The Distinction Between an Institution and Its Simulacrum
This report draws on a combination of primary institutional data, peer-reviewed research, major art market surveys, and journalism. Where possible, figures are cited to their original published sources. Readers are encouraged to verify current statistics independently, as the art market and workforce data evolve year on year.
One source that informed this report’s genesis deserves specific acknowledgment. Art historian Katy Hessel discussed the institutional exclusion of women from the Royal Academy of Arts in a recorded conversation with Pandora Sykes. The interview is available to subscribers of Intelligence Squared Plus. Because it is paywalled and no official transcript exists, it has not been quoted directly; however, the documented history of the Royal Academy fully corroborates Hessel’s central claims, and primary and secondary sources establishing those facts are cited throughout Part I.
This report draws on workforce demographic surveys, peer-reviewed research on the effects of diversity programming, institutional public records, and documented case studies in cultural sector equity initiatives. Primary quantitative sources include the Mellon Foundation’s Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey series (2015, 2019, 2022), data from the American Alliance of Museums, and research by scholars including Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev whose work on institutional diversity programs has produced findings that have been consistently underused by the institutions that commission it. Where cultural-sector-specific data is absent — which is frequent — data from adjacent sectors and meta-analyses of DEI research are cited with their limitations noted.
The absence of institutional self-disclosure is itself evidence. Institutions that perform inclusion have limited incentive to produce the data that would measure its absence. The data gaps in this report are not neutral omissions. They are the performance, made visible.
In 1985, a group of anonymous feminist activists wearing gorilla masks began postering New York. They called themselves the Guerrilla Girls, and four years later, they turned their attention to the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection. Their question — “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” — was accompanied by a count: less than five percent of the artists in the Modern Art sections were women, but eighty-five percent of the nudes were female. The math was clean. The argument was irrefutable.
The response from the art world was instructive. Critics praised the posters. Curators requested meetings. Galleries hosted discussions. Over the following four decades, the Guerrilla Girls were invited to present their data to museum boards. Their archive was acquired by the Getty Research Institute, where it is the most requested collection in the archive. Their posters entered the permanent collections of Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert, and the Centre Pompidou — the very institutions whose acquisition policies they had been critiquing.
They recounted in 2005: women were now three percent of the artists, and eighty-three percent of the nudes were female. They recounted again in 2012: four percent of the artists, seventy-six percent of the nudes. Twenty-three years of institutional attention, and the share of women artists had fallen.
In 2025, they conducted another recount. Forty years after the first count, the poster is still in print because the Met keeps giving them something to count.
Forty years. An entire industry of diversity programming, equity audits, inclusion consultants, DEI directors, institutional pledges, open letters, solidarity statements, and listening sessions. The Guerrilla Girls are now museum artifacts. The numbers they were protesting are still wrong.
This is what performative inclusion looks like over a long time horizon. The protest is acknowledged. The protest is collected. The problem the protest named remains.
A Substrate of Exclusion has built the evidentiary record: how the art world’s structural exclusions operate across gender, race, economic precarity, disability, and medium bias. This report turns to the question that record makes necessary — what an institution does with its findings, and what it looks like when doing becomes performing.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments was founded to answer that question in structure, not in statement. Every governance commitment, acquisition policy, compensation standard, and accountability mechanism in the MME’s founding architecture responds directly to what this series documents. This report identifies the mechanism by which institutional commitment becomes institutional performance, traces how it operates across the field, and describes what the MME has built to hold its architecture against it.
To understand performative inclusion, it is necessary to begin with what it is performing. Diversity programming in cultural institutions did not emerge from nothing. It emerged from a decades-long civil rights and feminist struggle that achieved real, documented change: legal protections against discrimination, the opening of academic and professional opportunities that had been categorically closed, the gradual shift from an art world in which women and artists of color were structurally excluded to one in which they were structurally disadvantaged. The distance between exclusion and disadvantage is real. It is also, as this series has documented, a distance that the art market has spent fifty years pretending is larger than it is.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened its doors in 1965. Title VII reached the largest cultural institutions first — its coverage began at employers of 100 or more and was phased down to 25 by 1968 and 15 by 1972 — and in the decades that followed, major museums began, slowly and under pressure, to hire women and people of color into roles previously reserved for white men. The result was measurable change. In 1970 women were a rarity in the director’s office; no survey of the era put a precise number on it, but they ran a tiny fraction of the country’s art museums. By 2022, they held 47.6 percent of directorships (AAMD). That is progress. It is also, as documented in Designed to Fail, progress concentrated in smaller-budget institutions and accompanied by a persistent pay gap: women museum directors earned $0.75 for every dollar earned by their male counterparts at equivalent institutions.
