The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2019. Photo by Geoff Livingston via Flickr.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, now the Art Museum of Philadelphia, has been in decline for a number of years.
Director Timothy Rub attempted to hold the line and keep up appearances for a good while. To a large extent, he succeeded. Exhibition openings (for the press) were well-organized and still special events with speeches and tables of breakfast delicacies for journalists on assignment. The old guard at the museum took the press seriously, a tradition going back to Anne d’Harnoncourt’s tenure when press events were actual sit-down diners (white table cloths and wine), where a Philadelphia journalist might find him or herself seated beside someone from the Wall Street Journal.
Under Rub’s tenure, most press events were held in the Grand Court, something of a scale-down from the d’Harnoncourt era but still respectable and something to look forward to.
Both d’Harnoncourt and Rub had a public face. They mixed and mingled with the press over a glass of wine and engaged in conversation. I recall a conversation I had with Rub after he had been at the museum for a few months. He wanted to know a little bit about me. He was interested and curious. I had had the same relationship with d’Harnoncourt (I’ve written about my experiences with d’Harnoncourt in Broad + Liberty some time ago.)
It’s unfortunate that a number of internal scandals rocked Rub’s tenure. This was when the #MeToo movement was at its height, and when that movement quickly morphed into a Stalinesque witch hunt. Men were being accused of something they supposedly said or did twenty and thirty years ago. All that mattered was the accusation. No evidence, no defense, just the axe and guillotine — the man in question was out.
A great change occurred after Rub was gone.
Suddenly all the career-earnest interns and new employees of the museum, the young guys and women one always saw at press events, were gone. It was as if a career at the museum was suddenly deemed not worthy of one’s time. And with this disappearance came a more utilitarian type of employee, people looking for jobs rather than careers. They were a far more casual group and many of them lacked that “museum aura” feeling I had known for ages.
Enter the new CEO, Sasha Suda.
She was from Canada. The sound of the name caused me to pause. Call it a vibe. I’m not xenophobic but I felt what I felt. The museum continued to have press exhibition openings, and I continued to attend but the new director always managed to be absent, or she managed to speak to journalists at the very beginning of the event before I got there and then retreated to her office. It was a full year or more before I actually saw her.
About this time, museum press events were slowly changing. They seemed a little hurried and more abbreviated now: I could see that old guard PMA formality was slowly being eroded.
The new boss liked things simple.
When Communications Director Norman Keyes left the museum, PMA in my mind became even more handicapped. Keyes was on top of things. He answered every email. Suddenly the museum had a string of people handling communications. Communications lacked a single face. It was bad.
Two journalists who have been attending museum events for as long as I have — 30 years — told me at a Barnes Foundation press event some months ago that it took them weeks to get press credentials for a PMA exhibition. I said, “What exhibition, what did I miss?” They expressed dismay. This was, I believe, in August 2025 and they were already talking about how difficult it might be to get on the press list for Dreamland: Surrealism at 100, the museum’s new exhibition due to open November 8 and run till February 16, 2026.
I made a special note of the Surrealism exhibition, and immediately emailed the museum about being on the list but heard nothing. I assume that email went into dead space.
The phenomenon of woke female curators and CEOs taking over cultural spaces across the nation has garnered a lot of attention. A past SEPTA female millennial CEO spent millions of dollars on a wasteful design project, rearranging lettering on subway stops and coming up with clever alphabet letter arrangements (like variations on LGBTQ) in subway cars, as if she was trying to send a message. Her tenure was a disaster.
Then there was the woke female CEO who almost destroyed the Mutter Museum.
I could tell that Sasha Suda was cut from this same cloth. There’s a pattern here: the (mostly) woke current head of The Athenaeum of Philadelphia has changed the programs there to match the urban leftist environment. Members have complained to me how she has cut receptions in half, sometimes eliminating them completely.
Cutting receptions down to the bare minimum seems to be a trait among these woke ladies. They also have a fixation on re-designing things, hence Sasha’s renaming of the museum to the Art Museum of Philadelphia, which has a pedestrian, grassroots feel to it, and which cost nearly $200,000.
(If they don’t know what to do on the job, they do something cosmetic.)
In any event, it took me nearly a week and a half to find out who handled PMA communications so I could attend the Surrealist press event.
When I attended the exhibition the other day I noticed certain changes I didn’t like. The Frank Gehry designed glass gateway to the underground garage was decked out like a movie marquee. One advertisement for the exhibition was a huge red billboard reading “Revolution,” which might have been lifted out of Stalinist Russia.
The atmosphere at the exhibition check-in table was dour and decidedly unhappy. Sasha Suda has already been fired but I asked if there was somebody I could talk to at a later time about the change in leadership. The young woman at the desk didn’t smile but seemed genuinely annoyed. She reminded me that the museum was only concentrating on the exhibition. It sounded a wee bit like a scolding. I reminded her that I didn’t want to talk to anyone “now,” but later.
As for the reception, it was a threadbare event with a miniature tray of cookies and bottled water for journalists. That’s it. Casual and utilitarian.
“The Philadelphia Museum of Art is dead,” I thought to myself. Still, when I walk through those grand hallways and look at the art, my mind goes back to d’Harnoncourt and the old days when the institution was truly grand.
While waiting for the 38 bus on museum grounds to go home, I encountered an old woman whom I thought had attended the press event, but when I asked her if she had been she said no.
“I don’t go to the museum much any more,” she said. “I used to go all the time. But it’s ugly there now. There’s all this in-fighting. It’s not a nice place.”
