In June 2020, the Manetti Shrem Museum made a Shared Commitment, signed by every member of our team, to ensure that diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion are central to the museum’s mission and operations. “Along with our UC Davis community and the nation,” we wrote, “we continue to mourn the deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and protest the ongoing violence against Black people. At the same time, we are grappling with how each of us can best serve as an ally to our community, and what actionable form that takes for the Manetti Shrem Museum.” At that moment, Vice Chancellor Renetta Garrison Tull charged our campus community to “Reflect. Learn. Plan. Act.” And Executive Director for Academic Advising Enrichment Kayton C. Carter asked us to “look beyond the moment” to achieve lasting change.
The Anti-Racism Action Plan is a working document that outlines the start of an ongoing process to confront systemic racism and create lasting change at our museum as we aspire to become a model for university art museums across the nation. This Action Plan, in these early stages, is the process by which the museum is identifying the questions that will empower change. Over time, the plan evolves from questions to a high-level outline and timeline that tracks many nuanced and complex projects — what we are calling “specific actions” — that range from collection assessment to staff training. We proceed from a belief that every aspect of our organization must be assessed while our staff and leadership at all levels deepen our understanding of, and ability to locate, the mechanisms of systemic racism at work in our museum.