The point is not that nothing changed. The point is that the institutional infrastructure built to manage and communicate that change became, over time, a substitute for deeper structural transformation rather than a mechanism for achieving it. When the legal floor was established, the creative class of institutions — the ones whose prestige derives precisely from appearing progressive — discovered that they could satisfy public expectation by managing the appearance of change rather than its reality.
By the 1990s, this management had professionalized. The diversity consultant emerged. The DEI workshop became standard. The institutional mission statement acquired an equity clause. The annual report acquired a diversity section. And the art world — which has always been sophisticated about the presentation of ideas — proved extraordinarily skilled at presenting inclusion without producing it.
The language of inclusion that pervades contemporary institutional life has three characteristic features. It is abstract. It is unmeasurable. And it is applied to the communication infrastructure of institutions rather than to their decision-making infrastructure.
Abstractions include: commitment, values, journey, centering, belonging, allyship, anti-racism, equity, and the increasingly ubiquitous phrase “doing the work.” These are not meaningless terms. They describe real goals. But in institutional usage, they function as declarations of intent rather than descriptions of practice, refined over decades to maximize the feeling of accountability while minimizing its substance. An institution can be “committed to equity” indefinitely without specifying what equity means, how it will be measured, who is responsible for achieving it, and what happens if it is not achieved.
The structural change these terms are meant to describe is not abstract. It is: who is on the board of directors and how were they selected. Who sits on the acquisition committee. What the curatorial staff demographics are at every level from senior curator to curatorial assistant. What the pay bands are, and whether they are published. How commissions are priced. Who writes the catalog essays and for what fee. What the ratio is between temporary programming featuring underrepresented artists and permanent collection acquisitions of their work. What percentage of the operating budget goes to artist fees versus administrative overhead.
These questions have answers. The answers are, in most institutions, either unpublished or, when published, alarming. The gap between the language and the answers is the measure of the performance.
The killing of George Floyd in May 2020 produced the largest public expression of anti-racist commitment in the history of the United States, and a significant portion of that expression came from cultural institutions. Within weeks, cultural institutions published anti-racism pledges by the hundreds — a wave documented across the art press through the summer of 2020 — from museums, galleries, foundations, and arts organizations. The American Alliance of Museums issued guidance. The Association of Art Museum Directors released a statement. Individual institutions announced new DEI positions, new curatorial initiatives, new collecting priorities, new community partnerships.
The pledges were, in many cases, specific enough to be measurable. They promised representation. They named percentages. They committed to timelines. They were signed by directors and boards. They were posted publicly and cited in grant applications.
Then the data arrived.
The Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey collected records for more than 30,000 staff at 328 North American art museums. It found that the museum workforce had moved from 72 percent white in 2015 to 64 percent white in 2022. In intellectual leadership — the curators, conservators, educators, and executives who determine what is acquired, exhibited, and interpreted — the white share fell from 84 percent in 2015 to 73 percent in 2022. Museum leadership and conservation, the most senior and most protected categories, remained 80 percent white. And aggregate Black representation did not appreciably change across all seven years: the diversification the sector reports is real, recent, concentrated in post-2020 hiring, and it has largely bypassed Black workers.
Between 2015 and 2022, the art museum sector had conducted two years of intensive public anti-racism pledging, hired hundreds of DEI directors, spent millions on diversity consulting, and launched scores of community engagement initiatives. The curatorial workforce had changed by five percentage points over seven years. Director demographics had barely moved. Board demographics had barely moved.
The Mellon data is the record. The record shows what the commitments produced. The gap between those two documents is the definition of performative inclusion.
The Mellon Foundation’s Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey is the most comprehensive longitudinal study of workforce demographics in the U.S. museum sector. The 2015 baseline was itself a response to decades of advocacy by museum workers of color who argued that the sector’s demographic reality was far worse than its self-presentation suggested. They were right. The table below presents the survey series’ core findings.
| Survey Year | All Staff: % White | Intellectual Leadership: % White | Museum Leadership: % White |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 (Baseline) | 72% | 84% | Grouped within intellectual leadership |
| 2018 (published January 2019) | ~68% | ~79% | 89% |
| 2022 (Third survey) | 64% | 73% | 80% (incl. conservation) |
| Change 2015–2022 | −8 points | −11 points | — |
Source: Mellon Foundation Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey, 2015, 2018, 2022.
The cumulative shift in intellectual leadership demographics over the full seven years: eleven points, from 84 percent white to 73 percent white. At the 2015–2022 pace — eleven points in seven years, most of it from post-2020 hiring — the intellectual leadership of U.S. art museums would not become majority non-white until approximately 2037. That date is an MME illustration from the survey trend, not a survey finding, and it holds only if the post-2020 hiring surge is sustained rather than performed. It is unrelated to the 2053 figure in Designed to Fail, which is the Burns Halperin Report’s projection for women’s share of auction sales: different population, different axis, different money. The United States’ white non-Hispanic population is currently 58 percent of the total. The curatorial profession is not simply lagging behind change; it is actively resisting it.
