15 March 7th–March 13th, 2019 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | Contents | FeeDBACK | oPInIon | neWs | FEATURE | nIght+DAy | CULtURe | FILm | CAFe | mUsIC | 24” $1599 26” $1979 28” $2899 Tire Prices 13” $49.00 14” $49.00 15” $50.00 16” $56.00 rims & Tire Packages 17” $749 18” $849 20” $1099 22” $1199 sTarT aT: sTarT aT: 17” $58.00 18” $62.00 20” $65.00 22” $90.00 24” $125.00 26” $144.00 28” $265.00 ing to have a bad attitude.” Swan pauses for effect. “In an email. No one met with her to ask her to calm down or be nicer or to ask what her problem was. Amada fired her in an email.” Swan met with Cruz in November 2016 to discuss Millman’s firing. “I started by saying it was nice to see her again, that we had met at such-and-such a gathering,” Swan recalls. “She interrupted me to say, ‘There are 432 docents; I can’t be expected to remember you all!’” Nothing was resolved at Swan’s meeting with Cruz, whom Swan said appeared un- interested in what she had to say about Millman or the low morale among docents. A letter-writing campaign also had no impact, Swan reports. “Hugh Ruddock wrote to every member of the board and to past docent presidents,” she says, referring to a wealthy longtime donor and retired master docent. “A hugely wealthy friend of mine wrote to Amada, who never responded. I have a list of rich people who tried to complain about what was happening, and were ignored.” A meeting of docent past presidents was crashed, according to Millman, by the chair of the board of trustees, and again nothing was resolved. After that, longtime docents began meeting privately to discuss how to move forward. And then Amada Cruz began firing more volunteers. Some, like Sylvia Wright, whom Mill- man says “gave a million docent tours and worked in the gift shop,” kept their sorrow to themselves. Others, like Gail Adams, in- sisted on standing up for herself and her fellow docents. If there were a competition among vol- unteers who are feeling bullied by Phoe- nix Art Museum, Adams would win. Hands down. “I’ve received a half-dozen letters,” she boasts, then laughs. “And one of them is from an attorney!” The first of these, from Cruz, begins with a stunningly snide reference to “as- pects of your volunteer service to the Phoenix Art Museum that you have found rewarding and that previously may have been beneficial at times” — hardly a warm- hearted thank you — and ends with a wry see-what-you-made-me-do? slur worthy of the worst wife-beater: “We regret your on- going conduct has reached this point …” Adams was a Contemporary Forum board member, enrolled in the museum’s 21st Century Society, and an early presi- dent of the Arizona Costume Institute, on whose board she served for years — until Cruz booted her in April 2016. “I’d been overheard saying not very pos- itive things about the changes at the mu- seum,” Adams admits. “But I was saying them in private conversations, expressing my frustration. Apparently that is not al- lowed, and Amada has people listening and reporting back.” A second email from Cruz, sent in May, was more to the point: “You and your hus- band are no longer members of any Sup- port Organizations.” Adams received yet another email from Cruz in October, telling her she was no lon- ger permitted to attend docent lectures, a perk of her paid membership to the muse- um’s Circles enclave. A certified letter from Mary Ellen Si- monson, an attorney at the law firm of Lewis and Roca, arrived not long after. Si- monson complains that Adams had re- cently spoke rudely to a museum employee and warns her to “correct your intolerable behavior.” Adams found Simonson’s letter amus- ing. “The best they could come up with was to threaten to remove us as Circles members,” she says. “Too late. We hadn’t re-upped.” “They were not running around naked at docent meetings,” says Swan of her fel- low volunteers. “They were challenging authority from someone who refused to talk to them about why things were changing after they’d worked a certain way for decades.” Elizabeth Teitel’s letter of warning came from docent president Rebecca Al- brecht, after Teitel asked Sáenz Oriti, at a docent meeting, if she knew how many do- cents had resigned since Sáenz Oriti took over the program. That letter crossed in the mail with Teitel’s letter of resignation. Teitel was a docent for 35 years. She left for most of the same reasons echoed by her colleagues: The current docent training has been dumbed down, de-emphasizing art history. Continuing education meetings were switched from Fridays to Mondays, when the museum and its gift shop and cafe are all closed, and who can work in a morgue? She claims Cruz shut down the Philip C. Curtis Gallery, funded as a perma- nent exhibit of the renowned local artist, because she doesn’t care about Arizona art. (Cruz claims otherwise, although the mu- seum owns and historically has shown very little work by local artists.) She says Cruz did away with the docent research com- mittee, which wrote scholarly papers de- signed to inform volunteers about the museum’s collection. “Kaela and Amada decided that no one cares about art history,” Teitel grouses, “because Kaela and Amada don’t.” Teitel and other docents complain that the museum took over booking tours, a task that docents themselves had handled for decades; and about how Sáenz Oriti disemboweled Art All Around Us, a de- cades-old art appreciation program aimed at senior citizens and others who can’t get to the museum. But mostly, Teitel says, she and 100 oth- ers left because of the lousy treatment by Cruz and her staff. “They have insulted us,” she says. “They’ve treated us like a liability instead of an asset.” It’s true that a whopping 101 docents have exited the program in the space of a year. The total docents in fiscal year 2018 was 454; eight months later, there are 353 — a 22 percent decrease, which, according to Bigler, is unprecedented: During the three previous years, docent Museum from p 13 >> p 16
