Hope & Dread Extra: Black Trustee Alliance

Hope & Dread Extra: Black Trustee Alliance focuses on a new organization—the Black Trustee Alliance—that hopes to bring change to the museum field. Tune in to hear from the collector and philanthropist Victoria Rogers, who is co-chair of BTA and Brooke Minto, its executive director.

Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman. 

Charlotte Burns:

Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.

Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.

Hope & Dread was all about people effecting change and one institution that was newly created during the pandemic, specifically to make change within museums is the Black Trustee Alliance [for Art Museums]. Here’s more from collector and philanthropist Victoria Rogers, who is co-chair at BTA, and Brooke Minto, who is executive director there.

Brooke Minto:

The Alliance was founded in the summer of 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. A group of New York area trustees were brought together by Darren Walker from the Ford Foundation, Elizabeth Alexander from Mellon [Foundation] and Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. And they brought together this group to think about the state of diversity at their respective institutions, looking at their institutions and what was happening with cultural institutions more broadly across the US. 

It was from that original session that a steering committee was formed to think about what a group like Black Trustee Alliance could do and what function they would serve and thinking through some of the difficulties of 2020 on cultural institutions. And so the group put together a strategic plan for a three-year launch. 

Victoria Rogers:

Many of us, especially outside of the coast are the only person of color sitting on the board of an art museum. And so just to be in collective conversation is really meaningful. And the next stage of our work is to think about how we can affect change.

I think so often in the cultural field, we are siloed within our institutions. Of course, there are informal relationships and informal friendships that people who love art can come together in different ways outside of their institution. But I do think there isn't as much cross-board collaboration for any reason than there could be. 

And so, I think that it was a pioneering idea to think about how do we, as Black board members get to know one another, like what does that look like? What shape could that take? And then what power could we have if we came together.

It is the first time that it's happening, but I feel like it's been a long time coming because the ability to impact change as a collective is obviously stronger than the ability to impact change as an individual. And so having alignment on values, being able to share with one another, what's worked at our institutions or what hasn't worked at our institutions, and to give a sense of best practices across museums is something that I know directors come together often and are part of alliances and share best practices, but board members, in general, don't really do it. And so, I think it's remarkable to have come together and then also to have come together with this shared mission and goal of improving diversity, equity and inclusion within our institutions.

Charlotte Burns:

Tell us about the strategic plan. What are the steps forward as you see them at the Alliance?

Victoria Rogers:

The Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums is really committed first and foremost to building community and developing insights from that community. And then being able to measure progress as we set goals against those insights for the kind of change that we want to see. And so, our first plan is to identify one another. There isn't a list or a collective set of, “these are all of the Black Trustees of American Art Museums”, but we actually are going out and finding those people. And so we have been very lucky to work in partnership with AAMD [Association of Art Museum Directors]  to actually source who the people of color are sitting on these museum boards and directors of art museums have been very helpful in identifying their trustees for us and sharing them.

And then also word of mouth has been helpful of course, too, in identifying these people. And so, we care a lot about coming together. 

A second goal of ours is really data-driven. We care a lot about being able to measure our progress. First about that existing group of members that we've identified, but then also about the field and the impact of Black people on the field and on institutions. And so, we are starting by benchmarking. We have a partnership with Ithaka, which is a data firm. We're really excited to be working with them. And we are starting by surveying and benchmarking both qualitative and quantitative data for the current cohort of Black trustees. And then from that baseline survey, we're going to be repeating it annually to see how that group grows or contracts. 

We also are commissioning some studies on the presence of Black people in boardrooms, on collections committees, exhibitions committees, and also in vendor pipelines too. So we've been thinking really holistically about the impact we can have. 

So, that’s where we’re starting, I think the third piece is around communications. We have the ambition to create Black papers instead of White papers that present some of our findings. And then we also will be corresponding through social media and more informal means to share what we're learning along the way.

Charlotte Burns:

So this is a real data-gathering act. How are you defining what constitutes a museum in America? Do you have a scale and scope of that?

Charlotte Burns:

And so if anyone is listening to this and they are a Black trustee at a museum, and they haven't somehow heard about you, where do they go? What do they do?

Brooke Minto:

They go to blacktrusteealliance.org. There's a very simple enrollment form where they include some details about where they serve as a trustee, what capacities they function in terms of committee work and other work at the institution, the duration of their service, that kind of thing, and join.

