Former Employee Sues Museum of Arts and Design, Claiming She Was Fired After Complaining about Director’s Expenses

The former chief financial officer of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design sued the institution last week, alleging that its leadership fired her after she accused the director of misusing institutional funds.

In the lawsuit, filed on Friday with the New York County Supreme Court, Denise Lewis claims that she approached the board with allegations about director Tim Rodgers. He had used MAD money to help fund expenses related to a second home in Connecticut, she claims. Moreover, she alleges, Rodgers had used MAD money to help pay for a vacation in Mexico for him and his husband last year.

Lewis claims that she contested the vacation expenses—which included a $600 fee for a rug for Rodgers’s second home—with Rodgers’s assistant. Board chair Michael Cohen became involved, and, according to the lawsuit, told her “not to pay those expenses,” which were “not proper.”

Then, in January, Lewis departed the museum. According to the lawsuit, Rodgers asked her to resign, saying that “she did not seem ‘happy’” to work at the museum where she had worked since 2017. She says that she declined to resign, and then was fired.

Lewis also alleges in her suit that after she was fired, the museum did not give her the documentation she needs to retain her CPA license.

MAD, the lawsuit claims, “engaged in its retaliatory actions with wanton negligence and reckless indifference” toward Lewis.

In response to a detailed list of fact-checking inquiries and a request for comment, a spokesperson for the museum said, “These allegations are untrue. We look forward to making our case in court.”

When Rodgers came to MAD in 2021, he became the museum’s 11th director in eight years; six of those leaders had been interim ones. “Some employees said that a carousel of different directors bringing new approaches has exhausted staff, strained relationships with some artists and damaged trust in the board,” the New York Times reported in its announcement of Rodgers’s hiring. “Former directors described the institution’s woes as reflective of bad board governance.”

Rodgers told the Times that “the first thing I have to do is earn the trust of the staff.”

Yet Lewis’s lawsuit alleges that Rodgers’s leadership had continued to be divisive among employees. She claims that the museum had raised discontent at the end of 2023 through decisions about bonuses and a shift in the hybrid work schedule for staff.

“Many staff members came to Lewis upset not only about the decisions made, but about the lack of proper communication about the decisions,” Lewis’s lawsuit claims. “Staff members complained to Lewis about the lack of leadership and several of them said they were going to update their resumes and start looking for new jobs.”