The Philadelphia Art Museum’s CEO Sasha Suda was terminated not long after the museum announced its rebrand.Hannah Yoon/The Globe and Mail
The Philadelphia Art Museum’s stark, monochromatic rebrand is stamped on billboards throughout its namesake city, and on placards at the foot of its eastern entrance, beckoning visitors up the same stairs that Sylvester Stallone climbed in 1976’s Rocky.
The new logo and name – recast just slightly from the former Philadelphia Museum of Art – went unnoticed by dozens of students on school trips Friday as they wandered the collections and listened to staff unpack the multidisciplinary work of Jasper Johns. Privately, though, some staff were willing to admit that they find the rebrand baffling, financially unnecessary or outright bad; one called it “bewildering.” (The Globe and Mail is not naming staff members due to fear of reprisal.)
But staff have got bigger matters to reckon with. Lurking between the Philadelphia Art Museum’s reconstructed Muromachi-period Japanese temple, extensive Marcel Duchamp collection, and a new exhibit on surrealism’s 100th anniversary is a leadership crisis with a Canadian curator at its core.
The October rebrand was the museum’s final high-profile announcement before director and chief executive Sasha Suda was fired by its board last week for cause. The former head of the National Gallery of Canada had finished just three years of a five-year contract. She’s since filed a lawsuit against the museum in a Pennsylvania state court over the dismissal, seeking damages and two years’ severance pay.
Former National Gallery director Sasha Suda sues Philadelphia Art Museum over dismissal
Depending on whom you ask, Ms. Suda’s exit could be related to the rebrand, conducted by the Brooklyn firm Gretel and building upon a 1938 design. It’s garnered controversy after internet commentators likened it to a sports-team logo while mockingly abbreviating the institution as “PhArt.” Even the choice to hire a New York design firm has riled up the local art community, which takes pride in having access to one of the premier visual-arts institutions in the United States.
“It is a real shame that, with the long history of talent in Philadelphia, you would not go to Philadelphians for a rebrand that purportedly was responding to their desires,” says Zara Anishanslin, a locally based art-history professor with the University of Delaware, who has consulted for the museum’s early American galleries.
The lawsuit filing sheds light on other factors that may have led to Ms. Suda’s dismissal. It suggests that the investigation that led to her ouster, conducted by an unnamed law firm, focused on expenses she says had been cleared with appropriate parties. This included a US$39,000 cost-of-living adjustment to Ms. Suda’s compensation, which she says was in line with increases given to unionized staff.
Sasha Suda, shown at the National Gallery of Canada in 2019, joined the Philadelphia Art Museum in 2022.Justin Tang/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Suda’s lawsuit more broadly paints her as someone at odds with members of the Philadelphia Art Museum’s board of trustees – who, according to the filing, were “constantly changing the rules for management,” the chief financial officer is claimed to have said. It outlines numerous allegations of head-butting and “interference,” including a dispute connected to simultaneously scheduled events with Philadelphia’s city council president and the museum’s largest corporate donor, Bank of America.
“A small cabal of trustees commissioned a sham investigation to create a pretext for Ms. Suda’s termination,” her lawyer, Luke Nikas of the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP in New York, said in an e-mailed statement. “Ms. Suda fought for and believed in a museum that would serve Philadelphia and its people, not the egos of a handful of trustees.”
The museum’s press office wrote in an e-mail this week that it is aware of Ms. Suda’s lawsuit, but said it was without merit and declined to comment further.
Some internet commentators likened the museum’s new branding to a sports-team logo.Hannah Yoon/The Globe and Mail
The Canadian curator was educated in the U.S. – Princeton University, Williams College and New York University – and has spent her career toggling between that country and Canada, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She joined the Philadelphia museum after leading the National Gallery of Canada from 2019 to 2022, cutting short a five-year, cabinet-approved term and at least tripling her salary in the process – to US$729,000, according to public records.
Her time at the National Gallery was met by staff disaffection and her exit from the Ottawa gallery precipitated months of fallout. After her exit, in November, 2022, four senior staff members were dismissed including Greg Hill, the former Audain senior curator of Indigenous art.
“There’s a lot of flowery words about respecting and supporting staff, yet staff are living a culture of fear and intimidation, afraid to speak out, afraid that they’re going to be restructured at any moment with no explanation,” Mr. Hill told The Globe in 2022.
During Ms. Suda’s tenure in Philadelphia, the lawsuit says, she deepened the art museum’s connections to local schools and cut the institution’s US$6-million deficit by two-thirds. She also undertook numerous programming and equity measures, including the establishment of the Brind Center for African and African Diasporic Art.
The terms Ms. Suda received upon exiting, her lawsuit argues, were inferior to those given to a male former CEO and other “male individuals who were pushed out of the Museum for engaging in actual wrongdoing.” It added that “her efforts to modernize the museum clashed with a small, corrupt, and unethical faction of the Board intent on preserving the status quo.”