Taking the Measure: Demographic Data as the Foundation for Change

Taking the Measure: Demographic Data as the Foundation for Change

In 1987, Howardena Pindell published Statistics, Testimony, and Supporting Documentation, a data-based critique of museum exhibitions and New York galleries. Drawing from gallery rosters and several years of museum exhibition catalogues, Pindell’s analysis highlighted the overwhelming whiteness of these spaces – 75 to 100 percent of artists shown were white, with the vast majority of institutions skewing towards the 100 percent mark.^{Pindell’s findings and methodology for her Art World Surveys are archived with research inspired by her work in a website published the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago that accompanied her 2018 retrospective Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen. https://pindell.mcachicago.org/art-world-surveys/}

Concurrently, the Guerrilla Girls began a poster campaign highlighting the gender inequality within galleries and museums. The plain, block text of the posters spelled out similar findings to Pindell’s own – little to no representation for women within institutional spaces.

What Pindell and the Guerrilla Girls found wasn’t new. Their research lays bare a phenomenon that is endemic to museums: the valorization of white, male artists above all else. It’s baked into the foundation of collecting, colonial biases permeating through hundreds of years to create a racist, patriarchal structure to which institutions are inextricably linked. It’s a foundation that seems to somehow remain nearly invisible to those it benefits yet glaringly obvious to those it disenfranchises. By compiling the data, Pindell and the Guerrilla Girls brought these discussions from the realm of anecdote to that of fact.

Nearly forty years later, we haven’t made much progress from the numbers reported. Demographic collection and the data-driven discussions that Pindell and the Guerrilla Girls pioneered, however, are on the rise.

I first started working with artist demographics as an undergraduate. It was a way of concretizing the trends I saw around me, a means by which diversification efforts could be tracked, their impact measured. How could an institution know if its methods were working if it didn’t know where it was starting from?

The Guerrilla Girls were foundational. Witty and sharp, their institutional critique is laid out in easily digestible poster formats, meant to engage a wide-ranging public audience. Their work is accessible and – most importantly – iterative. They return to the same forms to interrogate institutions over time, showing the scope of change over forty years.

Pindell, too, recognized the necessity for repetition. In a follow-up essay, Commentary and Update of Gallery and Museum Statistics, 1986–1997, she reflects on the changes to galleries and museums that occurred in the decade since her previous critique. The most notable difference is that most of the museums she surveyed did not reply to her requests for information.

This problem has been largely resolved by the growth of the Internet. The digitization of museum collections and exhibition history means easier access to the types of information Pindell and the Guerrilla Girls utilize – and, therefore, more opportunity for those outside the institution to reflect upon it.

2018 – 2019 seemed to be a breakthrough moment for demographics in the public sphere. I was deep in my own research when my advisor excitedly directed me to a recently published article, Diversity of artists in major U.S. museums (2019). Surveying over 10,000 artists from 18 museum collections, the article returned the conclusion that 75 percent of these artists were white men, with collections being overall 85 percent white and 88 percent male. The detailed statistical framework allowed for a greater examination of museum collections than previous iterations, another methodology to be utilized by future practice.

In 2018, Artnet published a report on the representation of African American artists within museums and the market. Spearheaded by Julia Haperin and Charlotte Burns, this project has expanded to become the Burns-Halperin Report, focusing on female artists in 2019 and a combination of both foci in the most recent iteration, published in late 2022. This has quickly become the benchmark for the art world to point to, with increasing numbers of op-eds and articles attached to the data breakdown. These reports survey ten years of acquisitions, exhibitions, and market data to provide a counter to narratives of vastly increased engagement with the relevant groups.

These major surveys served as a launchpad for a broader public engagement with demographic research – but they all come from outside the institution. If the goal of these projects is to address inequity within arts institutions, what are the institutions themselves doing to audit their collections?

Artist demographics have long been a tool turned on the museum externally, rather than an opportunity for internal contemplation. This position has shifted for many institutions over the last few years. The Association of Art Museum Curators recently published a best practices guide for creating demographic questionnaires, the result of discussions from colleagues across the field. This resource is a major step toward consistent and functional data collection across the field – a practice that will only serve to help larger discussions of collection and exhibition trends.

