America’s Oldest City Museum Goes Woke

Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum is embroiled in a coup and beset by fads.

I’ ve written a couple of stories about exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. It’s among the most distinguished museums in the country, distinguished for its sublime collection and spirit of experimentation.

In my two Atheneum stories, I didn’t write about its board of trustees, which is the worst board in the country. Stingy, imperious, and Podunk, the Atheneum board appeared on my radar screen last week when the museum and its very good director of five years parted ways. I know Thomas Loughman slightly because he was a curator at the Clark, where I was a curator for years, though we didn’t overlap. He’s a director with both a scholarly bent and a dynamic focus on the community.

But there’s hope for the Wadsworth Atheneum yet.

I read an interview in the Hartford Courant with William R. Peelle Jr., the chairman of the board, explaining why Loughman was leaving. Peelle was hot on the diversity-and-inclusion trail. It’s just one more gimmick the board has chased rather than opening their wallets and acting like they’re trustees of a serious public museum and not a club for egotists.

Peelle wanted the museum to be all about Hartford and race. As part of the museum’s ongoing strategic planning initiative, he asked trustees to tour the museum solo. Not a bad idea. He said trustees were “surprised by the oldness of the place.” Surprising since the galleries have just been beautifully redone, and, by the way, it’s a museum, not a theme park. The Atheneum shows art from over 5,000 years. It’s the oldest public museum in the country.

Some of the trustees, Peelle said, reported no “wow” moments like, I guess, what they’d experience on a water slide or at an archery range. Duncan Harris, a new black trustee who runs a community college, said the museum’s 179-year-old façade is aloof. “It kind of looks like a medieval castle,” the brainiac said of a Gothic Revival building. “There’s not enough programming connecting the museum to the Latinx and African-American communities.” He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He got his doctorate in education from Nova Southeastern University in Florida. It’s an online school.

Elsa Núñez, another new trustee, said children of color in Hartford see little at the museum to attract them. She’s the president of the small branch of Connecticut’s state university system. She has no experience in the museum world. There wasn’t enough art “from Africa, the islands, that are rich in artistic expression,” she griped.

I looked at the Atheneum website’s list of past exhibitions. There are plenty of shows of work by African-American and Caribbean-American artists. “Children of color in Hartford” are, overwhelmingly, American. They should be seeing — and at the Atheneum they are — the art of their country. And why presume these young people will find art from Africa and the islands particularly inspiring because of race? And she’s a teacher!

Peelle said “diversity and inclusion” were to dominate the museum’s agenda. The new director might not even be an art historian. Old is out. Scholarship is out. Preservation is out. Quality’s out. It’s all about diversity and inclusion. It’s all about the trustees feeling virtuous. Loughman might not have wanted to play the game.

Peelle’s a big dope.

For all his preening and prancing over the diversity-and-inclusion flimflam, losing the director of the museum as a consequence, the Atheneum board rebelled. After board meetings all week, Peelle was pushed out as board president. On the board since 1994, with one short break, he is now history. Hardy, har, har.

The museum’s service to Hartford is exemplary as well as laser-like, consistent with the fact that it’s a museum, not a community center. In his years as director, Loughman engaged the city’s politicians — a lackluster, dysfunctional lot — and its struggling schools. It was his idea to make the Atheneum free of charge to Hartford residents.

The Atheneum is an art museum. It’s not a vehicle for a fad. It’s not a megaphone, and it’s not an experiment. What did “diversity and inclusion” mean to Peelle? The staff is not upset as staffs are in most museums. Did it mean intrusive, humiliating anti-racist training? Did it mean race-based exhibitions all the time? Or race-based hiring? Or race-based parking? Was the Meissen going to go to the school cafeteria?

If Peelle and his unsmart trustees found no buzz, that was their problem. Caravaggio, Rothko, and Pollock leave this bunch cold. No school groups have visited the Atheneum for a year. It was closed for months. The COVID mass hysteria has basically disabled culture. Loughman, to his enormous credit, opened the Atheneum the second that Connecticut’s health czar allowed. Most museums, including the art gallery and the British Art Center, still have the Keep Out sign on their front doors. What were they expecting? Studio 54?

Peelle said, “Hartford’s changed over the last 20 years, and the museum hasn’t.” This is false. Its exhibition program has changed to meet the times, as has its teaching staff. Loughman made admission to the Atheneum free for people from Hartford. The museum has bought art by African-American, Latino, and female artists. I saw the new acquisitions when I visited to review two Atheneum shows a month ago.

The Atheneum used to have trustees who were captains of industry, connoisseurs, and collectors of national prominence. Peelle is a mediocrity. He’s a midlevel financial-services manager. His predecessor as board chairman, Henry Martin, is a retired business executive with a crappy art collection. I looked at the rest of the board. There are a couple of collectors of consequence. The ombudsman for the Hartford public schools is on the board. The relationship between the Atheneum and the local schools is already strong.

With Loughman out, the board picked Jeffrey N. Brown, a trustee, as the acting director. He’s the vice president of Newman’s Own, which sells salad dressing, cookies, and dog food. Frozen pizza for everyone sounds good, but does he know anything about running a great museum?

