In her first extensive interview since her firing from her post as director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum last year, Sasha Suda told Philadelphia Magazine that the board had attempted to strip her of the CEO portion of her title.
Though she previously made a similar allegation in her lawsuit against the museum, she had not gone into nearly as much detail as she did in the Philadelphia Magazine feature.
She claimed that Leslie Anne Miller, the former board chair at the museum, tried to separate her two positions after initially offering her both and hire her only as director. Only in the interim, Suda alleged, would Miller allow her to be both director and CEO.
Suda claimed in the Philadelphia Magazine article that she pushed back against this, noting that she had formerly been director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada. Only after she turned down Miller’s offer did the board backpedal its decision, Suda said.
When Miller finally did call Suda to officially offer her the job, with both the director and CEO posts, Suda reportedly responded, “You mean the one I applied for?”
A Philadelphia Art Museum spokesperson declined to comment, saying that the institution could not respond because the Suda case was ongoing litigation.
The details of Suda’s firing are still coming into focus. She was abruptly fired in November, on Election Day, via an email that attributed the decision to “cause,” without describing what that cause was.
In the wake of her surprise dismissal, she and the museum’s board have traded allegations about what really happened. The board has claimed that Suda “misused” institutional funds for her own gain, something that Suda has called a “sham.” Meanwhile, Suda has alleged that certain trustees began to unfairly investigate her; the museum has said the inquiry was fair and that it focused on “theft” of funds.
Whether a controversial rebrand—from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Philadelphia Art Museum, with a new acronym of PhAM that has been parodied as PhArt—played a role in Suda’s firing remains an open question. Certain trustees claimed that Suda had not adequately informed them of the rebrand in advance of instituting it, though Suda denied this in the Philadelphia Magazine story. (Citing anonymous sources, journalist Robert Huber reported that no one “sees anything” in the theory that the rebrand prompted Suda’s dismissal.)
The article did shed some light on another institutional matter that remains opaque: the departure of chief curator Carlos Basualdo. Basualdo, whose curatorial credits include a lauded Jasper Johns retrospective in 2022, started directing the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas last year.
According to Suda, she placed Basualdo on administrative leave in 2024, though she declined to specify why she had done so. She claimed that she had informed Ellen Caplan, the current board chair, of the decision, but that other board members seemed not to have known about it. “I didn’t know I couldn’t count on her to work the back channels,” Suda told Philadelphia Magazine.
Suda also claimed that at least one trustee was so upset by the decision that he sought a vote on whether she should remain at the museum. The vote appears not to have happened.
Through a spokesperson for the Nasher Sculpture Center, Basualdo declined to comment on his departure from the Philadelphia Art Museum, saying that the institution “is a great museum and will remain a great museum,” and that he wished Suda the best.
