Collective calls for racial diversity at NOMA
16th July 2020 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
While street murals proclaiming Black Lives Matter are being installed nationwide and discussions about systemic racism continue, in the wake of the senseless killings of unarmed Black people, a local collective of artists, museum professionals and art-enthusiasts in New Orleans last month launched the #DismantleNOMA campaign to address the lack of racial diversity within the city’s premier art institution.
“As we continue to protest the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and countless others, the moment has arrived to demand real change for our communities. To effectively do so, we must expose an institution’s racism and hypocrisy. Not only is there a recently installed plantation exhibition on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art, but there also exists a plantation-like culture behind its facade. The director, senior staff, and board of the New Orleans Museum of Art, historically steeped in white supremacy from the founding of the institution in 1911, need to be held accountable to the people and community they claim to be serving as a public facing institution. We are a group of former NOMA employees who have resigned from the museum in recent years as a result of the toxic work environment and institutional racism…” the collective wrote in an open letter.
Members of the collective presented NOMA’s leadership team with the document, including a list of grievances and demands on June 24 and hoped their offering would inspire a “transformational change,” within the institution.
“We are going to continue to push for inclusion and racial diversity,” says Jennifer Williams, a member of the #DismantleNOMA collective. Williams, NOMA’s former public programs manager, resigned in February 2020, after two years on the job. “I felt the organization was toxic and felt I couldn’t move forward.
Ifátùmínínú Bamgbàlà Arẹ̀ sà (formerly known as Kelsi Brooks), another collective member, resigned after six months as NOMA’s youth programs coordinator.
“I felt the situation was not healthy, Arẹ̀ sà explained. She said she was not paid a living wage relative to her position and that the workload was more suitable for two people, instead of one. “I was paid less than $36,000, while the director, Susan Taylor, gets almost 36,000 per month.”
In its #DismantleNOMA letter, the collective demanded the hiring of Blacks, indigenous, people of color and LGBTQ professionals at the leadership and managerial levels, the purchase and installation of work by local BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), racial sensitivity training, independent investigators of human resource complaints, and the termination of several NOMA leaders.
“NOMA’s leadership includes only one full-time Black staff member in a pool of 20+ directors, curators, and other decision makers – and none in executive leadership…. In addition to a predominantly white staff, less than 10% of NOMA’s nearly 50-member board are Black, with no Black individuals holding officer roles or serving as part of the 13-member executive committee.”
The group also pointed out that in addition to wage and benefit disparities, there was unnecessary surveillance of Black staff members, homophobic slurs hurled at a former LGBTQ employee, staffers were advised to enter through the back door and the policy was “routinely enforced for Black and LGBTQ staff,” having to enter through the back door.
“In addition to internal racism and bias, there are countless reported incidents of Black school groups, interns and visitors feeling targeted and harassed by white staff while visiting NOMA as recently as February 2020.”
Regarding wages, the group wrote, “Entry to mid-level staff – where nearly all of NOMA’s Black employees are found – are paid $15,000 – $45,000 yearly with no opportunity for meaningful raises. On the other hand, NOMA’s senior staff and directors receive compensation ranging from $100,000 to nearly $450,000 annually.”
Among the collective’s demands was a public apology, which, to its credit, NOMA’s leadership did and posted it on the museum’s website.
“We apologize to our staff, the community-at-large and #dismantleNOMA for any hurt we have caused…Now, together, NOMA’s board, leadership and staff are creating an agenda for change, recognizing that this is a dedicated and ongoing process. We also recognize that our internal practices have not been as welcoming or as inclusive as we would like them to be…”
In its statement, NOMA leadership committed to Increasing the representation of BIPOC in its board membership to 25 percent in each year over the next three years; forming an internal task force that will focus on cultural inclusion in NOMA’s staff, improving hiring practices, and making an independent, outside ombudsperson available for employee relations, among other action items.
“NOMA is committing the rest of its 2020 art acquisition funds to acquire works by BIPOC artists, focusing particularly on those who are from, or work in, New Orleans. We recognize that the museum’s collection is not currently reflective of the community it serves and consider this a first step towards a larger re-examination of NOMA’s collecting practices and a renewed commitment to diversifying the museum’s permanent collection,” according to NOMA.
