Former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe contends the Tennessee State Museum is being mismanaged, suggesting a bias against East and West Tennessee in the purchase of art exhibits and pointing to criminal charges filed against two employees this year, among other things.
The focus of Ashe’s criticism as a member and former chairman of the board overseeing museum operations is Lois Riggins-Ezzell, 75, executive director since 1981 and now heavily engaged in planning a new $160 million museum, scheduled to open in December 2018.
Another critic echoes Ashe on the contention that Riggins-Ezell has shown a geographic bias toward people in the Nashville area in art purchases, including two cases involving artists with political ties.
Ashe, 70, says Riggins-Ezzell should be replaced in her $90,000-per-year position and a new executive director brought aboard to oversee preparations for the new museum, which hinge on raising more than $40 million in private funds to go with $120 million in Legislature-approved state spending proposed by Gov. Bill Haslam.
Riggins-Ezzell declared last week she intends to remain “as long as I can” and, joined by three staff members in an interview session, disputed Ashe’s allegations and said the claims have left her angry and emotional at times.
She also vigorously asserted her ability to continue leadership of a museum that has progressed from “six employees in the basement of the War Memorial Building” when she took the job to its present status with 42 employees and $3.8 million in annual state funding, not counting donations from the private sector.
The current museum has 120,000 square feet of space on three floors of the James K. Polk State Office Building, a block from the state Capitol, but is widely acknowledged to be inadequate to housing a place to fulfill its proclaimed mission to “procure, preserve, exhibit and interpret objects which relate to the social, political, economic and cultural history of Tennessee and Tennesseans.”
“I am the museum. Jesus!” Riggins-Ezell exclaimed at one point while going over the criticism versus her accomplishments — although promptly expressing regret at the remark.
With the exception of Ashe, the executive director apparently enjoys solid support from the museum board, officially known as the Douglas Henry Tennessee State Museum Commission. The panel’s current chairman, Republican state Rep. Steve McDaniel of Parkers Crossroads, joined her and staff members at last week’s interview session and hailed Riggins-Ezzell’s “tremendous accomplishments” at length.
Support for the veteran director is likewise apparently solid on the board of the Tennessee State Museum Foundation, a separate entity dedicated to raising private funds for the museum — or at least it’s solid since two members of the Foundation board lost their seats recently after criticizing Riggins-Ezzell’s art-purchasing practices. By several accounts, she played a key role in overseeing the unseating of critics Henry Walker, a Nashville lawyer, and Charles Cook, a Nashville banker, from the Foundation board.
In an initial interview, Ashe said the museum has spent about $70,000 per year on “contemporary art” purchases and, over a 10-year period, more than 80 percent — roughly $600,000 of the $700,000 total — went to artists in Nashville and adjoining Williamson County.
Mary Jane Crockett-Green, the museum’s director of administration, said those figures are “extremely erroneous” and that she has no idea how Ashe came up with them.
All art purchases since 2008, including historic work, have totaled just $305,972, Crockett-Green said. Of that, about $214,000 came from public funds, the rest from donated funds.
“It does anger me — not to be questioned, but to see it done with supposed information that is erroneous and untrue,” Riggins-Ezzell said.
Ashe, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, said subsequently he had been given the figures by sources he declined to identify and conceded “maybe the figures are wrong, but not the percentage.” His own review of purchases, over a four or five-year period, indicated more than 80 percent involved Nashville-area artists, Ashe said, and he challenged museum staff to provide a geographic breakdown of the purchases.
A museum spokeswoman said a geographic breakdown was not available late Friday. Ashe said he raised the issue at a board meeting months ago and that Riggins-Ezzell acknowledged an imbalance and declared, “We’ll do better.”
He said since then, there have been purchases from East and West Tennessee, but talented artists in the two regions have still been “obviously shortchanged.”
