Updated July 15, 11am
Gary Garrels, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, announced his resignation on Saturday following an uproar over comments made at an all-staff Zoom meeting last week. His final day at the museum will be July 31.
Garrels was confronted in the July 7 staff meeting, Artnet first reported, about statements he had previously made concerning the museum’s collection priorities. At a time when museums are being called upon to diversify their holdings beyond the work of Western, white male artists, an Instagram post on the account @changethemuseum claimed that a white senior curator (widely understood to be Garrels) had ended a presentation about recent acquisitions of work by artists of color saying, “Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”
Garrels shared a similar sentiment while speaking publicly during a February 2020 panel at the FOG Design+Art Fair titled “Ways of Being Seen: Creating Visibility for Women in Art.”
“You’ve got this huge mountain you’re scaling to get to parity, to get to balance. It’s going to take a lot of time,” he said. “The other thing I have to say, and I’ve reassured artists, we will continue to collect white men. There are a lot of great women artists, but there are also still a lot of good men out there working as well.”
When panel moderator Sarah Douglas, editor in chief of ARTnews, suggested one approach would be to stop collecting work by white male artists for a period of time (as the Baltimore Museum of Art announced it would do in 2020), Garrels said, “I just don’t agree with that. That’s an alternative, different kind of profiling.”
In last week’s staff meeting, Garrels said avoiding the work of white men would amount to “reverse discrimination,” a phrase he later described as “an extremely poor choice of words.” A group of former museum employees organized under the name xSFM0MA quickly created a petition calling for Garrels’ resignation, writing, “Gary’s removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable. Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”
Garrels first worked at SFMOMA from 1993 to 2000 and returned to the museum in 2008 after curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. As ARTnews has previously reported, Garrels received a no-interest home loan for $500,000 from SFMOMA, approved by the museum’s board. (Museum director Neal Benezra received a $800,000 no-interest home loan.)
