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Andy Warhol Museum Receives Multi-Year Grant To Develop Diversity Strategies

Keith Srakocic
/
AP
Students play with mylar balloons at an exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side.

The Andy Warhol museum is the recipient of a new multi-year grant to encourage more diversity in art institutions.

The Warhol is among 20 organizations nationwide to receive funding from the Ford Foundation and Walton Family Foundation. The North Side museum will get $265,000 over three years to support education outreach, professional development and mentoring, and paid internships and fellowships.

“Often museums are reliant on unpaid labor, and you have to have a certain kind of means to participate in those kind of opportunities,” said Danielle Linzer, the museum’s director of learning and public engagement.

Linzer said the Warhol has a longstanding practice of hiring staff from participants in community-based education programs to increase diversity, and are looking to formalize those types of pathways and give them more support.

“The goal is really to create opportunities for young people from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the museum and cultural field, to enter the field, to receive mentoring, training, so they can advance into both long term engagement in the arts, and hopefully careers in the museum field,” said Linzer.

Studies have shown that only 16 percent of art museum leadership consists of people of color.