Officials at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the recipient of a recent $6 million grant from state taxpayers, are refusing to discuss the museum’s financial condition following the premature departure of its third executive director in a decade.
Despite repeated requests from the Journal Inquirer over the last month, a spokeswoman for the private not-for-profit corporation, Linda Richardson, said that neither she nor any member of the museum’s 31-person board of trustees would respond to some patrons’ concerns that the museum appears to be in dire straits.
“No, there’s nothing to say,” the spokeswoman said.
Coleman H. Casey, the board president, who has refused to return calls seeking comment, also has a “policy” of not speaking to reporters, according to Richardson.
Meanwhile, the board’s treasurer, Vincent J. Dowling, and a past president who remains on the board, John H. Motley, referred calls to Casey.
Richardson did provide copies of the museum’s annual reports for 2006 and 2005, but said that with the institution’s current fiscal year just ending, its 2007 report would not be made public until November.
Tax Return Missing
Federal law also requires that the museum’s annual federal tax return, known as its Form 990, be open for public inspection. To date, however, the museum’s latest available return was filed last year and covers 2005.
The 165-year-old institution, billed as the nation’s oldest public art museum, lost its director, Willard Holmes, a former chief operating officer and deputy director at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, two months ago.
Holmes reportedly told museum trustees last winter that he had decided to quit the museum when he realized the next phase of the its development – a $15.5 million expansion into the former Hartford Times building that will connect to the Adriaen’s Landing project – would require a commitment of as long as five years.
The renovation project, which includes a 75-space parking lot across the street from the museum, is expected to be funded with a state grant and privately raised money.
Director Missing
Museum officials, meanwhile, have offered no explanation for Holmes’ leaving.
The former director, who lived in West Hartford while working at the museum, has declined to return calls placed to his home.
Holmes’ exit after less than four years on the job followed the departure of more than a dozen other staff members over the last year, the New York Times reported last month.
It also said the museum had “run up deficits every year of his brief tenure,” with an almost $700,000 operating shortfall out of a $9 million budget in 2004.
The tax return filed by the museum last year does not necessarily support that statement, as it shows a $177,147 “excess” for the period between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006.
But the museum’s filing from 2005 reveals that it also suffered a $2.2 million deficit the previous year.
At the same time, the annual report published by the museum last year indicates that its total revenue, gains, and other support fell from $20,536,080 in 2004 to $15,496,006 in 2005, a drop of more than $5 million.
The lack of up-to-date information also makes for a cloudy portrait of museum attendance. The Times reported that attendance dropped from a peak of more than 228,000 in 2001 to a “historic low” of 108,614 in 2005.
The museum’s tax returns, meanwhile, put total museum attendance at 145,811 in fiscal 2006.
The museum that year also reported total revenue of $12.8 million and “total income-producing activities” — including admissions, exhibition fees, and the sale of museum merchandise — at $7.6 million.
That did not include any revenue generated by the museum’s annual golf tournament, which the return shows lost $10,000.
Journal Inquirer staff writer Ann Pallivathuckal also contributed to this report.
