November: PMA’s Sasha Suda talks about rising above rocky early days
Sasha Suda answers a question from interviewer Chris Satullo
On a mission to create a museum as diverse as the community it serves
By Eileen Kenna
Sasha Suda, director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, eyed the PMA with reverence long before her appointment there in June 2022.
Suda talked about that in a wide-ranging interview Nov. 1 as part of the Sunday Breakfast Club’s “New in Town” series. The event at the Fitler Club was attended by about 70 members and guests.
Suda, the youngest director in the musuem's history, also talked candidly about the museum's recent labor struggles and its complicated relationship with the Rocky statue at the foot of its famous steps.
'Rocky', of course, is really just a movie prop and not a piece of art, but Suda wants the museum to regard it more fondly: “As for Rocky, if it gets people in the door, what are we worried about? I think we’re taking ourselves too seriously." (More about Rocky later.)
Suda, a Canadian native whose impressive resume includes a tenure as director of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, remembers well one of her first, in-person impressions of the art at the PMA.
It was the gilded sculpture of Diana, goddess of the hunt, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which graces the top of Great Stair Hall.
“She’s cozy and human-sized while speaking to a higher cause,” Suda said. “You see her and she shows you that you’ve come somewhere important.”
Suda said her parents, who emigrated to Canada in 1968 from Czechoslovakia, “consumed culture in Canada.” Asked to describe some of her favorite pieces of art today, Suda cited Diana and Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and then told the story of what might be called her art awakening as a young teen.
She and her family traveled one summer to New York City to visit Jones Beach, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim.
“We were at the Guggenheim and I saw a piece of abstract art that just seemed crazy,” she recalled. “I remember asking my Dad, ‘What IS this?’ And my Dad said, ‘It’s an idea. Art can just be an idea’
“That was a really transformative moment for me that’s frozen in time, even if I don’t remember the exact work of art.”
Suda, a medievalist by training, spoke about her very modern aspirations for PMA.
“We want to be an institution that represents the community in which it exists and which introduces those communities to new things while also putting together something familiar and representative of everyone’s history,” she said.
In service of that vision, the museum is getting ready to launch the new Brind Center for African Art, dedicated to the acquisition, care and study of art of the continent and its diaspora. The museum already has a large collection of African art; much of it has been in storage for many years. The new venture is endowed by trustee Ira Brind. Suda said the museum is “on the brink of making an offer” to a director for the center after conducting a world-wide search.
“It will be our first Black-led curatorial sector and the first time we’ve made a clear commitment to the continent of Africa and its diaspora. Skipping over that continent was an oversight that couldn’t continue.”
More broadly, Suda said, “We want PMA to be “more queer, more female and more diverse. In Philadelphia, you have the audience that wants to get there, too.”
Asked to elucidate how those aspirations translate to the museum-goers’ experience, Suda replied: “We’re thinking about art in these amazing exhibitions, but we’re also thinking about the human experience within those …. We get feedback about how hard it can be to figure out where to go in the museum. Way-finding can be tough. [We get] feedback like: You expect us to know who Van Gogh is, who Picasso is? These are really basic things but for us will lead to changes because part of modernizing is considering the world outside our four walls.”
While the PMA has substantial philanthropic support, Suda noted that the institution is not financially independent from the city.
“The city is the landlord, they own the building, they own the Rocky steps. We’ve been defunded by the city to the tune of $6 million over the past few years.” She said she sees part of her role to be making and building relationships within City Hall to demonstrate that PMA is “integral to the city of Philadelphia.”
Now, back to those steps ...
Last summer, the Rocky steps (as we all call them) were used for a rather garish, one-week, 72-step high advertisement in vinyl for the Warner Brothers DC Comics movie Blue Beetle. Suda said she and her staff had no idea about the ad placement until it actually was happening. It was arranged by the parks department; the city charged $28,000 for the seven-day installation. The public was less than thrilled with the spectacle, according to local media reports.
