"How can we help?"
Whilst not explicitly having to do with the art world, it is important to mention how museums have helped their communities during the pandemic. At the beginning of the lockdown, New York and California were facing a rapidly growing number of coronavirus cases. Cases were increasing so rapidly that their hospitals were soon facing the issue of shortages in medical equipment such as ventilators for patients and face masks and nitrile gloves for health care staff.
Help came from the unlikely source of art museums (and schools). Art spaces around New York City began packing up crates of gloves typically used to protect artworks from oil and dust from the hands of those touching artworks, and sending off coveted N95 respirators that protect front-line health care workers from the virus. Typically, these everyday objects are used while installing and conserving artworks. However, with the brief pause in the arts due to the virus, they became lifesavers for doctors and other healthcare professionals across the state.
Art handlers and preparators at numerous museums were boxing up their supplies and shipping them off to area hospitals. People first noticed such efforts when the Whitney Museum’s senior deputy director and chief curator, Scott Rothkopf, Instagrammed a photo showing outbound boxes holding protective equipment. Bigger institutions soon followed. The Museum of Modern Art donated almost 3,000 nitrile gloves to Mount Sinai, New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, and other area hospitals, and sent three hundred N95 masks to NYU Langone, according to a press representative. MoMA PS1, its sister institution in Queens, donated 50 boxes of gloves to New York Presbyterian and Montefiore Medical Center.
In California, Conservation and installation staff at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art rounded up boxes of N95 respirators and gloves as well as Tyvek suits and shoe covers, according to a representative. The suits typically are used to keep museum workers’ clothes clean. The shoe covers, in everyday museum life, protect floors from dusty footprints, for example; in hospitals, they serve a much more urgent purpose.
San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum convened the museum’s emergency response team, which includes staff from every department, and found a few hundred N95 masks that it then donated to the city.
However, the museums’ help goes beyond that. Some of the museum city workers were being paid on furlough, and those who were unable to perform their duties from home, served as disaster service workers where they managed sites concerned with non-medical issues and coordinated services at city-run quarantine housing.
Not only did museums respond to the pandemic on a personal, institutional level, but they also responded by asking, “how can we help?” and supplying them with what they needed most.
Boucher, Brian. “As New York and California Hospitals Face Critical Equipment Shortages, Museums and Schools Step Into the Breach.” ARTnews.com, ARTnews.com, 25 Mar. 2020, www.artnews.com/art-news/news/coronavirus-new-york-los-angeles-museums-masks-gloves-1202682055/.