On Sept. 29, the Palm Springs Art Museum announced the selection of a new director, the fourth person who would hold the institution’s top administrative position in just seven years.
One week later, the chair of the search committee tasked with filling that position, trustee Patsy Marino, resigned from the museum’s board citing “inappropriate interference and attempts to influence the process” on the part of the museum’s executive committee, individual trustees and other unidentified museum staff and donors. So far, two more of 22 trustees have followed Marino out the door, after she addressed a carefully written, 1,200-word letter to the full board warning that “PSAM’s already poor reputation” would be further damaged by the selection.
Trustee Chair Craig Hartzman firmly defended the appointment. “We’re thrilled,” he said. “It was a very fair process, conducted in the right way, in consultation with other museum officials.”
The museum’s chief curator Christine Vendredi, former administrator of the corporate art collection of French luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton, was named the museum’s director. She was an unconventional choice. Vendredi holds a PhD in art history from the Sorbonne in Paris and one in architectural history from Charles University in Prague. She joined the staff only last year, with no prior nonprofit museum experience. Marino, in a copy of the resignation letter obtained by The Times, revealed that no other candidates were interviewed for the post.
Two unidentified “exceptional candidates” had been in line for competitive consideration along with Vendredi, the Oct. 6 letter explained, but the search committee “did not interview a single outside candidate.”
Marino made a point of emphasizing that Vendredi may well have proven to be the best candidate, but that the bungled process of simply elevating the chief curator to the directorship behind the scenes also did a disservice to the new director, as it “put her legitimacy in question.” She lamented that the museum “collectively failed in our fiduciary responsibility to our stakeholders and community.”
Reached by telephone, Marino declined to comment on the letter or the mismanaged director’s search.
The post opened in the spring with the sudden, unexpected resignation of Adam Lerner, who had been director since the summer of 2021. The museum’s top administrative office has had a revolving door since the 2014 retirement of Steven Nash, respected former deputy director of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who went on to lead Berkeley’s Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. Since then, three directors — plus a museum trustee who acted as interim CEO for nine months — have averaged less than three years in the demanding job.
With a modest current endowment of around $20 million, the Palm Springs Art Museum has long faced daunting financial hurdles. During a more than year-long closure from the brutal COVID-19 pandemic, income from the controversial $4.7-million sale of a major 1979 Helen Frankenthaler painting that had been a bequest of the late Steve Chase, a primary donor for whom the main museum gallery is named, was inappropriately put toward covering operating costs.
The Palm Springs Art Museum has about 12,000 works in its collection
(Guillaume Goureau / Palm Springs Art Museum )
The April news release announcing Lerner’s departure also publicized formation of a national search for his successor. However, according to Marino’s letter, the museum did not post the job opening to professional websites, including the museum’s own, for four months. Until then, her committee could not legitimately review possible aspirants. Without funds to hire a professional search firm, Marino explained to trustees that her committee then had to hustle to identify and attract candidates.
After the August posting of the search, the museum reportedly received about 17 resumes, “mostly unqualified,” the letter said, before direct solicitations to professional associates in the field eventually surfaced two potential names. Marino, who lives in both Palm Springs and La Jolla, has served on several nonprofit boards, including the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and as an advisor to the acclaimed Stuart Collection at UCSD, which has commissioned public art projects on the campus since 1981. In January she helmed a successful search committee for a director of Murals of La Jolla, which currently has 17 commissioned murals on view around the seaside village.
By early September, though, two search committee members had interviewed Vendredi, and the letter says four of the six members expressed a strong preference for ending the search without interviewing other candidates. With no director in place for more than five months, important museum decisions ranging from staff hiring to fundraising issues had come to a virtual halt. The committee tally was reported to trustee leadership. At the end of the month, Marino was in India on a business trip when the the museum’s executive committee held its regularly scheduled meeting back home, and she wrote that she asked board of trustees chair Craig Hartzman whether any votes on the job offer, compensation or an announcement were planned.
“He replied ‘no’,” the letter says. Four days later, while Marino was still abroad, Vendredi’s appointment was announced.
In a brief telephone interview, Hartzman took strong objection to Marino’s characterization of the process in the letter, especially noting that four of the six search committee members had approved the final choice. The executive committee, and then the full board, acted on that knowledge, he said.
Whatever the case, when the experienced chair of a search committee votes against the committee’s recommendation, that’s a huge red flag. It signals a need to slow down and investigate — not to rush in the other direction and force through a decision. Without consideration of multiple outside candidates, the search committee had in effect become simply a hiring committee for an in-house nominee.
Following distribution of Marino’s damning letter to the full board, sources say at least two additional trustees have tendered their resignations, while a third has stepped back from active participation. Better late than never, but the trustees that remain now have work to do to right the listing ship.