There are 2,620 art museums across the U.S. Who works in --
and who visits -- museums?
Employing publicly available datasets from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),
the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA)
grantee staff survey, and findings from two national art museum staff demographic
surveys, as well as artwork data from the Brooklyn Museum, these visualizations examine
staffing, visitors, and acquisitions.
7,346 paid museum staff, including 802 board members (paid and volunteer), work at New York City museums with budgets of
$1 million or more. The NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) 2015 survey identified staff by 22 job types and
individuals by 2010 US Census race and ethnicity categories. Museum staff numbers are sorted by race and
ethnicity along a horizontal axis. Hovering over each yellow circle reveals how many people work in this job category.
Numbers tell one part of the story. The pink percent button tracks a single ethnic or racial group along a horizontal axis. Hovering
over a pink circle reveals what percentage of that racial group works in that specific job category, e.g. Facilities or Education.
The green button sorts the percentages by job type along a vertical axis, showing the percentage of each racial and ethnic group
for each job category.
In 2015, 38.36% of paid staff and board members at these museums (2,817 people) identify as people of color -- compared to 66.7% of the NYC population.
This chart illustrates the museum 'discipline' within the larger DCLA cultural survey.
The 2015 findings from Ithaka S+R and its
funding partner, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, had a big impact on the city’s cultural community. Following the
report, the DCLA initiated a cultural plan, reaching out to nearly 200,000 local residents.
In July 2017, the "CreateNYC Plan" was released. One aspect of this plan involved tying funding to diversity plans: “DCLA will
introduce new diversity measures for our city's cultural organizations including collecting data from grantees
about the diversity of staff and board members; asking for organizations'
approaches to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); and in FY 2019 will require DEI
plans from the CIG [Cultural Institutions Group]." The CIG is a group of 33 institutions on city-owned
property (including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum.) These institutions operate as
publicly-owned facilities whose mandate is to provide cultural services accessible to all New Yorkers.
The 2000 U.S. Census groupings have been used to categorize employees and
audiences by race and Hispanic/Latino status. As the DCLA 2015 survey report pointed out, these
separate
categories are inadequate, since many individuals do not identify themselves with these groups.
However, these are the Census categories at present.
The following visualizations chart Brooklyn Museum artworks by nationality of artist. Each
circle is scaled to represent the number of artworks linked to a particular nationality.
60 nationalities are recorded with 39 variants where nationality and birthplace do not coincide.
776 artworks do not have an entry for artist nationality.
The second visualization divides the collection into artworks acquired before
2015: 9,961 (97.18%), and between 2015 and March 2019: 289 (2.82%). Here the circles indicate
the percentage of artworks by nationality. Colors
indicate continents.
Artworks by American artists represent over 68% of work collected before 2015. This figure decreases
down to 40% of the artworks acquired 2015 and after. British artwork acquisition increased from 5.44% pre-2015
to 37.72% after 2015. Paradoxically, the total of Anglo-American artworks increased from 74% of the total acquired
1943-2015 to 78% of the artworks acquired 2015 to March 2019. In terms of recent acquisitions, Haiti replaced Germany
as the fourth most collected country. 6.23% of artworks acquired in the last five years are by Haitian artists.