In this era of identity politics there is reluctance to address class identity despite its crucial intersection in which individuals are shaped by and identify with an array of cultural, structural, economic, and social contexts and how these various contexts intersect. Many mainstream cultural institutions continue to lie outside of most working people’s lived experiences and reflect the larger economic and cultural inequalities within our society.
Class as a critical category has fallen out of favor in many cultural institutions while the real impact of class continues to affect the lives of working people who are strategically excluded from contemporary culture. These issues have led to economic and cultural inequalities that have kept many members of working-class communities out of these public cultural institutions. The socio-economic relationship between working class communities, artists and cultural institutions discourages any kind of analyses because of unintentional class bias and many museums and art galleries are culturally irrelevant to working-class communities.
Museums and art galleries need to develop programming that makes meaningful engagement with culture and build bonds between audiences, exhibitions, collections, and links to working class communities. Creativity is critical to social change and cultural spaces need to be reimagined as public spaces to build a “living culture” for everyone in our communities. It is within this ideological context that art galleries and museums need to work towards becoming more accessible to the working communities. At the same time, these cultural interactions enable members of the public to construct new understandings, perspectives, and ideologies of disenfranchised voices.
Museums and art galleries need to experiment with alternative arts programming that makes meaningful engagement with local cultural institutions and new engagement practices with all communities. Art galleries and museums have the potential to become public spaces for exploring diversity of under-represented voices and have the potential to encourage visitors to actively construct their own interpretation of what they experience based on their own knowledge, experience, and class background.
In these times of growing inequity and unpredictability, we need to explore how arts and culture can engage working class communities and organizations. Contemporary cultural spaces have the potential to explore how disenfranchised voices can challenge dominant narratives to allow for numerous points of view and systems of belief to be articulated.
Art galleries and museums need choose to define opportunities for collaboration within working-class communities using dialogue to instigate change in consciousness and encourage real engagement with working class communities.