A knowledgeable docent, or guide, will provide information and behind-the-scenes facts about exhibits that are not on the labels accompanying the piece. School groups are always led by a docent, but adults can elect to join a tour as well. Many docents care about their role and do research on how best convey the mission of the museum to the visitor; the method of art museum tours has, therefore, changed. Docents used to stand next to an artwork and lecture about it, and now they focus more on conversation styles, like question and answer, to better engage with visitors, especially children, and meet them on their level. Docents are primarily unpaid, and, because of this, they are often composed of demographics able to spend considerable amounts of time working for free, mostly retired and wealthy people, specifically wealthy women. It’s therefore an interesting dichotomy: docents “educate the public about the art on [museum] walls—arguably the most important thing a museum can do, but also a job that often falls to unpaid employees. ¹” What has become the least valued job, at least in terms of pay, should be valued the most.

What is a Docent

The word “docent” has a local history as “historians note the title gained traction at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts around 1900.” ² This was a time when the MFA was in flux: it was still in its Copley Square location and would move to the Huntington Ave location in 1907. The museum was primarily displaying plaster casts instead of original artworks, and now it has one of the best collections of original art in the country. Some of the plaster casts from the MFA are still in Boston; they are in the niches above the balcony at Symphony Hall.

Following its start in Boston, the word “docent” spread across the country and became the predominant word for a museum guide. The first docents came from Junior Leagues and other progressively minded social organizations that were made up of wealthy white women. Others were the wives of museum board members, who were also wealthy white women. These women did not need to be paid, and, possibly, might not have appreciated it if someone tried to pay them. There may also have been some misogyny at play. As Rebecca Zorach argues, “the work of women was valued less and art education deemed dispensable. Museums didn’t have the budgets for these roles, so they needed people who could work for free. ³” Whatever the reason, the tradition of docents being volunteer positions started early and remains true today.

Docent Demographics Today

Museum docents in America today are 80% white, 57% over the age of 40, 81% college-educated, and 66% female. Less than 5% of docents in this country are Black. ⁴ We have talked before about how representation matters in museums, and this is true for docents, as well. It is important for visitors, especially children, to see a diverse staff and volunteer corps at museums, because it directly demonstrates that art is accessible to a wide variety of people. Museums are looking at their docents and thinking about ways to change the demographics to better represent their communities and better relate to visitors of color.

Local Racial Incidents Involving Docents

Palace Shaw was a docent at the ICA in Boston in 2017 when she witnessed white docents trying to communicate with Black children about art made by Black people and failing to do so with cultural awareness. At one point, a white docent compared a Black child’s hair to animal fur in an answer to a question about Black Power. ⁵ Can this be addressed with sensitivity training? At the MFA, the docent program has undergone a huge shift with its training in recent years. In years past, the museum would present new docents with Thomas Sully’s The Passage of the Delaware and a historian would discuss the battle of Trenton. In 2018, however, four different people came and provided different perspectives on the painting for new docents. There was still the historian, but now they also “discussed the work in the context of early 19th-century painting. Then [they] talked about it in the context of portraits of presidents and how Washington was seen in 1819. Then an educator who has written a book on slavery came to talk about a figure in the shadows of the painting: William Lee, whom Washington enslaved. Finally, a student of color who’d worked as a docent came to talk about why and how that context matters.⁶ ” The docents who received this training should have been well prepared to talk about the complexities of race in the pieces in the MFA collection. However, in 2019, there was a well-publicized incident where a school group was subjected to racist remarks by both docents and staff at the MFA, and the museum had to apologize.

