Telfair Museums abruptly laid off some 15 percent of its staff on January 9. The news was reported by Savannah television station WJCL.
While the museums offered severance, the layoffs were announced without warning on an afternoon Zoom call, according to former employees. Museum representatives told WJCL that the staff cuts stemmed from reduced funding and were approved by the museum’s executive committee of the board.
The Telfair Museums, the oldest public art museum in the South, comprises four institutions: the Telfair Academy, the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, Jepson Center and Telfair Children’s Art Museum.
The oldest of these, the Telfair Academy, was designed by British architect William Jay for Alexander Telfair and completed around 1820. In 1875, Mary Telfair, the last of her line, bequeathed the neoclassical mansion and its furnishings to the Georgia Historical Society to be turned into a public art museum. Its collection includes 19th- and 20th-century American and European art.
The Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters, also designed by Jay, was completed in 1819 and purchased by wealthy planter George Welshman Owens, who lived there with his wife, six children, and at least seven enslaved individuals. The property, which was donated to Telfair Museums in 1951 by Owens’s granddaughter, includes a rare example of intact urban slave quarters, and presents the house’s history through the lens of slavery in America.
The Jepson Center, completed in 2006, is devoted to contemporary art and rotating exhibitions, as well as the Telfair Children’s Art Museum.
