More than 1,500 people signed an open letter demanding the removal of Charles L. Venable from the command of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) after an offensive job advertisement appeared on the museum’s job platform. According to a new director’s job description, which has already been edited, the job responsibilities included “keeping the Museum’s traditional and central white art audience”.
The job description “shamelessly detailed the ways in which systemic racism permeates our city,” says the open letter. Conceived by Danicia Malone, Indianapolis city planner and former member of the IMA Contemporary Art Society, the letter describes a series of demands for the museum, along with the removal of Venable. Other requests include diversifying its mainly white Board of Trustees to include individuals from BIPOC and other underrepresented groups by June this year.
He also calls for “the immediate suspension of any pending or future funding for the museum” by Lilly Endowment, who gave the museum $ 7 million last year, and other major donors until the renovations are done.
“This cannot be fixed with programs, we want to emphasize that,” Malone told Hyperallergic. “This is not a situation where we can throw money to start a new course or exhibition. This is the changed system. We are not asking for a disbursement, we simply want to keep the funds until these things are resolved ”.
As of this afternoon, Malone has yet to receive an official response from the museum.
The language of the job list drew the ire of artists, IMA patrons and former and current museum workers and employees over the weekend. The invited curators of an upcoming exhibition at the IMA with Black Lives Matter muralists, Malina Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon, waived the objection. In an interview with WTHR, former chairman John Thompson said Venable should step down. According to IndyStar reports, Lilly Endowment said it took “the issues raised by the job announcement very seriously” and planned to meet with the board today.
Responding to the criticism attack, the IMA issued an apology and edited the post to read “the main audience of traditional art”. On a demonstration posted on Twitter on Saturday, the museum said: “We deeply regret that, in our job description, in our attempt to focus on building and diversifying our core audience, our newsroom has caused division rather than inclusive.
But the open letter demands a new update of the text, arguing that the most recent version “still implies a preference for a white audience”.
“This is not just a problem in Newfields,” Malone told Hyperallergic. “Although the letter may have been addressed to this incident at that institution, this is a situation that covers the entire community, the entire system, the state and the entire country.”
This morning, a group of 85 employees and museum stakeholders released their own missive, which echoes calls for the removal of Venable and describes the recent incident as a “boiling point” after months of “diversity, equity, access and inclusion. (DEAI) failures. ”Notably, the letter alleges that the team raised concerns about the job posting more than a month ago.
“When the language of the post was questioned at a staff meeting in January, it was advocated by Dr. Venable and Laura McGrew, senior director of guest experience and human resources,” the workers wrote.
They also denounce Venable’s “continuous gas lighting of the team” and the lack of accountability for the departure of a black curator, Dr. Kelli Morgan, last summer. IMA was at the center of the controversy when Morgan, the former associate curator of American art, resigned, alleging a “discriminatory” work environment, a lack of implicit biased training and incidents, including a “racist speech” by a museum Council member.
In an interview with Hyperallergic, Morgan, now an independent Atlanta-based curator, said she was not surprised by the language of the job list, which she considered “typical Newfields”.
“I didn’t even blink an eye,” she said. “Newfields is its own universe – it is very isolated, there is no real finger on what is happening not only in the art world, but in society in general. Indiana is very isolated in the same way, and white supremacy is normalized throughout the culture. [Venable] does not understand how racist the intention was in itself. ”
“I had been asking for DEIA training, implicit prejudice training, anti-racist training, since spring 2019, and it was excuse after excuse,” added Morgan. The museum began to engage in DEIA after his resignation, she said, but the unfortunate job description was published nonetheless.
“This job posting comes out while the institution is training at DEIA,” said Morgan. “So clearly, something is not computing.”
IMA is the ninth oldest art museum in the United States and also one of the richest, with a donation of more than $ 335 million in 2019. At that time, Venable’s remuneration as director and CEO of the museum was almost $ 800,000 , according to the most recent 990 records. The museum is located on the largest Newfield arts campus in Indianapolis, which also includes the Lilly House and Gardens estate and the 100-acre Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park.
The search for a museum director is part of a recently announced executive restructuring that promoted Venable, the current director and CEO of the museum, the president of Newfields’ general campus, releasing a new position to head the IMA. Jonathan M. Wright, the deputy director of the museum, was named Ruth Lilly as director of the Garden and Fairbanks Park.
In an interview with New York TimesVenable noted that the six-page job description also emphasized the importance of attracting a diverse audience, an objective he believes has been overshadowed by a single problem point.
Under Venable’s leadership since 2012, the campus has been renamed “Newfields” in an attempt to expand the institution’s audience beyond 16% of Indianapolis residents, who then represented more than 90% of visitors, according to a statement. Venable also spearheaded the development of non-traditional programming, such as a miniature golf course designed by artists, in order to reach a wider audience.
But many see his approval and defense of the biased job list as the latest in a series of inclusion-related mistakes. In 2015, Venable instituted a $ 18 admission fee to IMA, which was previously free. In the same year, members openly criticized changes to campus access points, including closing pedestrian entrances that some said made the arts center less accessible to people without a car.
“When you look at a campus like this, it has hundreds of hectares, beautiful green land, mostly isolated for residents who live in that area – many of them are the underserved population of all of Indianapolis,” Malone told Hyperallergic. “When you have all that demographic data living in an area like this and you have this gem of a saved and inaccessible space for them, that too, for me, is criminal.”
Newfields has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.