(The members of the museum’s board of governors and board of trustees are overwhelmingly white.) “Clearly there’s no investment or attention being paid to what’s being learned or communicated in the training,” she said. “Because if there were, there’s no way a job posting would’ve been written like that, let alone for a museum director.”Venable, a former deputy director at both the Dallas Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, has had a controversial tenure during nearly nine years at the helm of the Indianapolis museum. His commitment to cost-cutting led him to reduce the staff by about 11 percent and to institute an admission fee at the museum. Though Venable has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University, it was his departure from traditional art experiences that made him unpopular in the community.

Source: New York Times February 17, 2021 20:26 UTC