Battling a ‘Holy’ War

A Phoenix museum seeks to make peace with patrons after an edgy exhibit draws fire

No museum director relishes a sit-down talk with angry donors — and Frank Goodyear was no exception.

As the director of the Heard Museum, a small institution focused on Native American arts and culture in Phoenix, Mr. Goodyear was accustomed to hearing praise from visitors, supporters, and critics for the museum’s exhibitions of indigenous art, including traditional ceramics and weavings, as well as cutting-edge work by contemporary Native American artists.

But on this day last September, in his office at the museum’s Spanish-style complex, Mr. Goodyear was hearing something quite different.

Two of the institution’s most-generous donors were unhappy about a small exhibition, called “Holy Land: Diaspora and the Desert,” that was on display at the museum.

The donors, a Jewish married couple whom Mr. Goodyear would identify only as local arts patrons, were particularly upset about one piece: “November 8, 2005,” a video installation by Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, a Navajo artist, that drew a parallel between Native Americans’ experience of losing their land to that of the Jahalin Bedouins, whose traditional lands are now part of the state of Israel.

Mr. Goodyear had received several complaints about the show from Jewish visitors already, who took offense at the comparison between Israel’s dealings with the Jahalin and the federal government’s actions against the Native Americans.

That would perhaps be enough cause for concern in a city with a substantial Jewish population, like Phoenix.

But the visit from the donors took the matter beyond mere debate, potentially causing financial trouble for the institution, which expects to raise $1.9-million this year from individuals to help meet its $7.3-million budget.

“I didn’t want the Heard to be seen as anti-Semitic because we aren’t — and I’ve been around long enough to see these things mushroom,” says the director. “I thought, ‘How did we find ourselves in this situation?’”

Courting Controversy

The way a museum — or any arts charity — carries out its mission without annoying its key donors, and the way that it manages fallout when ire is inevitably raised, will ultimately go a long way toward determining its long-term health, relevance, and perhaps survival.

The Heard Museum’s experience with its “Holy Land” exhibit provides a case study of how an arts institution has managed the challenge.

Art is often — and, many would argue, ought to be — thought-provoking and controversial. Indeed, controversy can bring a museum benefits. News-media attention can make people curious to see what is going on and give small organizations a chance to show their influence. But edgy exhibits can also alienate even a museum’s most stalwart supporters.

Museum directors today continue to be influenced by memories of the 1999 showdown between the Brooklyn Museum and the mayor of New York over its “Sensation” exhibit, which included a painting that incorporated elephant dung on a canvas that depicted the Virgin Mary.

The mayor at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, sought to cut the museum’s subsidy from the city and end its lease if it did not remove the offending pieces; a judge later ruled that the mayor’s efforts had violated the First Amendment.

The Brooklyn Museum controversy has “become a part of our history,” says Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, in New York. Still, museum directors are not often deterred from courting controversy.

“I don’t think that directors think, ‘Are we going there?’” she says. “They think, ‘We are going there, so what do we do to educate the public about what we’re doing?’”

In 2004, a group of Phoenix-area curators, including Joe Baker, the curator of fine art at the Heard, gathered for shop talk and brainstorming at a coffeehouse up the street from the museum.

“We began to talk about peoples who had been displaced by acts of colonialism,” Mr. Baker recalls. “The discussion turned into questions: Why hadn’t Native Americans been a part of this total discussion about diaspora? And could we gather contemporary Native American work together in an exhibition that would also bring artists from all over the world?”

The exhibit “Holy Land” resulted, as an attempt to answer those queries.

Conversation Piece

Both Mr. Baker and co-curator Lara Taubman hoped that the exhibit would spur discussions of nation, identity, and diaspora among Heard visitors. The mix of artists was a bold strike for inclusion, thought Mr. Baker, who has often heard Native artists’ complaints about being shut out of mainstream museums.

But he suspected that not all of the museum’s visitors would embrace the exhibit’s concept. The Heard’s mission is to focus on indigenous Southwest arts and culture, and “Holy Land” would expand that vision by including Native American artists’ works alongside those by contemporary artists from other parts of the world.

And even the nontraditional Native American work spotlighted in “Holy Land,” he says, would be a stretch for many of the Heard’s visitors. “The artists we show here are not the artists you’d typically find exhibiting at a fair or a market-type environment,” Mr. Baker says. “I’m sure there’s a good portion of our audience that would just as soon the contemporary art go away.”

