Art museum director resigns following allegations
Mark Masuoka, director of the Akron Art Museum since 2013, resigned from his post Monday, several weeks after news stories revealed allegations of racism, sexism and bullying of employees by managers during his tenure.
The museum’s board of trustees accepted Masuoka’s resignation Monday but did not make the decision public until Tuesday in a press release. Details of Masuoka’s resignation, such as whether he received severance, were not immediately available.
The institution, which announced in March it would be closed through June 30 in response to the coronavirus pandemic, also announced that former museum board member Jon Fiume will serve as interim director while a search begins for a permanent replacement.
The museum will establish a multi-faceted search committee comprised of board members, museum staff and community leaders with credentials in both the art world and the Akron region, the museum said. The committee will appoint an executive search firm to guide the search.
“In accepting Mark’s resignation, the Board agreed it was time for a change in leadership that represents an opportunity to create a new direction for the Museum as we build a new organizational culture for the future,” Dr. Drew Engles, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees, said in a news release this week.
Fiume is an active member of Akron’s civic and arts community, the museum said.
His current or former roles include Board Director and
Vice Chairman, Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens; ArtsNow Board Trustee and Vice President; Reviewer of the Knight Foundation’s Arts Challenge Akron, and former Board Trustee of the Akron Art Museum from 2005-2015.
In June 2019, 27 employees shared an unsigned letter of complaint with museum trustees. The existence of the letter, detailing numerous incidents that had occurred over the previous year, was first reported April 30 on the website of ARTnews magazine.
The museum said in a press release the same day that trustees quickly hired an Akron law firm to investigate the complaints and to make recommendations.
The museum made several changes last summer and fall after the law firm reported it had substantiated some of the claims, but the institution would not describe any of the adjustments because they involved personnel.
Critics of Masuoka and of the museum’s handling of the allegations made by employees were not satisfied by the museum’s actions.
Discontent among former and current staff members about the museum’s handling of its internal problems spilled into public view after the publication of the ARTnews story in April.
Richard Rogers, a former museum president and a major donor, called on May 7 for Masuoka’s removal as director.
Annie McFadden, deputy mayor of Akron, urged employees on May 8 to report any claims of racism or sexism to the Akron Civil Rights Commission.
And in a news story published on cleveland.com on May 16, two former employees laid off from the museum on March 30 said publicly for the first time that they had heard Masuoka use what they described as racially coded language to describe black residents of Akron.
Masuoka’s alleged statements were included in the anonymous letter sent to trustees in 2019.
Neither the museum nor Masuoka have denied the claim.
Masuoka joined the Akron Art Museum after having managed a strong turnaround at the respected Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, an international artist-in-residence program in Omaha, Nebraska.
In several articles during his tenure at Bemis, The Omaha World-Herald reported that Masuoka rescued the center from a budget deficit in 2003 and later turned it into “what many consider to be one of the city’s most forward-thinking arts organizations.”
In Akron, Masuoka succeeded Mitchell Kahan, a popular and widely respected director who left the museum after 26 years.
Kahan led an architecturally dramatic, $35 million expansion and renovation completed in 2007.