PREFACE

The Best Practices Guide for Artist Demographic Data Coordination was created as a freely accessible document to serve as a foundational resource, advocacy tool, and guide for those looking to move forward with artist identity surveys ethically and fairly. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition that this type of assessment needs to be undertaken for the sake of transparency, accountability, and internal reckoning. Simultaneously, there has also been a growing apprehension about institutions initiating surveys individually and without direct lines of communication between them. Therefore, in October 2020, the AAMC Foundation began assembling colleagues, curators and non-curators alike, who were seeking a space to candidly share questions and concerns about museums’ processes and goals for gathering and analyzing information on artist identities. The community became the Artist Demographic Consortium, which included curators, collections and data managers, registrars, conservators, archivists, and more from over 40 institutions in the United States. As a full group and then in smaller working subgroups, these colleagues engaged in conversations that inspired and led to the framework for this guide. We are honored to have had the trust and candor of the consortium, many of whom participated in the making of Best Practices

Guide for Artist Demographic Data Coordination, and all of whom galvanized it. The consortium has expanded to merge with AAMC’s established Curator Gathering events, with the caveat that these gatherings vary from our traditional member-only format by continuing to welcome non-members from the consortium and AAMC members’ guests.

The creation of Best Practices

Guide for Artist Demographic Data

Coordination is indebted to conversations held over the past few years and to

The Mellon Foundation that has made the document a reality with their support. It should also be recognized that this undertaking is all possible because AAMC & AAMC Foundation are valued as conveners, supporters, and advocates for the curatorial community through our commitment to ethics, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.

At AAMC & AAMC Foundation, ethical best practices within the curatorial sector are at the forefront of our mission, as evident in our Call to Curators: DEAI Practices: Collections and Exhibitions , Code of Conduct for Curators , and Professional Practices for Art Curators in Nonprofits . These pledges and the Professional Practices guide, along with the information that follows in this document, present ways forward that are relevant beyond the curatorial field, and that are helpful and impactful for all museum and visual-arts nonprofit spaces. We encourage sharing these resources with colleagues and students in the arts community at large.

Within this guide, the term “artist” is used as broadly as possible to include makers and creators in multitudes of mediums and traditions, without dividing them into the predetermined but outdated subdivisions such as craft, fine art, design, film, and the like. In its centering of the authentic voice and active participation of the respondent, the guide offers broader ethical and procedural insight for the surveying and statistical gathering of demographic data from all institutional constituents—staff, donors, boards, visitors—and recognizes that organizations may benefit from incorporating all artist data collection into one project and process. This document primarily addresses gathering data from living artists, but many museums and arts organizations are seeking to better identify the demographic information of nonliving artists as well, and some of the processes, guidelines, engagement, and discussion points can also be relevant for these studies.

This document is, as its title indicates, a guide, and we acknowledge that it is by no means an exhaustive review of every possible detail or scenario that might be encountered. For curators working in differing locations, organizational types, and on varying scales of projects, experiences and policies will vary. However, it is our intent that this handbook provide an overview of as much information as possible, supplemented by relevant support material through case studies and additional resources.

This document is a guide, and we acknowledge that it is by no means an exhaustive review of every possible detail or scenario that might be encountered. For curators working in differing locations, organizational types, and on varying scales of projects, experiences and policies will vary. However, it is our intent that this handbook provide an overview of as much information as possible, supplemented by relevant support material through case studies and additional resources.

In creating this guide, we also seek to outline the highest level of current best practices, as the collection of demographic information is even more fraught if embarked upon without these. Accurate information on artists, provided in their voice, can bring forth change to our collecting and exhibition practices, and with it new possibilities but also new challenges. The pressures on staffing, budgets, and artists in undertaking a demographic data collection process can be significant. The need for organizations to complete this project at the highest level of ethics might make it unattainable. For these reasons, it was evident in the process of creating this document that there is a need for a centralized, artist-centered, accessible yet secure, and diligently maintained database, and that the collection process and content should be aligned with that database across all organizations. Unfortunately, to date this does not yet exist, but it is our hope that it will in the future.

We express our gratitude to all those who participated in the creation of this document. In particular, we are grateful to those who developed and spearheaded the project through all its stages: Briana Parker, Editor; Lucy Lydon, Project Manager, Director, Luce Productions; the AAMC & AAMC Foundation Board of Trustees and staff; the Artist Demographic Consortium; and The Mellon Foundation.

Judith Pineiro Executive Director, AAMC & AAMC Foundation