Walker reviewed art 30 purchases in preparing his memo, which found 11 of those purchases violated museum rules for obtaining artwork. In an interview, he said “almost all” of the purchases were in the Nashville area and, in his view, reflected Riggins-Ezzell and Leigh Hendry, the museum director of external affairs who was involved in purchases, “playing favorites … going on a shopping trip, using the state’s checkbook to buy things that pleased them.”
There is a public perception, Ashe said, that “it’s not a state museum, it’s a Nashville museum” — a proposition ardently disputed by Riggins-Ezzell.
She reeled off a long list of examples of artifacts and exhibits oriented to East and West Tennessee and pointed out contemporary art is a quite small piece of museum collections. Overall, for example, there are 7,793 artifacts classified as “art and architecture” versus 54,088 under “cultural history;” 12,360 as “military history;” 9,808 as “science and technology” and 9,741 as “fashion and textiles.”
In a memo to other Tennessee State Museum Foundation board members, Cook said the museum’s purchase of paintings from Susan Simmons raised an apparent conflict of interest. Simmons served in Lamar Alexander’s cabinet when he was governor at the time Riggins-Ezzell was first appointed as museum executive director. Simmons later served on the Foundation board. At the time of the purchases, she was serving on a “task force” reviewing the need for building a new state museum that was appointed by Gov. Bill Haslam.
Cook’s memo followed a review of museum art purchases by Walker, who said in his own memo that 11 art buys violated established rules. His list included three Simmons paintings bought for a total of $3,675 — the most expensive being $2,250 for a painting entitled “Red Dogwood Branches.”
Walker’s list also included four purchases of photographs — at $1,500 each — taken by Jessica Ingram, the daughter of veteran Tennessee political operative Tom Ingram and currently a professor of photojournalism at the California College of Arts. One picture shows the door of a building in Pulaski, Tenn., where the Ku Klux Klan was founded.
Tom Ingram — political adviser for years to Alexander, Haslam and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker — says he had “absolutely nothing” to do with the purchases and they were warranted by his daughter’s professional abilities, adding “I am really proud of her.”
Jessica Ingram has built a reputation based on photographs of the civil-rights movement, notably including an exhibit in the National Civil Rights Museum at Memphis.
Ashe and Walker, chief critics of the current museum director, said in separate interviews they think purchases of Jessica Ingram’s work are at least arguably warranted because of her national reputation on civil rights photography as a woman with Tennessee roots. Ezzell-Riggins said it is unquestionably warranted as a part of Tennessee’s history in the civil rights movement.
But Walker said purchase of Simmons’ “amateurish” work is an example of a “clear bias” in favor of “friends of Lois” getting preference in state museum purchases. Ashe said the value of Simmons’ work to taxpayers is “something people looking at it should decide on their own.” Cook offered no criticism of Simmons’ art, but said he remains concerned about the apparent conflict of interest.
Riggins-Ezzell staunchly defended the purchase of Simmons’ work, declaring her “an outstanding artist” who has realized and expanded development of innate talent in “mid-life” and who is likely to achieve future recognition. She likened Simmons’ work to that of Grandma Moses and said purchases of contemporary art, in general, are wise for the museum.
Ashe said he believes the museum has over-emphasized purchase of contemporary art as compared to historic works. Riggins-Ezzell said purchase of contemporary work from living artists is often financially astute, since prices are far lower for up-and-coming artistic works than for those of dead artists with a reputation.
She put Simmons’ work in this category, saying she would like to buy yet another painting from the “excellent artist” in a belief that “it would do nothing but increase and grow in value with age.”
Walker says an art gallery director told him the paintings were of such poor quality that he would not display them — an opinion Walker shares.
The state comptroller issued a special audit earlier this year reporting a museum employee had stolen more than $61,000 — most of it by falsifying invoices for museum purchases and sending the purchase money to her personal account. Kathy L. Alexander, 60, was indicted on charges of theft, forgery and fraud last week. She had been fired shortly after the comptroller’s report.
