![]() Viramontes said his experience speaks to a broader problem at the museum. Viramontes making any request for arbitration.” Viramontes directly about his allegations, the investigation, or the next steps of a mediation without the presence of a lawyer, and there is no record or witness of Mr. “At no point during the investigation or after,” Stifler said, “did anyone from the board communicate with Mr. “I asked for an arbitration agreement for a third-party mediator, and Maria Seferian made it very clear that was not going to happen.” “Instead, Carlos chose to resign,” the email read. In an email to staff, obtained by The Times, Shapiro said MOCA had suggested that she and Viramontes meet with a mediator, but that he rejected the first two proposed mediators and did not respond to the third. At that point I realized if this is how they handled things, there was no fixing this. “They said she was my boss and it’s up to her. “The board said, ‘We hear you, you’re right, but we’re not going to do anything about it,’” Viramontes said. He filed a complaint with the museum’s board, but this January an outside investigator hired by the museum determined that the retaliation claims were not substantiated. He also said Shapiro reneged on a 15% raise she had promised him that June. Viramontes said Shapiro stopped speaking to him or inviting him to important meetings he’d previously been part of regarding payroll, hiring and changes to employees’ roles. An outside HR advisor, the museum said, reported “obvious shortcomings in the 360 process managed.” MOCA denied that Shapiro retaliated against Viramontes. “There were things that came back about how she spoke to people or made them feel,” he said in an interview. The so-called “360 reviews” are a process that included Viramontes’ summaries of comments from Shapiro’s peers and direct reports. ![]() Viramontes said his supervisor, MOCA Deputy Director Amy Shapiro, retaliated against him because she was displeased with his handling of fall 2020 performance reviews of senior staff, including herself and Biesenbach. 19 email to the staff obtained by The Times. “I cannot continue to work in a hostile environment,” he wrote in a Feb. The museum’s human resources director, Carlos Viramontes, joined MOCA in November 2019 and quit in February. MOCA’s director, Klaus Biesenbach, was director there before taking his post at MOCA in fall 2018.Īs senior curator, Locks co-curated, with senior curator Bennett Simpson, “Seven Stations: Selections From MOCA’s Collection,” which is viewable online and may be seen in person when the museum opens to the public June 3. Lew and also worked at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s experimental satellite space in Queens. ![]() She co-curated the 2017 Whitney Biennial with Christopher Y. Locks joined MOCA’s curatorial team in July 2019 from New York, where she had been working as an independent curator. In her absence, the senior leadership team is handling the IDEA Initiative, and the museum has hired an IDEA advisor for the interim while it searches for a full-time IDEA executive. Locks, who didn’t respond to The Times’ request for a comment, was responsible for IDEA at MOCA. ![]() “We wish Mia all the best and thank her for her time at the museum.” “We are working across our organization to fulfill our IDEA vision, taking tangible and immediate steps that include anti-racism workshops, an internal compensation survey and position audit, the formation of a multi-language task force and the creation of a dedicated IDEA staff position,” she said. The museum responded by saying it is deeply committed to the IDEA Initiative, representative Sarah Stifler said by email. But ultimately, Locks said in her email, “MOCA’s leadership is not yet ready to fully embrace IDEA.” In Locks’ March 26 exit email to the staff, read to The Times by a MOCA employee and confirmed by the museum, Locks said she was grateful that the museum had launched its IDEA Initiative - an effort MOCA debuted in fall 2019 to promote inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility. Mia Locks, senior curator and head of new initiatives, resigned in late March after less than two years on the job. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles confirmed Monday the resignations of two key leaders, a senior curator who quit citing resistance to diversity initiatives and the director of human resources, who left because of a “hostile” work culture. ![]()
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