Category: Entertainment

If the question of who gets to call the shots at the Philadelphia Art Museum was a major source of friction between its former chief and board and staff, the museum’s new director and CEO arrives as something of a salve.

Eight weeks on the job, Daniel H. Weiss is signaling a philosophy that is anything but authoritarian.

“I believe very strongly in the idea of shared governance,” Weiss said in a recent interview that represents his most extended public comments since taking over the troubled museum. “Any mission-driven institution is almost axiomatically in service to all of the people who have an interest in what it does. So I don’t really have a lot of executive authority as the director of this institution.”

And yet, Weiss obviously understands that he is the one being tasked with the turnaround of one of the city’s flagship cultural groups. He also knows he must take action quickly.

“I don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m going to spend the next 12 to 18 months meeting with people and then we’ll figure out what needs to happen.’ We need to get after it.”

The listening tour

Weiss, 68, the former leader of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is well into his listening tour, talking to staff, board members, and others about the museum’s last three years with Sasha Suda at the helm and the messy split with her still playing out in courts both legal and of public opinion.

He says the next few months are about him getting a sense for “the most present problems that need to be addressed.”

Several are obvious, starting with what to do about the controversial name change and rebrand the museum rolled out in October.

“We need to sort out the rebrand and determine whether we change it or stay with it. And we’re looking at that,” said Weiss, who has put together a task force of staff and board to consider the question.

Earlier this week, the museum confirmed that it was parting ways with the marketing chief who oversaw the rebrand.

The financial picture remains challenging.

“We have a deficit. It is not sustainable and we need to fix it. In order to do that, we need to take a larger look at the organization and build a healthy model.”

There are facilities needs that are complex and very much rooted in the reality of how to pay for them. Like, what form a proposed new education center should take; what to do about the Perelman annex, the former office building across the street that opened in 2007 after a $90 million renovation and has been closed to the public since the pandemic; and where and how to address deferred maintenance to the main building.

“We need to prioritize our list so that we can begin a thoughtful plan of following up on all the work that was done before on the core project to figure out the next chapter.”

A strategic plan

The “next chapter” will eventually take shape in a new strategic plan.

In the spring and summer, Weiss hopes, conversations with board and staff will give the museum a “better sense of what our resources could be as we work our way to balance and health. And then next year, maybe early next year, we begin the process of putting together a plan.”

Weiss’ credentials in both business and art seem suited to the moment. He holds an MBA from Yale School of Management and has worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. His master’s degree in medieval and modern art and Ph.D. in Western medieval and Byzantine art were earned at Johns Hopkins University, where he is finishing up his teaching at the end of the semester.

Weiss, who has moved to Philadelphia with his wife, Sandra, sees his immediate job as reminding everyone what Philadelphia has in its museum.

The events of the last few months — the widely ridiculed rebrand, Suda’s mid-contract ouster, and the dramatic language used in her subsequent wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against the museum — have often eclipsed the art and made the main message coming out of the museum one of acrimony.

The new director is eager to change the message.

“What I’d like to do over the next six months to one year is to get everybody excited about what’s possible, what we already have. How, by supporting each other and investing excitedly in our mission, we can do something really important.”

The role of the board

Weiss also needs to consider the role of the Art Museum board, which, on the one hand, was not informed that the rebrand was final, according to some board members. On the other hand, it has been accused in Suda’s initial court filings of being overinvolved in museum matters.

“I don’t think our board needs radical restructuring … and this may seem counterintuitive in light of what you’ve been reading about in the newspapers, I think our board needs to be embraced as a real partner,” Weiss said. “And I do believe deeply in shared governance and that means the director and the senior administration have a job to do and the board has a job to do.”

“They’re different jobs but when they’re working in concert, you get much more for the institution than you do if they’re at odds with each other.”

How much of board-CEO relations is about structure, and how much is it the function of the personality of the person whose job it is to be the connective tissue? “Almost always it is more a function of the personalities than it is the structure,” he said.

As for the involvement of one emeritus board member, Julian A. Brodsky, Weiss has to determine the future of an unannounced, but reported by Philadelphia Magazine, $20 million pledge from the Comcast cofounder toward a dreamed-of education center.

“It’s an incredible gift and we’re enormously grateful for that. I’m in the process of talking about the timing of that and all of that,” he said.

