New PMA CEO Sasha Suda fired in a wild week at Philly’s premier museum

Philly has been working overtime on rebrands in recent years. The Kimmel Cultural Campus (itself a recent rebrand) became Ensemble Arts Philly, the Pennsylvania Ballet became the Philadelphia Ballet, and many other groups, including Penn Live Arts and Opera Philadelphia, are operating under new brands. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance has gotten a revamp, too. It’s a lot to keep up with, and it’s always worth wondering whether new branding is the best use of resources (including public attention) in an era of urgent challenges for our cultural sector, and many notable labor struggles.

“A very serious discussion”

Nothing electrifies Internet naysayers like dropping a new logo (see the asinine national flareup over Cracker Barrel’s attempt at a new image), and the PMA rebrand—featuring the stark silhouette of a griffin with “Philadelphia Art Museum” in serif block letters circling it—was no exception. But on my screen, the public reaction seemed unusually united: people dislike the new logo, saying it reminds them of a soccer team, a brewery, or the flag of some shoddy new fascist regime (we definitely don’t need any more of those at the moment). On October 10, Hyperallergic collected notable responses in a story titled “People Really Hate the Philadelphia Art Museum Rebrand”, which also notes Philadelphians’ disgust that the PMA hired a Brooklyn firm for its new look.

I marveled at Peter Dobrin’s November 3 Inquirer story, which revealed open dissention among museum leadership. “We were as surprised as everyone else,” board member Yoram (Jerry) Wind said of the rebrand. “The board should have been told when the launch was happening,” trustee Jennifer Rice said, adding that she likes the new look.

But Wind indicated that the branding is not final. “The board will have a very serious discussion with management that says, ‘Now that it’s out in the world, what do we do?’ … We definitely have to do something. They have to address the fact that there are so many negative comments about it.”

But even more surprising to me is a line in the story noting that “Art museum staffers who have complained about the new name and look have been told that, in fact, the museum didn’t change its name—legally, it’s still the Philadelphia Museum of Art.” This makes museum leadership sound inane, adding to the embarrassment of the board’s public consternation.

A bad look?

Outside commentators have been quick to posit that Suda’s dismissal relates to the apparent branding debacle, but others offer a more nuanced view.

“Lots of folks will jump all over this news and attribute it to the rebranding,” Philly author and cultural critic Tre Johnson said on Instagram on November 4. “It’s more likely that a confluence of things occurred under what basically sounds like Suda taking on the job in a turnaround effort.” And firing her via email was “not a good look.”

“I think they’ve totally hung her out to dry here,” Johnson told me via DM later. We both speculated that the branding issue was just a cover for the firing. “And it’d be absolutely RIDICULOUS to fire a museum CEO” over a rebrand that’s less than a year old, he added.

Fighting the “verve for change”?

Isa Segalovich, a Philly-based writer and viral anti-fascist folk-art expert (@interstellar_isabellar on Instagram) was more explicit in her November 4 video. She points to a profile of Suda that ran in the Philadelphia Citizen last August, which detailed Suda’s successful efforts to welcome more students to the museum and diversify its staff and programming, including the PMA’s landmark 2024 exhibition, The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure (a show I deeply enjoyed).

“As expected (especially in Philadelphia) that verve for change does not sit well with everyone,” Roxanne Patel Shepelavy writes in the Citizen. “Several people told me that some longtime board members are displeased with Suda for focusing—too much, they say—on inclusion, for what they consider a narrow focus when it comes to exhibitions, and for a slow start to fundraising.”

“Did the board of the PMA just fire its director because of its disastrous rebrand? Or are they using said rebrand fiasco as a coverup for being super racist?” Segalovich asks. She expresses her surprise at Suda’s firing, quotes the Citizen story on board members’ apparent opposition to inclusivity at the museum, and then puts the issue much more bluntly: “Translation: [Suda] is including too many exhibitions with too many Black artists.”

Segalovich opines that “board members are using the disastrous rebrand as a cover for their racism, for their conservatism, for bowing down to the Trump era … and making for an even less diverse Philadelphia Museum of Art.”

On that note, Philly Mag’s brief November 4 story about the firing has an ominous finish, noting that the stakes are high for the museum as well as its former CEO, “a Canadian citizen who is in the US on a work visa.” Is ICE about to show up at her door?

Change is a challenge

From my desk, I’m reluctant to speculate on exactly what happened here, though I was surprised by the public discord and inconsistent messaging evident in the initial Inquirer story, and then shocked by the manner of Suda’s firing. But Suda is certainly not the first woman tapped to helm a struggling institution that needs major changes, only to be quickly dismissed when the job proves impossible—at least in the short term.

I also know firsthand the challenges of staking out a more inclusive mission, in partnership with our team here at BSR. Since I took the editorial helm at BSR, I’ve gotten a steady drip of misunderstanding, doubts, disrespect, and sometimes outright insults related to our mission for inclusion and accessibility—including comments that I’m sure no-one is making to male editors. Early on, someone told me that diversity and excellence are mutually exclusive—which I knew then and now to be complete bunk. In fact, we believe the opposite: excellence cannot exist without diversity. (That view is increasingly under fire in today’s America, but the BSR team bows to no-one in advance.)

Build your own view, with our writers’ help

The leadership and identity of our city’s premier museum is an important topic, particularly for members of our cultural scene. As we continue that conversation, I encourage you to take advantage of our deepest resource here at BSR: our archive, which never has a paywall. Our writers have surveyed many PMA programs under Suda, including The Time Is Always Now, Naoto Fukusawa: Things In Themselves, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Moving Backwards, the Rikers Quilt by Jesse Krimes, a major Mary Cassatt show, and Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s. We also looked deeply at media coverage of the 2022 labor strike at the museum, which coincided with Suda’s first month on the job.

No single reporter or pundit can give you a definitive view of what’s happening atop the Rocky Steps, but if you dive into BSR’s coverage, you can develop your own sense of Suda’s tenure, and where the museum might be headed. We are proud to provide that sustained coverage, year after year, especially in moments like this.