10 March 7th–March 13th, 2019 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | music | cafe | film | culTuRe | NighT+Day | FeAtURe | NeWs | OPiNiON | feeDBacK | cONTeNTs | unteers who have toiled for 10 or 20 or 35 years — via email, without ever meeting them — simply because those volunteers were overheard being bitchy, or because they have “bad attitudes” about all these changes. No CEO of an art museum would do such things as this. According to these three women — and several of the more than 100 volunteers who have resigned in dis- gust in the past year — that is precisely what Amada Cruz has done in the four years she’s been head of Phoenix Art Museum. She has hired an inexperi- enced staff, they say, that knows neither museums nor art. And her approach to fixing the museum’s fi- nancial shortfall has, these former docents and de- throned organization leaders and ex-museum members claim, destroyed the spirit and annexed the accomplishments of a once-notable arts estab- lishment. “People used to wait in line outside Whiteman Hall to hear Cornelia Parker and Eric Fischl speak,” Nancy Millman, one of the dismissed do- cents, recently said. “We paid to have artists like Jennifer Steinkamp come talk to the docents, or Mary Morton, the curator of French painting at the National Gallery, speak about Gerôme.” These days, Millman said, docents lis- ten instead to the museum’s education di- rector, Kaela Sáenz Oriti, tell them the best ways to give a tour. “I have been giving museum tours lon- ger than that little bitch has been alive,” one of the canal walkers says when Sáenz Oriti’s name comes up. She’s hushed by the woman on her right, and a brief quar- rel ensues. This might be a story about a bunch of angry women who don’t like it when things change. Its moral could be that when you treat volunteers like a bunch of yokels, they stomp off in a huff, taking millions of dollars with them. Or it may just be a repeat of that story we’ve been hearing over and over these days, as Phoe- nix strains to become a world-class city — the one about the out-of-towner hired to fix things, who messes everything up in the process. Because wasn’t Amada Cruz brought in to fix the museum’s money problems? these women are asked. And hasn’t Cruz done that very thing, in nearly record time? The women, done with their quarrel, are briefly quiet. “Yes,” one of them finally answers. “But did she have to murder the museum in or- der to do it?” P eople who like to complain about Amada Cruz — and there are many of them — usually ignore the part about how she yanked the Phoenix Art Museum out of a financial mess. When she arrived, the museum routinely ran annual deficits of more than $1 million. Today, the museum is —on paper, at least — in the black. (It’s hard to say how healthy Phoe- nix Art Museum’s finances really are. Its audited financial statements for 2017-2018 show $40 million in assets, including $3 million in cash and cash equivalents, yet the museum has borrowed $1 million from the Arizona Community Foundation and another $1.2 million in an equity line of credit from Morgan Stanley. Why?) During her first six months as its direc- tor, the museum increased its endowment by nearly $5 million. When she hired for- mer Des Moines Art Center curator Gilbert Vicario as PAM’s chief curator — a position the museum hadn’t had in more than a de- cade — she first secured a perpetual en- dowment to fund that position from former Major League Baseball commis- sioner Bud Selig and his wife, Suzanne. Last month alone, Cruz helped the mu- seum snag a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to fund a retrospective of work by Teresita Fernández, as well as a $50,000 endowment from Thunderbirds Charities to expand the museum’s Teen Art Council. “Amada inherited deficit spending that stopped when she got here,” says Jon Hulburd, who chairs the museum’s board of trustees. “She put together a good fi- nancial team, and convinced them to spend more wisely. In four years, she’s doubled the pace of annual contributed revenue, which is just a fancy way of say- ing ‘donations.’ She’s asking for money from sources we’ve never seen money from. And she’s getting it.” Cruz isn’t just blindly making and sav- ing money for the museum, Hulburd in- sists. She’s upping the cultural ante here by choosing exhibits that sell tickets, like the recent “Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire,” a collection of ancient archaeological artifacts that Hulburd says banked $77,000. “That’s a bigger number than we’ve seen in a dozen years for any one ex- hibit,” he claims. Phoenix Art Museum, founded in 1959, needs those big numbers these days. Like most arts organizations, the museum took a sock to the gut with the Great Recession of 2008. Cash donations dried up and ticket sales withered. According to a 2015 report from the Cultural Data Project, which collects and analyzes budgets and audience response to nonprofits, most museums are only now recovering from that setback. Cruz replaced Jim Ballinger, a well- liked director who, during his 32-year stay, increased the museum’s budget and its audience, and oversaw a pair of expan- sions that quadrupled the facility’s gallery space. (Depending upon whom you ask, Ballinger either left of his own accord or was “shown the door” by the museum board.) Ballinger focused, many say, on the museumgoers and the volunteers who supported the institution, sidestepping turf wars between and among museum boosters and employees. “Jim may have left the museum in the red,” says former Contemporary Forum member Mary Westheimer, the wife and manager of international artist Kevin Caron. “But he built an incredible commu- nity, something much more difficult to do than raising money. He created a macro- cosm of art lovers who devoted themselves to the museum and who themselves raised money and goodwill.” Cruz arrived in February 2015. Born in Havana, Cuba, she’d most recently been executive director of Artpace San Antonio, a nonprofit gallery, and had previously cu- rated at Chicago’s Museum of Contempo- rary Art and as director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Charged with reversing the museum’s growing financial deficits and determined to streamline its operations, Cruz quickly made her plans clear: She would do so by soliciting giant cor- porate donations and romancing big-bucks donors; she’d eschew risky blockbuster ex- hibitions in favor of those she knew would sell; and she’d ask her curators to build exhibits that could tour the coun- try and increase the museum’s profile and its coffers. In person, Cruz is charming, eager to talk about the muse- um’s Discount Tire Free Family Day and thrilled about the Spanish-language tours the museum now offers. “When I first got here, I couldn’t be- lieve we didn’t al- ready have them,” she says with a wide smile, seated in her tidy office and sur- rounded by staff. “We have them now. I think that’s important in a city that’s 41 percent Latino.” Former staff members found Cruz less charming. Within six months of her ar- rival, more than a dozen employees bolted, including European, American, and Western art curator Jerry Smith; de- velopment director Ronald Miller; and education director Kathryn Blake. The museum’s web administrator, Evan Rob- erts, also took a hike, then bitched to the Arizona Republic that he and the others had fled because they resented “Cruz’s abrasive management style.” Marketing director Carlotta Soares and public-rela- tions manager Stephanie Lieb were among those Cruz sent packing, along with the CFO whose replacement, Kirsten Peterson Johansen, was canned less than a year later. The museum is reportedly on its third development director since Cruz arrived. It’s not unusual for a new executive to clean house, or for staffers to flee from a new regime. But the loudest criticism of Cruz isn’t that she dumped the deadbeats from her staff or chased off a bunch of ca- pable people who’d worked there for a long while. It’s that once she’d done that, she came gunning for a group that many con- sider the heart and soul of the Phoenix Art Museum. She came, according to recent legend, for the docents. Courtesy of the Phoenix Art Museum Phoenix Art Museum CEO Amada Cruz has reportedly fixed the organization’s failing finances, and chased away more than 100 volunteers. Museum from p 9 >> p 13
