How The Boards Of Philly’s Biggest Arts Institutions Are Getting This Moment All Wrong
BY JOEY SWEENEY | Taken all together, the University of the Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts represent, in one way or another, an awful lot of Philadelphia’s identity in the visual arts world. Beyond their own institutional reach, there is their community reach — it’d be difficult to find someone working in any of a variety of arts-related fields in town who has or has had no interface with any of the above throughout their career.
So how is it that each institution, in its own garden-of-Gethsemane way, has betrayed its vast communities in a moment when it should have doubled down on supporting them — in many cases, simply by listening — and been a resource to those folks, a calming force in the sea of chaos that is 2020?
As we speak, the following things are all in flux:
After a long and ugly string of harassment incidents, employees at the Philadelphia Museum of Art made an effort this spring to unionize. In May, PMA executives refused, enlisting museum managers in a campaign to tamp down the unionization; also during this time, brass emailed employees, basically saying “all lives matter.” Last month, PMA workers voted to unionize anyway in a landslide. Gail Harrity, the current President and COO of PMA, is stepping down.
In June, in a likewise exercise in tone-deafness, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts administration “sent staff a message reminding them not to affiliate the academy with political movements, after members noted their PAFA affiliation when signing a citywide petition in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and redistribution of police funds toward social services.” When staff reacted by issuing a petition to address the matter, PAFA’s board backed its CEO, thereby joining PAFA’s administration together in choosing a strange moment to stand on a technicality; sure, PAFA employees should not, as a matter of course, assume that their employer backs everything they do or supports every cause that they support. But surely, they should be able to back black lives mattering without breaking the kind of sweat that then ensued.
By the end of June, PAFA President & CEO, Dr. David R. Brigham, issued a statement walking all of this back, stating for his own part, at least, that he believes black lives matter and offering a slate of next steps that couldn’t help but feel like June 2020 corporate boilerplate. But the damage had been done: Where they could have made amends, instead they made a mess. This week, PAFA grads are boycotting their own MFA show in protest. Though the PAFA social media feeds have buried it, the matter is apparently ongoing.
Meanwhile, like too many colleges in the U.S. right now, University of the Arts has been egregiously relying on an underpaid army of adjuncts to fuel its growth, even as it continues to chomp up real estate throughout its own corner of Center City. Its labor force has announced its intention to unionize today. (Support them here.) Resistance from the University, based on all of the anecdotal evidence at hand, should be expected.
Some of what’s at the root of all this, of course, is money. Some of it is systemic racism — lots of it is systemic racism — and often, it’s both. But each of these situations feels like the kind of unforced error that would belong more to an anonymous corporation with no diversity at all, rather than organizations who’ve reaped the benefits of lifting up the voices of the marginalized for, collectively, centuries. How do folks in the arts, who at every level generally embark on their careers to open as many minds as possible, get this much this wrong? Three of Philly's most powerful arts institutions could have made a big statement in this moment, and in a way they did, but it was the wrong statement. This is a moment when schools and museums are (yes this is the word) scrambling to get it right, to listen properly. But here, where the response should have been, we’re a part of the solution and here’s how, it’s been, we’re a part of the problem and we just cannot get out of our own way, much less anyone else’s.
They still have time to get it right, but you wonder about how much time they have left to keep getting it exactly this wrong.
