The Smithsonian Institution quietly moved the director of its Smithsonian American Art Museum into another role this summer after staff complaints.
Stephanie Stebich, who joined the museum as director in 2017, has changed her LinkedIn to note that she left the role in September 2024. Her position listed on her profile is now described as the senior advisor to the undersecretary for museums and culture.
Jane Carpenter-Rock has now listed herself on LinkedIn as the museum’s acting director. She was previously the deputy director for museum content and outreach.
The changes went with little fanfare or an official announcement standard in the art world, and her new role went unreported until a Washington Post expose published Monday noting that she had been subject to years of complaints by her staff.
Stebich’s reassignment came just months after she announced to her staff in July that she would be taking an indefinite medical leave, the Washington Post reported. She is now an adviser to Kevin Gover, who reportedly resisted calls for her removal.
Allegations of a toxic work environment fostered by Stebich first came in the form of an internal letter staffers sent to Smithsonian leadership in July 2023 detailing their complaints, anonymous sources who spoke to the newspaper said, but members of its board of commissioners did not learn about the extent of staff discontent until this year.
Artnet has filed a request under a Smithsonian public information directive for internal communications surrounding Stebich’s reassignment and events that led to it.
Numerous discussions about leadership eventually reached a head between her supporters and her critics when multiple board members threatened to resign. Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, who has the sole authority for personnel matters pertaining to senior-level directors, revealed her new role in an internal email to staff on August 16 ahead of the September reassignment.
Stebich was a powerhouse fundraiser for the museum, raising more than $100 million in the seven years at the institution’s helm, but was “inexperienced” when it came to leading her 140 employees across the staff of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its separate Renwick Gallery, retired curator Virginia Mecklenburg told the newspaper.
The Renwick Gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images
Internal employee satisfaction surveys showed her popularity consistently decreasing throughout her tenure. Those surveys are not public and were not reviewed by Artnet for confirmation. But staffers described being publicly berated by Stebich and being blamed for her mistakes in interviews with the newspaper.
In one alleged incident in 2023, deputies under Stebich reprimanded staff members for “bullying” after the director was subject to a humiliating exercise led by a group of consultants in an all-staff meeting.
During the exercise, staffers submitted their top concerns about the museum’s operations using a digital tool that fed the results into a word cloud displayed to the audience. The words “toxic director” purportedly dominated the generated word cloud, with other terms including “burnout” and “staff morale” also prominently featured.
And Stebich was accused of creating rivalries among members of her staff that drove away talent, including demoting Mecklenburg from chief curator to senior curator in order to elevate Latin American art curator E. Carmen Ramos in 2019. Mecklenburg decided to retire this year after 45 years working for the American Art Museum and Ramos ultimately left to serve as the chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in 2021.
The Stebich controversy is the latest leadership dispute at the museum after Nancy Yao withdrew from her appointment as the founding director of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum, slated to open in a decade. Yao withdrew after it was revealed that she had settled three wrongful termination lawsuits with staff members when she helmed the Museum of Chinese in America.