The Public Shouldn’t Have to Pay to Be Members of Museums. That’s Why We’re Abolishing the Fees at Our Institution
The director of the ICA at VCU explains why pay-for-play museum membership should become a thing of the past.
April 21, 2021
Dominic Willsdon at the ICA. Image courtesy Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Photo: David Hale
It is not enough for museums merely to adapt to survive; in order to be true proponents of an inclusive, democratic culture, museums must make fundamental changes to structures that have long been taken for granted as standard practice. This can apply to something as (seemingly) simple as museum membership.
The enduring lessons of a New Deal writers project
In 1937, Sterling A. Brown, a poet and literature professor at Howard University, published a forthright essay charting the history of Black life in his hometown of Washington, DC from the district’s early status as the “very seat and center” of the domestic slave trade through the present-day effects of disenfranchisement and segregation. “In this border city, southern in so many respects, there is a denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant,” Brown wrote. “Social compulsion forces many who would naturally be on the side of civic fairness into hopelessness and indifference.”