Replacements will be properly inclusive, based on "an income equity-focused lens."

A docent and bout grouping consider "American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968" by David Hockney, in the Modern Wing at the Fine art Institute of Chicago on Aug. 25, 2014. (East. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

UPDATE: My response to the Institute's lath chairman, who attempts to avoid the primary result–race. (Here)

UPDATE: Yoo hoo, Chicago media. Where'southward your coverage of the Art Plant firing its old white lady docents? (Here)

Notation: The Fine art Found wouldn't give USA TODAY a copy of the letter firing the docents. You lot can read it at the lesser of this post.

For more than 60 years, crews of volunteer and dearest docents have faithfully, skillfully and happily introduced a million school children, museum members, donors and other groups to the treasures of the Fine art Institute of Chicago.

The visitors, of all backgrounds from all over America and foreign countries, were elevated by docents' cognition and honey of the museum's 300,000 works of art. The docents' contribution to the museum'south earth-class reputation is incalculable As is the expansion of the horizons of busloads of inner city schoolhouse children.

And now the docents been fired.

Unexpectedly, rudely, immediately and for the flimsiest and about insulting of reasons: Considering nigh are white.

They volition be somewhen replaced by a "limited number of paid educators," less experienced and knowledgable part-timers who will receive a munificent $25 dollars an 60 minutes. The electric current 82 volunteer docents could reapply to be among the much fewer volunteer "educators" who volition exist chosen on the footing of "an income equity-focused lens." Any that means. How well do you think that will work?

Information technology'south hard to describe the woke nonsense in the pink slip that was delivered to the docents past the Veronica Stein, the museum's Woman'due south Lath Executive Managing director of Learning and Public Engagement." That'southward why I have included her complete recitation beneath. Let me know if this makes sense to you.

Of course, information technology is couched in language that would seem not to be racist at its core; information technology's done in the proper name of inclusion and diversity, for the greater skilful, etc. and etc.

Veronica Stein, the Art Establish director (she'southward been in that location only since March), who fired the long-serving and demonstrably competent volunteer docents.

Yet, boiled downwardly, the justification for the firing is that the docents are white and women of means. In other words, women who take the time to go through the thorough, lengthy and extensive preparation that'south required. And who take the hours to actually behave the tours. Women of higher education and a in thrall of the arts. Not blackness or dark-brown enough are they. Non poor enough. They're women of privilege. All too much "merit" going on at the Art Institute. Fie.

The other side: " Museums Take a Docent Problem Inside the struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk most race."

I urge you to read the Docents' response below, itemizing all the training that is required, all the services they accept performed, all the skilful that they have done.

This isn't the first boggling stupid thing that the Art Institute has done to devalue a volunteer programme and the people they serve. A few years agone, the Institute ended a plan called Art Associates that bundled a day at the museum and lunch for senior centers and other organizations around Chicago. Information technology wasn't costing the Institute much, if anything at all.

Know what this tells me? That the Art Found has lost its commitment to its patrons. The Constitute is existence run for the benefit of the woke bureaucracy that's now in charge. Basics to all the tourists who include Chicago on their itinerary because they want to visit the Art Institute. Nuts to the regular Chicagoans and suburbanites who take out memberships considering they like to visit frequency, sometimes on the spur of the moment. Nuts to the black and brown Chicago school children who benefited mightily from the docent tours.

It'south a sad commentary on what the woke mindset has gifted to us–another reduction in the quality of our lives.

Related: A not bad Chicago Tribune editorial, "Shame on the Fine art Found for summarily canning its volunteer docents"

Docent letter to AIC President James Rondeau

September xiii, 2021

Dear Director Rondeau,

We believe the Department of Learning and Public Engagement and the at present former volunteer docent corps share a mutual goal: to create a meaningful and welcoming experience at the Art Institute of Chicago for students, visitors, donors, and members of all backgrounds.

