There’s a short animation titled We Love Museums… Do Museums Love Us Back? that many museum educators share. pinkyshow.org+1
In it, the museum is depicted as a cold container—objects frozen in time, visitors guided through on a predetermined path. The visitor says, We love museums… do museums love us back? The question hangs.
I’ve asked it myself many times. Not rhetorically. Inside the institution, where the rhetoric of welcoming and community is loud, but the lived experience of many colleagues is quieter, fragile. We say we love museums because we believe in their promise. The promise of art to open, to shift, to connect. We stay because we hope the institution will live up to that promise.
But too often, the institution doesn’t love back.
It shows up as:
- Programs built for visibility but shallow in relationship.
- Institutions that ask for volunteers to give their passion, but don’t invest in long-term support.
- Metrics celebrated on the annual report while the educators who built the work go unseen.
- Communities invited into exhibitions, then left without follow-up.
And I see the toll. My closest colleagues across cities and states are asking: Why are we still here? They pause mid-meeting, voice soft, not complaining just registering the dissonance between what we care about and how our institutions reward what we do.
They’re the ones who still design gallery sessions after long days of institutional demands. The ones who raise their hand when another school partnership wants to start. They’re the ones who care deeply about the communities their museums claim to serve even when the museum itself treats those communities like statistics.
Those educators become the real embodiment of care. They stay when nothing else seems logical. They build trust when it can’t be measured. They widen the door when the institution forgets how to open it. This work isn’t about saving the museum so much as about sustaining its better self. We don’t stay because the institution always loves us back. We stay because we believe someone should, and because making space for care might transform the institution one small gesture at a time.
And yes we make boundaries. Because giving care without reciprocity is not generosity, it’s burnout. We protect our creativity, our time, our value. We remind one another that the institution doesn’t define our worth. Our relationships do.
Artemis waits at the gate of the path, turns back, and looks at me: ready to walk, ready to pause, ready to retreat if needed. That look says what I want to say: We’ll keep moving, but we’ll also keep choosing where we stand.
Because if the museum doesn’t love us back, someone must. And sometimes it has to be us.
