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During a talk in Washington, D.C. last weekend, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak said she sees as a troubling pattern in museum leadership. In light of recent museum leadership reshuffles, she argued that male museum directors often retire, while women more frequently get fired, Charlotte Burns reported in the Financial Times Thursday.
“I’m petrified about what’s happening to leadership in our country, and particularly in our field,” said Paternak. “I think that if we were to take a look at the people—the museum leaders—who have lost their jobs, curators and directors in recent years, we would find that men retire and women get fired. And I’m not seeing any data on this. If anybody is in the press here, I’d like for you to study it.”
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Pasternak was speaking at the Making Their Mark Forum, a three-day conference organized by ARTnews Top 200 collector Komal Shah intended to “celebrate female artists and address enduring gender inequities in the art world,” as Julie Brener Davich reported for ARTnews earlier this week. The forum featured figures in the arts from museum leadership and auction house personnel to film directors and actors.
Pasternak was speaking on the panel, “The System Reimagined – Rethinking Museum Prac6ces: Acquisitions, Curation & Inclusion of Women Artists,” along with Christophe Cherix of Museum of Modern Art, Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and curator Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who until February 2025 was director and CEO of the forthcoming Lucas Museum.
As noted in the FT, several recent dismissals have raised more alarm about the issue. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, director and CEO Sasha Suda was fired three years into her contract, and quickly replaced by Daniel Weiss. (Suda has since alleged wrongful termination, which the museum denies, and the matter is currently being handled through private arbitration.) At the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., director Kim Sajet stepped down in June 2025, after President Donald Trump attempted to fire her on social media. (Sajet is now director of the Milwuakee Art Museum.) And then, at the Louvre in Paris, director Laurence des Cars resigned last month after a tumultuous year topped by a high-profile jewel smash-and-grab that exposed longstanding security problems. She was been replaced by Christophe Leribault.
And, as Jackson-Dumont noted in the panel, she hired six women “across different areas” at the Lucas Museum during her tenure. Only two remain at the museum. “You would have thought we blew up the universe. One reporter asked me where we found all these women,” she said.
Burns was also a speaker at the forum, along with her collaborator Julia Halperin; both journalists are known for writing the Burns-Halperin Report, which aims to provide a “concise, data-driven overview of the position of women artists in the contemporary art world,” per a release for the forum.
Update, 3/13/26, 12:09 p.m.: A previous version of this article contained phrasing similar to what appears in Charlotte Burns’s report on the Making Their Mark Forum for the Financial Times. This previous version did not meet ARTnews’s standards, and the editors regret this. This article has been re-edited accordingly.