For more than 60 years, volunteer docents enthusiastically accept devoted countless hours and personal resources to facilitate audience engagement in knowledgeable, relevant, and sensitive ways, every bit summarized below:

• Docent Expertise

  1. Trained by AIC staff, xviii classes of docents accept been part of this storied program. Currently, the corps consists of 82 active docents and 40 school group greeters.
  2. Engaged in xviii months of twice-a-week training to qualify equally a docent, 5 years of continual research and writing to meet the criteria of xiii museum content areas, and monthly and bi-weekly trainings to further educate ourselves with the materials, processes, and cultural context of the AIC's 300,000 works of art.
  1. Researched and wrote, throughout our tenure as docents, peer- and staffreviewed object enquiry papers, object lessons plans, and tour outlines. Docents accept completed more than 1,050 such papers to correspond the AIC collection accurately in their tours.
  2. Led in-gallery tours for K-12 thursday grade students, with upwardly to 25 people, and developed/family tours with 10-50 individuals. Facilitated up to two lx-minute, in-gallery student tours per solar day, ofttimes with a different theme/object for eighteen weeks of the academic year, plus a minimum of 24 one-hour tours with adults/families.
  3. Facilitated virtual tours to students, conducted past x volunteer docents trained and experienced in this type of tour. With more than than l docent-led virtual tours, the spring 2021 rollout of this new AIC initiative demonstrates the growing need to meet the demand for accessible arts education in a elearning environment. The dismissal of these 10 docents diminishes widespread opportunities for teachers and their students.
  4. Spent an average of 15 years of volunteer service defended to training, research, collaboration, and facilitating the highest-quality tours worthy of an AIC program.

• Docent Impact 1. Served more than than 1 million people including students, teachers, families, adults from Chicago, the suburbs, out of state, and international locations.

  1. Created a legacy of arts date beyond demographics. The docent program has been at the core of the AIC's engagement with its many diverse constituencie, including Post State of war, Boomers, Gen Ten, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen A, people who identify as ALAANA, LGBTQIA+, artists, writers, and marvel-seekers. Docents likewise have been at the forefront of the AIC'due south outreach to persons who currently run arts organizations and who create public policy, as well as trades persons, business organisation leaders, innovators, educators, start responders, and others. The docent program has continued with every thread of today's order to encourage a deeper understanding of the power of art.
  1. Designed and facilitated thousands of tours across the AIC's collection.
  2. Customized, as the point of contact for hundreds of teachers every year, tours specific to the needs of teachers and their students, ofttimes on the spot. These tours included AP subject tours, Spanish, English language-every bit-asecond-language tours, along with Dutch, Japanese, and American Studies tours, volume-based tours, classroom-themed programming, and tours based on teacher curricula.
  3. Helped design, pilot, and train swain docents and facilitated current tour frameworks specific to issues facing the public today. The subject matters of these bout frameworks, nevertheless in beingness today, are as follows:

a. Fine art + Activism

b. Art Across Cultures

c. Art + Science

d. Art + Admission tours

  1. Adult Docent ArtBox, a repository of shared scholarship. Proposed in 2005 by docent Martine Gary, this website was developed by the docents, who currently ain and manage information technology. The website includes more than 1,263 entries covering fine art historical/exhibition-specific scholarship, training notes and videos, object-specific inquiry, and lesson plans written by docents and reviewed by museum staff. Docent ArtBox is the first of its kind amid docent programs across the country.
  2. Created innovative, endowed memorial and giving programs. Docents have endowed the following programs that arose from their passion for the time to come of new scholarship and accessibility to arts instruction:

a. Bernice Nordenberg Memorial Lecture (2003) and Carole A. Given Winston Memorial Lecture (2015). Two distinct, annual lectures that provide contemporary discourse near arts and arts teaching to the docent/greeter corps.

b. Ruthie's Bus Fund (2014). Endowed by Ruth Powell (original docent class of 1961) after 53 years of arts education service, this fund has fabricated information technology possible for an estimated three,000 students to engage with fine art at the museum. Affectionately known as "Ruthie," Ruth Powell proposed the fund after she saw the cancellation of student tours due to transportation costs. The bus fund is generously supported past the docent/greeter corps.

c. 2003 National Docent Symposium Endowment. Proceeds from the Symposium, organized by fifteen Chicago docents and attended by more than 550 docents from the U.s.a., Canada, and State of israel, take been endowed to the museum. Every year, interest from the endowment is donated to an AIC department on a rotating, alphabetical basis.

  1. Established the Docent/Greeter Variety and Inclusion Committee in 2014. Docents formed this important committee prior to the museum's training dedicated to variety and inclusion. The commission's mission is to build awareness of implicit biases and to provide learning opportunities to foster variety, equity, inclusion and accessibility in tours and ourselves. We sponsor lectures, workshops, safe-space conversations, readings, and self-reflection opportunities for docents and greeters to increase cocky-sensation toward racial, income, gender equality, and cultural diversity.
  2. Continued to strop docent education and grooming skills during the challenge of COVID-19. Amongst the pandemic and AIC shutdown, the current corps of docents and greeters almost led and participated in training, study groups, and workshops that emphasized how to programme tours featuring fine art across cultures, illustrating art and activism, and catering to students with special access needs.

