This post was originally published on artnews.com
Departments devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion—DEI, as it is known for short—have long existed at US museums, even before the widespread push to expand them in the past five years. But this month, DEI offices became the subject of national news in ways they had not before.
With President Donald Trump having issued an executive order last week that called for an end to federal DEI programs, two Washington, D.C. institutions—the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution—said they would end their programs devoted to diversity and equity. The National Gallery has already removed language about DEI from its website.
Although Trump’s executive order pertains only to institutions that receive government funding, the news has raised concern in the art world about how far the trend will go. For now, however, the ramifications of these closures remain largely unclear.
But what are DEI departments at museums, and what do they do? Below is a guide to these offices and how they have flourished in the past five years.
What is DEI?
DEI—sometimes also known as DEAI, with the A standing for accessibility—comprises any efforts to diversify programming and initiatives at a respective institution. Museums are hardly the only places that have DEI initiatives: many organizations, from supermarket chains to universities, have them. DEI initiatives focus on eliminating discrimination for all individuals when it comes to interfacing with these organizations.
How do DEI initiatives work at museums?
These days, many major museums in the US have DEI departments. These offices do not curate exhibitions, but they are involved in the making of shows, with members of DEI departments helping curators to think through how information about artworks is relayed to the public in the most inclusive way possible.
In some museums, this has meant providing wall text in multiple languages, in an effort to draw in visitors whose first language may not be English. Whereas, in the past, most institutions only offered wall text in English previously, now it is increasingly common to see bi- and even trilingual captions. Within galleries and on websites, museums may also offer certain texts with the intention of making institutions accessible to disabled viewers.
DEI staff also work with other departments on general museum practices. A 2022 report on DEAI by the Alliance of American Museum recommended that these staff members also focus their attention on how institutions acquire objects and how museums set their sustainability standards. Behind the scenes, DEI staff also offer trainings to museum staff and trustees, and offer pathways for diversifying institutional workforces, which in the US have historically skewed white, both at the topmost levels and in the ranks beneath them.
When did US museums begin forming DEI initiatives?
Some museums have long had DEI initiatives, though it was until recently roughly the past decade that institutions began to invest more resources into them. In 2016, for example, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art hired Rod Bigelow as its first-ever chief diversity officer with the aim of correcting a racial disparity in its staff, the vast majority of which was white. This was universally the case at the time, according to a 2015 Mellon Foundation report that revealed that 84 percent of museums staff members in the US were white.
Bigelow told ARTnews, “From hiring diverse staff to deciding who makes up an advisory committee to what’s in the galleries—everything must be done to make sure we retain momentum in the long term. That means, firstly, educating the team on what it means to be anti-racist and what racist systems exist that we contribute to.”
In 2020, the killing of George Floyd ignited a global reckoning with structural racism, leading many museum workers to issue statements critical of the role that institutions had played in that oppression. Many institutions issued statements pledging to do better going forward, and as part of that push, they vowed to hire chief diversity officers. Institutions across the country, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, subsequently hired people to fill these positions, which in many cases were firsts for the respective museums.
How successful have DEI initiatives been at museums?
The 2022 AAM report on DEI recommended that institutions make clear and defined commitments to remedying targeted issues. Many institutions did so in 2020. Two years later, in 2022, Artnet News surveyed those museums and found that most institutions had begun work on at least some of these points. But it was not always clear whether the problems had been solved, and in some cases, it was not ambiguous whether the institutions even had a DEI plan going forward.
Why does Trump want to end federal DEI initiatives?
Trump’s executive order states that DEI initiatives are “radical and wasteful,” and claims that the “Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.” Last week, Trump announced that all federal DEI employees were being put on paid leave effective immediately.
Many have criticized the decision as a concerted initiative to undo progress toward racial equity, something previously upheld by both Democratic and Republican politicians. The American Civil Liberties Union accused Trump of “undertaking a deliberate effort to obfuscate and weaponize civil rights laws that address discrimination and ensure everyone has a fair chance to compete.”
Which museums impacted by the Trump executive order?
Trump’s executive order, informally called a “DEI ban,” was directed at government programs and therefore does not impact every organization in the US. That also means the majority of museums in this country are not likely to be affected, since most institutions are not government-run, even if they receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and similar organizations.
The order does, however, impact museums maintained by the government, and two have already begun disbanding their DEI initiatives. They include the National Gallery of Art, widely regarded as one of the top museums in the country, and the Smithsonian Institution, a network of museums that includes the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
The National Gallery and the Smithsonian have already stripped their sites of DEI-related language, but it isn’t widely understood yet how it will impact their public-facing programming. The Washington Post obtained a letter from Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, who wrote that the institution was considering “the new policy documents that might potentially impact our mission.” In 2022, Bunch was one of the chairs behind the committee responsible for the AAM’s DEAI report.