Charlotte Burns: 

So, Brooke, what are the next steps for BTA?

Brooke Minto: 

We've been very fortunate to have the support of the Mellon Foundation and that support has allowed us to partner with Ithaka S+R specifically, who are highly regarded researchers in the field, who not only understand higher ed, but also museums and institutions of all kinds in our field and adjacent to our field.

Charlotte Burns: 

Can you tell me more about how it's going to roll out?

Brooke Minto:

Yeah, our first body of work with them will really be to set a baseline for the Black Trustee Alliance as we move forward with a trustee demographic survey. Who are the Black trustees that are currently serving and in what capacities are they involved at the institutions they serve? 

We're very interested in thinking more about exhibitions, collections and programming and representation of Black narratives in those areas. We're also interested in looking at vendors, contractors, service providers, and what if any, are the links between the patronage of Black and minority-owned businesses by museums and cultural institutions and philanthropy.

There are some institutions and some boards that have done tremendous and transformative work, and there's others that are just beginning this work. 

There's just so many stories that need to be told that are happening at institutions that even I've learned over the last several months and we hope to do that, we need to be a vehicle for that.

Charlotte Burns:  

Do you have a sense of how systemic problems are and how easily or otherwise they might be attended to?

Brooke Minto: 

We're getting a better sense of that, but I mean, I think it's pretty clear they are systemic. I don't think that this transformation and change that we're hoping to see will be quick. I think it would be naive to think it would happen in the short term, but I think what we're hoping is to put in place some structures that will ensure this change, not only happens but is maintained over time. We all feel strongly that the data work is part of that. And our hope there is to create a pipeline development for data analysis work in museums.

I think our hope is always that museums will grow and learn from this kind of partnership and third-party support that we're offering them, but that also in the future, they will be more accountable on their own. So is there someone in the institution that is tracking work, whether it's at the governance level or with regard to collections or any area aspect of the museum, but that's really tracking certain types of data, measuring it year over year and ensuring that institutions are meeting the goals that they set for themselves. 

And I think, if there's this consistency of reporting, of sharing, it will become essential to the day-to-day flow and it won't get pushed to the side when other urgencies or priorities seemingly pop up. It's just will become as essential to museum operations as any other thing you would do to support a collection or to support education programming. It has to be as essential as all of the other work of museums.

Charlotte Burns:

How important do you think it is to have a very clear mission?

Brooke Minto:

I think it's important and I know ours seems quite simple and that's to increase the inclusion of Black perspectives and narratives in North American art museums. And we started with North America simply just for our first pilot. And we feel strongly that doing so, increasing these perspectives, will result in more equitable institutions, excellent institutions and institutions that appeal to the broad cross-section of communities, it seems almost obvious. So ours feels very clear, how we get there is more complex and still needs to be articulated even further, but the goal is clear.

Charlotte Burns:

The title of the show is Hope & Dread. When you look forward, do you feel hope, do you feel dread?

Victoria Rogers:

I certainly feel hope. I am so focused on issues of racial justice and equity and inclusion. And when I think about the way in which George Floyd's death is brought a sense of “we must do something now,” to so many people who I think were not engaged in the conversation that so many of us have been having for so long. I feel hope. I think that there's nothing new besides the attention that people have focused on this work. And so, I feel like with the collective, maybe this circles back to collective action, but with the power of the collective, I'm a believer that change will happen and come.

Brooke Minto:

Oh, I definitely feel more hope. I've worked in museums a very long time in cities of very different sizes in this country and abroad and I feel like I understand institutions, although I'm learning so much more and more about them in this new role, but I feel very hopeful. The more I get to know people and to share BTAs mission and desires over the next several years and what we hope to contribute and how we hope to partner and advance this transformative work of institutions, the more positive replies I get, the more interest, the more opportunities to collaborate. It's been really wonderful, so I think certainly my experience has been that BTA is something that the museum community is quite excited about and willing to engage with. And I think the more positive the response we get, the more encouraged I am. So I'm at this moment feeling quite hopeful that we will have the ability and the opportunity to advance the field and really see the change that we're imagining and we're envisioning.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Victoria and Brooke, tune into episode seven “Executive Session.” 

Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. 

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez. 

And our theme music is by the inimitable Philip Glass.