Photo by Zhicheng Zhao on Wikimedia Commons
Thom Nickels: Renamed, rebranded, and reduced — What happened to the Philadelphia Museum of Art?
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.”
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.
It is ever thus in the world of fine art. Because the people now in charge are badly educated in art and have little to no talent, they substitute the cause d’jour for the actual mission of the museum. Art for the uplifting of the viewers mind and soul is subordinated to political and ideological propaganda. I am reminded of the relentless journey in communist counties to the drab and dreary, but politically correct art. It is like looking on Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence. The horrifying thing is that the attack on non “woke” art is an attack on the very foundations of western civilization,
Literally NOT what’s been happening but please keep telling those of us who actually work in this sector all about the good old days. Imagine a world where largely white male leadership has ignored a changing world and changing mandate, leveraging their institutions in convoluted ways and leading them ever closer to the brink. Imagine an era where those piles of literal sh*t are then handed over to women, often black women, who are then expected to magically fix decades of poor leadership — with great window dressing — and challenged at every turn by the same backwards facing “leaders” who think oh so very much of themselves. Please do sit down and just stop. The rest of us are tired of your inability or unwillingness to learn anything new.
Did the author mention race? The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The delightful thing about current events is people make it nice and easy, by showing their stripes so plainly these days.
Want to wear a mask in public? Great. Makes it easy to evaluate that person.
Want to make outrageous claims about the environment and be oblivious about the impact of the diesel engine upon society? Great. Makes it super easy to evaluate that person.
Want to put your pronouns in your signature block? Great. Makes it super easy to evaluate that person.
Would you please consider the logging industry, and print this comment.
Hey, Elaine. You don’t speak for anybody but yourself.
The rest of us are tired of the nonsense of people always complaining about what they’re tired of from society. Give it a rest already.
What’s “new” in the art world is pretentious tripe from the children of privilege.
Did you read the article? He gives his highest praise, by far, to
Anne d’Harnoncourt’s leadership. How can spending, now reportedly 1 million , on a title shuffle, no one can explain and without the board’s approval, in any way not be seen as a spectacular bust?
Who is she to spend that kind of money on her own say so? The board had to can her after that. That was plenty to trigger the ” for cause.” Calling members of the Board ” a cabal” in her lawsuit is laughable. It’s called the Board. She threw down the gauntlet. They picked it up.
Typical response from an out of touch wokester. Keep ruining everything that was once great. And maybe you should “sit down and just stop”
Imagine watching decades of failed governance, financial mismanagement, and institutional rot — and deciding the real tragedy is the lack of pastries at press events. This isn’t journalism; it’s nostalgia for the days when the “old guard” handed out wine and press packets while quietly driving Philadelphia’s great cultural institutions into the ground.
The crisis at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — and at PAFA, UArts, and the Mütter — isn’t about bottled water or “woke women.” It’s about boards that have treated public institutions as private playgrounds for decades: unaccountable, self-congratulatory, and allergic to reform. When new leaders — often women — step in and actually try to save these places, to open the doors wider, diversify programming, and bring integrity to stewardship, they’re scapegoated for the mess they inherited.
Here’s a challenge for Thom Nickels and anyone writing in his echo chamber of grievance: do your job. Investigate the boards — the people legally and financially responsible for these failures. Ask who’s been sitting in those seats for twenty years while budgets bled dry and missions eroded. Ask why the same “old boys” keep recycling themselves through every boardroom in the city, guarding access, hoarding privilege, and blaming progress when it threatens their comfort.
The “decline” you mourn isn’t the loss of champagne receptions — it’s the consequence of your own complacency. You’re not chronicling the fall; you’re helping it along.
Lol clearly the author touched a nerve. Good.
Not everything you do is progress or revolutionary.
They don’t make Otis Spunkmeyer cookies anymore.
So begins the strident explanations of the “why it happened and whose is to blame” for the Museum, blame someone else, old white guys are a good target and is much easier than justifying what is happening by listing specific problems which are to be solved and how to do it. Pushing an agenda and an ideology is not art, but it appears to be gratifying.
Misandrist: One who hates men.
In 1918, the U.S. Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, and it was ratified August 18, 1920. That eventually devolved into two income households. $1 in 1920 is the equivalent in purchasing power to about $16.20 today. Yet, there was a time when it was normal for a shoe salesman (like Al Bundy from Married with Children) with only a high-school degree could afford a nice house, with children, on one income. These days we are taxed to the max, trained to be politically correct, tolerate an ever expanding helpless class, and the very few children that are being born are being raised by the government. Most people don’t even know what a misandrist is, but an awful lot of them run our institutions now. Society is much softer than you realize. We let communists run our society, and that is our fault. We don’t even protect children in the children’s section of the library these days. Remember when the US coasts got suckered into believing we should stay home for “two weeks.”
All those old prophets were not admonishing and yelling at their people because they liked following the rules… they were literally just trying to point out the obvious. Most people don’t like discipline. Remember that terrible movie Idiocracy? The plot was they had a crippling food shortage caused by the population watering crops with a sports drink, instead of water.
God is water. Our society shunned God and consequently we are dying.
would like to have read it all but the fifth time the page jumped because of ads I lost any remaining desire
Now it comes out the DEI officer Suda brought in stole 58,000. The museum kept it quite and kept reducing the amount she had to pay back until it became obvious not a dollar was forthcoming and they had to make the crime public.
https://www.inquirer.com/crime/philadelphia-art-museum-theft-hr-director-20251121.html
What else was going on down there these last few years?
Thankfully the Board has brought in the guy who cleaned up a Met mess years back.
He has the experience needed.