Home > Essays > Impact of the pandemic on art gallery diversity
By Alonso del Arte, February 1, 2021
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has canceled many cultural events and postponed others. That of course included art exhibitions. In the early days of the pandemic, art galleries simply closed. Some offered "virtual exhibitions."
Later on, some galleries opened, but required guests to wear masks and limited how many guests could be in the gallery at a time. At least one gallery checked guests' body temperatures before allowing them in the gallery. Naturally, attendance to opening receptions was quite low, perhaps even lower than what health department guidelines would have allowed.
One silver lining to this crisis seems to be that art galleries are exhibiting black and Latino artists they would not have even considered prior to the pandemic. And not because they somehow coincidentally became better at the beginning of the pandemic, but because they were very good all along.
With many white artists deciding they can wait to until after the pandemic to exhibit again, gallery owners and directors are more willing to think outside the box, and consider less obvious artists for solo and group exhibits.
I'm talking about artists who were rejected with cowardly silence, as if they weren't even worthy of a properly written rejection letter (the proper way to reject a proposal is briefly and clearly—there should be no doubt that the proposal was received, considered and rejected). Now, the flood of proposals has presumably slowed down to a trickle, and artists with a shorter C.V. can get greater consideration that they would have gotten before the pandemic.
Hopefully now that President Joe Biden is bringing commonsense, decency, honesty and sanity back to the White House, along with a carefully thought-out plan to end the pandemic, we will be able to come out of lockdown in just a few months.
But a return to normal doesn't necessarily have to mean a return to business as usual. The opportunities that have been extended to black and Latino artists during this pandemic need to remain open once everyone has been vaccinated against the coronavirus and art galleries and other venues are no longer required to limit event attendance.
And just as before, that will require awareness and a proactive effort, though for different reasons. The end of the lockdown will very likely mean that a lot of white artists will flood art galleries with exhibition proposals. Attempts to diversify the roster of exhibiting artists at art galleries could fall through the cracks, forgotten as gallery owners hope that big name white artists will bring people back to the galleries.
I ask gallery owners and directors to keep diversity foremost in their minds as they make plans to resume a more normal schedule in their galleries. One way would be to invite artists who exhibited during the pandemic to exhibit again once all health department restrictions have been lifted.
If they do this, I think they will be pleasantly surprised by the results, as their patrons discover some really good art they would have never otherwise seen merely because of the artist's race.
Lip service to diversity was part of the old normal. Hopefully in the new normal it will be replaced by impactful efforts to actually increase diversity.