The New Orleans Museum of Art (Noma) is facing significant backlash over the appointment of a white woman as Curator of African Art. After making the announcement on June 29, the museum experienced a deluge of dissent on social media; to date, there are over 850 comments on the museum instagram post announcing the hiring.
“Until you all remedy this situation with a REAL apology and a new black hire, I can no longer support NOMA,” wrote Megan Braden-Perry (@megandoesnola), a local journalist. Alexis Jackson (@ajaxsn33) shared, “I live here and work in the arts internationally and could provide a list of several dozen candidates for BIPOC museum and research with degrees and projects exploring a wide range of African art specialties. I’m sure Mrs. Maples is an absolute star and a champion in her field. But ignoring those who better connect with the community this museum calls home is embarrassing and shameful for you.
In a statement released in response to the outcry, a spokesperson for the museum wrote, “We are listening carefully to feedback from New Orleans residents and the public on the appointment of the new curator at the Museum of African Art. We recognize the need for NOMA staff and the museum field in general to represent a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. We take this priority very seriously for positions across the institution… We are committed to using this time to learn and act. In the immediate term, we will hold a town hall to openly discuss race and equity in museums. We recognize that listening is only a small part of living up to our commitment to be an inclusive and anti-racist institution.
In response, No White Saviors (@nowhitesaviors), a Ugandan-based feminist non-profit organization with over 840,000 followers, wrote: “Public meetings will not get the results you are asking for.
On June 30, in an email to New Orleans Times-Picayunethe weekly of Gambit, a spokesperson for the museum highlighted Maples’ professional accomplishments. “Maples’ academic experience combined with her sustained relationships with organizations and artists in Africa, her work in curating innovative exhibitions, and her leadership in the fight against decoloniality and restitution led us to select her for this post,” the spokesperson said.
Maples was previously Curator of World African Arts at the North Carolina Museum of Art and was Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her doctorate in visual studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has curated a series of exhibitions and written extensively on historical and contemporary African art, decolonization, the ethics of collecting, and issues surrounding the restitution of looted art objects. For her first major project at Noma, she is working on a 2025 exhibition focusing on West African masquerade culture in collaboration with the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal.
Noma’s decision to hire Maples has further amplified tension between the institution and New Orleans’ black community, first publicly exposed during the height of racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. The Instagram account @dismantlenoma shared a litany of racist incidents and microaggressions reported anonymously by former staff and visitors to the institution, inspiring the museum to publish a statement promising substantive change. “We can and will do better,” the statement said. “When we are able to rehire, we are 100% committed to expanding the diversity of our workforce, in every department, at every level.”
The current backlash against Noma’s hiring decision echoes a similar scandal in 2018, when the Brooklyn Museum announced the appointment of Kristen Windmuller-Luna, a white woman, as a consulting curator of African art. Public outcry came quickly, forcing the Brooklyn Museum to defend his controversial tenancy.
Museum director Anne Pasternak wrote in a statement released by art news“In order to ensure the highest level of academic excellence in the way we preserve and present our collections of historic African art, we knew the job required a specialist with a PhD in this field.” Windmuller-Luna’s nomination was also championed by Chika Okeke-Agulu, a professor of African art at Princeton University, who wrote in a blog post“I fully support his hiring, and while we need to put pressure on museums and schools of art history to do more to diversify their ranks of curators, managers and professors, this does not makes absolutely no sense to say that white people should not be hired to organize or teach African art.
Windmuller-Luna now heads the African Art Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Brooklyn Museum hired Ernestine White-Mifetua black South African art historian, for the role of Curator of African Art in 2022.
Amid the furor that followed Windmulla-Luna’s hiring in Brooklyn, Steven Nelson, director of UCLA’s Center for African Studies, offered a more holistic look at a episode 2018 from NPR, now defunct code switch podcast, which discussed racial politics in popular culture. He felt that the museum’s criticism was the result of a broader misconception “that scholars and curators of African art are largely people of color…Yet the field of the history of African art in the United States is largely white and female. I am one of a small handful of African Americans who specialize in African art history. Nelson pointed to larger systemic factors impacting the pool of talent eligible for leadership roles within museums.
