As Art Fund publishes new research on diversity in the curatorial workforce, Rachael Browning reflects on the urgency – and challenges – of compiling such a report.
Our core purpose at Art Fund is to help museums and galleries go further by building and sharing collections, helping curators develop their expertise and inspiring and engaging visitors. To do this we develop and iterate our programme of support in direct response to what we are seeing and what we are hearing, often conducting research to understand the particular and changing needs of the sector and how we can make a distinct, valuable and relevant contribution to its ambitions.
It has been well documented that people from minority-ethnic backgrounds make up a very small proportion of the UK’s museum and gallery workforce. Within this, a very small percentage of curators are people of colour, despite many years of diversity schemes. It is inescapable that a lack of diverse voices, experiences and critiques in shaping our collections and programmes means our institutions – their workforces and audiences – will never be fully inclusive, reflective or relevant.
To understand how to tackle this more effectively we commissioned a report to assess the impact of ethnic diversity initiatives on the curatorial workforce. Our aim was to produce a piece of work to set out the priorities for funders, museums and arts organisations to meaningfully increase ethnic and cultural diversity in the sector. The final report is a combination of two pieces of work by Black-led organisations Museum X and Culture& across 2021-2022.