Remuseum

Remuseum drives innovation in U.S. art museums by supporting leaders through research, convenings, and catalytic initiatives. Focusing on relevance, governance, and financial sustainability, Remuseum empowers directors, educators, curators, and trustees to create new models that help museums better serve and fulfill their public missions. Remuseum has directly and deeply engaged directors of nearly 40 leading U.S. museums in their work.

The Problem
Museums serve as repositories of history and custodians of culture, providing invaluable spaces for unique learning opportunities. However, today’s American art museums perpetuate legacy systems built around object acquisition, accumulation, and preservation over public engagement. Rewarded by continued dramatic growth in collection size, museums work toward that goal, allocating budgets and resources aligned to obtaining and preserving objects. As a result, museums have shifted away from their public-serving missions.

Museums have unclear data and incentives, antiquated policies of governance, and misaligned budgets for their resources. Despite significant growth in objects owned in the last 40 years, there has been no corresponding growth in adult public attendance (rather a decline from 26% in 2002 to 18% in 2022). In addition, only 17% of museums disclose the number of annual visitors and consolidated financial statements. Museums have policies that require them to use proceeds to reinvest into buying more objects and preserve their collections at exorbitant costs (approximately 60% of annual operating expenses).

The Solution
Remuseum is a capacity-building entity focused on helping museums and their leaders — directors and trustees — move toward the democratization of information and assets. Remuseum is creating a powerful new social movement, using data, to hold arts and culture institutions accountable to their 501(c)(3) public charity status of serving the public good. By collecting and publishing data about where museums spend their money and how much the public interacts with their art, Remuseum’s transparency efforts aim to encourage these institutions to rebalance incentives, norms, and budgets, driving them to better fulfill their stated public missions.

By providing decision-makers and the public access to relevant data, Remuseum challenges the culture of privacy in museums. Their research focuses on recentering museums to public-centered missions, using data from the Association of Art Museum Directors and Form 990s to document and analyze museum performance. Using this information, Remuseum has created the first non-proprietary database on the operations of 153 major museums and developed a tool to measure and rank their effectiveness in delivering on public-facing missions. Key metrics, including visitor numbers, financial data, and program spending, are tracked and shared publicly.