People of color represent 20% of museum staff. Students
and young professionals strive to break barriers and
enter the curatorial field.

Pesqueira, born in the city of Pico Rivera, didn't grow up going to museums with her parents. She developed an interest in art through school and taking trips to museums with her older sisters. Now that she is a fellow in LACMA's Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship program, her parents are interested to learn more about what Pesqueira wants to pursue as a career.

"My family's definitely very supportive even if it's not something that they know much about. They're definitely opened [to] experiencing that with me," Pesqueira says.

Pesqueira is entering a field where people of color constitute 20% of museum staff, only about half of their representation in the wider population. For students and young professionals who want to enter the curatorial field, getting ahead means overcoming financial challenges, institutional barriers and microaggressions.

In 2015, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance of Museums and research firm Ithaka S+R, released a demographic survey documenting the low level of diversity in American art museums. The data showed that 84% of curator, conservator, educator and leadership roles were held by white Americans. Hispanics represented 3%; Asian Americans, 6%; and black Americans, 4%. A follow-up Mellon study published in January of this year showed little progress. The percentage of people of color holding curator jobs went from 12% to 16% in three years.

The foundation created the Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship program in 2013 to provide curatorial training to students from underrepresented communities to help develop a pipeline of future museum staffers who reflect America's growing diversity.

"Museums need to invest in a bigger range of talent in order to continue to thrive and remain relevant," said Mariët Westermann, executive vice president of the Mellon Foundation, in a company news blog.

LACMA and five other major museum institutions in the U.S. provide a weeklong summer academy to 15 students. Then two participants are selected for two-year paid fellowship at the museum, where they are mentored one on one by LACMA's curators.

Museums are institutional spaces that represent who we are as a society, said Robeson Taj Frazier, USC professor and director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at the university's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. "And oftentimes those spaces are one of many spaces that have excluded a variety of groups," he said.

The Mellon program allows students from underrepresented groups to experience a paid fellowship (with a yearly stipend of $10,000) and encourages participants to apply to graduate school, which in many cases is required to become a curator at a museum. Fellows are required to work part time during the school year and full time in the summer.

"It's important for me to be in this program because it really allows that space that hasn't existed before," said Pesqueira, who is in her first year of the two-year fellowship and a student at Whittier College.

JaBrea Patterson-West, a Mellon fellow at LACMA and student at USC, believes that having a diverse curatorial department would help public-serving institutions better reflect their audiences and communities with their content.

"You don't have to have a black curator work on that project if you want to have an exhibition of a black artist's work," Patterson-West said. "But I think it is important to have input from people throughout the museum who identify with that population and give context for the artist's work in a way that is not disrespectful to the museum viewers."

The challenges students face in diversity-focused programs

While the Mellon program has opened doors for students to enter predominantly white institutions, students say they are continually reminded that they're in a space that isn't necessarily meant for them.

Patterson-West recalls the challenges of having an unpaid internship at LACMA before she applied for the scholarship.

"It's difficult as someone who comes from a lower socioeconomic background to be able to get started in the museum world," she said. Patterson-West worked another part-time job to afford transportation and food during her internship.

If it weren't for the yearly stipend, Pesquiera couldn't afford to continue college, let alone pursue the fellowship, she said. She uses her paycheck to help cover her tuition at Whittier College.

Hope Flores, a former Mellon fellow at LACMA, used to take public transportation to get to the museum from East Los Angeles. She said that as a community college student working a full-time job, she enjoyed the program and made great connections. But it was a really difficult experience, Flores said, and it almost felt as if programs like the Mellon fellowship weren't created for students like her.

"I've met really incredibly supportive and inspiring people through these programs," Flores said. "My issues aren't interpersonal issues so much as structural issues of the very design of the program."

When we think of diversity and inclusion, she said, most programs think only about ethnic and cultural diversity, which can result in a preference for students from a higher economic status. "But we're not thinking about class or disability differences. I'm a working-class person, and that comes with a lot of mental health problems," Flores said.

"I was going between East LA and the Westside and constantly having to code-switch and just have to be a different person essentially," she said. "It was a real struggle."

It's important to think about where museums are located and how such choices enforce economic disparities and limit accessibility, Frazier of USC said.

"Oftentimes people don't feel comfortable in museums," he said, "because they think you have to be super quiet and it's high prestige only for rich people."

The need for role models in predominantly white institutions

Jennifer Cernada, curatorial assistant and a former Mellon fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, had a much different experience from some of her counterparts elsewhere. She considers herself lucky to have had Mari Carmen Ramírez, the first appointed curator of Latin American art in the U.S., as a mentor because Ramírez shared similar experiences of working in a traditionally elite institution as a woman of color.

