"We must recognise the workers who make museum-going a smooth architectural experience"
Following protests about working conditions at well-known museums ? like the Marciano Art Foundation and MoMA ? Mimi Zeiger says it's time to address architecture's relationship to unfair labour practices.
A symbol of the Freemasons ? the architecturally familiar square and compass ? decorate the facade of the hastily shuttered Marciano Art Foundation, formerly the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, on Wilshire Boulevard. The tools, as part of the mysterious Masonic arcana, represent in some interpretations a belief system in which labour is held as an honest universal.
The irony is that foundation founders Maurice and Paul Marciano of Guess fame abruptly closed their museum-cum-tax-haven as visitor-services staff members voted to unionise. An act that left about 70 employees, on Los Angeles minimum wage of $14.25 (£10.83) an hour, out of work. The Marciano's union-busting closure of a somewhat public home for their private collection, roughly 1,500 works, has sent ripples through LA's art and culture community. It comes at a moment when board membership and investments of established institutions like New York City's Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are increasingly scrutinised, and philanthropy is critiqued alongside curatorial efforts.
This relationship between labour and architecture is less tenuous than it might seem
As institutional transparency comes to the fore at the board level, we must also recognise the workers who make museum-going a smooth archi...
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