Despite our training, experience, and passion for working with both students and adults, on Friday, September 3, 2021, Veronica Stein announced the end of our 60year-old docent program. Ms. Stein said that the 82 volunteer docents would be replaced by half-dozen office-time employees, and that in 2023, "unpaid volunteer educators will be reintroduced." She also stated that the rebuilt volunteer educator program will exist based on "an income disinterestedness-focused lens."

We believe we were dismissed (i) because the museum's perspective is that the electric current docent corps' demographics practice non meet the need of the strategic plan (two) the museum concluded that reengineering the docent plan was a step towards achieving the museum's important goal of creating a civilisation of diversity and inclusion. Nosotros do not believe that bringing the threescore-year-old docent program to such an abrupt end was necessary, as we see other paths forward. Nosotros offering some alternative suggestions and ideas below.

We applaud the AIC's recognition that it needs to meliorate embrace diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. We concord that the museum, from top to bottom must better reflect the Chicago area customs that information technology serves. Nosotros also believe that our noesis, enthusiasm, and commitment can contribute to achieving our common goal — the museum'due south and ours — of making the museum a more welcome place for all. As members of the museum community, we program to keep to be role models for volunteer museum educators everywhere.

Dismissing current volunteer educators will mostly affect the students and adults who expect to participate in tours by highly trained, artistic, and caring docents with a wealth of feel. The desperate reduction in docent educators appear by Veronica Stein will significantly reduce capacity for pupil and adult in-gallery and virtual tours.

To that end, the Docent Council respectfully asks the Fine art Institute of Chicago for a meeting to hash out the following proposals:

• Implement a hybrid educator model (paid/unpaid) for the adjacent three years, during which volunteer educators/docents would work alongside new part-time, paid educators to increase student accessibility to arts didactics. Charge the experienced docents with the task of beingness mentors and valuable resources for futurity educators.

• Collaborate with multiple AIC volunteer docents to actively craft, pilot, recruit, railroad train AIC's future educator corps.

• Publicly recognize, through the AIC's decision-makers, the breadth of academic rigor, commitment, dedication, and personal resources that docents contributed to AIC without compensation for lx years.

  1. Honor the legacy of arts education facilitated by docents past displaying a memorial plaque list every AIC docent who served during the
  2. past threescore years, stating their years of service. The plaque should be placed prominently in the Ryan Didactics Center.
  1. A alphabetic character to all AIC museum stakeholders and customs members, officially announcing:

a. The museum's decision to stop the current docent program.

b. The museum's recognition of the docent program's pure and forward-looking mission of giving Chicago youth the gift of fine art and education. The museum's docent organization was created, led, and perpetuated past volunteers, whose passion for art fueled this program for more than half a century – it deserves to be recognized.

c. The museum'southward acknowledgement that a volunteer try of this magnitude and longevity will never exist replicated, merely that it tin can and will serve as a strong foundation for a future iteration of museum education.

• Opportunity to publish on the AIC website and member magazine a thank you annotation from the docent corps to the constituency we served.

• Complimentary individual lifetime memberships.

It is our hope that these comments exist taken as constructive, then that accessibility to art, and arts teaching among all museum volunteers, staff, donors, AIC members, students, and guests be equitable and inclusive.

Nosotros request an in-person coming together with you lot to explain fully our perspective regarding the end of the current docent plan, and regarding our commitment to the healthy development of AIC'southward arts teaching. Docent Council President, Gigi Vaffis (gvaffis@aol.com) and Vice President Patricia Grand. Fuentes (p.m.fuentes@comcast.internet) will contact your function this week to gear up a meeting at the Fine art Constitute.

On behalf of all past and present docents who have walked the halls of the volunteer educator program, we cheers for taking the time to reflect on our response.