What is the mechanism? Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev’s research — published in the Harvard Business Review in 2016 and expanded in their 2022 book Getting to Diversity — provides the most rigorous answer. Analyzing data from over 800 U.S. companies across three decades, they found that the most common diversity programs — mandatory training, hiring tests, and grievance procedures — either produced no improvement in management diversity or made it worse: five years after instituting mandatory training, the average company’s share of Black women in management had fallen nine percent. The programs that actually moved the needle: formal mentoring, diversity task forces that put managers to work on the problem, targeted recruitment, and diversity managers with genuine accountability — mechanisms of engagement, contact, and social accountability rather than command and control.
The art museum sector has overwhelmingly chosen the ineffective programs. Mandatory bias training is near-universal. Grievance procedures are standard. Formal mentoring with executive accountability, targeted recruitment, voluntary self-examination, and diversity managers with genuine accountability: rare. Diversity officers are common at larger institutions, but — as Section 3.1 documents — stripped of the authority that Dobbin and Kalev’s data shows makes the role work. The sector has selected for the interventions that allow it to demonstrate commitment while avoiding accountability. This is not an accident.
If workforce demographics are lagging, board demographics tell a more specific story. Museum boards are not merely symbolic; they control endowments, select directors, approve acquisition budgets, and set compensation. Who sits on a museum board determines the direction of the institution in ways that curatorial programming cannot. And museum boards have changed almost not at all.
AAM and BoardSource’s Museum Board Leadership 2017 study found museum board members 89.3 percent white, board chairs 92.6 percent white, and 46 percent of museum boards entirely white — ‘tipped to white, older males,’ in the study’s words, and drawn from wealthier populations. AAM’s 2018 Facing Change report built the sector’s DEAI agenda on that finding. The mechanism is structural: boards recruit through personal networks, and 91 percent of white Americans’ social networks are other white Americans. This is not a surprising finding. It is a structural one. Boards hire directors. Directors hire curators. The pipeline begins with who is permitted to govern.
Museums have responded to this finding by acknowledging it. They have issued commitments to board diversification, created trustee pipeline programs, held listening sessions with community representatives. AAM’s follow-up study, published in 2024, showed that entirely white boards had fallen from 46 percent to 27 percent since 2017 — and that 71 percent of museum boards were still at least three-quarters white. The all-white board is retreating; the supermajority-white board remains the norm.
The endowment control question requires a specific observation. Museum boards in the United States are self-perpetuating: existing board members typically nominate and vote on new members. The people with the most to lose from structural equity — those who have benefited from the existing distribution of cultural capital, prestige, and financial access — are precisely the people controlling the pipeline. The cui bono question, which runs through this series as a standing analytical lens, has a precise answer here: the perpetuation of board homogeneity serves the interests of existing board members by maintaining the conditions under which their own cultural and financial capital was accumulated. Inclusion threatens not merely comfort but the mechanisms by which certain kinds of accumulated cultural authority retain value.
Cultural institutions — particularly in major metropolitan areas — are among the most publicly progressive employers in any sector. They hold LGBTQ+ History Month events, display rainbow flags, issue statements during anti-trans legislative campaigns. They are, by self-presentation, among the most inclusive workplaces available to LGBTQ+ workers.
The survey data tells a more complicated story. McKinsey’s 2020 research on LGBTQ+ workers documented the gap directly: at companies with visible, well-publicized support for LGBTQ+ rights, employees still corrected colleagues’ assumptions about their identity, came out repeatedly, and concealed themselves at work — more than 60 percent reported the first, roughly half the second, and transgender employees were three times more likely to feel they could not speak about themselves. The visible commitment and the lived experience are two different records.
This finding connects directly to the wage data documented in Designed to Fail. Trans women, non-binary workers, and LGBTQ+ workers of color experience the widest wage gaps, the highest rates of workplace discrimination, and the highest rates of poverty — and these gaps are not materially different in “progressive” cultural institutions than in the general workforce. The institution that hangs the flag and holds the mixer has not changed the organizational dynamics that drive the gap. It has changed the marketing.
There is no sector-specific longitudinal study of LGBTQ+ workers in the arts that would allow a direct comparison of “progressive” versus other cultural employers. That absence is itself evidence. The arts sector has produced substantial DEI documentation and almost no demographic accountability infrastructure for LGBTQ+ workers specifically. The commitments run well ahead of the measurement.
One of the most precisely documented mechanisms of performative inclusion is the relationship between temporary exhibition programming and permanent collection acquisition. Major institutions have, since the 1990s, increasingly used temporary exhibitions featuring women artists and artists of color as the primary evidence of their inclusive practice. These exhibitions are prominent, well-funded, and widely reviewed. They are also, by definition, temporary.
