MoMA Answers To No One

According to our website, Glenn Lowry, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) earned about $1 million last year. If this is true, this would make him one of the highest-paid non-profit leaders in the nation. But is it true?

Sadly, for donors, charity watchdogs, and those who happen to like honesty, veracity, and transparency, I'm just not sure if it's true or not.

The New York Times today has the story that, from 1995 to 2003, Mr. Lowry was paid vastly more than the museum reported to federal and state officials. Two of the museum’s wealthiest trustees, David Rockefeller and Agnes Gund, created a trust, and through that trust, they paid Mr. Lowry a total of $5.35 million — in amounts ranging from $35,800 to $3.5 million a year. This is salary in addition to the compensation supplied by the museum, which was still demonstrably higher than any other museum official in the nation.

These off-the-books payments supposedly stopped in 2004 (although, coincidentally, that's the same year the museum bought Mr. Lowry a new Manhattan apartment) but how can we possibly know that? They never acknowledged the payments in the first place, until the state AG's office became curious about why this particular trust was making multi-million dollar payments to another organization's executive director.

Was all this illegal? I have no idea.

Do they now have a federal tax problem, due to the fact that they've never amended their 990s for the 9 years in question, meaning that the compensation sections of the MoMA's returns are patently false? Yes, I would suspect so.

But most importantly, was this a sleazy, sneaky, and underhanded move clearly designed to skirt the intention of the laws that govern our nation's non-profits?

This much is true.