Christopher Crockett, 37, who had the job title of “preparator” at the state museum and who is the son of Crockett-Green, was arrested along with two other men last month in Mount Juliet, Tenn., by officers who reported seizing 300 pounds of marijuana at the same time. The men face charges involving narcotics and weapons. Crockett resigned as a museum employee following his arrest.
Alexander and Crockett each had prior criminal records — in Alexander’s case involving theft from a former employer. Ashe says the two cases “at the very best show poor judgment” by Riggins-Ezzell, who is ultimately responsible for all hiring and firing at the museum.
Riggins-Ezzell and Crockett-Green said Alexander and Crockett originally worked at the museum as employees of contractors on a temporary basis. Both did good work and wound up getting jobs as state employees, they said.
In Alexander’s case, her criminal record — although disclosed to the former employer holding a contract with the museum — was never revealed to museum officials, they said. Thus, officials said, she was able to exploit her position, including the handling of purchase orders, to steal from the museum.
In Crockett’s case, the marijuana arrest had nothing to do with his museum duties. Museum staffers said Crockett had disclosed his criminal record, but after two years of good work, his supervisor recommended him as an employee and — with his mother staying out of the hiring process — he was given the job, which paid about $26,000 per year and involved mostly physical labor.
“That sounds like nepotism, even if it wasn’t,” said Ashe, who said he plans to propose the museum adopt a policy of never hiring former convicts in the future.
He and Walker said their “sources” within museum operations suggested Crockett was rarely seen at work. Walker called Crockett “a ghost employee.”
Numerous battles
Ashe and Riggins-Ezzell have clashed on several other matters as well. The former mayor, for example, said he thought the museum should proceed with having a traveling exhibit on Lamar Alexander’s service as governor this year, although it was inappropriate when originally scheduled to coincide with Alexander’s re-election campaign last year as a U.S. senator.
Riggins-Ezzell decided to cancel plans for a 2015 Alexander traveling exhibit, and the Douglas Henry State Museum Commission, after brief discussion at its last meeting, let that decision stand.
Ashe said he didn’t object at the time because he was certain to be voted down when opposing a Riggins-Ezzell decision and “at some point, it becomes a matter of how many battles you want to fight.”
But Ashe also said he plans to bring up for discussion at the commission’s next meeting in October the idea of establishing a search committee to find a successor to Riggins-Ezzell as executive director. A motion to oust her — she serves at the pleasure of the commission — might not even get the necessary seconding motion at this point, he said, but “we ought to at least talk about it.”
Riggins-Ezzell, he said, should be “honored and saluted” for her past work, but should step aside for new leadership in a new era with a new museum in the works.
“On boards, I’ve always raised questions that others didn’t want to answer,” said Ashe, who served in the state House and Senate in the 1980s. “I did the same thing as a legislator … (but) I try to be professional and impersonal.”
Riggins-Ezzell, while saying Ashe’s penchant toward hyperbole and exaggeration can be irritating, declares there are also positive aspects. Although Ashe and Walker suggest she is intolerant of dissent, Riggins-Ezzell said she welcomes it because, “It makes you better. It makes you work harder.”
Ashe, she said, has been “very challenging to me” but has “asked good questions” as a commission member.
“It has helped me look very closely at my own actions and clarify” what needs to be done, she said. Adjustments have been made, and she stands ready to continue to work toward setting up a new museum she has envisioned for decades, Riggins-Ezzell said.
McDaniel, who succeeded Ashe as commission chairman about 18 months ago, takes a diplomatic position — lauding Riggins-Ezzell’s “outstanding service” but declaring “at some point” the commission needs to look toward a “transition” in museum leadership. That will be sorted out in the months ahead, he said.
“I don’t know anyone on the commission who doesn’t want her standing there to cut the ribbon on the new museum,” McDaniel said.
Ashe said he, too, would be happy to watch Riggins-Ezzell cut the ribbon — but would prefer that occur as a bow to the past, not as a look to the future.