The Last Post (for 2021) & Three Words for 2022
Johannes von Gmunden - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_von_Gmunden_Calendar_1.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93939688
In 10 days 2021 will be in the history books and we will be living 2022. At the moment though, with Omicron duplicating, it feels like a meaner, angrier version of 2020 where every choice demands serious thought. Should I go? Should I stay? Are they vaccinated AND boostered? How much do those home tests cost? What was my life like the last time prices were this high? And on and on.
Today, I went back and read my final post from 2020. In it, I laid out five ways I hoped to make change in the coming year. They were:
Be the point person for a director search that starts by recognizing implicit bias, conducts an equitable search, resulting in a diverse, creative candidate who challenges us in new ways.
Continue to diversify our collections, art, photography and rare books, through acquisition and in cataloguing language.
Continue to shift our organizational lens so white privilege isn’t always center stage.
Grow empathy.
Nurture creativity.
Although I don't feel hugely successful, I did, weirdly, succeed in at least three out of five. We hired a new leader, someone who's smart, kind, empathetic and supportive. Having worked for someone who was none of those things, I can tell you it makes a huge difference. I continue to work at acknowledging and then shifting my own white privilege so the lens is more inclusive and empathetic. I try daily to nurture my own and other's creativity while also being empathetic. Creativity needs time, however, and some days it feels as though it is trapped on a container ship off the coast. The area of change that's proved hardest is diversifying our collections mostly because turning that wheel means money. Our donors are often older, white and male, making them not always enthusiastic about building collections that are non-white and female. Nevertheless, it remains a written goal, and one that's easy to point to when we're offered a gift.
Over this year, I've written about workplace bullying and crying at work specifically for women because I believe they are sometimes caught in COVID's crosshairs in ways men are not. I wrote about taking grief to work because this has been, and remains, a deeply sad year for me. I also wrote about creativity and trust, and I wrote about Nina Simon, who remains a she-ro for me mostly because she has the courage to walk away from all this museum stuff and write a novel. At least I think that's what she's doing because periodically I answer her probing questions on Twitter about one of her characters who seems to be about my age.
It's time to say something about the coming year so here is my hope: My hope is that every museum leader, whether they lead a program or an organization, whether they lead 1.5 people or the equivalent of a small town, can, when they're alone, say honestly and truthfully, "My staff is safe, seen and supported." If that's not true, if there are tiny things that need to be changed or great gaping holes, my hope is they make that sentence a truth in 2022. If your staff is safe, they are not harassed and bullied. Should they be, because you can't control everything, you will have implemented processes to support and help them. If they are seen, they know you believe in them, in the person they really are, not some artificial version of themselves. And if they are supported, they are mentored, encouraged, and given space to be creative, no matter their assigned tasks.
If you--because you are important too--and your staff are safe, seen and supported, the constant gnawing need for self care will also lessen. It won't be perfect. Life rarely is, but it will be a long way toward better. So think about what you need to do to move the needle toward those three simple words: safe, seen, supported.
I'll close this end-of-year post with a poem. Given the space we're currently in, we probably should read more poetry, and the title is fitting. In the meantime, be well, take care of those you love, and I'll be back here in 2022.
Joan Baldwin
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón - 1976-
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