It can be difficult to agree on how to best approach these issues with children, even among people who have had plenty of training about race. Ginnie Hibbard is a docent at the MFA, and she has been through the more rigorous training of recent years and applauds it. She says, when asked how she handles talking about race in art with young kids, that “I would not bring up race…I would not bring up the differences between people in the paintings, because you’re making the assumption that the kids notice the differences. ⁷” But with older kids, she says that “I’d give them the whole spiel… They’re old enough to understand, and they might experience racism in their own lives.⁸” Porchia Moore, the museum staff member, disagrees with Hibbard. Moore is the co-creator of the Visitors of Color Project and is a consultant who specializes in training museum staff and volunteers about race. She says, “I would argue that the notion and structure of racial equity and historical thinking are concepts that need to be taught from the earliest age possible… in fact, there is no better place to do this than the museum.⁹”

Museums Are Trying to Find Solutions

Given that there have been issues with white volunteers not handling race well despite being trained, and that there are huge representation problems within the docent population, museums are trying to come up with solutions. These solutions usually fit into two categories: disassemble the docent program entirely and start over, or work on recruiting a more diverse group of people within the pre-existing program. The latter category has proven to be more popular, but there are two high-profile examples that have chosen the former.

Dismantling Docent Programs

In 2014, the Smithsonian’s contemporary museum, the Hirschhorn, closed its docent program in favor of recruiting college students who did the work for course credit. 25 docents were dismissed, and there was some outrage about the abrupt way this was done. In fact, the Secretary of the Smithsonian was not even aware of the decision. Generally, however, the incident failed to make national news and the outrage died down. In 2015, the year after this change, the museum reported its largest single donation up to that point and donations went up 50% from 2014, so the museum did not suffer any long-term effects after firing its docents.

Compare that with the recent shutdown of the Art Institute of Chicago’s docent program. Last year in 2021, the museum closed its program and an email was sent out to all 122 docents outlining the future of volunteering at the Institute. Veronica Stein, the Woman’s Board executive director of Learning and Public Engagement, explained in the email that the museum was starting over from scratch. They would be rolling out a new model over the next couple of years, eventually landing on a hybrid of paid docents and volunteers in 2023. These new docents would be actively recruited from demographics that had been previously underrepresented in the docent program, and, by offering pay to many, the docent program would be much more accessible than it previously had been. The newly fired docents responded by sending a letter to the Director of the Institute, James Rondeau, where they outlined the decades of expertise and knowledge they had contributed to the museum; many docents spent their free time researching the museum’s collection to improve their tours. Soon, national news was covering it, there were claims that the Art Institute of Chicago was being racist against white people, and the museum was left stunned by the reaction against them.

There is, of course, much more under the surface in this situation. Firstly, there had not been a new docent at the museum in 12 years. The museum claims this is because the program hadn’t been working, and they were trying to figure out what to do with it. The Docent Council President, Gigi Vaffis, was under the impression that they were looking for improvements to the program, but she didn’t believe they would actually shut down the program. Twelve years without a single new volunteer is a long time. It’s hard to imagine that the docent council was not wondering about their future and actively trying to discuss strategies for the future with the administration to keep this eventuality at bay. Vaffis says that the Docent Council “offered ideas, but for a long time, there wasn’t a capacity (from the museum) to act. ¹⁰ ” Again, it is hard to imagine twelve years of suggesting new strategies, those strategies being rejected time and time again, and then being blindsided by this decision.

The larger conversation of racism and privilege in this decision needs to be addressed too. It was not just fringe and sensational attention-seekers that accused the Institute of racism against white people in this decision. The Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune alluded to it, as well. The conversation was wide-reaching, and Chicago lampposts were decorated with stickers that read, “AIC hates white people.” People asked whether the docents’ civil rights had been violated. As one writer argued, “attempts to hire staff on the basis of race not only does violence to fundamental notions of fairness, it also violates existing civil rights legislation. The firing of the AIC docents was only possible because unpaid staffers are not covered by its provisions. ¹¹” And all of this, every reaction and thought piece, tweet, sticker, and article, has been about how the docents were impacted by this decision, not the museum-goers. Nina Sanchez of Enrich Chicago summed it perfectly when she said, “What strikes me about the way all of the institutions involved responded was the amount of attention given to the impact on docents and nobody else…it gives credence to divisive rhetoric, and at some point, we just need an honest conversation about who we’re really preferencing. ¹²”

Improving Existing Docent Programs

There are several museums that have tried the other tactic. Sacramento’s Crocker Museum has recruited younger, less wealthy, and less white docents for their docent classes from 2019 onward. This has resulted in a more diverse docent program: The number of white docents in the program went down 9% and docents who made more than $150,000 went down 17% between 2017 and 2019. ¹³ The museum has also included more diversity and inclusion training into its docent curriculum. Meanwhile, the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Whitney in New York City have focused on compensating younger people for tours. The Whitney still uses docents for its adult tours but pays younger people to do school group tours. The Mississippi Museum of Art is similar except that it gives college credit to students from local HBCUs to be tour guides.

