In a bid to strengthen its inclusivity efforts, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has hired its first ever senior director of belonging and inclusion.
Rosa Rodriguez-Williams will officially take on the role Wednesday.
Rodriguez-Williams was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Lawrence, Mass. She holds a master’s degree in social work from Boston College and previously worked as the director of the Latinx Student Cultural Center at Northeastern University.
Her new role will serve the museum’s endeavor to increase inclusion of and engagement with historically underserved audiences, according to an MFA press release. The museum is aiming to better represent Boston’s diversity.
“The MFA is rising up to the present moment with a desire to reimagine and reinvent itself,” Rodriguez-Williams said in the release. “Places like the MFA belong to all of us.”
The MFA announced the hiring of Rodriguez-Williams Thursday after initially creating the position in late 2019.
Makeeba McCreary, the Patti and Jonathan Kraft chief of learning and community engagement at the MFA, said the new position focuses on creating a sense of belonging for visitors as well as the museum’s own workforce.
“It’s working with the people who are curators and who are doing interpretation or who are teaching educational programs,” McCreary said, “helping them get competent in their own inclusion practice and making sure that there aren’t any obstacles to somebody feeling like they could belong here.”
Rodriguez-Williams, who will report to McCreary directly, is well-versed in diversity and inclusion practices, McCreary said.
“She is very grounded in her own blind spots, but also in the reason why it’s really important to make sure that inclusivity, in particular, as it relates to race, is always at the forefront of the conversation,” McCreary said. “She’s very warm and she makes really tough conversations able to happen with a lot of grace and a lot of room and generosity.”
The director’s arrival comes several months after the museum created a $500,000 fund to improve diversity and inclusion at its facilities. The fund was announced in May as part of a memorandum of understanding with the office of Attorney General Maura Healey, following discrimination allegations from a Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy field trip to the museum one year prior.
After DLA teachers brought attention to what happened, investigations — one internal and one by the AG’s office — opened. After reviewing security footage and conducting interviews, the museum identified and banned from MFA grounds the patrons who made racist remarks to members of the school.
In response, the MFA revisited its own procedures, including how its security guards present themselves while patrolling and between shifts. Some DLA students had said they felt they were being overly monitored while touring the exhibits.
The museum expanded training for staff and volunteers, with topics ranging from identifying unconscious bias to sexual harassment.
As part of her role, Rodriguez-Williams will focus on these policies to assist the MFA in creating a sense of belonging for its visitors.
Wyona Lynch-McWhite, senior vice president at the Arts Consulting Group in Boston, said many arts and culture organizations are examining which voices are being heard.
“Most organizations want to really get a sense of who their audience is, and by extension of that, who they’re not serving,” Lynch-McWhite said. “We have to kind of look up from the table and see who is missing from this conversation. Whose voice do we need to include to make sure it’s an inclusive process?”
An MFA web page entitled “Toward a More Inclusive MFA” keeps track of the museum’s progress toward these goals.
McCreary said the MFA expects to launch a cultural assessment of the museum in the near future. Still in the design phase, the assessment will be conducted by an external consultant.
“That’s a practice that I think will help shed a lot of light on areas of strength,” McCreary said, “and also on blind spots that we have as it relates to inclusion.”
The MFA remains closed as a COVID-19 precaution, but hopes to open back up in early fall, according to the website.
