Museums Buy Temporary Shows, Not Permanent Change

Three Los Angeles museums — the Getty, LACMA. The Hammer — are mounting exhibitions this year celebrating three lesbian artists, Monica Majoli, Millie Wilson, and Susan Silton, decades after their work circulated through underground galleries while major institutions ignored them.

This should feel like correction, like reckoning, like visibility at last. But this pattern keeps replaying. It already happened almost exactly once before.

In 1992, the LA County Museum of Art opened a major retrospective of Betye Saar, an LA-based Black artist working rigorously for three decades while the institution treated her as peripheral. Two years later, the Getty mounted a show of Black photographers from the 1950s and 60s, followed by LACMA's programming on overlooked Chicano muralists of the postwar period.

Each show was framed as correction and generated serious attention, catalog essays, scholarly legitimation. But mounting a three-month exhibition requires temporary curatorial labor and borrowed wall space. Changing what a museum actually owns, what it displays year-round. Who gets to decide those things requires taking purchasing budget from somewhere else. Those are not the same gesture.

One is visible and generous and temporary. The other is costly and structural and permanent. By 2005, a decade after those Black artist retrospectives, the permanent collection representation had barely moved. Watch whether these three artists' works actually get acquired into the permanent collections in the years after the exhibitions close. You'll know if this is structural change or surface-level correction by watching what gets bought, not what gets hung temporarily.

That principle works in your own world too. When someone or something promises change, track the budget line, not the announcement.