The Brooklyn Museum has a new African art curator, and many are not happy with the new hire.
The museum announced on Monday that it had appointed Kristen Windmuller-Luna to manage the museum’s African art collections. She is a white woman.
According to the Huffington Post, “most critics of the choice, including scholars who work in the field of art history, wondered why the museum couldn’t find a qualified black candidate as a curator of African art. Some said the hire highlighted a general lack of diversity in the arts, while others suggested the hires were just another sign of Brooklyn’s gentrification.”
The museum also announced that they had hired Drew Sawyer, a white man, as their photography curator.
The new hires highlight the fact that African-Americans only make up four percent of all curators, conservators, educators and museum leaders, according to a museum demographic survey coordinated by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2015.