Respectfully,

Art Establish of Chicago 2021-2022 Docent Council

Gigi Vaffis, President Patricia Thousand. Fuentes, Vice President Helen Vick, Secretary James Sturm, Treasurer Catherine Thomson, Monday Rep Lisa Seifried, Monday Rep Dietrich Klevorn, Tuesday Rep Chris Burke, Tuesday Rep Kathy Sargent, Wednesday Rep Sarah Davy, Thursday Rep Kate Flores, Thursday Rep Jim Boehner, Friday Rep Joy Daskal, Co-Chair, Diversity and Inclusion Committee

Veronica Stein'due south pinkish slip to docents:.

September iii, 2021

Dear volunteer educators,

Thank yous for your ongoing back up of the Art Constitute. I continue to be incredibly grateful for your dedication to our customs and for your meaningful work.

I write to you today with an update on our volunteer educator programme and our overall arroyo to enhancing our visitors' experience of the museum through sustained, meaningful date with the collection. Driven by our mission to share our singular collections with our city and the world, the Fine art Institute is a place of gathering; we foster the exchange of ideas and inspire an expansive, inclusive agreement of man creativity. Without question, much of this exchange and inspiration happens straight in our galleries––on school tours, during family visits, and recently, through virtual programs.

As a leader in our field, we proceed to evolve our systems to better run into the needs of our visitors, supporters, and staff. Over the final year, we have had the opportunity to evaluate our volunteer educator program. As a civic institution, we acknowledge our responsibility to rebuild the volunteer educator program in a way that allows community members of all income levels to participate, responds to issues of class and income equity, and does not require fiscal flexibility to participate. Rather than refresh our current program, systems, and processes, nosotros feel that at present is the time to rebuild our plan from the ground up. This means the plan'southward current iteration will come to an end.

The museum'south docent program was first established in 1961 with the support of the Adult female's Board and the Junior League of Chicago to revitalize and expand programming for children. Since that time, the program has benefited from the active engagement and enthusiasm of devoted volunteers, reaching countless students and visitors. Every bit nosotros honor the legacy of these contributions and limited gratitude to the numerous volunteers who have brought our galleries to life for so many audiences, we acknowledge this moment every bit an opportunity to grow into a new phase of this work.

We have developed a 3-twelvemonth plan during which nosotros will design, develop, and implement a new, sustainable program that is more than closely aligned with our redefined mission, values, and identity. The museum aims to build a responsive, sustainable, and inclusive program that integrates the goals outlined in our strategic program: to laurels and embrace our civic office past investing in Chicago-area learners, educators, and creatives and to reinvigorate in-gallery learning programs to promote accessibility, equitable teaching approaches, and greater inclusion of visitors' cultures. We aspire to cultivate lifelong visitors, prioritize the evolving needs of our Chicagoland communities, and serve as a model for peer institutions.

Cardinal to this new program volition be the development of a pool of part-fourth dimension, paid museum educators. By scaling back our program to a limited number of paid educators, the Learning and Public Engagement section will be meliorate positioned to train, back up, and manage this staff, facilitate program evaluation, and perform quality assurance. We will somewhen grow this initially small pool of paid educators to fit the needs of the institution. Chiefly, all current volunteer educators are invited to apply for the paid museum educator positions.

The program will accept a phased approach. From now until Dec 2021, we volition transition to a ratio of fourscore% in-gallery tours and programming to 20% virtual tours and programming. Overall educational programming will continue at a reduced scale. Staff volition design models for educator recruitment, training, and assessment, identifying and dismantling barriers that have historically limited participation.

Another key element volition be a five-member advisory board composed of volunteer educators and leaders in the museum education field to help inform our path forward. While this grouping volition function in a consultative rather than decision-making capacity, we believe that it is critical to honor our volunteer educators' experience and insight equally we embark on our programmatic blueprint process.

In 2022, we volition increment our capacity and reinstitute the Ryan Learning Heart volunteer programme––both for greeter roles and for fine art-making events. Then, in 2023, unpaid volunteer educators will be re-introduced via a redesigned model that includes an updated recruitment, application, training, and assessment protocols.

In recognition of your dedicated work and passionate back up of the museum and our visitors, we are providing you and all our volunteer educators costless memberships through 2023. We will likewise offer exclusive access to two annual lectures presented at the museum. Nosotros are eager to support our community through meaningful and culturally responsive arts learning experiences, and nosotros thank you for your continued collaboration and support. Nosotros very much hope that you will stay connected with us as we build on this remarkable history.

With sincere appreciation,

Veronica Stein Adult female's Lath Executive Director of Learning and Public Engagement

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