The art itself

Weiss does not dispute that the museum needs changing. But a host of questions beckon.

What about the art itself? Is the museum’s pipeline of shows — some of which are years in the planning — the right mix for the audience the museum wants to attract? Why are doors open only five days and past 5 o’clock one day a week? Is a general admission ticket of $30 too high for this city?

“Every great art museum faces the same challenge, which is that these are intimidating places by design. So how do you, on the one hand, celebrate this great magnificent institution sometimes called a castle on the hill? And at the same time [be] welcoming to schoolchildren who have never been here before? That’s not easy. We faced the same issue at the Met.”

He sees the shifting societal context in which the museum finds itself as an opportunity.

“The world is a mess,” he said. He would like the museum to be an answer to that turmoil — though clearly, given the last few months, Philadelphia’s major art museum is not cloistered from conflict.

“There are very few places in the world that are entirely to the good, and art museums are among them. We are here to enrich, to enlighten, to inspire, to build community, to invite difference to come together, to have shared learning experiences for everyone,” Weiss said.

“The world is a lot bigger, more complicated, richer, and inspiring than just the world you live in on a day-to-day basis. If everybody can have that experience, we are incrementally a more civil society than we were before people came into the institution. Those are all great things.”

The Philadelphia Art Museum has parted ways with the marketing executive who oversaw the museum’s controversial rebranding campaign.

Paul Dien, the chief marketing officer hired by former museum director and CEO Sasha Suda in 2023, has resigned effective Feb. 1, the museum confirmed Tuesday.

Dien has accepted a consulting opportunity and was not available for an interview on Tuesday. The museum had no further details to share, a spokesperson said.

The change is the first in the senior executive team since veteran museum and nonprofit leader Daniel H. Weiss was brought in as director and CEO about eight weeks ago.

The museum is currently mulling whether to keep or alter the rebrand, Weiss said in a recent interview.

Dien, who was previously vice president of advancement and partnerships at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, oversaw the Art Museum’s name change and new visual identity. He and Suda had hoped the museum’s rebrand would revive sagging attendance after its unveiling in early October.

“It’s going to bring people in and help put us more clearly on the map,” Suda said at the time.

“We have so much research that shows there is this brand perception that we’re the castle on the hill,” Dien said last November, during the rebrand’s rollout. “And so my job right now is [to ask], ‘How do we come down the steps and meet people where they’re at?’”

But the campaign was widely — though not universally — mocked.

A Hyperallergic story carried the headline: “People Really Hate the Philadelphia Art Museum Rebrand.”

A review in trade blog Brand New praised the rebrand, saying that it infused the museum with a “much needed, new, distinct, and energetic identity that was sorely missing.”

The rebrand, designed by Brooklyn-based branding and design firm Gretel, came with a name change for the institution, from Philadelphia Museum of Art to Philadelphia Art Museum, as well as a shorthand moniker — PhAM, which the museum has used for its new web address, visitpham.org, and in some marketing materials.

That drew an unfortunate joke moniker from wags — PhArt.

“We are an amazing museum with an amazing collection, amazing curators, and an amazing experience, and it’s really a shame, the jokes and negative reaction to the rebranding,” said museum trustee Yoram (Jerry) Wind a few weeks after the rebrand was introduced.

Another board member, Jennifer Rice, expressed support for it shortly after its launch.

“I do like it. I love the tagline ‘Wall to Wall Art for All.’ I like that it feels fresh and feels new and feels like it would connect with the audience we’ve had trouble connecting with,” Rice said

Some critics complained that a new logo inspired by the griffin figures adorning the building’s roofline looked less like that of an art museum and more reminiscent of a beer label or soccer team emblem.

The rebrand, including the name change, new logo, and bolder graphics, also comprises a series of punchy taglines, like “Made You Look” and “Revolutionary Since 1876.”

Weiss has set up a task force of board and staff to evaluate the rebranding to “take a look at how it’s playing, what works, what doesn’t work, to do some analytical work around that and get a sense of how our various constituencies are perceiving it, recognizing that almost any rebrand is controversial at first,” he said. “The question is whether we’re in the territory of a rebrand that is counterproductive to our ambition or not.”

Their findings will be presented to the board for discussion on whether “we stay as it is now or make changes.”

Suda was ousted as director and CEO in November, three years into her five-year contract. She filed a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against the museum about a week later.