Philadelphia Art Museum names a new director and CEO

The Philadelphia Art Museum, seeking to calm the waters after a turbulent six-week stretch, has named an experienced hand, Daniel H. Weiss, as director and CEO.

Weiss, 68, was president of Haverford College starting in 2013 and left the post in 2015 to lead the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, staying eight years. Prior to Haverford, he was president of Lafayette College.

The decision was approved Friday morning by the Art Museum’s trustees with a unanimous vote, a spokesperson said.

Weiss’ appointment comes as something of a surprise. The museum had been expected to name an interim director while it searched for a permanent one. Right now, Weiss is set to remain in the post only through the end of 2028, though his tenure could be extended.

He takes over an institution left shaken by the Nov. 4 firing of its director and CEO, Sasha Suda, after an investigation by an outside law firm flagged the handling of her own compensation. She filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the museum less than a week later.

Weiss said Friday that despite the recent turmoil, the museum had all of the important required ingredients it needed for its future — a great collection, staff, buildings, and mission.

“What we have to do is clean things up and reaffirm our commitment to that mission,” he said. “I don’t think the challenges are so steep. They have to be addressed, they are real, but they are not overwhelming.”

The first thing he will do, he said, is to sit down with the staff, board, donors, and other constituents, and through these conversations the museum’s priorities would emerge.

“I know less about these issues than anybody else does at this point, so I need to listen and to learn,” he said.

Art Museum board chair Ellen T. Caplan was not available for comment, a spokesperson said, but she said in a statement that the museum was “extraordinarily fortunate to have someone of Dan Weiss’s caliber and experience step into this critical role.”

His proven track record of museum leadership, along with his “deep understanding of the field, and his ability to navigate complex institutional challenges,” she said, “make him ideally suited to provide stability and strategic direction during this critical period for the art museum.”

Weiss comes to his new post with both substantial art and business credentials. An art historian, he holds a master’s degree in medieval and modern art and a Ph.D. in western medieval and Byzantine art, both from Johns Hopkins University. He previously earned an MBA from Yale School of Management and worked for consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton.

He was at Haverford College for a little less than two years before being hired away to lead the Met along with director Thomas P. Campbell. With Campbell’s departure in 2017, he took on the title of chief executive. He worked alongside Max Hollein after Hollein became director in 2018. Weiss left the Met in 2023.

He was the head of Haverford College in 2014 when it received its largest single gift to date at the time — $25 million from Howard Lutnick, then-chairman of the college’s board of managers and a Haverford graduate. (Lutnick is currently U.S. secretary of commerce.)

Weiss brings to the Art Museum another storehouse of knowledge. He recently worked as a consultant to the museum’s board, a museum spokesperson said.

He is no stranger to controversy. At the Met, he helped the museum grapple with decisions such as the end of its longtime pay-as-you-wish admission policy, as well as the question of whether to cut ties with the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured and marketed the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

The museum in 2019 announced it would stop accepting gifts from the Sacklers, and in 2021 it removed the family’s name from a number of exhibition spaces, including the wing that houses the popular Temple of Dendur.

Weiss was also at the Met when the museum faced a set of circumstances not unlike some of those the Philadelphia Art Museum is facing now. In 2017, struggling with a deficit, the Met decided to pause plans for a $600 million expansion. Instead, it focused on more mundane, if important, projects, like work on the roof and skylights.

Most recently, for the past two years, Weiss has been a humanities professor and senior advisor to the provost for the arts at Johns Hopkins University.

Suda filed a lawsuit on Nov. 10 against her former employer. Her lawyer said that she was the victim of a “small cabal” from the board that commissioned a “sham investigation” as a “pretext” for her “unlawful dismissal.”

The Art Museum on Thursday responded to the lawsuit in Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas with a petition saying Suda was dismissed after an investigation determined that she “misappropriated funds from the museum and lied to cover up her theft.” Her lawyer called the museum’s accusations false. “These are the same recycled allegations from the sham investigation that the museum manufactured as a pretext for Suda’s wrongful termination,” he said.

The Art Museum has a list of short- and long-term challenges with which it must grapple. Among them is the question of whether to roll back the recent name change and rebrand, which have been widely mocked and disliked.

It also has several big pieces of the operational, facilities, and financial puzzle to prioritize. The Perelman annex was closed to the public during the pandemic and has not reopened; a planned expansion of gallery space beneath the museum’s east steps is in limbo; deferred maintenance on the main building awaits attention; the endowment is considered inadequate for an institution of its size.

In addition, the museum is challenged by an operating deficit and visitorship numbers that have not recovered post-pandemic.

Weiss — who is expected to take over the museum Dec. 1 — is the author of several books, including a recent one that explores the place of the art museum in society throughout history and examines its challenges today in the larger culture. Its title suggests the case he will need to make as the museum’s 15th director: Why the Museum Matters.

“This is a great museum with a bright, important future,” said Weiss, “and our ability to fulfill our mission requires everyone’s involvement.”