Labor on Display: The Exhibition of U.S. Art Objects and the Museum Labor Unionization Movement

While museums are public-facing institutions, they are also workplaces. Recently, there has been a renewed push toward labor unionization in the United States from workers both outside and inside museums. In consideration of the current bourgeois-influenced interpretation of art objects, the museum’s history of barring people of lower economic classes from its collections, and the current museum workplace environment, a common thread of labor emerges. This paper investigates the relationship between museum labor in the United States and the Marxist art historical interpretation of labor in art objects.