do museums

reflect
who we are as a society?

 statistics

comparisons

 data visualizations

inferences

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.

Local museum staff: 2015

At New York City Department of Cultural Affairs-funded museums with budgets greater than $1 million. The staff survey, undertaken by Ithaka S+R in 2015, was developed out of an earlier effort to measure demographics of those working in U.S. art museums.

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.

National Art Audiences

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reports on the percent of the U.S. adult population who visited an art museum or gallery that year. The chart shows changing audience attendance for 1982-2017.

Who goes to art museums? About 79% of audiences were white non-Hispanic, 9% Hispanic, and 6% African-American (2015).
These groups constitute approximately 69%, 14%, and 11% of the U.S. population (NEA).

Trend lines for race and ethnic sub-groups illustrate variations in national art museum attendance for years 2012-2017:
Hispanic, African American, other, all, Asian, and white.
Percent of U.S. adults who went to an art museum or gallery.

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.

National art museum staff: 2015-2018

Two additional national art museum demographic surveys were undertaken
by Ithaka S+R. Staff were approximately ten percentage points more racially and ethnically homogenous than the U.S. population in 2015.

The 2018 Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey revealed that 35% of new hires among repeat participants were people of color, up from 26% in 2015. But the report showed that hiring in the 4 "intellectual leadership" job positions revealed differences between curatorial and education staff versus art museum leadership (including executive positions) and conservation staff who lagged the trend. These two charts are from the 2018 survey report.

Local Museum Curators: 2015

318 paid curators at NYC Department of Cultural Affairs-funded museums with budgets greater than $1 million. The deeper yellow color represents the number of curators hired prior to 2010: the top brighter yellow represents those hired 2010 through to the survey in 2015.

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.

Artists in the Brooklyn Museum:


Where Do They Come From?



NUMBERS


local museum artworks: 2019

Each circle groups artworks from the Contemporary Collection by nationality of the artists. Data on the 10,253 artworks from the Brooklyn Museum's api.

Acquisitions at the Brooklyn Museum


1943-2015 vs. 2015-March 2019


PERCENTAGES

Datasets:

Public use data files accessed on the National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture, ICPSR 36606, Schonfeld, Roger, and Sweeney, Liam. “Diversity Survey of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Grantees,” 2015. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2017-01-10. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36606.v2

Kevin Williams and David Keen. 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Nov. 2009, accessed Mar. 16, 2019, Fig.3-7, P18

Public use data files accessed on the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), Demographic changes in arts attendance and literary reading: 2012 to 2017, ADP18-DemographicTables. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). NEA’s Office of Research & Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Westermann, Mariët, Liam Sweeney, and Roger C. Schonfeld. Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018, Ithaka S+R. Last Modified 28 January 2019.

Schonfeld, Roger, Westermann, Mariët, Sweeney, Liam. Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, July 28, 2015.

Brooklyn Museum Contemporary Collection api accessed 3.19.

Acknowledgements

This thesis data visualization was built on and strongly draws from the instrumental work of Ithaka S+R and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2015, and follow-up 2018 survey, and on Ithaka S+R’s survey Diversity in the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Community.

Thank you to professors at Parsons for helping me shape and realize this project for your invaluable feedback. In particular, Christian Swinehart, Richard The, Daniel Sauter, and Aaron Hill, and to my talented colleagues in Major Studio 2, to Masaki Iwabuchi and to Felix Buchholz for expert technical assistance. The code and data sets are on github.