The permanent collection is not temporary. It is the institutional argument about what art matters — the accumulation of every acquisition decision, weighted by budget and curatorial authority, that the museum has made across its history. And permanent collection demographics have changed at a pace even slower than workforce demographics.
A PLOS ONE study cited in Designed to Fail and The Geography of Exclusion analyzed the collections of the top eighteen U.S. art museums and found that works by male artists constituted 87 percent of the holdings and works by white artists 85 percent. The 2022 Burns Halperin Report, which examined 31 U.S. museums over the years 2008 to 2020, found that work by women accounted for 11 percent of acquisitions against 14.9 percent of exhibitions — and that the acquisition share peaked in 2009, before the decade of intensive inclusion programming began. Work by Black American artists accounted for 2.2 percent of acquisitions; work by Black American women, 0.5 percent.
The pattern this reveals is precise: institutions acquire the exhibition track record — visibility, critical attention, public credit for inclusion — while maintaining the permanent collection economics: value concentration in white male work, with its associated insurance, appraisal, and resale implications. The artist benefits from the exhibition. The institution benefits from both the public credit and the maintained collection economics. The institution’s contribution to establishing historically excluded art forms as fine art remains rhetorical rather than financial.
This is not an accident. It is a risk management strategy. Acquiring work by artists outside the established market hierarchy creates collection assets of uncertain value — and as documented in What Institutions Are Worth, institutional appraisal practices and insurance standards for work by underrepresented artists lag the market precisely because institutions have not been acquiring it. The exhibition takes none of that risk. It takes the credit for inclusion while maintaining the financial conservatism of the permanent collection.
| Mechanism | What Institutions Do | What It Produces |
|---|---|---|
| Diversity officer / DEI team | Hire a dedicated equity role, often advisory | Institutional cover; low tenure (shortest of any executive function); demographics unchanged |
| Mandatory diversity training | Annual bias workshops, HR compliance modules | No measurable effect on management diversity; documented negative effect in some categories (Dobbin & Kalev, 2022) |
| Temporary exhibition programming | Feature underrepresented artists in time-limited shows | Public credit for inclusion; no obligation to acquire; permanent collection demographics unchanged |
| Equity pledge / open letter | Publish public commitment with specific timelines | Communications product; no enforcement mechanism; Mellon data shows minimal follow-through |
| DEI consulting spend | Commission external audits, training programs | $7–9 billion annual industry; institutions receive grant eligibility; consultant receives fee; demographics unchanged |
| Tokenistic acquisition | Purchase one work by an underrepresented artist | Press release; no revised acquisition policy; market value of dominant-group work unchanged |
Sources: Dobbin & Kalev, Getting to Diversity (2022); Mellon Foundation Demographic Surveys (2015–2022); Washington Post (2021); Russell Reynolds/Spencer Stuart CDO tenure research (2022–2024); AAM Facing Change (2018)
The diversity, equity, and inclusion staff position became standard at major arts organizations in the mid-2010s and near-universal in the post-2020 period. Most major U.S. museums now have at least one staff member whose title includes “equity,” “diversity,” or “inclusion.” Many have entire DEI departments.
The Mellon data, cross-referenced with institutional reporting, reveals a pattern in how these positions function. DEI officers in arts organizations are disproportionately women of color — the demographic the institution is ostensibly seeking to support. They are typically positioned outside the core decision-making hierarchy: outside the curatorial chain of command, with limited authority over hiring, no authority over acquisition budgets, and advisory rather than directive roles. Their structural function is to provide the institution with advice that the institution can choose to take or ignore — and to absorb the public-facing accountability for equity that the institution’s leadership prefers not to hold.
This structure produces predictable results. The DEI officer is the person the institution points to when equity questions are raised in the press. The DEI officer is also the person who leaves when the equity program produces insufficient results — a pattern documented in the corporate sector, where executive search research found that nearly 60 percent of the chief diversity officers in post in 2018 had left within four years, and that CDO tenure — averaging under three years — is the shortest in the C-suite, against seven years for chief executives. No cultural institution or sector body has published equivalent tenure data for its own DEI roles. The absence is consistent with everything else this report documents. The churn is not incidental. A position with short tenure and limited authority cannot produce structural change. It can produce documentation of effort, which is the institutional goal.
The genuine version of this function — the function that produces structural change rather than institutional cover — requires authority over hiring, over acquisition, over compensation, and over board nomination. It requires a reporting line to the board rather than through an executive layer with an interest in minimizing disruption. It requires published targets and published accountability. And it requires the institutional acceptance that genuine equity work will produce conflict, because genuine equity work requires redistribution — of resources, of authority, of credit — from those who currently hold them to those who currently do not.
An institution that hires a DEI officer to avoid that conflict is not hiring a DEI officer. It is hiring a DEI performance.
