INDIANAPOLIS – After editing and apologizing for an insensitive job advertisement that appeared on a recruitment website, Charles L. Venable, the president of Newfields, the 152-acre campus that houses the Indianapolis Museum of Art, resigned.
“We are ashamed of the leadership of Newfields and ourselves,” said the museum’s board of trustees and board of governors in a statement on their website on Wednesday, in which they said they accepted Venable’s resignation. “We ignore, exclude and disappoint members of our community and staff. We commit to doing better. “
“We thank him for his service and agree that his resignation is necessary for Newfields to become the cultural institution that our community needs and deserves,” said the statement.
Venable, 60, has run the museum as director and executive president since 2012; he assumed the newly created position of president of Newfields earlier this year. Jerry Wise, the museum’s financial director, will serve as acting president of Newfields.
The job list, which was posted on the research firm m / Oppenheim’s website since January, but only surfaced last Friday, said the museum was looking for a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience, but to maintain its “traditional, mainstream white art audience.”
A group of 85 Newfields officials and members of the board of governors released a public letter on Tuesday calling for Venable’s resignation. More than 1,900 artists, local artistic leaders and former museum employees also published an open letter over the weekend calling for its removal. They asked the main funders of the museum to suspend financial support until reforms, including a more diversified council and a curatorial team, could be implemented.
Newfields said on Wednesday it would conduct an independent review of the museum’s leadership, culture and boards of trustees and governors, and would add additional free or reduced-rate days to make the museum more accessible to the community. Other reforms include forming a community advisory committee across the city, expanding programming that represents people of marginalized identities and implementing anti-racist training for employees, board members and volunteers.
Venable said in an interview on Saturday that the decision to use “white” on the job list was intentional and explained that the goal was to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as it moved towards greater diversity, equity and inclusion . The museum subsequently revised the description attached to the list, which now says it seeks to “welcome and embrace a more diverse audience”, while maintaining the museum’s “traditional central art audience”.
Venable said the drafts of the description were written and edited by both the museum and the search company.
The rush from the original list was quick. The two guest curators at the museum’s next exhibition, “DRIP: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural” in April, said in a statement on Saturday night that they could not continue organizing the exhibition unless the museum apologized to the 18 artists involved and agreed to “Show more works of black artists in perpetuity.” On Monday, a member of the board of trustees resigned.
The incident was the latest controversy for Newfields, who faced charges of exclusion from residents of the neighborhood, which has a large black population, and criticism for trumpeting the work of black artists without substantially supporting them during Venable’s widely debated term. (The members of the museum’s board of governors and board of trustees are predominantly white.)
Kelli Morgan, a former associate curator who was recruited in 2018 to diversify the museum’s galleries, resigned in July, calling the museum’s culture “toxic” and “discriminatory” in a letter she sent to Venable, as well as members of the council, artists and the local media.
Morgan, who is black, said in an interview on Saturday that while the museum has started training its leaders in diversity, equity and inclusion, she was disappointed that she still included insensitive language in the job description.
“Of course, there is no investment or attention being paid to what is being learned or communicated in training,” she said. “Because, if there were, there would be no way that a job advertisement was written like that, much less for a museum director.”
Venable, former deputy director of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, has had a controversial tenure for almost nine years at the helm of the Indianapolis museum. He was criticized for presenting more popular campus experiences, including a miniature golf course designed by artists. His commitment to cutting costs led him to reduce his staff by about 11 percent and to institute an admission fee to the museum. Although Venable holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University, it was his departure from traditional art experiences that made him unpopular in the community. He also shook things up by getting his curators to give each museum’s artwork a basic grade in an effort to reduce the collection and avoid paying for more storage.
His departure comes at a time when other institutions have struggled with a reckoning around the race, including how to diversify teams, councils and white majority collections.
Last year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had to contend with what officials called structural inequalities. Gary Garrels, formerly its chief curator, resigned in July amid the team’s anger, after using the term “reverse discrimination” in a call from Zoom to all employees.
Venable said at the time of Morgan’s resignation that the museum was taking steps to become more diverse, but that it would take time. But now it will do so with a new voice in charge.
“We promise to make the necessary changes to ensure that we can regain your trust and respect,” the museum’s board said in a statement on Wednesday. “We commit to being held accountable, as well as holding the institution accountable, to ensure that Newfields is diverse, equitable, accessible and inclusive.”
The board said that a detailed action plan, with specific deadlines, will be followed within the next 30 days.
While members of the Indianapolis black art community see Venable’s resignation as a start, they are sure it cannot be the end of the conversation.
“The CEO is just the head, and then there will be another head when he is gone,” Josiah McCruiston, a local musician, told The Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s black-owned newspaper, on Monday. “You have to resolve the root situation before you start to reap the rewards.”
Robin Pogrebin contributed reporting.