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For decades, Emilie Lemakis has based art on the experiences and short-lived experiences of her daily life.
His work includes abstract pencil drawings of light bulbs and a kitchen drain inside the Boston apartment where he lived during art school. “The Ceremonial Sitting Throne” recognizes the long years he spent on watch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It is an homage to the chair from someone whose work rarely requires one to be used. Their supplies include donations from fellow guards—dry-cleaning bags that once held freshly pressed uniforms.
Now she’s in the middle of another project that capitalizes on her location at the museum, which she’s said she’s loved since she started walking the aisles of the Met in 1994.
In January he began making buttons for himself and the other guards, indicating how long they worked at the museum and how much they were paid per hour. Hers says “27 Years 22.65 HR”.
While the buttons appear to be an act of activism for the guards whose unions are in the middle of contract negotiations, Lemakis said he has not begun disbanding them as part of any campaign to influence the administration. To him, buttons are an art project: a commentary on time and money and a statement that people are not defined by their income.
“I had a fantasy that everyone who works at the museum wears a button,” he said recently, adding: “A lot of people are ashamed of what they’ve done, and I think that’s wrong.”
But speeches at the Met and many other museums these days are often about the huge gap between senior executives and other museum workers, whose wages and compensation packages can total more than $1 million. This gap is cited by experts as one of the reasons for its existence. such a success in organizing workers In American museums, where nearly two dozen have seen new bargaining units set up in the past three years.
At the Met, neither Local 1503 of the 37th District Council, which has long represented the museum’s guards, nor museum management will discuss contract negotiations, saying this could backfire in order to reach an agreement.
museum in december raised the starting hourly rate It’s an initiative designed to attract more candidates for guards between $15.51 and $16.50. The earnings of the guards at the Met appear to be in line with broad industry standards, as reported in a report. 2021 salary survey By the Association of Art Museum Managers. It set the median earnings of museum custodians at $39,300 per year in fiscal 2020. (Museums with an operating budget of $20 million or more averaged $42,700, according to the survey.)
Still, the Met, one of the world’s largest museums, acknowledged that with the rise in the starting fee, it faces some difficulties in finding candidates in the labor market. highly competitive for low-wage workers.
The Met, which employed 400 guards prior to the pandemic, took leave and laid off 120, months after the coronavirus began to spread in New York City, closing the museum and causing loss of revenue. These guards were eventually offered their jobs back, and dozens more did. With recent recruitment, 340 guards are currently on duty at the museum.
Lemakis said he had ordered buttons for about 50 guards who answered his questions about years of service and hourly wages. The quarter inch buttons were made by a manufacturer he found on the internet. He estimated that a dozen or so guards wore the buttons on a given day while patrolling the museum, but said a supervisor had recently told colleagues that they should not be worn on duty.
The Met declined to answer a question about whether the guards had been instructed not to unbutton Lemakis at work.
No museum patron has ever talked to him about buttons, Lemakis said. He added that his project was not funded or influenced by Local 1503, but conceded that some of his colleagues saw the buttons as a goal in support of the union’s claim that they deserved to be paid more—a goal he supports.
Lemakis said the button idea had floated for several years, adding that when the museum was forced to close temporarily in 2020, revenue became more of a focus for him. Lemakis said he found his salary, although he still received it. It’s hard to make a living without working overtime.
After news of the increased starting pay for guards spread, Lemakis decided to investigate how much veterans were earning. He said that some of his colleagues were not interested in sharing salary information, perhaps because they took it personally.
In this context, Lemakis said he felt that while working in the galleries, there were visitors who read the button on the collar of his jacket but did not want to learn more.
“People look at my button but they really don’t know what to say,” Lemakis said. “Only a very specific type of visitor will ask that.”
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