The tokenistic exhibition has a specific structure. An institution identifies a historically underrepresented artist, or group of artists, of genuine quality. The exhibition is given real resources: a strong venue, a capable curator, a robust catalog. Critical attention follows. The public sees the work. The institution receives credit for the inclusion.
What the institution does not do: acquire substantially from this exhibition or from this artist’s market. What the institution does not do: revise its acquisition criteria to weight underrepresented artists systematically. What the institution does not do: apply the same critical resources and institutional attention to an ongoing acquisition program in this area. The exhibition ends. The artist returns to the conditions the exhibition temporarily relieved. The institution’s permanent collection is unchanged.
The gap between the exhibition record and the collection record is documented. The 2022 Burns Halperin Report found that across 31 U.S. museums between 2008 and 2020, work by women accounted for 14.9 percent of exhibitions but only 11 percent of acquisitions — and the acquisition share peaked in 2009. The exhibition is where the credit accrues. The collection is where the commitment would show, and it does not.
The tokenistic acquisition is the permanent collection equivalent: one work by an underrepresented artist acquired at a modest price, announced in an institutional press release as evidence of collection diversification, while the acquisition committee’s budget and attention remain concentrated in the established market hierarchy. The work enters the collection. It is displayed, occasionally. It does not trigger a revision of acquisition policy, a change in insurance appraisal standards for work by underrepresented artists, or a commitment to further acquisition. It is evidence of inclusion, not the practice of it.
The institutional pledge is the signature artifact of performative inclusion in the current era. Between June and December 2020, hundreds of arts organizations published statements, pledges, and commitments to anti-racist practice. The statements were long, specific, and emotionally forceful. They named systemic racism directly. They acknowledged institutional failure. They committed to timelines.
A Washington Post analysis in August 2021 tracked the racial justice commitments of America’s fifty biggest public companies after George Floyd’s murder — at least $49.5 billion — and found that only $1.7 billion had been confirmed disbursed, with more than ninety percent of the total, $45.2 billion, allocated as loans and investments the companies stood to profit from rather than as grants. Legal scholars writing in the Columbia Law Review documented the structural problem: by valuing racial equity in terms of its potential profitability, corporate racial responsibility consistently subordinated human dignity to wealth maximization — making the pledge, in many cases, a mechanism for extracting the appearance of commitment rather than its substance.
The cultural sector’s pledges were not systematically tracked by any equivalent journalism. The Mellon data, arriving in 2022, provided the most comprehensive assessment. The curatorial diversity numbers — five points over seven years, barely accelerated by the 2020 pledging moment — tell the story.
What produced this outcome? The pledge is, in institutional terms, a communications product. It is designed to be issued, publicized, and then archived. Its function in the communications cycle is complete at the moment of publication. The institutional processes that would produce the structural change the pledge describes — board governance reform, hiring policy revision, acquisition criteria change, compensation band publication — are separate from the communications infrastructure and are governed by people with limited incentive to produce disruption.
An enforcement mechanism is not part of the standard pledge. There is no independent monitoring body with authority over arts institutions’ equity commitments. The AAM’s accreditation standards — which constitute the primary external accountability mechanism for U.S. museums — assess equity through a process of self-report and site review that has limited capacity to detect the gap between stated commitment and actual practice. An institution can submit an equity plan and receive accreditation. Whether the plan is implemented is a matter of institutional will.
The cui bono question produces a more precise picture than the language of institutional “failure” suggests. Performative inclusion is not merely the result of institutions trying and falling short. It is, in many cases, a structure that serves specific interests.
The global diversity and inclusion market — the consulting, training, and compliance products institutions buy to demonstrate commitment — was estimated by market-research firm Global Industry Analysts at $7.5 billion in 2020 and $9.3 billion in 2022. It profits from the permanent status of diversity as a problem to be managed rather than solved. Mandatory diversity training — documented as ineffective — is the industry’s most common product. It is also the product that generates repeat engagement: training that does not work requires more training. The institution receives credit for the program. The consultant receives the fee. The demographics do not change. Everyone except the excluded artist or worker has received what they wanted from the transaction.
The institution itself benefits in specific ways. Grant-making bodies, government funders, and major donors have, since the late 1990s, increasingly required equity commitments as a condition of funding. An institution with a DEI officer, diversity programming, and published equity statements is positioned to receive this funding regardless of whether its structural practice has changed. The DEI infrastructure is, in part, a grant compliance mechanism.
The board benefits from the maintenance of existing network dynamics. Senior staff benefits from the maintenance of existing hiring pipelines. Curatorial staff benefits from the maintenance of existing market hierarchies, in which the work they have expertise appraising — predominantly white male European and American modernism — retains its market dominance. The artist of color benefits from the temporary exhibition and the associated press attention. The permanent structure of who gets collected, who gets acquired, and who sets market benchmarks is unchanged.
