An Orlando Museum’s Disputed Basquiats Are Gone. Its Leadership Is, Too.

Sharp said that she and several other term-limited trustees had previously been asked to stay on and help guide the museum through its ongoing crisis. “We kept asking the chair to make a full, fair and honest statement of what really happened here,” Sharp said. “We have been begging her to do it! It took a lot for me to say we have no resort but to call this meeting.” With a sigh, she added, “It’s obvious that the people who didn’t want to have this meeting didn’t want to face up to the issues we had been trying to raise.”

Brumback subsequently stepped down as chair and was succeeded by Mark Elliott, whom several trustees saw as a close ally of hers. In a news release that noted that Brumback would “collaborate” with Elliott, the new chair said “we have our work cut out for us” and added that his tasks included “focusing on good governance and the museum’s practices and procedures.”

One of his first tasks will be finding a new museum director. Last Wednesday, after the ouster of the trustees, Whitlock, the museum’s interim director, who had seemed to be sympathetic to some of their concerns in internal emails, resigned.

“I love the museum, I want to see it do well,” Whitlock, who had temporarily led the museum during a previous upheaval, said in an interview. “But it’s obvious that by resigning, I was not pleased with certain things.”

His voice cracking, he concluded, “And that’s all I can tell you.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/arts/design/orlando-museum-of-art-fake-basquiats.html