Akron Art Museum chair defends handling of allegations
“Message Matters.”
That was the name of a simple art installation Mark Masuoka brought to the Akron Art Museum several months after he was hired as its director in 2013.
Every night for a year, lights inside a museum stairwell blinked on and off, repeatedly sending out the same four-letter Morse code message to the city: Luv U, Luv U, Luv U.
The beacon of love appeared to be a signal of change: Masuoka said he wanted the Akron Art Museum to reach beyond its walls and serve a much wider, more diverse audience, often in the neighborhoods where they live.
Some say he made great public strides during nearly seven years.
Yet inside the museum, a crisis simmered.
In public, the museum publicly celebrated works by an ethnic array of male and female artists, many of whose work was influenced by race, sex or disenfranchisement.
But behind museum doors, some former employees say, racism, sexism and bullying flourished among museum staff, sometimes fueled by Masuoka himself.
One former employee has told several news publications that Masuoka used racial code to describe residents of Akron’s Summit Lake, a largely poor, African-American neighborhood that city leaders and nonprofits have been trying to revive in recent years.
While the museum publicly embraced its mission to bring art to Summit Lake, Masuoka privately spoke disparagingly about “Summit Lake people,” the employee was quoted as saying.
In one meeting, she said Masuoka even wondered aloud if Summit Lake residents could access one of the museum’s smartphone applications because they used “throwaway gangster phones,” several publications reported.
Masuoka has so far not responded to the Beacon Journal’s interview requests.
He resigned Monday, leaving a trail of questions that have largely gone unanswered by him or the museum’s board of directors, which has known about the employee allegations since June, when it quietly hired a law firm to investigate.
Masuoka has since hired an attorney, Benjamin Rudolph Delson. On Saturday, Delson sent the Beacon Journal an email saying that Masuoka “certainly denies ever having used racially-coded language, and he has spent his professional life standing against racism, sexism, and bullying of all kinds.”
Dual crises
The internal turmoil at the 98-year-old museum comes at an extraordinarily precarious moment.
The museum faces the double whammy of managing an ugly crisis while dealing with the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced its closure through at least June.
On Wednesday, reporters from the Akron Beacon Journal emailed 16 questions to Jon Fiume, a former museum board member who was appointed the museum’s interim director Tuesday.
Among other things, the newspaper asked about:
- The museum’s financial health. Even before the scandal, the museum forecast losing as much as $933,000 in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year ending June 30, or about a quarter of its annual $4.2 million budget because of its ongoing closure.
- The possible impact of the internal crisis on donor support, particularly that of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a consistent funder that in 2017 gave the museum its largest single gift in history, $8 million, and also, separately, funds projects at Summit Lake. A Knight Foundation spokesman declined to comment for this article.
- The law firm’s investigation. Although not considered a public record under Ohio law, detailed information about the findings from the investigation may help clear up confusion over what happened at the museum and how the museum board handled it.
On Friday, Dr. Drew Engles, president of the museum board of trustees, responded to the Beacon Journal with a two-page letter. Engles issued a brief statement May 4, but had not returned Beacon Journal reporter calls for weeks. The letter did not answer individual questions, saying the museum was still gathering relevant information.
But he did indicate that findings of the investigation are off-limits.
“I wish to be as transparent as possible about the Board response to the concern of our employees in 2019, but I cannot provide material that would be part of an individual’s personnel file as we treat such information as private and confidential.”
In the letter, Engles doesn’t take sides on what Masuoka is accused of saying about Summit Lake residents and their phones.
“I have no firsthand knowledge of what Mr. Masuoka said or didn’t say,” he wrote in the letter. “What I do know with certainty is that during Mr. Masuoka’s term as director, the Museum saw a dramatic increase in the community outreach from our institution.”
Since 2015, Engles said the museum had brought largescale reproductions of artwork to more than a dozen neighborhoods and towns.
Several he listed, including Summit Lake, are racially diverse and poor.
“Furthermore, when Art Institutions are being lambasted for catering to certain tastes long championed by members homogenous in their ethnicity, level of affluence and predilection for western European art, the Akron Art Museum can rest proudly on the fact that we have been successful in celebrating the work of artists diverse not only in their ethnicity and gender, but who have also been disenfranchised in one way or another.”
Engles listed a series of artists the museum highlighted as examples, including Nick Cave, an acclaimed African-American fabric sculptor from Chicago whose work was on display at the museum last year and brought to life by dancers at the Summit Lake Community Center.
In the letter, Engles recounts the museum board’s handling of employee complaints of racism, sexism and bullying this way:
The museum board received an anonymous letter “purported to be from 27 current and former employees” outlining complaints of racism, sexism and bullying in June, he wrote.
“It was disheartening to read many of their concerns,” Engles wrote.
“The board moved swiftly to hire employment lawyers who, over the next month, interviewed every employee willing to step forward, along with other staff members, supervisors and administrators.
“As a result of these extensive interviews, some [allegations] were substantiated, some were unsubstantiated, and some were disproven,” Engles wrote. In the letter, Engles didn’t recount any of the allegations, or which ones were substantiated.
Some employees were disciplined, others counseled, Engles wrote.
“Any individual who was found to have exhibited racist or sexist behavior is no longer a member of our staff,” Engles wrote, saying the board would “not tolerate any racist, sexist or discriminatory behavior.”
In addition to sorting out employee complaints, the law firm also made recommendations for changes at the museum to solve some of the issues employees raised.
Engles said the board adopted them all.
“Some were as simple as designating a lactation room for employees,” Engles wrote. “Others were more nuanced such as an increased awareness for implicit bias.”
One of the museum’s most “glaring deficiencies,” Engles said, was the need for an onsite human resources professional, who was brought in.
The staff member started by training the museum’s leadership team — Engles didn’t specify what type of training — and was starting to train other employees when the museum closed during the pandemic.
That was about eight months after the board received the letter from employees.
Layoffs spark new complaints
If it wasn’t for the pandemic, the public may have never learned about the employee allegations and Matsuoka would likely still be in charge of the Akron Art Museum.
But employees began reaching out to ARTnews, after the museum in March began layoffs.
Some believed the museum was using the pandemic as a cover to get rid of the remaining employees who signed the June 2019 letter that triggered the investigation. Only one of those who signed remains employed by the museum, now on a part-time basis, reported by ARTnews April 30 and confirmed by former employees interviewed by the Beacon Journal.
“What we are seeing is severe mismanagement by leaders who are using the pandemic as a scapegoat,” former museum employee Jen Alverson told ARTnews.
In his letter, Engles disputed any claim of retaliation, insisting the museum tried to retain as many of its employees as possible while dealing with the financial reality of closing during the pandemic.
“While a callous approach would have been to simply initiate immediate layoffs, the Museum elected to provide employees with both of their April paychecks,” Engles wrote.
Moreover, he said Masuoka initiated a “board challenge,” asking the members to raise their level of giving through one-time gifts to the operating fund, early membership renewals or conversion to higher membership levels.
Watching these two scenarios unfolding simultaneously — employees claiming they were being laid off in retaliation as Masuoka was trying to raise money to help them — “was as gut-wrenching as it was ironic,” Engles wrote.
Engles doesn’t say what ultimately led to Masuoka’s resignation last week , or whether he wanted Masuoka to stay.
In the end, with lots of questions yet to be answered, Engles tried looking forward to a new message that matters.
“We believe that the most recent course of events, as painful as they have been, have provided us with a distinct opportunity,” he wrote. “We have an interim director [Fiume] that the Board believes has a unique skill set that will foster cultural transformation that will make the Museum better than we have ever been.”