For its part, the museum leadership issued a statement saying that “We love the idea of using the stairs for promotional purposes and we would welcome opportunities to use these stairs to promote Philadelphia’s emerging artists.”
Sylvester Stallone certainly supports that sentiment. Suda said when the ad was being installed on the steps, Stallone, who was in town at the time, called the museum.
“Rocky asked to meet with me,” Suda recalled, smiling. “And it was actually incredibly emotional. We had several guards there, white, African American, Hispanic, older, younger, and they said to him, ‘You’ve changed my life for this or that reason.’ It was really powerful to see the impact that Rocky the character has had.”
Stallone told Suda that in all the times he has visited the Rocky steps and the city since the first Rocky movie was released more than 40 years ago that he had never been invited inside by an art director before.
“He said, ‘I care about this place. I’m an artist, too, and I care about the steps. They look horrible. I don’t know what’s going on in here, but I want to help.'"
Stallone is behind the new kiosk at the bottom of the famous steps where Rocky merchandise is for sale. He’s donating proceeds from his “merch” to help fix and maintain the steps, Suda said.
“He’s in a partnership with us now,” she said. “It’s gonna be more Rocky and more Sylvester Stallone. And I think that’s OK. I think we need to be behind whatever it takes to prove to people that we’re not the ‘castle on the hill.’”
Labor unrest at the museum greeted Suda from day one of her arrival. Contract negotiations had been going on for two years before and 185 staff went on strike for 19 days, coinciding with Suda’s first day on the job, Sept. 26, 2022.
She endured criticism for staying out of the active negotiating process. She said she stands by her decision not to cross the picket line nor to get involved in the nitty gritty of negotiations.
“It was very intentional because I had not negotiated the offer that had been made.” She said she preferred to lay the groundwork for the PMA future which included seeing the $2 million Matisse exhibit come together and establishing relationships with her 70-member board.
“I’ve come from unionized environments with long-term unions and this one here is really big and really raw. ... There’s a lot that’s out of my control. A local union leader has to learn and grow in that role. I’m not the right mentor for that nor should I ever be. …You really have to build trust and trust still eludes us. This is human relational stuff that’s probably going to take a decade to learn. It’s hard when people don’t feel valued in the workplace. I do think we’re on the right path now.”
She injected a bit of humor into her account of that difficult time when she brought up the well-known, two-story poster union organizers plastered on the North entrance of the museum and elsewhere that cheekily asked, a la Carmen Santiago: “Where in the World Is Sasha Suda?”
Her 8-year-old twin son and a daughter thought it was hilarious: “They saw it and said: 'We ask that question all the time!'”
Suda talked about how museums can navigate the tricky waters of cultural and identity appropriation.
Citing an example that unsettled her as a Canadian, she noted that recently the Canadian singer Buffy St. Marie, a respected elder of indigenous music, has come under fire for allegedly being born to non-indigenous parents.
“It can be extremely damaging, taking advantage of other people’s disadvantage,” she said. “Institutions battle with this in many ways. ... How do you think of the history of [appropriated} objects as they’re presented? I think it’s fabulous if we can continue having civil discourse around these topics. I happen not to be someone who thinks we can do away with that history.”
Asked by club member Thaddeus Squire what makes PMA "distinctive," Suda cited the museum's history of successful, sustained collaborative relationships with significant artists. She cited the Ellsworth Kelly room and the Duchamp installation as examples of artists choosing the PMA over other institutions such as the Met in New York because in Philadelphia they were integrally involved in the presentation of their work.
“Working relationships with artists manifest in ways that are truly magical and in other ways which can be challenging.”
However, all the artists who have collaborated this way on installations thus far have been white and male.
“Where is the room for the new artists?”
She said there’s always a tension between making room for the new, lesser-known artists and the planning of “blockbuster shows” that help keep the lights on for current and future PMA visitors.
She seems more than up to the challenge.