A Museum Unionization Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story Zine (2026)

A collection of possible museum career scenarios, drawn from personal anecdotes shared during the research for my doctoral dissertation, social media and news media coverage of the post-2019 museum unionization wave and other recent events in the museum world, my own autoethnographic reflections on my experience in this field and this movement, and the scholarly literature around museum work and cultural labor.

Download the Online Version here. 

Get in touch to request a print version (free for workers who want to organize their workplace!)

Museum Unions Enact Workplace Justice Zine (2025)

A collaborative resource on leveraging art museum collective bargaining agreements towards equity, created with the Museums Moving Forward Study Group on Contracts & Equity 

Download the Online Version here 

Download the Print Version here

Some tips for printing at home:

• Print double-sided and make sure "flip on short edge" is checked so all pages are right-side up
• Select the "fit" option under scale settings so everything fits the page properly
• When you go to fold the zine, fold each sheet in half along the center then nest the folded sheets inside each other in numerical order. The outermost sheet will have page 1 on the front cover and the last page on the back cover. When nested correctly, you should be able to flip through and see all pages in order.

Listen to an interview about the zine on the Labor Jawn podcast!

Art Museum Union Contract Language Database (2024 - present)

This public spreadsheet collects and organizes contract language from the most recent publicly-available collective bargaining agreements between art museums and their labor unions. The goal is for this document to serve as a repository of union-driven achievements and offer sample language for negotiating teams from across institutions and parent unions.

 This is a living document that will be updated periodically; feedback on how to improve this resource is welcome. 

Select Recent Publications

*Ripley (Tobin), A. (2026). Why are Unions Members so Dissatisfied? Making Sense of the Union Data in MMF's 2025 Data Study. MMF: Publications. Museums Moving Forward.

Ripley (Tobin), A. (2026). "But the pay was horrible:" Advancing equity in the museum and the fight for a living wage. Critical Sociology: Symposium on Art Work. OnlineFirst, 1-17.

Ripley (Tobin), A. (2026). Bargaining at the museum: Building equity into new union contracts. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. OnlineFirst, 1-17. 

*Ripley, (Tobin) A. (2026, January 7). Museum Leaders, Recognize Your Unions Now. Hyperallergic. 

*Ripley (Tobin), A. (2025). "Men! Let's stick together this time:" A review of collective action in U.S. art museums, 1930s - present. Museum Worlds, 13(1), 94-107. (Making Museum Professionals, K. Hill & C. Wintle, guest eds.).

*Ripley (Tobin), A. (2025). "'Another World is Possible:' Liberatory Unionism in the US Art Museum Labor Movement." Power at Work.

*Ripley (Tobin), A. & Hurley, M. (2025). The museum education job taxonomy: How our job titles affect our work and our value. Museum Management and Curatorship, 1-26. Advance online publication. DOI:10.1080/09647775.2025.2512328

Ripley (Tobin), A. (Spring 2025). Forming an art museum labor union: The case of PASTA MoMA. International Journal of Arts Management, 27(3), 113-120.

*Ripley (Tobin), A. (2024). The passion subsidy. MMF: Publications. Museums Moving Forward.

*Ripley (Tobin), A. (2023). "Not just for coal miners:" Unionization in U.S. art museums. Curator: The Museum Journal, 66(4), 609–627.

*open access

Art Museum Unions Index, with Liz Levine and Museums Moving Forward (MMF) (2024, updated 2026)

MMF's Art Museum Unions Index is a research tool, archive in progress, and repository of collective efforts to improve and reform museum workplaces through union organizing over the decades. In keeping with MMF's practice of foregrounding data-centered avenues to drive change, the Art Museum Unions Index tracks union-organizing campaigns and events across the sector to better contextualize the current union-organizing wave, which began in 2019, in terms of the larger history of labor and grassroots activism in US art museums. The current dataset focuses exclusively on private nonprofit art museums based in the United States.