It was just days before Christmas, but Kathryn Matson, the executive director of the Orlando Museum of Art, sounded anything but festive. During a special meeting, he addressed several trustees and major donors, addressing the fallout from the foundation’s past 18 months.
“We are in a serious financial crisis,” he explained, according to a recording of the internal meeting provided to The New York Times and confirmed by a participant. The museum, known as OMA, was still reeling from the disastrous 2022 exhibition of paintings it said were by art world legend Jean-Michel Basquiat — paintings seized from the museum’s walls in June by members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. art crime group during a raid. A Los Angeles auctioneer later admitted to the FBI that he and an associate had forged the paintings, some in as little as five minutes.
At her December meeting, Mattson detailed the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost the museum to hire “crisis communications professionals” and “a legal defense team” to deal with the fallout: intense media scrutiny, an ongoing investigation by the FBI and museum. current lawsuit for fraud, conspiracy and various violations against both the owners of the alleged Basquiats and their former executive director, Aaron De Groft, who had presented the Basquiat show and was fired after the 2022 FBI raid.
“Within a year we had a 25 percent increase in unbudgeted spending,” Mattson continued. The museum’s reserves, he said, “were nearing the level of exhaustion, and that was our cushion. We’ve also maxed out our credit lines and have loans.”
The Orlando Museum was now facing $500,000 in debt — half of it for legal bills, Mattson said on the recording. The outlook for the rest of the museum’s fiscal year, which ended June 30, was even worse: He said at the time that the museum, which has an annual budget of about $4 million, “is projecting a deficit this year of about $1 million. “
“We don’t have the funds readily available to cover it,” he said. “I mean, that’s the truth of the matter.”
Mattson also told the group that a recent meeting she had with three of Orlando’s most prominent philanthropists, personally convened by Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, ended with “no dollar results” and no immediate financial rescue.
Asked Friday about the museum’s financial straits, Mattson did not dispute specific numbers at the Dec. 21 meeting and pointed to several positive developments going forward, including returning attendance to pre-Covid levels, hosting more than 9,000 local children as well as a $400,000 grant that provides free admission and special programming one day a month.
But he acknowledged the museum currently had a “significant cash shortfall” and said its projected deficit for fiscal year 2024 was $835,000. It added in a statement that the museum “seeks to recover these costs from the defendants in its civil action” and “has also sought financial assistance from the government and its philanthropic partners”.
“The museum trustees have stepped up significantly by doubling or increasing their contributions to bridge this liquidity crisis,” he said. The museum declined to provide specific information about those trustee donations.
In a tense meeting with museum staff on Jan. 8, Mattson struck a reassuring tone. According to several attendees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had previously been threatened with termination if they spoke to the press, Mattson sought to rally her frustrated staff around OMA’s upcoming centennial celebrations for its role as one of the oldest cultural institutions in the Central Florida.
Mattson, who was hired in April 2023 as the museum’s interim executive director and CEO and quietly made permanent by trustees in December, did not discuss finances with her staff at that meeting. Instead, he spoke about the museum’s lawsuit against De Groft and the owners of Basquiat artworks. (For his part, De Groft has hit back at OMA, insisting that the Basquiats are genuine and that his termination was unfair.)
The museum has faced criticism from within. At the end of December a public “Save OMA” campaign set in motion by Fiorella Escalon, who was then a member of the museum’s Acquisition Trust board, which focuses on purchasing art for the museum. In an online petition that has since gathered hundreds of signatures, Escalon criticized the museum’s leadership after the Basquiat exhibition and its “continuous efforts to eliminate” anyone who tried to “root out corruption and incompetence.” The resulting lack of transparency, Escalon said, had caused donors to flee and called for the resignation of Mattson and the entire board, as well as the reinstatement of the previous interim executive director, Luder Whitlock, who resigned in August. 2022.
Escalon was notified Jan. 10 that she had been removed from the museum’s acquisitions board and barred from any future position at the museum.
“The reason I went public is if I don’t say anything, the museum will go down,” Escalon said in an interview. “And everybody’s going to say, ‘Oh yeah, we should have done something.’ But nobody did.”
To assess the museum’s finances, The Times asked an independent expert, Maria Elena Gutierrez, its director Chora Creativea consulting firm in Washington, DC that has worked closely with nonprofit organizations, including the Andy Warhol Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, to evaluate both publicly available federal tax documents and internal financial summaries that had been provided to OMA trustees and had been vetted by the Times.
Gutierrez’s analysis found that the museum’s financial condition was healthy before 2022 and comparable to other museums of its size, but that it had seriously deteriorated since then. The size of his projected shortfall — for a foundation with an annual budget of about $4 million and an endowment of $4 million — makes it “extreme,” he said.
Gutierrez said the museum would need one or more key philanthropists — what she called “white knights” — to save it financially. “If the board acts urgently, it can turn it around,” he said, noting the serious risks of facing a “crisis of confidence and crisis of liquidity.”
As previously reported in the Times, several of OMA’s high-profile donors have either shifted their support to Rollins Museum of Art at nearby Rollins College, or sat on their checkbooks. Interviews with OMA staff and former trustees indicate growing frustration with the museum’s legal and crisis management costs.
Internal records provided to trustees and seen by The Times showed that in 2022, after the Basquiat exhibition, the museum spent $444,590 on a law firm and $144,193 on a crisis communications firm. Its current budget, for the fiscal year that ended in June, has allocated another $317,425 to pay both companies. And in a December 2023 court filing for the museum’s lawsuit against De Groft and the owners who claim the artworks are bona fide Basquiats, the museum he said expected another $500,000 in legal fees to bring that case to trial, which is now set for October 2025.
The museum also has pressing capital needs. Its looming costs include $6.8 million in repairs to the museum’s roof and its HVAC system, both of which are judged to be past their “useful life” or beyond an outside contractor. Museum visitors have already seen post-storm buckets in the exhibit areas and inside the gift shop. As Mattson said on the December recording: “We have too many leaks and it puts the art at risk.” He added that “it’s not a nice thing to do, it’s necessary.”