Less than four months after the Philadelphia Museum of Art unveiled a bold but unpopular rebranding campaign that included a new logo and name — the Philadelphia Art Museum — trustees announced on Wednesday a return to the institution’s historic identity.
“It was a misstep,” Daniel Weiss, the museum’s director and chief executive, said in a phone interview on Thursday. “The reason there was so much public consternation and criticism is because it didn’t resonate.”
The rebranding campaign had been initiated by a former director, Sasha Suda, who was suddenly ousted by trustees in November, roughly three years into her five-year contract. Weiss said that the rollback would take place over the next few months but that some parts of its rebranding would be spared, including the new griffin logo.
The idea of abandoning the new name had been under consideration for nearly six weeks. Locals had started mocking the venerable institution as the “PhArt Museum” and questioned its direction after Suda stepped down.
Rebuilding community trust is a priority for the museum. “The institution has been through a difficult time, something like a trauma,” Weiss said. “My goal is to stabilize the institution and restore trust.”
One of his primary goals is balancing the budget. Weiss, a former president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who steered that institution through a financial stabilization, said the Philadelphia museum was facing a deficit of nearly $6 million, about 8 percent of the budget, though he expected the number could be higher.
“We are digging into everything,” he said, noting that his office was reviewing the cost of open positions that would need to be filled, property investments and equipment needs.
The nonprofit museum has spent the last six years navigating a series of controversies that began with misconduct allegations against a former manager. Executives apologized, and employees unionized. Suda, who was hired in 2022 after the museum’s longtime director Timothy Rub stepped down, began her tenure as employees picketed outside the museum at the start of a 19-day strike during contract negotiations.
In November, she filed a lawsuit claiming that the museum lacked a valid reason for abruptly firing her from one of the most prominent jobs in the art world. In her suit, charging wrongful termination, she said she had been dismissed after a “corrupt and unethical faction” of the museum’s board objected to her moves to modernize the institution, and obstructed her ability to manage the institution effectively from the very beginning.
The museum responded with its own legal filing, claiming that Suda had “violated her agreement by misappropriating museum funds and engaging in repeated acts of dishonesty.” It was a partial reference to a $39,000 cost-of-living adjustment over two years, which Suda has claimed she received approval for. (Her annual base salary was $720,000.)
Suda had hoped that a jury trial would clear her name. But last week a Pennsylvania state court judge moved the lawsuit into arbitration, a private process for settling legal disputes.
Suda’s lawyer, Luke Nicas, said arbitration would make little difference to the outcome of the case, but he criticized the museum. “We are not surprised that the museum wants to hide its illegal conduct in a confidential arbitration, but we will hold the museum accountable wherever the case is heard,” he said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for the museum said in a statement that the ruling aligned with the arbitration terms in the contract that Suda had signed with the nonprofit, adding that the museum would “now return to our focus on the museum’s mission of bringing art and inspiration to the people of Philadelphia.”
Weiss declined to comment on the lawsuit but said he hoped the rollback of the rebranding would demonstrate that the museum was moving in the right direction to regain public trust.
“The best outcome is that the rebrand is a quick story,” Weiss said. “I’ve found that people here want things to be better.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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