About the new name for that big museum at the end of the Parkway: Never mind.<\/p>\n
Four months after rolling out a new name with great fanfare, the Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a> is once again calling itself the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum\u2019s board Wednesday afternoon voted unanimously at a special meeting to scrap the name Philadelphia Art Museum, which had been announced Oct. 8 as part of a larger rebranding<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some signs and materials are being quickly changed over with the old-new name, while others will be reprinted or revamped in coming weeks. The new PhAM acronym used in marketing materials will be dropped, and the museum will once again refer to itself in shorthand as the PMA, as many Philadelphians long have.<\/p>\n Why the retreat?<\/p>\n In short, the new name was widely disliked<\/a>. <\/p>\n The museum spent the past several weeks surveying opinions, said director and CEO Daniel H. Weiss<\/a>, and \u201cI think what we learned from our survey, and it\u2019s not surprising, is that people who have any knowledge of the institution \u2014 donors, staff, trustees, members \u2014 they know the name and it resonates with them. It\u2019s something distinctive, it\u2019s who we are. And changing the name for no obvious reason created a sense of alienation and didn\u2019t make sense to a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n Philadelphia Museum of Art had been the name of the nearly 150-year-old institution for 87 years until the change this fall.<\/p>\n The museum will, however, keep visual elements of the larger rebranding \u2014 the logo that echoes one of the griffin figures along the roofline of the museum\u2019s main building, and bold fonts in signage and promotional materials.<\/p>\n As for the continued use of slightly irreverent tag lines that came with the rebrand \u2014 phrases like \u201cYouse should visit more often,\u201d \u2014 \u201cProbably not so much,\u201d said Weiss. \u201cWe will modify those a little downstream, but the idea is to return to a slightly more aligned presentation more closely tied to our mission.\u201d<\/p>\n The rebranding \u2014 which was widely, though not universally, criticized upon its rollout \u2014 was a major initiative of former director and CEO Sasha Suda and marketing chief Paul Dien. <\/p>\n When the museum announced the name change, Suda explained it by saying that it was \u201ctruly a reflection of what the community has called it for a long time,\u201d and that it was \u201calso a sort of significant way of starting a new chapter and saying, \u2018Look, we\u2019re definitely starting a new chapter here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Dien left the museum as of Feb. 1<\/a>. Suda was fired Nov. 4 and, after filing a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against the museum<\/a>, was ordered on Friday by Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas to settle the matter behind closed doors through arbitration<\/a> rather than in a public trial.<\/p>\n