The Atheneum board has been dysfunctional for years. In 2001 and 2002, John Rowland, while he was the governor and before he went to jail, made the revival of Hartford his top priority. He championed the redevelopment of the Atheneum’s neighborhood. George David, the head of United Technologies, was head of the Atheneum board. Now, there’s a heavy hitter. He wanted to leverage the focus on downtown Hartford on behalf of the museum.

The Atheneum proposed its own $120 million renovation, expansion, and endowment building campaign. The State of Connecticut pledged $20 million to the Atheneum. The museum hired a big-name architect, and about half the money had been raised.

Preparing for the big fundraising drive, David added new trustees to the board. Among these were Agnes Gund, Gabriella de Ferrari, Jill Kraus, and Carol LeWitt, all prominent in the New York art world. Some of the locals felt threatened. Control was paramount to them. They wanted money from outsiders. That reduced their giving obligations. But they didn’t want what they saw as interference. The Atheneum historically had relied on big corporate gifts, but with the collapse of Hartford’s dominance in insurance, defense, and banking, personal giving was vital.

Backbiting, undermining, and gossip turned epic. The rumbling mountain of yokel envy and snit exploded at a trustee meeting on December 19, 2002. I was a curator at the Clark then. I’d never known a case where the chair of a museum board quit in the middle of a meeting, but David did, walking out. I don’t know whether he slammed the door behind him.

“It was nasty, petty, and venomous, and after seeing how people acted, there was no way I wanted to be part of the place,” Kraus said when she quit. Trustees leaked emails criticizing one another to the Courant, which gleefully printed them. The publisher was one of the paysan trustees.

I read some of the resignation letters, printed in the Courant. Ferrari wrote that the locals’ behavior was “inconsistent with my perception of loyalty, gratitude, and fiduciary responsibility.” Gund, president of MoMA’s board, said she was shocked to see David “so misused and ill-treated after all he’s done.” And on and on. The $120 million expansion collapsed. Connecticut made good on its $20 million pledge, which was used to fix the roof on each of the museum’s five buildings.

History seems to repeat itself.

The trustees who remained, among them Peelle, are the same clique running the Atheneum board today. I looked at the list of donors for the renovation completed a couple of years ago when the roofs and other projects were done. Big trustee giving was conspicuously absent. They’re cheap.

I’ve known all of the Atheneum’s directors since the 1980s. The board didn’t like Patrick McCaughey, a boisterous Australian. Then they hired Peter Sutton, who came from Sotheby’s. If an Australian accent didn’t work miracles, links to a high-powered auction house in New York might. He got involved in an internal scandal, and out he went.

They next hired Kate Sellers, the development director at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “She can raise money, so we won’t have to give,” they must’ve thought with quiet satisfaction, their wallets bolted to their butts. She was gone in two years. Her crime was asking the board to give. She hadn’t gotten the memo. They didn’t like Willard Holmes, who was going to run the place efficiently since that was the flavor of the month. He left fast. They didn’t like Susan Talbott, the next director. Peelle didn’t like Loughman. Now, Peele is gone, but diversity and inclusion is still the kick.

The Wadsworth Atheneum doesn’t serve Hartford alone. It’s the civic museum for a part of Connecticut with 750,000 people. And Hartford isn’t the only town with poverty problems, and it’s not by any means the only town with racial diversity. East Hartford, across the Connecticut River, has 50,000 people. It’s a small, distressed city. You can see East Hartford from the Atheneum. Bloomfield, Windsor, and the suburbs south of Hartford have big working-class and poor populations as well as tony neighborhoods. Evidently, they’re getting the blow-off.

They don’t want a museum director. They want control. The fiasco in 2002 and 2003 proved that the board culture at the Atheneum, aside from yahooism, is control.

They want a mime. They want someone to give kids novelty entertainment. They want someone who won’t say a peep. A diversity-and-inclusion director would rile the Atheneum’s very good and serious curatorial staff. He or she — or the board might hire a “they” — would have flailed, because the Atheneum is what it is. It’s a very high-end, scholarly significant place. It’s doing a lot for Hartford’s schools, but the staff is not a team of social workers. The museum, any great museum, after a point, needs to be enjoyed on its own terms.

My theory, and I have a theory for most things, is that Peelle and his cronies on the board would have pushed to sell art for cash. The Atheneum is chronically broke, since its financial model relied on big corporate money and bucks from local executives. That’s over. The museum has endowments to buy art but not to run the place.

Peelle and a corps of grasping board hayseeds would probably have tried to plead impoverishment from a collapse in admission, event, and shop income. There’s a one-year window of opportunity to sell art for COVID-relief cash without sanctions from professional museum associations. Loughman wouldn’t countenance the sale of art to raise cash for the operating budget or for a crackpot, faddish diversity initiative.

Will Loughman go back? If he does, it would be a victory for traditional, art-and-scholarship directors, the kind I was. And it would be a warning for trustees who play the gimmick game.

If Loughman doesn’t, the museum will face a year without leadership, except Brown’s, the guy from Newman’s Own. Pass the Ranch Dressing, please.