Sacrifice and Scarcity: The Realities of Museum Work
Illustration by Mike Thompson
It’s been proven by numerous anecdotal and demographic surveys like FSJ’s that the museum field is not accessible to all. Innumerable financial, social, racial, and cultural barriers have acted as gatekeepers to a profession historically held by wealthy white social elites-turned-academics. In the even more niche field of fashion studies, pathways to a successful and sustainable museum career are rare, unique, and almost never linear or reproducible.
At the age of 26, I have worked for about seven years in fashion and textile collections across the United States in several different capacities. I’ve had what most would call a linear or logical pathway into a successful early career as a fashion conservator. Though it is not reflective of most museum professionals working in fashion studies, or even of other fashion conservators specifically, several people have pointed to my path as an example of how one can successfully enter the field. However, my experience also highlights the numerous endemic financial barriers and pitfalls that plague young professionals in this process.
It is important for me to first acknowledge the privilege that I do have which has aided me professionally. I am a young, white, cis-gendered woman who physically conforms to dominant feminine beauty ideals. I did, however, come from a far less privileged socioeconomic background, a profile that has become more common now that the museum field outwardly appears to be democratized (though I would argue that this is largely false advertising).
I grew up in an area of mid-Western Wisconsin where the median household income was under $50,000, in a family that by those standards was middle class. I was incredibly fortunate, as most are not, to have been made aware of textile and fashion conservation as a career possibility by the time I started college. My decision to attend the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to complete my undergraduate degree was, however, primarily a financial one. I didn’t have money to pay for college; what college savings my parents had put aside for me were lost in the 2008-2009 recession. With very limited resources, I wanted to choose a state school that had a good reputation for students finding jobs in the museum field but also a low tuition cost. Even so, the financial reality of an inexpensive undergraduate education was still a $72,000 burden, only half of which was covered by federal student loans with high interest rates. And that dollar amount didn’t even take into account that I needed a master’s degree to work in any museum position.
When I decided that I was going to pursue fashion and textile conservation as a career, which I knew would require me to leave the Midwest for graduate school, my parents were very frank about their concerns. Both grew up in large, poor working-class families. Their parents’ highest level of education was high school, they themselves each have associates degrees, and I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree. Real social and economic mobility in much of the Midwest is simply a pipe dream. It largely happens over several generations and it has an evident ceiling preventing people from moving to other areas with higher costs of living. To my parents, my career choice was entirely impractical. They were honest with me that my chosen path was not going to be easy, and that I would have to make a lot of sacrifices to accomplish my goals.
This feedback about the need to make financial sacrifices in exchange for access to and success in the field has consistently come from established and emerging professionals throughout my career. That constant reinforcement informed many of the decisions I made in terms of what I was willing to live with in order to work in a career I love. For example, knowing that I would eventually need to pay for graduate school, I chose to take the maximum number of credits each semester in order to graduate in four years. In addition, I was encouraged to seek out experience working in fashion and textile collections to gain the connections needed to eventually acquire an entry-level paid position. This resulted in an overwhelming and exhausting schedule: being a full-time student taking 18 credits a semester, completing unpaid internships in museum collections and conservation, and working part-time to financially support myself.
I would never have been able to succeed in this field if I did not have a marketable skill I could use to make money to support myself. My mom taught me how to sew at a young age, so I was able to become a seamstress working in bridal alterations at the age of nineteen, making $13.60 an hour. This was not much to live off of, but minimum wage in Wisconsin, which I had previously been making at a fabric store, was in comparison only $7.25.
“I was continually told by professionals working in the field that competition for paid positions was very high because the field was overpopulated and that, unfortunately, unpaid experience was necessary to get a paid position. As a young professional who was tired of being told I was too poor to participate, consistently being told this just reinforced the belief that my sacrifices were necessary and justified.”
The only graduate program I considered was the Fashion and Textile Studies program at FIT because it is a state school with relatively low tuition and it does not require the obscene amount of unpaid pre-program treatment experience that conservation programs like Winterthur do. But again, this inexpensive education was going to add an additional $30,000 of student debt onto my plate, and that didn’t even take into account the enormously high cost of living in New York City.
