MOCA Cleveland to reopen Oct. 1 as it reckons with charges of censorship, racial blind spots – cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio The normally vibrant Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland has been closed for a full six months, far longer than other cultural institutions in the region that shut down in March in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

It wasnt just the public health crisis that kept MOCAs building in University Circle shuttered for so long, and at a steep price, forcing layoffs, pay cuts and plans to reduce the museums hours.

In addition to figuring out how to reopen safely, the museum has been sorting through fallout over its controversial decision last winter to cancel an exhibition of drawings by New York artist Shaun Leonardo depicting police killings of Black men and youths.

An artists accusation

The cancellation led the artist to accuse MOCA publicly in June of censoring him. Jill Snyder, who had led the museum for 23 years, resigned shortly thereafter. The show that would have come to Cleveland is now on view at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Mass.

Meanwhile, MOCA Cleveland, founded in 1968 as a non-collecting institution focused on exhibiting contemporary art from around the world, is poised to reopen Oct. 1 as it grapples with what went wrong over the Leonardo show and how to fix it.

Last month, the museum hired PPICW, an Atlanta-based consulting firm, to help it examine whether the museums own practices reinforced structural racism and how to transform a hierarchical office culture that may have contributed to the Leonardo debacle.

In an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer the first since the controversy over the Leonardo show Interim Executive Director and CEO Megan Lykins Reich described how the museum is adjusting after what she called the "watershed moment that happened in June.''

- Megan Lykins Reich, interim director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, said the institution is learning from what she called "the watershed moment'' that occurred when it made the controversial decision to cancel an exhibition of drawings of Black victims of police violence. Museum of Contemporary Art ClevelandMuseum of Contemporary Art Cleve

"As humans we do often learn more from mistakes than our successes,'' said Reich, a native of Cincinnati who worked her way up the ranks at MOCA from a curatorial fellowship in 2004. I think this was an opportunity for us to learn and we took it seriously.

Pandemic impact

Aside from its unique circumstances, the news from MOCA echoes that of other Northeast Ohio cultural institutions slammed by the pandemic.

MOCA anticipates losing 25 percent of its revenues in 2021, or roughly $900,000 on a $3.5 million budget, because of the pandemic, Reich said.

As a consequence, the museum laid off 10 employees in two groups in July and earlier this month, effectively reducing its staff by 20 percent to 36 employees.

The museum also imposed a 10% pay cut on its top managers, and reduced exhibition seasons from three to two a year, Reich said.

Furthermore, the museum is cutting public hours from six to three days a week in order to reduce expenses.

When the museum reopens Oct. 1, staffers will focus two days a week on providing online programming on its digital platforms, Reich said. And, while its galleries are closed, the museum will host students of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District two days a week, using the building as a remote classroom.

To provide room for social distancing, the museum is closing its retail shop and using the area as its main entrance lobby because it has more space than the original lobby.

Visitors arriving at the museum, located at Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road in University Circles Uptown district, will have to follow health protocols, including a wellness check at the door, and mandatory use of face coverings.

MOCA will feature an exhibition by Margaret Kilgallen in its winter series. (Image courtesy Margaret Kilgallen, MOCA)

Shows that were on view in March, including a retrospective exhibition on the work of the late Margaret Kilgallen, and "Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom,'' a show of works by Black and Indigenous artists, will be extended through Jan. 2.

A new exhibition, opening in February and co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, will focus on works by 20 to 30 emerging and under-recognized artists from across the Midwest.

Beyond those basics, Reich and other members of the museums staff and board said theyre still in a period of institutional soul-searching.

Internal conflicts

The process hasnt been entirely smooth. A group of employees who call themselves the MOCA Collective staged an informal slowdown over the summer and drafted a series of grievances, copies of which have been obtained by cleveland.com.

The documents question the museums top-down management style and the truthfulness of MOCAs public statements about the cancellation of the Leonardo show. They also include the statement that staff of color are in the lowest level positions and do not have any real power at MOCA.

Reich said the document was never shared with museum leaders or board members, even though she encouraged the group to do so.

MOCA is not unique in facing such accusations. Museums and cultural institutions around the world have recently faced scrutiny and protests over everything from workplace violations and toxic office cultures to lack of racial and social equity and the social impact of trustees' business activities.

Such complaints have been heightened this year by the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country after George Floyd died under a police officers knee in Minneapolis in May.

The most visible example locally has been the Akron Art Museum, where laid-off employees raised accusations of racism, sexism and bullying of staff by managers. The museum reopened in July, as former employees picketed the institution.

The turmoil at MOCA, in contrast, stayed inside.

"We needed time,'' said Amy Cronauer, the museums director of foundation giving. "COVID alone is challenging, but in the face of the community conversations around the [Leonardo] exhibition not happening, there was staff discussion, and a little unrest.''

Institutional disconnect

It wasnt that MOCA ignored issues of racial and social equity in programming and outreach.