“I appreciate the apology, but it doesn’t represent transformational change,” says Williams, who opposes several of the commitments NOMA made.
“Regarding the internal task force, they’re asking the same individuals who caused the problems to solve the problems. There needs to be an external task force of Black donors and Black-owned arts nonprofits. Ashé and Community Book Center receive much less for their racial equity programs. NOMA has gotten hundreds of thousands (of dollars) for diversity and equity inclusion programming. They should be partners with NOMA.”
“We were not happy with the apology,” Arẹ̀ sà added. “Transitional change is not the same as transformational change.”
The collective is also dissatisfied with the closure of the plantation parlor exhibition. “They’re putting it on pause, rather than shutting the parlor down. Perhaps they should sell the plantation parlor and use the money for purchasing work of Black artists from New Orleans. Thirty-five percent of their acquisitions would be appropriate. And it’s going to take three years for them to recruit 25 percent BIPOC board members? They also neglected our demands for a change in leadership and an independent investigation of the origins and history of ownership of all African and Indigenous objects in the museum,” Arẹ̀ sà continued.
“This investigation must take place in collaboration with DismantleNOMA representatives, independent BIPOC curators and representatives from the respective countries for the expressed purpose of returning all sacred and religious objects to their country/people of origin,” the collective wrote.
The DismantleNOMA collective also took issue with the fact that NOMA received a lot of funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Walton Foundation for social justice and racial equity programming but failed to accomplish true racial inclusion. “The Walton Foundation funds were used for a paid internship program for HBCU students. Several students felt uncomfortable at the museum,” Williams explained. “Jalisa Orellana spent six months at the museum, left and decided not to pursue a career in museum management. She was a Professional Pathways intern from Xavier. She participated in the program funded by the Walton Family and Ford Foundation. She was one of our best and brightest.”
“When I was still an intern at NOMA in 2018, I did work in the cafe from my laptop sometimes because there wasn’t enough space in the office for me. A woman who worked the register came up to me multiple times in one day telling me to move because other (read: white) ‘paying’ customers wanted to sit at my table ‘cause it had good lighting. I refused each time and she got more aggressive and direct with me ‘til she was nearly yelling. It started small, went from – ‘It’s getting busy’ (it wasn’t) to ‘You need to move because rah rah rah,’ and then I showed her my badge,” says Jalisa Orellana, who was a Xavier University student at that time.
“Mind you I was a paying customer too. I was drinking my ‘lil coffee, but that’s beside the point. She was fired because, according to my higher ups, this wasn’t her first incident being unfoundedly aggressive (racist) towards an HBCU intern. Why was she able to act like that more than once? And how many other times had she done that to other guests and gone unreported? They gave me a $100 gift card to ‘make up for it’ but it was so embarrassing. After she was fired, the rest of the white kitchen staff started acting weirdly with me too; like they were afraid I’d get them next or something,” Orellana continues.
I could go on about all the different types of isms and phobias I experienced first-hand or that I talked about with other staff (especially BLACK, especially PART TIME!). the way we were surveilled in there…no one deserves to work anywhere that makes them feel like they’re in trouble all the time. Cultural institutions like museums need to do more than virtue signal, especially when the world has reached yet another boiling point. NOMA is not an anomaly and has a responsibility to do right by Black people in a city that would have no culture without them,” she wrote.
Responding to DismantleNO-MA’s letter, NOMA’s leadership invited collective members to a meeting.
“The director, Susan Taylor, reached out five days after we presented our letter internally. She invited us to a meeting with senior staff.” But they declined the invitation because “We were calling for the immediate removal of NOMA administrators who have facilitated this toxic culture, including Director Susan Taylor, Deputy Director Anne Banos, Facility Manager Steve Lewis, and Human Resources Manager Donna Dunn.”
“We requested to meet with the NOMA Board of Directors. We feel that NOMA could move forward with racial diversity,” Williams concludes. “We believe this is the right thing to do. Not only for NOMA but for the entire community,” Arẹ̀ sà affirmed.
As efforts to undo racism continue, we all should remember Martin Luther King Jr’s advice:
White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned… White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro’s desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,
American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.
September 1, 1967
This article originally published in the July 13, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
