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A crowdsourced salary spreadsheet that circulated among workers showed enormous pay disparities affecting lower-level staffers - disproportionately likely to be people of color - across museums nationally. Staffers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Akron Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Guggenheim, among hundreds of others, also published open letters decrying what they described as cultures of racism at their institutions. In June, an Instagram account called Change the Museum began publishing accounts of racism from anonymous employees at major American institutions, including the Met and the MoMA, garnering tens of thousands of followers. The Guston firestorm was the culmination of a summer of discontent in which museum insiders had already begun to loudly ask these uncomfortable questions. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves - about their class and racial foundations.” Because these particular museum leaders must realize, it said, that “to remind museum-goers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. The letter went on to critique not just these particular museum leaders, but also the institution of the museum itself. Instead, it argued, the postponement served to illustrate that the museum leaders had failed to prepare themselves for America’s reinvigorated racial justice movement. “Rarely has there been a better illustration of ‘white’ culpability than in these powerful men and women’s apparent feeling of powerlessness to explain to their public the true power of an artist’s work,” it read. Within days, more than 100 of the biggest names in the art world - including Adrian Piper, Martin Puryear, Matthew Barney, Coco Fusco, Benjamin Buchloh, and Zoe Leonard - had signed an open letter denouncing the decision. Guston, who was Jewish, always wrote clearly that he saw his KKK motif as an exploration of evil. In delaying the show until 2024, the museums said in a joint statement, “We think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”Īrt world onlookers were furious. The exhibit, which included two dozen of Guston’s depictions of the Ku Klux Klan, had already been postponed once because of the pandemic. The reason? They worried their audiences might blanch at his paintings of Klansmen. This September, the art world was rocked when four major museums - the National Gallery of Art in Washington the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - postponed a planned retrospective of the art of the modernist painter Philip Guston. Part of The Museums Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.