Who owns Denver Art Museum’s art?
City audit says it’s unclear on some works
A city and county of Denver audit of Denver Art Museum last week raised questions about the ownership of certain works, even as the city and museum officials deny the need to act on the audit’s conclusions.
Released Jan. 21, the audit recommended a half-dozen behind-the-scenes changes to how the institution does business, including concerns about board diversity. But it also spotlighted a rare clash between auditor Timothy O’Brien and the museum over access and ownership.
The museum received more than $20 million in annual funding from the city in 2018 and 2019, including bond funds for its ongoing North Building renovation and construction project. But its formalized relationship with Denver, which began in 1932, is in jeopardy if it doesn’t clarify the ownership of several works it shares with the city, O’Brien concluded after his 10month audit.
“The Denver Art Museum’s agreement with the city is unclear and lacks documentation of which entity owns what and what each entity’s responsibilities are,” O’Brien wrote. “The museum also needs to strengthen how it handles inventory planning, and its governing board could better represent the diversity of the communities it serves.”
Museum leaders and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s office both disagreed with O’Brien on the need to update their formal partnership. They cited a smooth relationship and planned, future actions that will eventually follow O’Brien’s guidance.
“The Mayor’s Office agreed with six of the seven recommendations in the report, which will go a long way toward addressing the concerns raised by the audit,” wrote Hancock
spokesman Mike Strott, referencing O’Brien’s recommendations on how to improve the 35member museum board’s recruitment and bylaws.
“However,” he continued, “we felt it was premature to leap straight to creating an entirely new operating agreement before we’ve implemented those six recommendations, and before we’ve had a chance to consider whether a new operating agreement is what’s really needed.”
Denver Art Museum officials declined to identify which art works were in potential ownership dispute because, they argued, there were none.
“We don’t really feel like there’s a lack of clarity around that,” said Andrea Fulton, deputy director and chief marketing officer for Denver Art Museum. “It’s a matter of procedural documentation. We agree, of course, and are more than happy to work with the city to reconcile all those assets. But there’s not really a lack of understanding between us.”
O’Brien’s biggest frustration — and one that recalls his adversarial Denver Zoo audit of 2017, in which Zoo officials offered months of resistance before capitulating — is that museum leaders refused to provide him full access to their ARGUS data. That’s the museum’s collection management system that catalogs in fine detail the nonprofit’s 70,000-plus paintings, sculptures and other works of art.
O’Brien said he was told by museum staff that an intern once made an unauthorized copy of the closely-held database, which museum officials consider a valuable extension of their collected works. As a result, he said, museums officials flatly refused to allow him to make a digital copy of the archive for off-site analysis. O’Brien’s staff was also closely monitored at times while collecting data from the archive on-site, he said.
“I don’t like being equated with an intern, and I think I’ve got the law on my side. The law is a higher calling than a policy of the museum,” O’Brien said. “This is one reason why the audit took as long as it did.”
Deputy museum director Fulton disagreed, saying O’Brien’s team was given full access and training on how to use the database. She said it would never be acceptable to take a museum work or artifact out of the building, and that its archive is treated the same way “from a security and integrity standpoint.”
“The Museum has no knowledge of any inappropriate copying of data by an intern,” Fulton wrote in a follow-up email. “The bottom line is that the team had unfiltered access to the data onsite.”
O’Brien’s recommendations are advisory, not legally binding, but they are authorized by the city and county of Denver charter. O’Brien has been making his way through the city’s top-tier cultural nonprofits in recent years, including the aforementioned Denver Zoo, as well as Denver Botanic Gardens. His 2018 report on the latter urged the gardens to improve safety practices, among other recommendations.
Fulton said museum leaders appreciated the outside perspective on how they operate. They were already planning to update many of their practices as they moved this year into their expanded campus, following major renovations and construction at and around 100 W. 14th Ave., Fulton said.
“These are windows into different areas of the work, and the operations of an art museum are big and broad and extensive,” she said. “And that’s exactly how we have digested this audit. These are really targeted, specific areas of potential improvement that we’re happy to investigate.”
Museum leaders were hoping to unveil their $150 million redo of the Geo Ponti-designed North Building (which will be reintroduced as the Martin Building) and a 50,000-square-foot new visitors center in June 2020, but pushed that back as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Their new target date is this fall.