Larry Oscar, president of the museums board of directors, estimated that since the museum moved to its new building in 2012, some 40 percent of its exhibitions presented work by non-majority artists.

To mark its 50th anniversary, the museum announced in 2019 that it was eliminating admission fees. It hired LaTanya Autry as the first participant in a curatorial fellowship designed for emerging curators of color, and started its Engagement Guide program for more than 15 paid apprentices to provide security and to engage visitors in conversations about art.

Snyder described the program as a professional on-ramp for young Clevelanders aspiring to museum careers and said the program would reflect demographics of Cuyahoga County, which is 30 percent Black. Reich said that the Engagement Guide program has been preserved, despite the latest cutbacks in spending.

But for some employees, the furor over the cancellation of the Leonardo exhibition showed a disconnect between the museums policies and programs, and how it actually functions internally.

- Latanya Autry, the Gund Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary ArtCleveland, has criticized the institution over its handling and cancellation of a controversial exhibition of drawings by New York artist Shaun Leonardo depicting police killings of blacks. Steven Litt, Cleveland.comSteven Litt, Cleveland.com

Autry, who is Black and widely known in the art world as a leader of Museums are Not Neutral, a movement devoted to equity-based transformation, said publicly in June that she felt marginalized as one of a handful of Black employees on the museums professional staff.

"Theres no support for me,'' she said at the time.

Failure of communication

The cancellation of the Leonardo show also highlighted how MOCA failed to anticipate early on that the exhibition could have disturbed Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot and killed by Cleveland police in 2014 while he was playing with a toy gun. Leonardos show would have included drawings based on surveillance videos of Tamirs death.

Without referring to Rice, though the museum tried belatedly to reach out to her privately, Snyder wrote in a public apology that MOCA cancelled the show because it didnt want to traumatize Clevelanders affected by police violence.

But she then wrote that the museum regretted the decision and that it had failed to seek diverse views about Leonardos work in the citys Black community.

"Through exchanges with trusted and valued community members, weve had tough conversations with feedback that the Black community is not a monolith,'' Snyder said in hers statement.

Reich declined in her interview to discuss Snyder, other than to praise her accomplishments, including leading construction of the museums new home, a four-story structure wrapped in reflective black steel.

In a statement she posted in late August on MOCAs website, Reich said that flawed processes during the exhibitions cancellation had a "negative impact on many individuals and revealed our roles in perpetuating institutional practices that reinforce structural racism and implicit bias.''

Constructive steps

She issued her own apology over the cancellation the museums third on the topic and pledged to undertake actions that included hiring PPICW to undertake equity training and anti-racism education.

Other steps the museum will take include:

- Setting up a staff and board committee to audit internal practices through "an anti-racism lens.''

- Developing public events to address topics including racism in art museums and the art world, and the "role of art in justice, and the ethics of representation.''

- Creating a paid community advisory committee to help guide the museum in public engagement and programming.

The meltdown over the Leonardo exhibition was surprising for a once sure-footed institution with a long history of presenting cutting-edge art in Cleveland.

In its early decades, the institution now known as MOCA championed leading contemporary artists from Cleveland and around the world that the far bigger, richer and stodgier Cleveland Museum of Art then virtually ignored.

MOCA brought works by Christo, Andy Warhol, Red Grooms, Jasper Johns, Frank Gehry and Robert Rauschenberg to Cleveland. It staged performance art happenings. It wasnt afraid of controversy. In 1996, during the culture wars over public funding of the arts, it did a show on artists reactions to the American flag, including a piece that invited viewers to stand on Old Glory.

An upstart matures

Now, more than 50 years later, MOCA is adjusting to middle age in an angular, sharply faceted building whose shiny facades make it feel both attractive and somehow unapproachable, like a person wearing mirror shades.

Marjorie Talalay, left, and Nina Sundell, opened the New Gallery, which evolved into the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, in December, 1968 with backing from collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund.Plain Dealer file

Oscar, the board president, said MOCA wont start a search for a new director until it completes more work on racial equity with the Atlanta-based consulting firm.

Theres a danger, though, that MOCA could somehow become cautious, afraid to show anything that could offend anyone for any reason. If it loses its courage, it will have lost touch with its roots as a gutsy champion of the new.

Thats a line MOCA will have to learn to walk.

"We are looking to grow and become more transparent, and are grappling with how to use art to explore the tougher questions in life, but also in a way that doesnt cause harm,'' said Cronauer, the director of foundation giving.

Nicole Ledinek, the museums curator of education and engagement, for one, said shes confident that the museum can find a way forward.

"MOCAs essence is still intact,'' she said. It will keep asking people to be thinkers and to take risk and to challenge themselves and to grow.

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MOCA Cleveland to reopen Oct. 1 as it reckons with charges of censorship, racial blind spots - cleveland.com