Lately, the question comes up everywhere I go, whispered in hallways, shared over coffee, written between the lines of resignation emails and conference panels: Why are we still doing this?
It’s not a cynical question. It’s an honest one. The kind that comes from people who have given everything to a field that often doesn’t give much back.
We are tired. Tired of counting attendance instead of attention. Tired of defending the work as “impactful” in the language of metrics that flatten meaning. Tired of watching programs built on trust and time reduced to bullet points on a board report.
Many of the best educators I know, colleagues, mentors, friends across the country, have left. Not because they stopped caring, but because they couldn’t keep caring inside systems that treated care as inefficiency.
I understand that. There have been moments when I’ve asked myself the same question:
What am I still doing here, in an institution that measures value in numbers but asks for heart?
The truth is complicated. Some days, I stay because of inertia, because leaving would mean untangling a life built inside these walls. Other days, I stay because the work itself still feels sacred, even when the institution doesn’t. Because the galleries still hum when a group of teachers start to really see. Because a student in Hang asks a question that stops me cold. Because a colleague catches my eye mid-program, and we share that unspoken understanding — yes, this is it.
That’s what keeps me here: those brief, luminous moments when the work cuts through the noise and reminds me that art, and learning, still matter.
The museum may not always believe it, but I do. And I believe in the people who do this work beside me. The ones who show up anyway, who still hold the room with care, who still make space for curiosity in an environment that rewards certainty.
We stay for each other. We stay because we’ve built something the institution can’t quantify: trust, community, and a way of being with art that refuses to become a product.
But staying comes with a cost. It requires boundaries, humor, deep friendship, and the kind of resilience that isn’t about toughness but tenderness and the ability to keep feeling even when feeling hurts.
Some days, that feels like rebellion. Choosing empathy in a culture of performance.
Choosing stillness in a system addicted to speed. Choosing people over outcomes.
We stay because this practice. This slow, human work matters beyond any one museum.
It’s a way of seeing the world. It’s a conviction that attention changes things.
When I walk with Artemis in the evenings, I think about my colleagues in other cities, walking their own neighborhoods, still turning over the same questions:
How long can we keep doing this?
Does it still matter?
Are we still making a difference?
And I want to tell them: yes. Even if the institution forgets, the work remembers. Every shared silence, every question that opens rather than closes, every student who walks away seeing differently- that’s the real record. That’s what endures.
The museum may never be the place we imagined it could be. But the practice, the way we teach, look, and care, is larger than the institution that houses it.
That’s why I stay. Not because it’s easy, but because leaving would mean abandoning a language I still believe in. A way of being with art and people that feels, even now, like care.
The light shifts, the numbers rise and fall, the leadership changes. But the work, the true work, remains. And so do we.
