Our year began in anticipation of the MFA’s 150th anniversary in February 2020, the start of a yearlong celebration of inclusion and community. It was planned as an ambitious expression of our core values, and of our commitment to be a museum for all of Boston.
Exhibitions highlighted local artists (“Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death”), a landmark acquisition of photography (“Viewpoints: Photographs from the Howard Greenberg Collection”), and art from past decades and millennia that spoke to contemporary audiences and built a bridge to the future ( “Ancient Nubia Now” and “Women Take the Floor”).
Our first exhibition of calendar year 2020, “Black Histories, Black Futures,” curated by Boston-area teens, put the year’s focus on inclusion front and center. In the Museum’s main pathways, the exhibition’s curators—students from Boston’s high schools—highlighted selections of 20th-century work by artists of color meaningful to them. We looked forward to engaging and sharing in conversations with our communities in the months to come.
But in March 2020, our plans changed. In response to the global pandemic and national lockdown, the MFA, along with rest of the country’s museums, had to close its doors.
2020 tested our resolve and our commitment—to our community and to one another. We experienced a year unlike any in the MFA’s history, with challenges that gave us pause and disrupted tradition, and made us rethink issues of service.
Like our peer museums and arts organizations, we faced the question of how to remain a resource for the community while keeping staff, visitors, and our city safe. We consulted with colleagues all over the world on policy, procedure, safety, and ethics. We sought new ways to responsibly navigate the unknown. Our immediate challenges were many, from compliance with local governance, to postponing long-planned exhibitions and programs, to maintaining safe conditions for the art in our care and the colleagues who are its custodians.
With strong leadership, dedicated staff, and adherence to core values, we began to address each new circumstance. But we had no way of knowing how long the crisis would last—or how it would change—demanding new ways of working and communicating.
We made the shift to the digital realm, keeping our audiences connected, close, and engaged. We affirmed the power of art to heal and to display the resilience of the human spirit. We reached new audiences far from the Fenway.
The MFA was fortunate—thanks to the careful management of our endowment and the responsiveness of donors and benefactors—to weather the financial hardship of months, and possibly years, of reduced admissions revenue. We kept the collection safe, and by working remotely, kept our most valuable resource—our people—safe too, and focused energy on advocating for the arts and arts organizations not as fortunate.
Our fiscal year ended on June 30, 2020, with the Museum still closed. We were hopeful, but uncertain, about reopening soon. The MFA subsequently reopened in the fall, and, as of this writing in Spring 2021, has increased capacity and welcomed visitors safely to almost all galleries and exhibitions.
June 2020 was also a time of reckoning with racial injustice in this country, and the MFA, like cultural institutions across America, engaged with its relevance and its inequities, as well as how to answer the pain of our communities.
The times demand of us a broader definition of the cultural and social missions of museums. As Lonnie Bunch III, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, stated:
“I believe very strongly that museums have a social justice role to play, that museums have an opportunity to not become community centers, but to be at the center of their community, to help the community grapple with the challenges they face, to use history, to use science, to use education, to give the public tools to grapple with this.”
Deeply true. And to expand, museums have an opportunity to place art at the center of the dialogue, too. To use art to affirm identity, expand historical understanding, and release the creative spirit in all of us. Great art empowers and gives pleasure, and great museums do as well. Art gives us a way to see ourselves, and see others all around us, every day.
The responsibility for presenting art in a public space to convene, share, and explore is about connecting the Museum to the world around us in real time, and in real space. Museums must meet and then create their points of sustained engagement with issues of our time. And we will.