As strike continues, Philadelphia art museum says Matisse exhibit will go on

As the opening of its blockbuster Matisse show looms, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is grappling with the first staff-wide strike in its history, complete with picket lines, mounting tension between those on the inside and colleagues on the outside, and the potential for serious institutional damage.

Members of the 180-worker PMA Union, an affiliate of AFSCME DC47, walked off the job Sept. 26. Since then, the museum has remained open, with managers and nonunion employees — the remainder of its roughly 350-employee workforce — doing everything from staffing the museum stores to tending the collection.

But as the strike continues, staff and management divisions deepen, and the prospect increases that the 140-work Matisse exhibition, which is scheduled to open to the public on Oct. 20, will be badly hurt by the walkout.

Like battlefields, labor negotiations create a considerable amount of fog and smoke, making accurate information extremely difficult to come by. The strike at the PMA is no different, and it’s safe to say that both sides are suffering from cloudy visibility.

“It’s been hard to be in a zone where there’s been too little information sharing, because it’s easy to feel like things are being misrepresented and not to have a whole lot of a voice,” said one striker, lamenting the lack of reliable information — a concern coming from all sides in the dispute.

» READ MORE: What do the art museum workers want? Five key issues at the heart of their strike.

As of Saturday, the two sides have not spoken at the bargaining table since Sept. 23, according to the union and the museum. A federal mediator has determined that talks at the moment would not be productive. The two sides have been negotiating the union’s first contract since October of 2020 after employees voted to unionize during the summer of 2020.

Given the snail’s pace of talks, and now the absence of any talks at all, some observers are questioning whether a timely opening of the Matisse show is even possible. The blockbuster exhibition — “Matisse in the 1930s” — is a singularly Philadelphia exhibition that also involves the Barnes Foundation, home of a transformational 1932-1933 Matisse mural, The Dance. After Philadelphia, the exhibition travels to France. (The show is expected to close Jan. 29.)

The Matisse exhibition would be a big deal in any circumstance, but coming after two years of shutdowns and the pandemic — and staff woes stemming from abuse allegations, layoffs, and the current labor dispute — the museum has been banking on Matisse to buoy spirits and to strengthen finances.

Now management insists that the show will open on time, regardless of the strike.

“We definitely expect it to open on schedule,” said Norman Keyes, the museum’s director of communications, who serves as spokesperson for the institution.

It’s probably safe to say that most museumgoers have not been compelled to cross a picket line to view art. The Matisse show may well test their desire to do so.

Will it even be ready?

Museum officials said multiple times in recent days that Matisse was largely hung and would absolutely be ready to open on the 20th.

But striking workers picketing the institution say that most of the staff members who install exhibitions are out on the picket lines. This raises the obvious question of who is installing the show. Usually lending agreements, insurance requirements, and federal indemnification programs spell out in minute detail how valuable artworks coming into an institution must be handled.

“The hanging of a show like this is not something that just anybody can do and the PMA is not going to go out on a limb and have people who aren’t qualified to do this kind of work,” said one museum professional who did not want to be identified because of a relationship with the art museum. “It is a process that’s highly scrutinized. And the PMA registrar’s and conservators take this very, very, very seriously. And would not open the show without the proper people in place to hang the art.”

Board members and senior managers would not comment on strike procedures and the new museum director and chief executive, Sacha Suda, who has been on the job only since Sept. 26, is not part of negotiations, according to Keyes.

“The museum is not commenting on its special exhibition installation process, or on any strike contingency planning,” Keyes said in an official statement Friday.

Strikers on the picket line say they believe the museum has hired outside art handlers to install Matisse. As of Friday, more than half the show had been hung, they said. They also maintained that couriers arriving from lending institutions have been surprised by the presence of strikers and picket lines.

Such couriers essentially babysit works of art traveling from their home institutions. They monitor how the art is handled and determine whether it is being treated with proper care.

“We had two couriers show up today that we managed to intercept before they went in and they had no idea that we were on strike,” one striker, who did not wish to be identified, said on Thursday. The striker said the couriers were “coming from other countries.” Another striker said the couriers and installers were coming from New York. The museum would not comment.

The union also posted Instagram photos on its Twitter feed that show workers — some nonunion PMA employees, and some not identified — hoisting and holding giant Matisse works, apparently hanging them on the walls of the Dorrance Galleries of the Art Museum. In one of the photographs, which could not be verified independently, a worker without gloves can be seen holding up a huge Matisse sketch — a basic violation of art handling procedures.

With the stakes so high, many wonder why the two sides are not at the bargaining table seeking to resolve their differences, putting their gloves on, and getting back to work.

The answer to that depends on whom you talk to. Museum leaders and board members complain that they have made a reasonable offer and that the union has refused to respond to it. Union leaders say that is not the case. In their view, management is simply seeking to delay — a classic effort to weaken union resolve.

According to email exchanges between negotiators, the union did respond to the museum’s most recent offer, proposing modifications; the museum negotiators, lawyers for Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius LLP, declined to take the offers to the museum board for consideration. According to union negotiators, the museum has said that only a portion of the union’s proposal could be brought back to the board for consideration.

The union declined to whittle down its proposal regarding wages and health care.

And there it sits. The key sticking points involve wages and benefits — in particular, health-care benefits.

The two sides, according to estimates provided by some members of City Council are all of $300,000 apart. Councilmember Cindy Bass called a seeming impasse over that “ridiculous.”

The views of city and state officials and council members matter because the city owns the art museum building and leases the land to the museum corporation, a private nonprofit, for a pittance. The city also pays several million dollars annually for museum utilities, provides a multimillion dollar annual subsidy, and benefits economically from the museum serving as a magnet for visitors.

“It is critical that museum leadership work with the members of [PMA Union] Local 397 to negotiate in good faith in order to reach a timely resolution that both sides can agree to,” a city spokesperson said in a Friday statement. “As this strike continues, the city will continue to help facilitate discussions between the two parties so that both sides can reach an agreement that will benefit both workers and the museum as a whole.”

On Wednesday, the entire Philadelphia State Senate delegation signed off on a letter to the PMA trustees calling for a contract guaranteeing “family-sustaining wages” and affordable health care. “This is not only fair, just, and appropriate, but it is what enables PMA to retain the talented individuals who have helped build the museum to its current position of international renown,” they wrote. “We urge the PMA Board of Trustees and leadership to agree promptly to a contract that addresses the issues made public by the Union throughout the duration of this strike.”

On Friday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said he would join strikers on Saturday and called on PMA management “to return to the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.”

On Saturday, Krasner expressed his support for the striking workers rallying at the museum’s west entrance. Liz Shuler, national president of the AFL-CIO, and Pat Eiding, head of the Philadelphia chapter of the AFL-CIO, also joined the picketers, expressing strong support.

The museum has consistently maintained that it is negotiating in good faith and that it remains ready to proceed with the talks. Board members have said, in the words of one, “that this institution will remain committed to mounting and exhibiting as planned and will do so under difficult circumstances successfully.”

Both union and management maintain that there is no impasse. As of Friday there were no formal bargaining sessions scheduled.