At the museum, women directors face the glass cliff

Open this photo in gallery:

Imagine how awful it is to run an art museum these days. Money is tight, politics are divisive and staff is in open revolt. The board hired you to make changes, but is soon having second thoughts. Everyone says they want accessibility and diversity but, when you deliver, the pundits accuse you of being “woke.” Your workers are divided on these new approaches but in agreement they want more money.

And heaven forbid you’re a woman.

In the past decade, women have moved into more of the top museum administration jobs – which means they are often the ones tearing out their hair in the director’s office. If they crash, they may be victims of what is known as the glass cliff: Women get hired as leaders when an organization is in crisis and needs to change, and then take disproportionate blame for failure.

There have been rumblings of this problem in the cultural community for months now, but Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum, finally went public with the accusation that female leaders aren’t being treated fairly.

“I think that if we were to take a look at the people – the museum leaders – who have lost their jobs, curators and directors in recent years, we would find that men retire and women get fired,” she said at the inaugural Making Their Mark Forum in Washington earlier this month.

Fight at the museum: Sasha Suda and the legal battle at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Pasternak called for more research and didn’t name names, but she was quoted in a recent article in the Financial Times written by Charlotte Burns, a U.S. researcher who publishes the Burns-Halperin report on gender diversity in the visual arts. Pointing out that female leaders are particularly vulnerable if they are also people of colour, Burns referred to Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who left the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in L.A. last year as filmmaker George Lucas took over programming, and Elvira Dyangani Ose, who is leaving the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona a few months before her contract expires.

Burns also mentioned Devyani Saltzman (the daughter of South Asian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta), whose job as head of arts was discontinued by London’s Barbican Centre after less than two years. The move prompted a letter of protest signed by Salman Rushdie and other prominent members of the arts community.

And the list included Laurence des Cars, the recently departed director of the Louvre Museum in Paris, and Sasha Suda, former director of the National Gallery of Canada and then the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose wrongful dismissal suit against that U.S. museum is now under arbitration.

Open this photo in gallery:

If we are counting Canadians we could add Gaëtane Verna, former director of the Power Plant at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre, who resigned from her job at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus last October. And who could forget the very public fight over the departure of Nathalie Bondil from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2020.

Each director’s situation was different –the Louvre had experienced an embarrassing theft; the Museum of Narrative Art hasn’t opened yet – but the pattern is worrisome. The museum world is conservative and hierarchical, usually led from above by somebody with serious academic credentials. Women are well represented in upper management but much less often in the top job. Historically, the art community as a whole has been obviously sexist, awarding male artists shows and sales at many times the rate of women’s work, hence the need for the Making Their Mark forum, which focuses on advancing gender equity in the visual arts.

Museums are working hard to include more art by women and other under-represented groups and to diversify their staff and attract new audiences. But they aren’t helped by public accusations: Either they’re told a diversity push is mere window dressing or they’re scolded for bowing to a leftist political agenda. This situation has reached crisis proportions in the United States, where President Donald Trump’s direct interference led to the resignation of National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet, the first woman to have ever held that job.

Open this photo in gallery:

If there is a common thread in several of these stories it’s the rapidity with which museum boards have ended the honeymoon with new hires who represent diversity – second guessing the directors’ decisions – and often replaced them with white men.

In both Ottawa and Philadelphia, Suda seemed to have faced challenges managing donors and trustees. In her lawsuit – in allegations not tested in court – she describes a Philadelphia board that was essentially running the museum when she arrived. Wrestling a board filled with powerful donors back into its correct place would never be easy, and if the recent controversy over the Art Gallery of Ontario’s decision not to buy a work by Nan Goldin proves anything, it’s that overreach by trustees and donors is real. (At the AGO, after donor and trustee Judy Schulich brought the artist’s pro-Palestinian politics into an acquisition committee’s debate over an unrelated work, the group voted to cancel the purchase and curator John Zeppetelli resigned.)

Opinion: The AGO didn’t just embroil itself in controversy over Nan Goldin’s work – it missed out on a magnificent piece of art

Art museums depend on wealthy individuals, often art collectors themselves, to sit on their boards and committees, to donate art and to give money. Some are model philanthropists, hands-off but dedicated to the institutions; others not so much.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Suda was a new leader hired to fix an institution that had suffered a harassment scandal and a strike. She renamed it the Philadelphia Art Museum and commissioned a new logo. You can certainly debate whether that was the best way to keep the museum relevant, but when The Globe investigated her departure, sources agreed that it was her conflict with the board, not the branding, that was the sticking point. And yet, three months later, her male successor – Daniel Weiss – has reverted to the old name.

As art museums struggle to change, blaming the new director for the mess may prove easier than getting the job done.

Open this photo in gallery: