After SFMOMA Cuts Salaries by 20%, Employees Call Out Major Loans Granted to Executives

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art( SFMOMA)( Jeremy Thompson/ Flickr)

SAN FRANCISCO — In the 2000 s, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art( SFMOMA) conceded $1.3 million in home loans to staff in leadership castes. The museum’s board approved a reportedly interest-free $801,900 home loan for superintendent Neal Benezra in 2002, followed by a $500,000 lend for former senior curator Gary Garrels in 2008. Now, labor union representatives and xSFMOMA, groupings of onetime works agitating for change at the museum, say these transactions epitomize the institutional inequity accented by recent layoffs and furloughs.

On Friday, August 28, SFMOMA announced a 20% furlough for all staff, making the cuts in an internal edict as an “equitable” measure designed to avoid layoffs. It is the third round of sections to devastate the museum this year. In an interrogation with Hyperallergic, Nat Naylor, SFMOMA’s representative with OPEIU Local 29, bristled at the idea that the parts are equitable: a companywide percentage reduction cannot is equitable — it hurts the lowest-paid craftsmen “the worlds largest”.

“A 20% chipped to payments that collection from $400,000 to $20/ hour is not equitable mathematically on its face, ” Naylor said. “As the museum encounters very real business striving as a consequence of not being able to open, one has to wonder about all of the money they’ve put forward in fringe benefits such as housing lends for Neal Benezra and Gary Garrels. […] For our members this trimmed can represent not obliging payment, and it’s merely the right amount that they can’t were eligible for unemployment.”

Naylor added that the gash is a “slap in the face” to the dozens of employees who’ve been working onsite while the museum is closed to the public. She also said that the museum has not answered the union’s calls for hazard pay and jaunt compensation. “Some of our members have been basically losing money trying to get to work safely since April, during a pandemic and then with bad breath character, ” Naylor said. “Now they’re being thanked with this 20% money cut.”

The home loans resonate as represents of institutional inequality because “ongoing increases in costs of housing and living have concluded the previously expensive Bay Area more difficult for art workers, ” xSFMOMA said in a statement to Hyperallergic. “SFMOMA, like countless nonprofit institutions with billionaire councils, exists to generate and preserve wealth by exploit the interests of the people it purposes to support and serve.”

Since the mid-2 000 s, while landowners systemically abated rent-controlled housing, pay for numerous SFMOMA employees just kept pace with the city’s minimum wage. But director payments multiplied, and the credits positioned Benezra and Garrels to benefit from the real-estate boom warn their employees’ future in San Francisco. xSFMOMA, in its statement, bickered the lends show an institution that’s strayed from its aim to serve the public as a cultural asset.

Benezra has led SFMOMA during a period of striking rise , not least a $305 -million swelling to accommodate the modern prowes collecting of Doris and Donald Fisher, billionaire benefactors of the Gap. On top of the capital constructed through friendly financing on his house, Benezra’s earnings has been an increase threefold. SFMOMA’s 2018 tax filings evidence Benezra’s annual compensation outdoes $ 1 million.

Judging by wages, the vast majority of SFMOMA works do not appear to have shared in the benefits of institutional growth.

Between 2004 and 2018, the hourly proportion for frontline points originated from $13.91 to $19.22, historic collective bargaining agreements indicate. In the same period, the minimum wage in San Francisco grew from $8.50 to $15 an hour. In other utterances, in 14 years the minimum wage rose 76% while the SFMOMA wage rose 38%. For most of this same timeframe, admissions and membership proletarians weren’t even SFMOMA’s lowest paid employees — in 2016, when San Francisco’s minimum wages contacted $13 an hour, an SFMOMA coat-checker started at $13.72.

The $ 801,900 home equity credit that the SFMOMA board of trustees approved for Benezra was used to finance a $1.7 million Victorian two-story in the Eureka Valley neighborhood of San Francisco in 2002, public records present. SFMOMA declined to share the loan periods. A 2004Chronicle of Philanthropy article calls it a 10 -year , no-interest mortgage credit. In an example of SFMOMA smoothing Benezra’s home refinancing, the museum would also go on to subordinate its interest in the owned to other future lenders in return for$ 1, public records prove. One of the lenders was Charles Schwab Bank, whose namesake sits on the museum council. Today the house would retrieve $3.5 -$ 3.9 million, according to real-estate website Redfin.

Benezra, in turn, offered a same lend to recruit Garrels as senior curator, Garrels said at a organization cros in June, are consistent with two attendees. Public records register Garrels and his partner bought a room a half mile from Benezra for $1.6 million in 2008. At the meeting, Garrels said the $500,000 lend was necessary to cover his relocation from Los Angeles, where he was working as a curator at the Hammer Museum.

Garrels, who could not be reached for statement, resigned in July after citing “reverse racism” while protecting the importance of continuing to collect art white humanities.( He apologized for what he called his “extremely poor choice of words.”) It is not clear if he has begun to repay the home loan. SFMOMA’s most recently available charge filings from 2018 expres he still owes $500,000.

An SFMOMA spokesperson declined to manufacture Benezra or other officials available for an interview. The spokesman declined to provide a statement on the loans. Benezra countenanced a 50% salary cut earlier this year, the spokesman said. The 20% trimmed doesn’t are available to Benezra.

California law narrowly earmarks nonprofit public welfare business such as SFMOMA to issue lends to employees when financing a principal residence is necessary to secure their services, Arthur Rieman, organizing collaborator at the Law Firm for Nonprofits, said during an interrogation. Like a bank or any other mortgage lender, the nonprofit should protect its interest in the money it lends.

“No bank would issue a no-interest home loan, ” Rieman said. “If I were admonishing a buyer that wanted to make a loan to military officers, I’d require the credit be at commercially reasonable terms.”

Some museum chairmen live in museum-owned housing, a benefit with marked tax benefits. But home loans for what the Internal Revenue Service calls “interested persons” appear to be rare.

On the most recent accessible excise filings , not one of the New York museums with the top 10 highest-paid directors reported an superb lend to an employee. Nor did any other art museum in the San Francisco Bay Area.( The San Francisco Symphony, however, has attained “housing assistance” and “relocation assistance” loans to its lead and dean bassist .)

Hyperallergic discussed recent levy filings for more than 20 other skill museums nationwide and acquired two with remarkable lends to works. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s board approved $150,000 and $200,000 loans for “bridge financing” on two former deputy directors’ home purchases. Gary Tinterow, head of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, owes $784,261 on a board-approved $ 950,000 mortgage. Neither museum responded to comment requests.

Industry rules constitution the American Alliance of Museums does not have a policy or guidelines regarding representatives issuing lends to employees, a spokesperson said in an email.

Read more: hyperallergic.com