Sean Decatur to Lead NYC’s American Museum of Natural History

Sean Decatur, the president of Ohio’s Kenyon Faculty, will be the upcoming director of New York’s American Museum of Purely natural Background (AMNH), making him the initially Black person to guide the institution. In April, Decatur will take above from Ellen Futter, who has been at the helm of the AMNH considering that 1993, a part that manufactured her the 1st woman to guide a key New York Metropolis museum.

Decatur has been president of Kenyon due to the fact 2013, and prior to assuming management of the Ohio liberal arts faculty, he labored as a professor of biophysical chemistry. This will be his first time presiding above a museum.

“I really feel as if everything I’ve carried out in existence has led up to the remarkable privilege, responsibility, and chance of heading the American Museum of Purely natural Background,” Decatur stated in an AMNH statement nowadays, December 7. He included that the museum is completely ready to deal with the up coming “crucial issues,” which he explained consist of “everything from scientific investigation to supporting community education, and to growing obtain.”

The previous handful of years have not been devoid of controversy at the museum, wherever Decatur will inherit a document of workforce struggles. In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the museum’s personnel was influenced by layoffs and furloughs. Two yrs later on, citing a lack of task safety and reduced spend, AMNH personnel voted to unionize, and around 100 personnel joined their 78 colleagues who were previously users of Local 1559 chapter of DC 37.

And in January, the institution at last eliminated the racist Theodore Roosevelt statue that extended stood outdoors its entrance, a bronze sculpture that depicted the former US president flanked by two scaled-down Black and Indigenous figures. The statue, erected in 1940, was a stage of rivalry for a long time and regularly doused with phony blood in protests heading as much again as the 1970s.

Even right after the sculpture was eliminated, criticism arose about its supposed desired destination. The operate would journey to the privately funded Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota, in close proximity to Roosevelt’s former ranch and namesake national park, pieces of which encompass land taken from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) people in the mid-19th century. Protestors called for the statue to alternatively be ruined.

Decatur will believe his new article in April 2023.