When he first saw Ms. Tsinhnahjinnie’s video of interviews with Jahalin Bedouins, Mr. Baker says, he was delighted.

“I thought her piece was so extremely poignant because it involves another culture, other people, but tied so directly to native cultures and their connection to the land,” he says. “And that to me was fascinating. The Native artist as a journalist, in a strange land, among different people, bringing the story home — to me it was very important that it be in the exhibit.”

It never occurred to either of its curators that the piece would offend the museum’s Jewish patrons. Says Ms. Taubman, the Jewish daughter of an Israeli mother: “For me to be anti-Semitic would be almost impossible.”

Angry Feedback

The exhibit opened at the end of 2005, but it took until the following July, when Israel began military action in Lebanon after the political group Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers, for controversy to erupt.

In the context of those events, “Holy Land” — and, specifically, Ms. Tsinhnahjinnie’s video — became far more charged. “This was right in the moment,” says Mr. Baker. “This is CNN.”

Last August, the Valley of the Sun Jewish Community Center hosted the Maccabi Games, an event that brought thousands of Jewish visitors to the city — many of whom visited the Heard Museum and saw “Holy Land.”

Not too long after that, Bill Straus, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Phoenix chapter, began fielding calls from unhappy visitors. All told, Mr. Straus estimates that he received some 50 complaints from people in the Phoenix area, and half a dozen e-mail messages and letters from out-of-town visitors, all sounding a similar note: Ms. Tsinhnahjinnie’s video installation was unbalanced and harshly anti-Israel.

Mr. Straus doesn’t often receive complaints about artwork, he says, but the precise issue that delighted Mr. Baker and Ms. Taubman — that the exhibit was occurring at the Heard — helped to provoke ire.

“What is this doing at a Southwestern cultural museum?” Mr. Straus recalls hearing.

Mr. Straus didn’t like the video either. “I thought it was an unbelievably one-sided, narrow-focused view of a complicated situation,” he says. “I thought the video did a grave injustice to a world problem.”

He contacted Mr. Goodyear, questioning the museum’s judgment in including the video in its exhibit, and asking why it was displayed without any additional explanation.

Other complaints rolled in. Jason Meyers, then the museum’s director of marketing communication and now public-relations manager for a local nonprofit credit union, says that he received about 20 phone calls “from very influential and loud voices in the Jewish community. Most people complained that we didn’t put the video into context. They felt that the film bordered on propaganda.”

An article about the exhibit in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, published in September, sparked more phone calls to the museum.

Throughout the controversy, the artist whose work caused the uproar remained silent, intending for her work to speak for itself. But, reflecting on the episode now, Ms. Tsinhnahjinnie says she was not surprised by the uproar.

“If you’re going to have a show titled ‘Holy Land,’ surely you would expect to have some kind of controversy,” she says. “I do political work, and when one does political work it’s going to create reactions and bring up issues. And in no way is the reaction going to change my work or my perspective.”

In response to the criticism that her installation was anti-Semitic, she points out that the group that brought her to interview the Bedouins in the first place was a Jewish Israeli group.

“All that the piece is is information,” she says. “It’s information about a situation that’s taking place. There is a wall being built, there are houses being demolished. These are truths.”

As for the criticism that her video was one-sided, she says, “It was a personal piece of documentation. It’s from a very personal point of view.”

She is pleased, she says, with the Heard’s support for her work and its handling of the uproar.

As part of the museum’s response, its board president, Jeff Kahn, met with three “respected members of the Jewish community,” he said in a written statement prepared for The Chronicle. “Each of these individuals, separately, advised the Heard Museum to be open and sensitive to people’s concerns.”

Mr. Goodyear met with Mr. Straus in September. Soon after, the museum head met with the Jewish couple who were major donors to the museum. He listened to their criticism, he says, then spelled out his view of the Heard’s role: that the museum is about ideas, issues, and free expression. And then he explained that it wasn’t the museum’s intention to present a negative picture of the Israeli government or the Jewish people.

The major donors with whom he met, he says, didn’t threaten to pull their donation, and the meeting was marked by “a good dialogue.” Afterward, he says, he sent the donors a thank-you note, “saying that I really appreciated their input and that I hoped that they wouldn’t abandon the institution.” The couple have continued to give to the Heard, says Mr. Goodyear.

