Museum Studies Commons^™

Deaccession Decision-Making During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Multi-Site Case Study Of Art Museums In The United States, Shannon Hahn

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

At the beginning of the pandemic, museums were forced to close, resulting in significant losses in earned revenue. To address budgetary shortfalls across the museum field, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) temporarily relaxed their deaccessioning guidelines to allow museums to sell works of art from their collections and use proceeds to support the direct care of collections. This project utilized a qualitative multi-site case study and textual analysis to examine deaccession decisions of four art museums in the United States that deaccessioned works of art during the pandemic. Textual data was collected from online newspaper articles, press releases, …