Cernada recalls a moment back in 2015 at the Houston museum when the security guard asked to check her bag before leaving. She had never been checked before, she said, and the guard didn't check the bag of the person who walked out before her. When Cernada told Ramírez about the situation, her mentor took direct action, which made her feel that she was protected.

"I was very lucky to have Mari Carmen specifically as a mentor because she also went through a lot of that," Cernada said.

Racial and ethnic diversity isn't enough to make institutions reflect society. Joseph Valencia, exhibitions coordinator at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College and a former participant in the Mellon summer academy, said that museum staff should be trained in social work because of the lack of intentionality.

"If you don't have a diverse team that can think about different types of experiences, then you kind of are creating things that are just for you," Valencia said. "If you're the only person that has a different point of view, you could easily get burned out and not feel supported."

The Mellon Foundation has invested in other programs such as the curatorial studies program at Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta. Kéla Jackson, a former Mellon fellow at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, is graduating this May as an art history major and was a member of the inaugural cohort of Spelman's curatorial studies program. She recently curated her own show at the museum as the culminating project of her Mellon fellowship.

"It gave me a foot in the door and a way to see myself in a space that I didn't even know I could exist," said Jackson, who is now a museum assistant at Spelman College Museum.

Creating digital spaces and communities for comfort

The internet has become a place for people to curate the types of spaces they want to have while driving attention to them, said Tyree Boyd-Pates, history curator and program manager at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

Boyd-Pates encourages students who want to enter the curatorial field "not to wait for the art world to hear about you, but make the art world hear about you on your own terms."

As an undergraduate student in 2011, Kimberly Drew, an independent curator and former social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, created a Tumblr blog called Black Contemporary Art to share art by and about people of African descent.

USC student Patterson-West, an art history major, was inspired by Drew to create her own blog, Modern Black Contemporary. She sees it as a way to practice her curatorial skills on a digital space.

"[It] is a safe space where I can share and learn about modern black contemporary artists and share that with other people," Patterson-West said. "I can't not give [Drew] credit because I really look up to her work."

Karen Vidángos, public affairs specialist at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, was in graduate school when she began her blog, A Latina in Museums, to highlight Latinxs who work in cultural institutions.

She initially didn't see graduate school as an option. "This is not the case for all people of color, but a lack of exposure is just one of many underlying issues that creates barriers to access in the museum field," Vidángos said in an email. "I was fortunate enough to find a professor who encouraged and guided me through the process."

Vidángos also turned to Twitter in search of a community who understood the way she felt as a Latina in a predominantly white cultural institution.

"There's a museum community on Twitter that is already talking about diversity and intersectionality in the museum field," Vidángos said. "That's what got me started thinking more actively about me and that space and what that means and really learning how to articulate that because I've always felt a certain kind of way."

Diversity and representation go beyond museum walls

Programs like the Mellon fellowship are only part of what museums will need to do to create change, said Hilary Walter, coordinator of curatorial fellowships at LACMA. All museum staff should have training on understanding what white privilege is and the challenges people from underrepresented groups face in the field, she said.

But Frazier of USC says it's important to have representation on multiple fronts: student and faculty makeup in arts programs in universities, and the curriculum and how it is taught.

"When we think about the arts broadly, they have been referred to as European or Euro American arts so we have to use an adjective to position the arts of other cultures," Frazier said.

It's crucial that arts programs have professors who not only represent marginalized groups in terms of identity, but whose research and scholarship constitute the artistic cultures that have been excluded from art history.

Teaching non-Euro or Euro American art does not mean incorporating everything that has been marginalized in one week, Frazier said. "It's not just something that covers a particular week or is its own class, but is very much part of how the field and the discipline is conceptualized."

In 2017, the Mellon fellowship program received a $3.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to continue through 2022.

The foundation reports that 20 students have participated in the fellowship and 13 alumni are working in the arts or have enrolled in graduate programs.

Flores, who is completing her associate's degree at East Los Angeles College, is transferring to Cal State Long Beach this fall. In many ways, she hoped that the Mellon fellowship, and other diversity programs, were more supportive for students who are in the process of transferring schools.

She is the only student who was in community college while participating in the fellowship at LACMA. Most have been juniors or seniors.

"[It's] not really taking to account non-traditional students like me that have literally taken five-plus years to finish my undergrad," she said.

"Great things came out of it," Flores said. "But again maybe not designed for people like me, which is sad [because] you want to think that these things that are progressive are designed for everybody, even the most lowly among us, but that isn't always the case."

Ultimately, having a diverse curatorial department affects whose work is chosen to be displayed on museum walls.

Kohshin Finley, who has developed a following for his paintings of people of color, has been featured in galleries and at the California African American Museum.

"A gallery or museum that has a diverse curatorial department may be more keen on reflecting their own wider vision of what artists can look like," Finley said. This is important, he said, for giving artists of color a greater chance "to be in spaces that they historically have not [had] the most access to."