Founded in 2014 as a wider advocacy vision, and first publicly staged on Monday, June 29, 2015, what began as the delightfully unruly Hug A Museum Worker was never really about random embraces. It was, from the start, a spirited defense of the people who make museums possible: the workers behind the vitrines, the labels, the lights, the loans, the scholarship, the shipping crates, the school visits, the climate reports, the conservation labs, and the public magic. What later evolved into International Museum Workers Day, and now speaks in the broader register of IMPD, has always had one central purpose: to introduce the public to the many professions involved in the creation, research, discovery, and presentation of heritage.
And now, museum workers have spoken.
So let us begin with the first and most sensible amendment to this whole affair: ask first. Before approaching anyone, museum worker or not, to shake their hand, hug them, or otherwise launch a surprise performance of public affection, obtain consent. Culture may thrive on encounter, but civilization still prefers manners. A museum is not a rugby scrum. It is not a wedding dance floor. And while warmth is welcome, ambush is not.
There is also, quite rightly, a special dispensation for those museum workers who have Mondays off. If the official date falls on a Monday, gestures of appreciation, kind words, applause, gratitude, and yes, the occasional consensual hug, may be extended across the preceding weekend. Bureaucracy has never looked so tender.
But why should such a day matter at all?
Because museums do not run on stillness.
To the casual eye, they appear to float in a kind of immaculate hush: objects gleam, labels behave, meaning arrives dressed for dinner. Everything suggests that culture has simply arranged itself, as though exhibitions drift into being on a perfumed cloud of scholarship and tasteful typography. Not quite. Museums run on people. On nerve, judgment, stamina, diplomacy, technical knowledge, and the daily choreography of making heritage intelligible to the public. Behind every polished display stands an ensemble cast of registrars, curators, conservators, educators, installers, archivists, designers, researchers, guards, technicians, editors, photographers, administrators, and many others whose names are too rarely in lights.
In that sense, museums are indeed the playhouse of the Muses: not one muse, but the whole dazzling company. History enters with Clio; tragedy broods in a side gallery with Melpomene; Terpsichore slips through the education wing; Urania peers toward the heavens; and cinema, naturally, sneaks in through the stage door pretending not to be the favorite child. But even a divine repertory company cannot perform without stagehands. Objects do not levitate into vitrines out of pure curatorial moonlight. Someone researches them, handles them, mounts them, interprets them, protects them, and explains why they matter at all.
That was the point of the first edition in 2015, and the point has only grown louder with time. The inaugural event was marked by museums, associations, and museum professionals in more than thirty countries. By the following years, engagement had widened dramatically: by 2017, heritage professionals in more than 150 countries had taken part, and by 2018 the initiative had been marked across 170 countries, in 21 languages, and on 12 platforms. That is no small curtain call. It is a global correction.
Because this was never merely a cute social media stunt in a clever hat.
It was, and remains, an argument. A public correction to one of culture’s most elegant bad habits: loving museums while overlooking the labor that makes them possible. We praise institutions in the abstract, then forget the humans who keep the lights on, the pests out, the storage stable, the school groups moving, the budgets breathing, and the ideas in circulation. Museum workers do not ask for sainthood. They are asking, rather modestly, to stop being treated like invisible upholstery.
And so, if one wishes to celebrate properly, one might do more than offer a symbolic squeeze. Become a member. Visit often. Shop in the museum store. Volunteer where appropriate. Follow and amplify museums and museum workers online. Subscribe to their newsletters. Support museum associations. Attend the lecture, the screening, the late opening, the small exhibition that did not arrive with a brass band. In brief: show up.
That is the true gesture.
Not sentiment without substance, but appreciation with follow-through.
Not mythology.
People.
And museum workers, dear audience, deserve better than a passing nod from the wings. They deserve top billing.