Council for Artists Rights

Museums’ Prestige for Sale: Senior Staff of Two

Museums Curate Artwork for Dallas Cowboys Stadium
Decision raises questions about the use of nonprofit employees to manage
art-related profit-making ventures

March 30, 2010

Dear ally of artists' rights:

Here is a copy of our open letter which was conveyed today to the Ft. Worth Star-
Telegram /DFW.com.

Open Letter to Ft. Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com

Re: "Cowboys Stadium calls for artwork on a grand scale and team delivers" March
25, 2010, DFW.com article by Gaile Robinson (reporter for Ft. Worth Star-Telegram)

Dear Ft. Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com:

Given the restraints a recession imposes on businesses of all sizes, it is wonderful

that despite the economic strains on North Texas, a new Dallas Cowboys Stadium
came to fruition. However, the Council for Artists Rights has a two-pronged concern.

Our first concern is about the heavy outlay of nonprofit human resources used
to support a private enterprise via the stocking of the Cowboys stadium with new
artwork. We disagree with the Dallas Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of
Fort Worth letting its employees spend significant amounts of their time to manage
the Dallas Cowboys Art Program (DCAP). This issue is about museum staff using
their expertise as curators to benefit the DCAP, a private venture. As employees of
nonprofit museums, senior curator Michael Auping and lead curator Charles Wylie--as
part of an art council created by Mary Zlot--used their knowledge to advise Zlot how to
spend the big bucks on 19 artists. Having museum curators directly involved accrues
the museums' reputation to the Cowboys Stadium. The museums' prestige--gained at
public expense--should not be for sale at any price.

Is it not the purview of art dealers, independent curators and artists to earn their
bread and butter from commercial ventures like the DCAP?

If Auping and Wylie do not have enough work to keep them occupied at the
museum, perhaps the museums' board of trustees needs to take a hard look at those
positions and consider making them part-time jobs with the commensurate reduction
in salary and employee benefits. This issue--museum professionals' ties to art-related
commercial ventures--is the subject of a New York Times article dated November
18, 2007 "Museums Solicit Dealers' Largess," concerning the Los Angeles Museum
of Contemporary Art. That article caused art lawyer Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento to
write an editorial called "Private Contributions and Public Institutions," which was
published on Clancco.com November 28, 2007. He references the NYT article in it.

We are not legal scholars but it appears that these North Texas museums' seasoned
curators are serving private interests rather than the public. Is that behavior a classic
example of having a conflict of interest? Their actions--and by extension, the museums
themselves--strongly intimates of having violated Internal Revenue Service rules.
The IRS code states that not-for-profit museums must be operated exclusively for the
purposes which gave rise to receiving its tax-exempt status under code Section 501(c)
(3), namely, serving the public, and not private enterprise. In other words, the private
enterprise has already received a private benefit via their tax deductible contribution.
Museum resources ultimately belong to the public; the public is the museum patron via
being a taxpayer.

Is it time to blow the whistle on these museums' policy by getting nonprofit ethics and
accountability investigator US Senator Charles "Chuck" Grassley (R-Iowa) involved?
His campaign to clean up nonprofits is legendary and well-covered by the press.

Secondly, for over 150 years this country had an organized national system to
educate, through exposure, the entire art community and the public, including art
collectors, as to what was regularly being produced by living artists and how artists were
ranked by many of the top professionals in the field. This was done without favoritism
and was a system available
to all artists, professionals and the public, including collectors, without compromising
or jeopardizing the tax-exempt status of public institutions. It was called the juried
exhibition and it occurred at the local, regional, national and international level. Such a
system may or may not have produced the same artists hand-picked to stock the Dallas
Cowboys Stadium. As it
stands, only few people chose those 19 artists which is a tremendous concentration of
power. Is this method of choosingartwork really fair to the rest of the artists who were
not given the opportunity for their work to be seen by the DCAP?
 Texas art historian Sam Blain Jr. echoes our last point. He recently posted this
response on a social networking website after receiving a query about whether or
not a certain "credentialed" Texas wildflower artist would get any mention or "ink" in
textbooks:

“John, it appears the only contemporary artists who do get ‘any’ ink at all, appear
to get it as a result of their dealer/gallery/collector promotional handiwork or through
their publicity agents. With the absence of true juried regional exhibitions, as were held
throughout the country up through the early to mid 1960s, our American artists have ...
lacked any honest means by which to become ‘credentialed’ as professional artists. A
good example of this is the Texas art scene.When the Texas Annuals were in-place,
Texas artists were juried by highly esteemed professional artists and well respected
museum professionals brought in from across the the country. In turn, those prize
winners from those juried shows received
national (and, in many cases, international) ‘ink’ in newspapers and periodicals. Those
prize winners from those ‘feeder’ exhibitions went on to enter the larger multi-state
shows and the press always followed...as did all the museums across the country. Then
came the Nationals and Internationals. It was a much healthier art scene, all the way
around! When the Texas
Annuals were done away with, the investor-collectors, private dealers, etc....took over
and proclaimed who the professional artists were....and, in many cases, private art
collectors became private art dealers. The 1930s and 1940s were the ‘ideal’ time, it
appears. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, Jerry Bywaters of the Dallas
Museum of Fine Arts kept the state scene ‘alive’ by bringing in the other major Texas art
museums as co-sponsors of the Texas Annuals... up until the DMFA's board of directors
replaced him with Merrill C. Rueppel, who can be credited with turning the DMFA into a
private showroom for private-collectors who had become private dealers.”

Regarding our first concern at the top of this letter, perhaps at the next Dallas
Cowboys home game President Obama and his Cabinet will personally provide valet
parking for stadium cars. Why not?

The Council for Artists Rights is based in Chicago, IL USA. Its thrust is to educate
the public about artists' rights and advocates for artists whose work is in distress. CFAR
was spontaneously born in 2004 when devotees of public art learned a city park district
had irrevocably altered--without its creator's permission--a 20 year old work of public art.

Recognition of CFAR founding member John Viramontes:

Honoree, Huffington Post blogger Esther J. Cepeda's Chicago Latino List 2009.

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