American museums — their boards, their staffs, the people who visit them — are far more white than the American population as a whole. It’s a problem that can affect museums’ bottom lines, but it also seems to be in direct contradiction with many of these institutions’ missions to spread knowledge and wonder far and wide.
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is emerging as an exception. The general arts museum, which has been around for more than 75 years, has seen the proportion of nonwhite visitors triple to 45 percent in recent years. That’s close to the percentage of people of color in the Atlanta area.
Museum director Rand Suffolk says that increase happened in part because the staff got together to brainstorm how to better serve their audience. Suffolk spoke with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro about how the museum has become more inclusive and what other steps they’re working toward to promote diversity.
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