Once, art museums felt like a place to get away from all the chaos and confusion of everyday life—a place to enjoy beauty and consider eternal questions of life in a curated, contemplative and quiet environment. The beauty and the questions it raises are still there for the enjoying, but museums have, as of late, become a focal point of the anger, resentment, divisiveness and demand for change raging just outside institutional walls.

This year has been transformative in more ways than one. Full of landmark exhibitions like the Rijksmuseum Vermeer show, 2023 also forced the art world to reckon with questions of ownership, censorship, accessibility and how to keep institutions above water as societal tides change.

In February, an art exhibition organized by the nonprofit group Embracing Our Differences that was to take place on the Manatee-Sarasota campus of the State College of Florida was canceled after university officials told the Sarasota-based nonprofit to remove the words “diversity,” “justice,” “equality” and “inclusion” from any promotional materials and wall text. School officials claimed that the words could inspire violence or trigger post-traumatic stress disorder among student-veterans. Others theorized that Governor Ron DeSantis’ recently announced funding cuts to state universities’ diversity, equity and inclusion programs were the real impetus. “We are not a political organization with a political agenda,” a statement from Embracing Our Differences claimed, but terms that might be widely accepted as positive in a mature democracy have become another flashpoint in the ongoing culture wars.

Some museums took steps in the opposite direction this year. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art made diversity, equity and inclusion key elements of its acquisition strategy, focusing on artists with connections to the Bay Area, artists in the LGBTQIA community, women artists, disabled artists and artists of color. Over 200 works accessed in 2023 are part of that collecting priority, including Marcel Pardo Ariza’s “I Am Very Lucky, Very Lucky to be Trans” (2022) and An-My Lê’s “Fragment VII: High School Students Protesting Gun Violence, Washington Square Park, New York” (2018/2020). Christopher Bedford became director of SF MoMA in 2022, right after leaving the directorship of the Baltimore Museum of Art where he had been a take-no-prisoners proponent of making the institution an instrument of social change.

He’s not alone. Many museum leaders prioritized selling off, or deaccessioning, artworks by white male artists to purchase pieces by members of underrepresented groups in 2023. And several other U.S. art museums have also sought to increase their holdings in works by artists who have traditionally been underrepresented in museum collections. The Smithsonian........

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