Former Anchorage Museum employees demand investigation into work environment under director

A group of former Anchorage Museum employees is calling for an investigation into the leadership and work culture under its director, Julie Decker. 

Five former employees, plus the museum’s former chief of security who worked as a contractor, sent a letter to the museum’s board of directors on June 1. 

In it, they charge Decker with fostering an opaque, chaotic and stressful work culture. Senior staff were “directly berated, manipulated, lied to, undermined, and met with prolonged silent treatment by the director/CEO,” it reads. 

“There’s just a real pattern of toxicity that has been going on for years,” said Kirsten Anderson, one of the authors of the letter. She was deputy director and chief curator of the museum until she resigned in 2020. 

She said it took two years after she resigned for herself and other staff to process their experiences at the museum and organize writing the letter. 

In an emailed statement, Decker said that she values all museum staff and said she sees employee feedback as a way to improve the museum. 

“Our focus for the past few years has been on navigating the museum and staff through this pandemic in the most human way possible and I’m proud of how we have all pulled together to do that,” she wrote. 

The authors of the letter ask the board to conduct anonymous interviews with former and current staff and to investigate staff turnover. 

“We strongly urge the Board to prioritize the need to rebuild a Museum that is safe, supportive, and inclusive–particularly for BIPOC, LGBTQ+ staff, and working mothers,” it reads. 

Carla Beam, the chair of the museum’s board of directors, said the board is taking the concerns in the letter seriously, but did not elaborate on its next steps. 

“We’ll be looking into it as we would any such concerns that are raised by the public that are appropriate for the board to handle,” she said. 

Beam said in more than two-and-a-half years on the board, she hadn’t heard any similar complaints about Decker.

Decker has been the museum’s director since 2013. The museum currently employs 67 people, according to Decker, and had an annual budget of about $10 million last year, according to tax documents. 

Jesus Landin-Torrez, a former curator and signatory of the letter, said they experienced micro-aggressions and felt excluded during their year there. Landin-Torrez identifies as chicano. 

“When I was there it felt like an overworked, toxic environment, with a lot of gaslighting going on and there was no transparency or accountability, no systems in place for conflict resolution,” they wrote in a text message. 

Landin-Torrez said they’d worked in several museums in their career and said other museums are dealing with similar reckonings over work culture and inclusion of marginalized groups in decision making. 

“These kind of allegations and investigations are happening at other museums all over the country, and we’re just asking for one to happen here at the Anchorage Museum too,” they wrote.