The worker who does not benefit is the one the program was designed to include.
The history documented in Parts I through III is not abstract. It is a map of the failure mode the Museum of Mosaic Environments must specifically design against. The MME is a new institution. It does not have forty years of accumulated practice to reform, inherited board composition to dismantle, or legacy acquisition habits to overcome. What it has is the opportunity to build structures that make performative inclusion materially impossible — not through aspiration but through operational design.
The commitments in this section are not statements of intent. They are institutional specifications.
The MME will publish an annual Equity and Accountability Report. This report is not a DEI section of an annual report. It is a standalone primary accountability document, publicly accessible, with the following required contents:
Curatorial workforce demographics by race, gender, LGBTQ+ identity, and disability status, at every level from senior curator through curatorial assistant and paid intern — disaggregated, not reported as a single “diversity” figure.
Compensation data by role, broken down by demographic category, with explicit gaps identified, year-on-year trend lines, and published timeline targets for gap closure.
Acquisition data by demographic category of artist: every acquisition in the reporting year, with the artist’s demographic information (self-reported), the acquisition price, the decision-making authority responsible, and the appraisal value established for insurance purposes. Published annually.
Artist fees paid for all exhibitions, commissions, and speaking engagements, benchmarked against peer-institution standards. Where the MME exceeds those standards, the excess is noted and the rationale stated.
Board composition, with the date each trustee joined, the nomination process, and the demographic profile of the nominating committee.
This data is the institution’s equity credential. It is the only credential that cannot be performed.
The MME will not create a DEI officer position whose authority extends only to advice. The equity function in the MME is structural: embedded in every hiring decision, every acquisition decision, every compensation decision, every commission, and every board nomination. This requires equity accountability running from the board level through every departmental function.
The MME will establish an Equity Committee of the Board with authority over equity policy — not an advisory committee, but a governance body with defined power to review and challenge hiring and acquisition decisions that fail to meet published targets. This committee will have direct access to the annual demographic data without filtering through institutional staff, and it will include at minimum one artist and one community member alongside institutional trustees. Its deliberations will be summarized in the annual Equity and Accountability Report.
The MME’s acquisition policy will explicitly invert the industry standard pattern. For every temporary exhibition featuring artists from underrepresented groups, the MME will commit a defined minimum acquisition budget to permanent collection acquisitions from those groups — not necessarily from the exhibition itself, but in parallel and in proportion. The temporary exhibition does not count as equity; it creates an obligation to make equity permanent. This commitment will be published in advance of each exhibition and reported in the annual Equity and Accountability Report. Failure to meet the commitment triggers a board-level review.
The MME’s minimum artist fees will be published and applied without exception. The fees will be set at the upper range of peer-institution standards, not the median, and explicitly higher than standard institutional benchmarks for artists from underrepresented groups — in recognition of the documented wage gap established in Designed to Fail and the additional institutional labor these artists are routinely asked to perform: community representation, interpretive programming, educational facilitation, and the credentialing function that the museum benefits from and the artist provides. The fee structure will be reviewed annually and adjusted for inflation.
Artist compensation, made public and consistently applied, is institutional communications of a specific kind: the kind that can be verified.
The MME will not offer, request, or accept unpaid labor in any institutional function — not in the form of unpaid internships, unpaid curatorial consultation, or “exposure” as partial compensation for any contribution. The equity literature is unambiguous on this point: unpaid positions filter for class background, and class background in the arts tracks closely with race, disability, and inherited wealth, as documented in The Unpaid Canvas and The Disability Gap. An institution that relies on unpaid labor for its intellectual programming is not building an equitable institution; it is maintaining the class barrier in a different form, with better branding.
The MME’s board will not be self-perpetuating in the standard sense. Board nominations will require: demographic data on current board composition, a written rationale for why the candidate advances board equity, and review by the Equity Committee before any vote. A standing board resolution — reviewable but requiring a supermajority to modify — will establish minimum representation floors for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, working artists, and community members. These floors will be published. When board composition falls below the floor in any category, the next nomination cycle must address the gap before any other nominations are considered.
These governance specifications exist for a specific reason: the MME’s founding director and founder will not always be present, and founder intentions do not survive succession without structural embedding. The governance architecture must be capable of enforcing the institution’s founding values in the absence of the people who held them. This is not pessimism. It is institutional design.
There is a sentence that appears, in various forms, in nearly every institutional DEI document produced in the last decade: “We know we have more work to do.” It is the sentence that ends accountability by framing it as ongoing. The work is always more. The record is never the measure. The measure is the commitment to keep working — which requires no specific outcome and generates no specific consequence.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments will have a record. In ten years, the record will show what the institution acquired, who it paid, what those people were paid, who served on its board, what the demographic composition of its curatorial staff was, and what happened when any of those figures failed to meet the published targets. That record is the institution’s equity credential. Nothing else is.