While the actual price of the education and experience required for success in the field was difficult enough to physically manage on a day-to-day basis, the hardest aspect of these financial hurdles was the psychological trauma of living in a state of scarcity for so many consecutive years, a state that I was consistently told to believe was necessary to be successful. For years, I barely had enough money to pay for basic necessities like food and stable housing. At the same time, I was continually told by professionals working in the field that competition for paid positions was very high because the field was overpopulated and that, unfortunately, unpaid experience was necessary to get a paid position. As a young professional who was tired of being told I was too poor to participate, consistently being told this just reinforced the belief that my sacrifices were necessary and justified.
Because of this, graduate school was both the best and the worst experience of my life. The course load was heavy, and I was only making $20 an hour in bridal alterations which required me to work a substantial, and largely unmanageable, number of hours to financially survive. However, FIT’s program connected me to an enormous amount of wonderful and inspiring opportunities to work in different New York City collections and conservation labs. Between my first and second year of school I completed two conservation internships at the Cooper Hewitt and the Museum at FIT. While admittedly each of these internships did eventually become paid positions, both were unpaid at the time. Choosing to do them both, which was something I felt that I needed to do to gain access to paid positions, required me to maintain an even more overwhelming schedule and unhealthy lifestyle. I was living off of pizza and dollar store food. I was working and going to class 7 days a week for about 5 months straight while completing these internships. I was also in a very unstable living situation because that was all I could afford.
Halfway through graduate school I was hired as an Intermittent Conservator in Textiles at the Cooper Hewitt at $27.40 an hour, a rate determined by the federal government’s General Schedule Payscale as the Cooper Hewitt is a Smithsonian Institution. This job quite literally changed my life, as the path I was previously on was not in any way sustainable. Though it was still necessary for me to continue working in alterations, the increased pay allowed me to work fewer total hours while completing school and to better afford basic necessities.
“In my first year out of school, it became clear to me that emerging professionals are the most marketable in the field expressly because institutions can offer them very little in pay and benefits.”
It is, however, important to note that being offered this paid position was also positive reinforcement of the belief that the sacrifices I made were worth it in the long run. It was only in my last year of graduate school that I began to receive feedback and reinforcement that those sacrifices were unrealistic and not in my overall best interest, that I should ask for more and give up less. I think this feedback only came at that time because I had broken into the field and that once I was in a position of just slightly more power, my expectations and expectations of me could begin to change.
However, after completing graduate school, I realized that I wasn’t making enough to support myself, especially once my loans went into repayment. My work at the Cooper Hewitt was exhibition-driven and not consistent. By that time, I had already made positive connections with both the Costume Collection at the Museum of the City of New York and the conservation lab at the Museum at FIT. Each of those relationships led to additional part-time positions, which was again more positive reinforcement.
In my first year out of school, however, it became clear to me that emerging professionals are the most marketable in the field expressly because institutions can offer them very little in pay and benefits. It’s the culture of scarcity in job opportunities (constantly reinforced to young professionals by established professionals who went through the same thing) that allows them to get away with this. In my first year out of graduate school I was making anywhere between $20 and $27.40 an hour using the same knowledge and expertise and doing the same work.
Suddenly, I found myself balancing contract and part-time work with three museums to financially make ends meet, all while receiving no benefits. While I am incredibly grateful and consider myself very fortunate to be able to do the work that I love every day, since that isn’t the case for most, I am once again in an unsustainable position. While I was able to begin to negotiate better compensation after about a year of work, what leveraging power I did gain largely disappeared when the coronavirus pandemic dramatically cut off all museum cashflows. I was, in the end, lucky to be a contract and part-time worker when the pandemic hit because no museum was paying me benefits, so it didn’t cost them anything to keep me and I avoided being laid off.
In addition, prior to the pandemic, I was one of the only professionals working in the field at my age, with about a ten-year age gap between myself and my next-youngest colleague. While this is in some part a result of the age at which I started seeking experience in the field, I’ve largely attributed this to the economic effects of the 2008-2009 recession, which saw a severe drop-off in available paid positions, limiting possible career advancement for those who graduated from programs over the last ten years. The economic fallout from the pandemic is likely going to cause much the same effect, and I’m fearful that it will only increase our feelings of scarcity, which will reinforce our willingness to make greater financial sacrifices.
It isn’t lost on me that coming from less in terms of my socioeconomic background has made me less likely to ask for more in terms of fair compensation. Those who have more expect more. But I do believe that we as a broad field have the power to reframe our messaging on the realities of scarcity in the field. Instead of reinforcing the belief that unpaid work is necessary, we should be using our power to create more paid experiences and rewarding the young professionals who are unable to take unpaid work, especially in a period of intense scarcity.
