Museum Archipelago

60. Stephanie Cunningham on the Creation and Growth of Museum Hue

March 18th, 2019  |  14 mins 28 secs

stephanie cunningham

The fight for racial diversity in museums and other cultural institutions is not new: people of color have been fighting for inclusion in white mainstream museums for over 50 years. Dispose these efforts, change has been limited. A 2018 survey by the Mellon Foundation found that 88% of people in museum leadership positions are white.

Stephanie Cunningham has a clear answer for why these white institutions aren’t changing: “When you’ve been practicing exclusion for so long, you can’t change overnight.” That’s one of the reasons why she co-founded Museum Hue with Monica Montgomery in 2015.

In this episode, Cunningham traces Museum Hue’s trajectory from a small collective to a national membership-based organization, and spells out why being a well-meaning institution is necessary but not sufficient for equity in the field.