative value might look like, how
to create digital opportunities that have legitimacy
in their own terms that are, if I can put it this way,
reasonable alternatives to the in-person experience
of the hand of the artist.
I would say at Princeton we've had certain advantages
in this regard because of the fact that we for some years
now have been working on developing a new art museum.
We had begun the work of thinking
about how to deliver more of our content digitally because
of a construction project facing us in the future.
We'd begun thinking about distance learning.
I think therefore we had a leg up, if you will,
of thinking about how to turn that spigot on really fast.
But it still means--
it feels to me that we're learning every week
about what works and what doesn't work
and about the importance of varying
some of these platforms.
We've had some great success of launching or sustaining
our late Thursday programs in a digital format.
But it also became very clear quickly
that a sameness could creep into that programming
very fast if we weren't really attentive to mixing it
up, affording different formats, platforms, etc that
afford moments for people to participate in an active way.
It's so easy to translate it into the passive model.
And I think that just goes against so much of what we've
been as a field trying to do institutionally
for 10 or 20 years now.
And so that is, of course, also opening our eyes
to thinking about things like the fact
that every individual and every family
doesn't have a similar access to information technology,
to hardware, to software, to broadband platforms that
enable the kinds of learning moments that we might want
to privilege.
And so I foresee, for example, partnering more aggressively
with social service organizations,
maybe not our usual art world partners,
in order to try to find remedies that
grapple with some of those really
fundamental impediments around technology or around access.
If we overlay that with the vivid reminders
of how deep rooted racism continues
to be in American society, it provokes me to recognize that
both digitally and in the future spatially when
we return to built spaces and actual objects,
that we have to double-down our commitment to the continuing
diversification of our collections,
the continuing opening out of our
and sharing of our voice, of inviting more
voices to the table, of maybe even
in the academic environment expanding our definitions
of what expertise looks like.
So it's a very rich stew at the moment of kind
of interweaving these various issues.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
INTERVIEWER: This podcast is a production
of the Princeton University Office of Communications.
The opinions expressed herein represent
the views of the individuals involved, not
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