The Times. Arts
Dan Grossman
When I first saw the wording for the job description, I thought back to the time when the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields seemed to be making progress towards creating a truly 21st-century museum.Â
It was July 2019. Kelli Morgan, the museumâs new associate curator, was taking me on a tour of the American galleries. She had just completed a partial rotation of artwork in the galleries. Her most striking choice was to place the painting âKnowledge of the Past is Key to the Future, St. Sebastian,â a work completed in 1986 by prominent African American artist Robert H. Colescott, among artworks from the Gilded Age.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields has apologized for a job listing seeking a new director who would maintain the museum’s “traditional, core,.
SHARE
A US museum has apologised for a job listing seeking a new director who would maintain the museum’s “traditional, core, white art audience .
The wording was a bullet point in a six-page job description that also said the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields was working to attract a more diverse audience.
However, museum officials removed the word “white”
at the weekend following outrage, including backlash from guest curators of an exhibit on a Black Lives Matter mural in Indianapolis.
The museum’s director and chief executive, Charles Venable, said the decision to use “white” had been intentional to show the museum wouldn’t abandon its existing audience as it works for more diversity.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields
The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields has apologised for and amended a job listing it posted last month saying that it was seeking a director who would seek to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience” as well as attract a more diverse one.
The wording has been changed to remove the word “white” amid a backlash from critics including guest curators for a planned exhibition at the museum titled
Drip: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural. The two curators, Malina Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon, who oversee GANGGANG, an Indianapolis-based art incubator for artists of colour, said on Saturday they could not continue in their roles and asked the museum to apologise to all of the artists involved in the show and to embrace a strategy for displaying “more works from more Black artists in perpetuity”.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields has apologized for a job listing seeking a new director who would maintain the museum’s “traditional, core,.