How to Move Forward

Museum education is at the service of the visitor and the community. What got lost in the conversation about the Art Institute of Chicago, what Nina Sanchez was alluding to, was the perspectives and opinions of the visitors, the community at large, the communities of color, the staff at large, and the staff members of color. The docent is the conduit of museum education and is, therefore, also at the service of the visitor and the community. It is imperative that docents, like all people, be treated fairly. But the mission of the museum must be to provide the best educational experience for everyone who walks through the door. For many museums, that means retaining the docents who have decades of knowledge about the collections while also recruiting more diverse docents so that there is more representation on the museum floor. Training is not enough; trained docents are still being racist to visitors, and they still have differing opinions on whether you can discuss racism with young children, as we discussed above. Docent programs need to add people of color to their ranks to diminish racist incidents and to better answer the questions that children of color have. Most museums that have increased demographics outside of the standard wealthy white woman, including younger people and those who make an average wage, have discovered that payment or a reduction in volunteer hours is necessary. This will become more standard and is important if museums are to stay relevant and be a cornerstone of their communities. Most museums will probably not dismantle their entire docent program, but it will need to be taken on a case-by-case basis and more nuance needs to be added to the conversation. The Chicago incident was blown out of proportion. People need to remember who museums serve: the members of the communities they exist in, every member.

1. Sophie Haigney, “Museums Have a Docent Problem,” Slate, August 18, 2020, https://slate.com/culture/2020/08/museums-train-white-docents-talk-race-art.html.
2. Emma Colton, “Chicago Museum Fires All of Its Mostly White Female, Financially Well-off Docents for Lack of Diversity,” Text. Article, Fox News (Fox News, October 17, 2021), https://www.foxnews.com/us/art-institute-of-chicago-fires-docents-diversity.
3. Rebecca Zorach, “Why the Art Institute of Chicago’s New Docent Program Faces Whitelash,” Hyperallergic, November 9, 2021, http://hyperallergic.com/691425/why-the-art-institute-of-chicagos-new-docent-program-faces-whitelash/.
4. “Museum Docent Demographics and Statistics [2022]: Number Of Museum Docents In The US,” January 29, 2021, https://www.zippia.com/museum-docent-jobs/demographics/.
5.  Haigney, “Museums Have a Docent Problem.”
6.  Haigney, “Museums Have a Docent Problem.”
7.  Haigney, “Museums Have a Docent Problem.”
8.  Haigney, “Museums Have a Docent Problem.”
9.  Haigney, “Museums Have a Docent Problem.”
10. TNS, “Chicago’s Art Institute Fired Its Volunteer Docents and Caused a Furor Heard Nationwide,” Greater Milwaukee Today, accessed March 24, 2022, https://www.gmtoday.com/news/illinois/chicago-s-art-institute-fired-its-volunteer-docents-and-caused-a-furor-heard-nationwide/article_bc816578-56b3-11ec-a98f-5b15c9c07dce.html.
11. “Equity Concerns Lead to a Mass-Firing of Museum Volunteers,” Quillette, November 15, 2021, https://quillette.com/2021/11/15/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-museum-tour-guides/.
12. TNS, “Chicago’s Art Institute Fired Its Volunteer Docents and Caused a Furor Heard Nationwide.”
13.  “Docent Diversity Initiative: Looking at 2020 and Beyond,” Crocker Art Museum, accessed February 28, 2022, https://www.crockerart.org/oculus/docent-diversity-initiative-looking-at-2020-and-beyond.