Equity Commitments

Staffing, Training, and Diversification

TUAG full-time and part-time staff have and continue to undergo implicit bias training, both as individuals and as a group, to develop an open and anti-bias work culture. This is being augmented by installing BIPOC individuals in staff and leadership positions which is happening, slowly. When we can expand our staff again, we will hire BIPOC staff members and, in the meantime, we will work toward making our work culture sustainable and supportive for BIPOC staff members and freelancers. As an educational institution, we offer professional opportunities for students interested in museum work, and we commit to supporting our BIPOC students in order to facilitate pathways to inclusive and diverse museum leadership in the future.

Student Voices

We commit to sharing our platform and resources to support the formation of a Student Programming Committee (SPC) to include students as active and valued voices within our exhibition and program planning process. We will engage with and learn from students in order to better meet their needs and wants through the exhibitions and programs the galleries offer. This means opening up our spaces to all students, being mindful that gallery spaces, including ours, have not always been welcoming for our BIPOC students.

With a newly established group of current students, the SAB is learning about TUAG operations and have begun to offer feedback and make recommendations. They are in the process of developing student-centered programs that began to roll out in Spring 2021.

Public Art and Collections Audit

Over the summer and fall of 2020, the Tufts Public Art Committee (PAC), spearheaded by the Art Galleries, led a university-wide audit of all of artworks on view in public spaces to ensure that representation on campus includes both BIPOC subjects and works by BIPOC artists.  This effort is part of Tufts President Anthony Monaco’s initial commitments toward making the university an anti-racist institution. “We need to think critically about whose history and images are displayed” on campus, as President Monaco noted. A summary of the key findings of this work can be found here

The audit, led by TUAG staff and students, is extending into the entirety of our Permanent Collection. With the first phase complete, our work ahead of us is clear.

The PAC’s workstream report can be found here, summarizing the current state of representation on campus and key recommendations towards repair.

Concurrently, we are also examining the content and history of these objects, assessing the values they represent, and using this data to rewrite our Collections Policies to prioritize the acquisition of artwork by BIPOC artists and makers.

Land Acknowledgement Learning

In 2020, in accordance with our Land Acknowledgment that we first enacted three years ago, we launched a Land Acknowledgment Working Group within our staff to engage more deeply with the statement on display in the Art Galleries’ spaces, as an ongoing process of reflection and to be in better relationship with Indigenous communities. We are educating ourselves on settler colonialism, and how it is continually present in our region and within the knowledge systems of universities, as we work towards expansive ways to welcome and  support Indigenous cultural practices in our structure and programs and act as an ally to Indigenous-led advocacy. This group works in parallel with the efforts to create a university-wide land acknowledgment statement.

Accessibility

In order to make our exhibitions, collections, and public programs both online and in-person accessible to everyone we launched a staff-led working group to research and implement best practices within the field. We acknowledge that this is a process, a process that we have just begun, and will continue updating our operations.

Furthermore, we recognize the intersection between marginalized communities and disabilities and the disproportionate ways this has limited access. Outreach and collaborating with communities will be crucial to understand how we can better serve them.  

Our first steps towards a more inclusive space include a new website that follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), adding Alt Text for images online, adding Image Descriptions on our social media posts, offering Closed Captions and Transcriptions on online programs, following ADA guidelines on our exhibition’s installations and designs, and using accessible language for all informational texts. 

TUAG Racial and Cultural Equity Steering Committee

To ensure that our work stays consistent and remains an ongoing priority, the Art Galleries have developed a staff-led steering committee. This committee meets weekly to assess our own progress toward the action items outlined in this letter. The committee will also help coordinate our efforts with those of our parent institution, Tufts University, and our Boston-area community at large, working closely with our colleagues in the Tufts Action Group and Tufts for Black Lives.