The exhibit’s curators prepared statements for the news media that were passed along to Mr. Straus, and the museum also officially responded to the article that ran in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, expressing the museum’s wish to be sensitive to its Jewish patrons and visitors.

The Heard also posted a label next to Ms. Tsinhnahjinnie’s video to clarify the museum’s position, stating that the piece represented only the artist’s views and not the institution’s. “The film is not a documentary, but rather a commentary through the eyes of one person,” the label said. “We remain sensitive to hearing the concerns of the Jewish community, and it is our hope that the film opens a dialogue where none existed before.”

Lessons Learned

Geri Wright, the Heard’s director of development, says that while she was not aware of “Holy Land” having a lingering negative effect among local Jewish donors, it may have had a latent one. “You really don’t know if it’s hurt you until you don’t get the gift,” she says. At the moment, however, she has no plans to alter her fund-raising strategy.

Between the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years — the latter of which ended September 30, at the peak of the “Holy Land” controversy — fund raising from individuals remained flat for the museum. About $1.6-million was raised from individuals in both years.

But Mr. Straus believes the incident did damage the Heard’s reputation among local Jewish residents. “I hate to broad-brush the entire Jewish community in Phoenix, but I would say that there was a great deal of discomfort about it,” he says. Mr. Straus and Mr. Goodyear have organized a meeting for their two organizations’ staffs and constituents, slated for September, to lay the groundwork for a public event to bring together local Native American and Jewish groups.

The “Holy Land” exhibit ended on schedule, in December. With hindsight, it might have made sense to include local Jewish leaders in the preparations for “Holy Land,” says Ann Marshall, the Heard’s director of collections, interpretation, and education. But since the museum didn’t realize the impact that Ms. Tsinhnahjinnie’s video would have, the idea didn’t come up.

What’s more, says Ms. Marshall, “we’re used to talking to the people whose cultural heritage we’re representing” — and the Heard doesn’t have a tradition of speaking directly to Jewish groups.

Mr. Baker believes that additional programming to accompany “Holy Land,” such as a public symposium or forum to discuss the ideas in the exhibit, could have helped defuse the tension. Although the curators contemplated such additional events as they planned the show, they ran short of money to make it happen. “When I look back on the exhibit and the experience, I think that’s how we as an institution fell short,” says Mr. Baker.

The show, which had a tiny budget of just $32,000 — slightly more than a third of the museum’s average exhibit budget — was financed through the Heard’s operating budget.

“Would we have gone forward with showing the video, knowing what we do now? Yes, we would,” says Mr. Goodyear. “But we would have been more prepared to respond to the criticism, and we would have been prepared to create some kind of place for public response.”

Despite the local controversy, “Holy Land” earned fans for the museum, raising its profile in the world of contemporary art, says Mr. Baker. “‘Holy Land’ has been the high point of my career as a curator,” he says. The exhibit was reviewed in major arts publications like Art Papers, and Mr. Baker won the 2007 Contemporary Catalyst Award from Arizona’s Scottsdale Contemporary Museum of Art for the role he played.

Currently he is enmeshed in planning “Re:Mix,” another contemporary exhibition, and a collaboration between the Heard Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, which is set to open in October in Phoenix and in May 2008 in New York.

“I expect it to be controversial,” says Mr. Baker. “It presents new viewpoints and new commentary on what it means to be Indian, and it addresses hybridity and urban Indian culture. The entire exhibit is very provocative work.”

Although he expresses hope that “Re:Mix” will include public symposia to put its works in context, little money is available to support such programming. The funds for “Re:Mix,” like for “Holy Land,” are coming from the Heard Museum’s operating budget, though the cost for the $300,000 exhibit will be shared with the National Museum of the American Indian.

Raising money for the project has been “difficult,” says Ms. Wright, because of its contemporary and controversial content. She approached seven corporate and foundation entities for support for the “Re:Mix” exhibit and was declined by all of them — although Ms. Wright says, none of the grant makers specifically cited the “Holy Land” controversy as a reason for their refusal.

In the meantime, she says, “If I can’t find funding for an exhibit, then I find funding for other things within the institution, and the operating budget takes over. The exhibit will still happen.” And controversy may also.