18 March 7th–March 13th, 2019 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | mUsIC | CAFe | FILm | CULtURe | nIght+DAy | FEATURE | neWs | oPInIon | FeeDBACK | Contents | port organizations were falling apart. “I could see that they were having trouble,” she says. “They were struggling with membership, getting people to join, rais- ing money, all of that.” The museum wanted, Cruz said in her letter, to “bring necessary structure to the support groups.” “We already had structure,” Swan groans. “They kept saying the phrase ‘best practices.’ If I heard it once more I was go- ing to hurl. It was corporate speak for ‘We want your money to pay our bills.’” Told that the museum wanted control of the support organization money to make its payroll, Cruz chuckles. “I hadn’t heard that one before,” she contends, although in that letter to support organizations, Cruz writes, “Beginning in FY18 (July 1, 2017 – June 30, 2018), a percentage of all funds raised by a support group in excess of its approved, budgeted expenses will be paid to the Museum to support administrative and programmatic expenses…” Swan, a founding member of Friends of European Art, laughs when she hears that Cruz thought the support organizations were faltering. “We were not having trou- ble raising money,” she insists. “The mu- seum needed our money to pay its bills and get out of the red and into the black. They got our money, but they lost our support.” That money always belonged to the museum, Hulburd says, because the groups were linked to and financially sup- portive of the Phoenix Art Museum. “Do- nors gave that money to support the museum,” he clarifies, “and not necessar- ily to support the support group. After the groups bought us a painting or whatever, the remaining funds were meant to be used by the museum.” It’s all moot, Mary Westheimer says. Nine of the 11 support organizations are gone. The goodwill they created is gone. The art they might have bought won’t be found on any walls. “But I guess the mu- seum got what they wanted,” she says. “A bunch of money, right now.” But what about later? W hen what she calls “the explo- sions” first began — not long af- ter Nancy Millman was fired and before the last of the support groups folded — Cathy Swan began to think about the long-term fallout of those explosions. In February 2017, Swan and five other vol- unteers met with the museum’s board of trustees. “We were given 15 minutes, total,” Swan remembers. “I had two and a half minutes to show how I’d documented a loss of $60 million in estate-planning gifts to the mu- seum over just four months, between No- vember 2016 and February 2017, from people who were angry or hurt and were withdrawing their bequests.” After she spoke, a board member told Swan it wasn’t their job to worry about other people’s estate planning. “They said they were in the black, and that was what mattered,” Swan recalls. The museum doesn’t care, Swan be- lieves, about the list of people — some of them quite wealthy — who are disinherit- ing Phoenix Art Museum. Gail Adams is among them; she has cut PAM out of her will. Nancy Millman had arranged for her antique jewelry collec- tion and several 19th-century French lith- ographs to be left to the museum; she’s since found another home for them. French Thompson had a letter from a couple who’d previously bequeathed mil- lions of dollars in property to Phoenix Art Museum, but have recently made other arrangements. That $60 million figure Cathy Swan came up with two years ago has since grown. Hulburd says he’s heard that for- mer museum members are changing their wills, and it makes him sad. “But because we don’t currently track planned giving, we can’t really count on that as income, or regret it as lost income.” Likewise, Cruz seems unfazed by the notion that unhappy museum members are taking their marbles with them when they leave. “You never know what some- one’s going to leave you until they’ve gone on to that better place,” she says. And then she smiles. T he trio of docents has nearly com- pleted their weekly walk along the canal. One of them, the one whose name might be Martha, has stopped to talk to a homeless man named Bud. “She’s always trying to give him a sand- wich,” the woman who might be Kathi confides to a friend who has joined them. She stops to shake a rock out of her shoe and resumes com- plaining about the Phoenix Art Museum docent program. But why, if the program is so terrible, do these three stay on? their friend asks. Jan says she likes the social aspect of the do- cent group. “Some of my oldest friends are docents,” she offers. “I’ve been doing it so long …” she begins, her voice trailing off. Martha gives up on Bud, who doesn’t want lunch, and rejoins the others, who are walking in place on the canal’s towpath. “I’m leaving docents when my member- ship is up in June,” she says, and Kathi groans. “Maybe Amada will leave before then,” Kathi says. “I hope so,” Jan replies. “I’ve been pray- ing she will. I’ve been lighting candles.” It won’t matter, Martha insists. “Even if she does go, it’s too late. She’s run every- body off, she’s killed off all the support groups, she took all the fun and the smarts out of the museum. She’s a cash register, and a cash register doesn’t care about art. A cash register has no soul. As far as some of us are concerned, there is no Phoenix Art Museum anymore.” Museum from p 16 AmAdA Cruz, ACCording to CAthy SwAn, “didn’t juSt diSreSpeCt uS. She SpAt upon uS.”