The Guerrilla Girls have spent forty years producing the data that cultural institutions use to demonstrate their awareness of the problem while not solving it. Their posters are in the Met’s collection. The numbers on those posters are still wrong. There is no version of that story in which the collection of the protest by the institution constitutes progress. The MME’s version of this story will be the one in which the data the institution publishes demonstrates that its founding values were not a communication strategy.
The argument against performative inclusion is the same argument for the institution. If the MME performs inclusion, it is not an institution. It is a mirror.
This report is a working document. It will be updated as new data becomes available, as the MME’s own record accumulates, and as the field continues to evolve. Every section is a resource to be drawn from — for governance design, for investor messaging, for hiring policy, and for the annual accountability report that this institution will be required to produce whether or not the data reflects well on it.
That requirement is not a burden. It is the point.
The following table consolidates primary data points cited throughout this report for use in institutional governance, communications, and advocacy materials.
| Statistic | Figure | Source / Year |
|---|---|---|
| US art museum workforce: % white (2015 baseline) | 72% | Mellon Foundation, 2015 |
| US art museum workforce: % white (2022) | 64% | Mellon Foundation, 2022 |
| Intellectual leadership (curators, conservators, educators, leadership): % white (2015) | 84% | Mellon Foundation, 2015 |
| Intellectual leadership (curators, conservators, educators, leadership): % white (2022) | 73% | Mellon Foundation, 2022 |
| Museum leadership and conservation: % white (2022) | 80% | Mellon Foundation, 2022 |
| Museum trustees: % white (2022) | 68.6% | BTA/Ithaka S+R trustee survey respondents, 2022 |
| Projected year intellectual leadership becomes majority non-white at 2015–2022 pace | c. 2037 | MME calculation from Mellon/Ithaka series (illustrative) |
| US museum boards: % white (AAM) | 89.3% of board members (2017); 71% of boards ≥75% white (2024) | AAM/BoardSource Museum Board Leadership studies |
| Mandatory diversity training: effect on management diversity | Null or negative | Dobbin & Kalev, HBR 2016 / Getting to Diversity, 2022 |
| DEI consulting industry annual value | $7–9 billion | Global Industry Analysts, 2020–2022 estimates |
| Average tenure: chief diversity officer (corporate; no cultural-sector data exists) | 1.8–3.4 years, shortest in the C-suite | Russell Reynolds Associates; Spencer Stuart, 2022–2024 |
| Top 18 US museum permanent collections: % male artists | 87% | PLOS ONE study, 2019 |
| Works by women as share of museum acquisitions, 31 U.S. museums, 2008–2020 | 11% (vs. 14.9% of exhibitions) | Burns Halperin Report, 2022 |
| LGBTQ+ workers at high-visibility-support employers: still concealing/correcting identity at work | >60% correct colleagues’ assumptions; ~50% come out repeatedly; transgender employees 3× more likely to stay silent | McKinsey, ‘LGBTQ+ voices,’ June 2020 |
| Women’s share of art museum director positions (US, all sizes) | 47.6% | AAMD, cited in Designed to Fail |
| Women directors at institutions with budgets >$15m | 30% | AAMD, cited in Designed to Fail |
| Corporate pledges on racial equity confirmed disbursed as of August 2021 | $1.7B of $49.5B pledged | Washington Post, 2021 |
Source: Full source details provided in the body of this report. Survey data from Mellon Foundation, AAM, McKinsey, and National Equity Atlas. Calculations marked MME are derived from published survey trend data.
Mellon Foundation. Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey. 2015, 2019, 2022. mellon.org
American Alliance of Museums and BoardSource. Museum Board Leadership 2017. 2017. aam-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/eyizzp-download-the-report.pdf
American Alliance of Museums. Facing Change: Insights from the American Alliance of Museums’ Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Working Group. 2018. aam-us.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/AAM-DEAI-Working-Group-Full-Report-2018.pdf
American Alliance of Museums/NORC. Museum Board Leadership 2024 insights. 10 October 2024. aam-us.org/2024/10/10/research-insights-from-aams-museum-board-leadership-survey/
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “EEOC History: 1964–1969.” eeoc.gov/history/eeoc-history-1964-1969
Dobbin, F. and Kalev, A. “Why Diversity Programs Fail.” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2016. hbr.org
Dobbin, F. and Kalev, A. Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. Harvard University Press, 2022.
Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). The Ongoing Gender Gap in Art Museum Directorships. aamd.org. Cited in Designed to Fail.
McKinsey & Company. “LGBTQ+ voices: Learning from lived experiences” and “How the LGBTQ+ community fares in the workplace.” June 2020. mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/lgbtq-plus-voices-learning-from-lived-experiences
Human Rights Campaign Foundation. The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States. 2022. hrc.org. Cited in Designed to Fail.
Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. LGBTQ Poverty in the United States. 2019. williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu. Cited in Designed to Fail.
Topaz, C.M., et al. “Diversity of Artists in Major U.S. Museums.” PLOS ONE, 2019. journals.plos.org
National Museum of Women in the Arts. Get the Facts. 2021. nmwa.org
Burns Halperin Report. Studio Burns Media / artnet News, 2022. studioburns.media/exactly-how-underrepresented-are-women-and-black-american-artists-in-the-art-world-read-the-full-data-rundown-here/ (also news.artnet.com/art-world/full-data-rundown-burns-halperin-report-2227460)
Art Basel & UBS. The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report. 2023, 2024, 2025. artbasel.com
Fortune. “Nearly 60% of chief diversity officers who took the job in 2018 have already left it.” 6 September 2022. fortune.com/2022/09/06/chief-diversity-officer-planning-turnover-exit-costly-loss/
Fortune. “Diversity officers have the shortest tenure in the C-suite.” 10 January 2024. fortune.com/2024/01/10/diversity-officers-ceo-csuite-tenure-turnover-fortune500/
Business Chief. “Chief Diversity Officer: Why Tenure Is Low, Turnover Is High.” July 2023. businesschief.com/sustainability/chief-diversity-officer-why-tenure-is-low-turnover-is-high
Jan, Tracy, Jena McGregor, and Meghan Hoyer. “Corporate America’s $50 Billion Promise.” Washington Post, August 23, 2021. washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/george-floyd-corporate-america-racial-justice/
Fletcher, Gina-Gail S. and Lovelace, H. Timothy, Jr. “Corporate Racial Responsibility.” Columbia Law Review, Vol. 124, No. 2 (2024). columbialawreview.org/content/corporate-racial-responsibility/
Global Industry Analysts. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Market report ($7.5B, 2020 est.). 27 January 2022. globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/01/27/2374060/28124/en/
Global Industry Analysts, via PR Newswire. “As Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Hits $9.3 Billion in Global Spending, Watch Out for These Key Trends in 2022.” 2022. prnewswire.com/news-releases/as-diversity-equity–inclusion-hits-9-3-billion-in-global-spending-watch-out-for-these-key-trends-in-2022–301487159.html
Guerrilla Girls. Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met Museum? 1989; recounted 2005, 2012, 2025. guerrillagirls.com
Guerrilla Girls. “Naked Through the Ages.” guerrillagirls.com/naked-through-the-ages
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Katy Hessel audio tour transcript, Guerrilla Girls. metmuseum.org/perspectives/katy-hessel-audio-tour-guerrilla-girls-transcript
Tate. “Who Are Guerrilla Girls?” tate.org.uk/art/artists/guerrilla-girls-6858/who-are-guerrilla-girls
Getty. “Inside the Guerrilla Girls.” getty.edu/news/inside-the-guerilla-girls/
BmoreArt. “Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.” July 2025. bmoreart.com/2025/07/guerrilla-girls-making-trouble-at-the-national-museum-of-women-in-the-arts.html
Parker, R. and Pollock, G. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. Routledge, 1981. Cited in Designed to Fail.
Kalev, A., Dobbin, F., and Kelly, E. “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies.” American Sociological Review, 2006.
Designed to Fail: A History of Gender Inequality, Pay Disparity, and the Art/Craft Divide. The structural history this report requires. Designed to Fail establishes the art/craft hierarchy as a constructed mechanism of exclusion and documents the wage gap, director demographics, and pay inequity that Performative Inclusion shows DEI programming has failed to close.
The Geography of Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity, and the Art Market. Documents the racial geography of market exclusion that Section 2.3 and the Mellon data in Section 2.1 map at the workforce level. Together the two reports establish both the market and labor dimensions of the same structural pattern.
The Unpaid Canvas. Establishes the economic precarity that performative inclusion leaves untouched. The class barrier reinforced by unpaid institutional positions — named in Section 4.5 of this report — is documented in full there.
The Disability Gap. Named in Section 4.5 alongside The Unpaid Canvas as documentation of the access barriers that unpaid labor perpetuates.
What Institutions Are Worth. The companion analysis of institutional valuation and permanent collection economics. Section 2.4 of this report on the tokenistic acquisition and exhibition pattern is grounded in the appraisal and insurance dynamics documented there.
This report was developed through an iterative, fact-checked, and edited collaborative research process between Rachael Que Vargas and Anthropic’s Claude (in two roles — long-form research and document operations). The questions, institutional framework, and editorial judgment are the author’s; the research synthesis and structural development are collaborative.
© 2026 Rachael Que Vargas / Museum of Mosaic Environments. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). You may share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes with attribution. Full license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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