Arts Center hires Texan for top job

Leader of El Paso museum set to take over at Little Rock facility

The Arkansas Arts Center on Tuesday selected Victoria Ramirez, the director of the El Paso Museum in Texas, to lead the downtown Little Rock museum as it embarks on a $128 million makeover.

The public museum’s board unanimously agreed to hire the 49-year-old after an hourlong closed meeting.

The quick voice vote concluded a process otherwise playing out in secret, with details about potential candidates and how they were vetted shielded from public view.

Ramirez is tentatively set to start in October, when the museum is scheduled to break ground on its renovation and expansion, board President Merritt Dyke said.

Ramirez said the project will “undoubtedly usher in the most expansive era” in the Arts Center’s history.

The Arts Center’s chief financial officer, Laine Harber, has filled the post on an interim basis for a year since former Executive Director Todd Herman left for a new job.

Plans to renovate and expand the museum, which is in MacArthur Park, have been in the works since 2015.

Harber has publicly maintained he had no interest in the full-time job and said Tuesday he didn’t apply for it. Harber wants to stay with the Arts Center as chief financial officer and hopes to see through the museum’s overhaul, he said.

“I hope I’ll have the opportunity to stay on,” Harber said. “In all honesty I don’t know much yet.”

Shortly after the meeting, Dyke said he would provide details about Ramirez’s compensation later in the day, but he later declined, saying he hadn’t “received any documentation as to what’s been agreed to.”

Herman earned roughly $210,000 per year when he left the job.

“[Ramirez’s] deep experience in exhibitions, education, planning, and fundraising comes at the perfect time as we work to strengthen the Arkansas Arts Center as the regions’ premier center for visual and performing arts,” Dyke said.

The closed session at which trustees discussed hiring Ramirez came near the end of the board’s August meeting. State law allows public bodies to meet in private to consider “employment, appointment, promotion, demotion, disciplining, or resignation of any public officer or employee.” Dyke cited “employment” as the basis for the session.

When reporters and museum staff members were invited back into the room an hour later, Dyke said the board voted unanimously to hire Ramirez and announced trustees would then do so in public.

A three-page news release announcing Ramirez’s appointment was distributed immediately after the vote.

Ramirez has served as director of the El Paso museum since early 2017. She oversaw a collection of more than 7,000 works, 12 annual exhibitions and an art school.

Rebecca Krasne, immediate past chairwoman for the El Paso museum’s foundation, said “Little Rock is lucky to get” Ramirez and her 2½-year tenure there was “too short.”

Krasne specifically praised Ramirez’s focus on the museum’s Kress Collection, a grouping of 57 European paintings and two marble sculptures.

“Under her leadership, she and her team completely reimagined and reinstalled our Kress Collection, and she was in the process of renovating all of our upstairs galleries,” Krasne said. “She built a team here that was extraordinarily empowered to do their jobs well.”

Before taking the El Paso job, Ramirez was deputy director of the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin and was the education director at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

She holds a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the University of Houston, a master’s in education and art history from George Washington University and a bachelor’s in art history from the University of Maryland, College Park.

“At first glance, that’s what I envisioned the leader being, someone with a strong arts and education background,” Harber said.

“The Arkansas Arts Center is a jewel for Little Rock and the region, and the project to re-envision the Arts Center will undoubtedly usher in the most expansive era in the institution’s history,” Ramirez, said in a statement.

Fundraisers have secured at least $118 million toward the $128 million price tag to overhaul the museum. That sum includes $31.2 million raised from Little Rock’s sale of hotel tax-backed revenue bonds last year.

Stephens Inc. chairman and chief executive Warren Stephens, who along with his wife Harriet led the campaign to raise money for the museum expansion, said Ramirez’s hiring means that the “Arts Center Board is reaffirming its commitment to the inspirational power and educational possibilities” of art.

The Arts Center Foundation convened a search committee to find an executive director and contracted with the private firm Phillips Oppenheim to assist with the search, Dyke said. Neither he nor any other museum trustees were on the committee, he said.

The search committee made a recommendation to the board, Dyke said.

“The board did not consider more than one candidate,” he said.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Tuesday afternoon filed open-records requests with the museum, the Arts Center Foundation and Phillips Oppenheim.

The request seeks all applications for the position submitted over the past year and any working papers, notes or internal memos related to the search maintained by those entities.

The newspaper argued state Supreme Court precedent in the 1990 case City of Fayetteville v. Edmark compels the foundation and the search firm to comply with state Freedom of Information Act and make those documents public because their involvement in the hiring process amounts to public business.

“The Arkansas Arts Center is a jewel for Little Rock and the region, and the project to re-envision the Arts Center will undoubtedly usher in the most expansive era in the institution’s history.” — Victoria Ramirez, hired as director of the Arkansas Arts Center