Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

In 2001, activist Sadie Roberts-Joseph founded the Baton Rouge African American Museum "after Baton Rouge refused to make black history a mandatory part of schools' curriculum," as CNN reported. Last month, Roberts-Joseph was killed, and in August, a month following her tragic murder, the museum has been vandalized, part of larger anti-justice movements in a polarized country.

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) recently announced "2020 Vision," a year of exhibitions and programs dedicated to female-identifying artists. The show also marks the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, and according to the announcement, the initiative will encompass 13 solo exhibitions and seven thematic shows beginning in fall 2019, with additional presentations still being planned.

The organizers of an exhibition in Berlin inspired by the Afrofuturism movement and Elon Musk did not include a single black artist in its lineup, as an The Guardian reported, criticism followed. The Künstlerhaus Bethanien space, where the exhibition takes place has fallen into “old curatorial habits that favor white men," according to the activist group Soup du Jour, wrote The Guardian.

Following the resignation of Warren Kanders from the board of the Whitney Museum of Art, after months of protests over his company’s sale of tear gas, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, wrote how this case reveals how "museums have become contested spaces in a rapidly-changing country." Furthermore, Walker emphasizes that to engage diverse leaders, "museums should redefine the terms of trusteeship."

Executive directors/CEOs of color are leaving their positions and, as Vu Le puts it in a recent blog post, this is an "urgent issue" that "will have serious implications for our sector."

“Contested Memory” is an essay series I recently wrote for Monument Lab (see http://monumentlab.com/news/2019/2/24/the-rebel-archive). In the first two essays, I drew from a range of theorists and writers to examine how the historical record is constructed through active erasure and probed at the radical potential that imagination holds for charting black cartographies of freedom.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become major topics of conversation in arts and culture within the past decade. Studies have shown that there is a marked lack of DEI in all areas of the sector, including audiences, artistic offerings, governing boards, professional staff, and financial support. Compounding this issue is the rapidly changing demographic makeup of the United States; it is estimated that by 2042, people of color will no longer be in the minority.

The new Arts & Culture Leaders of Color Fellowship, launched by Americans for the Arts, The Joyce Foundation, and American Express Foundation, introduced recently its first 12 fellows. The fellowship is a one-year professional development program for emerging and mid-career arts leaders of color across arts disciplines in the Great Lakes region.

Invisible Histories Project (iHP) is a non-profit based in Birmingham, Alabama with a mission to collect and preserve the material history of the Queer South.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, was named the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, effective June 16.