Despite the numerous forays into demographic research, there is one thing conspicuously missing: the voice of the artist. Even artist-driven projects defer to second-hand information – interviews, published sources, material scraped from institutional catalogues. It is within the institutional space that artist’s voices can emerge, collected through demographic questionnaires.  

The main issue with demographics is that identity never fits easily into little prescribed boxes. When you reduce everything to an aggregate series of numbers, you lose all elements of intersectionality, the nuances of an individual’s lived experience. But through this flattening you get a sense of the larger shape of a collection, the trends that have dominated acquisitions. A questionnaire provides an opportunity for dialogue, a connection that can help to navigate some of the tricky corners of large-scale reporting. It’s not a perfect system, but it leaves room for questions and growth.

The process of demographic collection becomes circular – an ouroboros of structural biases. To address institutional racism and sexism, a tool must be created to measure it. In creating the tool, these same biases appear in what identity markers are presented, what space is made for non-traditional forms of identification. Many demographic surveys, including the Burns-Halperin Report, rely on the US Census for demographic markers, despite it being a largely reductive method of information gathering (especially regarding gender identity, which as of the 2020 Census was conflated with sex and presented with only the options of Male or Female). It’s all inextricably tied together, where you can’t move forward effectively until you look back.

You keep moving forward and tripping over the same hurdles. The process inches onward. It’s how we’ve stayed in nearly the same place as we were forty years ago, though largely more conscious of our position this time around.

For the Walker, demographics went hand in hand with acquisitions, a process that left over half of collection artists unsurveyed and largely without any information at all. Updates to the questionnaire meant most of the information that was present utilized outdated demographic categories that didn’t quite align with the new structure. This fluctuation was expected – as conversations around identity shift, so must the tools we use to measure it.

The void of information called to me – what stories were we missing by leaving these blanks? I wanted to pull back the curtain, better understand what fell through the cracks. The forward motion of acquisitions would capture this information for some artists already in the collection, but the majority would remain as they were. Thus began my retroactive data collection.

Here is the sticking point of demographic questionnaires: the process relies on people and their willingness to talk about themselves. It is both my greatest joy and biggest frustration with this work. A mutable and unreliable subject of study, there’s no way to achieve a perfect round of data collection wherein every artist returns a completed questionnaire, nor will there be a time when collection has been ‘finished.’ This variability makes every completed questionnaire, every conversation around the work that much more satisfying – a recognition of the importance of this information and a representation of the artists themselves.

A clearer picture of the collection formed as I received information from artists, resolving itself piece by piece into a picture that is typical of institutions – largely male and largely white. Though this information was not news, it was gratifying to see laid out so plainly. Finally, here was something concrete: a foundation from which a more equitable collection can grow.

Throughout the data collection process, it became obvious that this work was not specific to the collection itself. Exhibitions, lecture series, performances and other programs that contract artists deserve equal scrutiny. Building systems for demographic collection across departments means greater accountability for the institution as a whole. The system cannot change if only one element is shifted.

Demographic surveying is a constant work in progress. Projects like the Burns-Halperin report and Pindell’s Art World Surveys give a snapshot of moments in time, a benchmark that can be utilized to compare future iterations of the same process. The iteration of their reports provides an insight into the short-term fluctuations (or lack thereof) within the art world. It shows where gains were made and what is still left to be done.

This process takes time. Demographic information exists as a tool for future practices, not as an end in its own right. For the public, it serves to demystify the slow-moving machines that are museums and provide a way to see the shape of the whole. Institutions have had decades (in some cases, hundreds of years) to amass artworks under a white male-centric collecting pedagogy. No collection can be changed overnight.

It’s easy to look at the slow shifts of the last forty years in a pessimistic light – there’s still so much work to do. Knowing the numbers may not immediately fix the problems, but having the overview lets you comprehend the structure you’re trying to dismantle. It helps create a path to where you want to be, lets you look back along the way and course correct if needed.

Each iteration of demographic research casts more light on the institutional barriers in place that slow the push for diversification and equity. It gets people talking and thinking. It puts the issues in plain text, creates an open and accessible dialogue. It is a great start, a sure and solid step forward towards long-awaited changes – one that can repeat to keep institutions accountable, to highlight the gains, to keep us moving where we aim to be.▪︎