The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago has been steadily building an inclusive roster of curators as a way to attract new audiences and rethink the narrative of art history typically framed around Italian Renaissance and Western European ideals. “Who you choose in organizing the program has an impact,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, the museum’s director. “You are responsible for correcting a canon.”

Museums have tended to explain away their lack of diversity by bemoaning a scarcity of qualified curators. But art professionals say museums just have to look a little harder for help — perhaps to Spelman College’s new Curatorial Studies Program or the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Teen Curators program. “We go to state schools to get them,” Elizabeth W. Easton, director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City, said of young job candidates. “When people say it’s so impossible, that isn’t true.”

People of color have had difficulty entering the pipeline, facing barriers that include exclusion from informal mentoring networks, resistance to alternative perspectives on art history, and financial hurdles: many entry-level internships are unpaid.

“I had to turn down a curatorial assistant offer at the Guggenheim in 1999 because of how little the pay was,” said Christine Y. Kim, now an associate curator of contemporary art at Lacma. “For many marginalized young people interested in art, museums still represent authority, whiteness and power — places where we do not belong.”

Several institutions are trying to address the compensation issues. Lacma, for example, recently selected two college graduates for a new paid fellowship, and teamed up with Arizona State University for a three-year program that combines academic training and work experience to develop a diverse pool of curators, directors and other museum professionals.