I was at a fundraiser at the Orlando Museum of Art (OMA)in the week leading up to the FBI raid to sieve the 325 fake Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that were on exhibit. I had heard a rumor that at a similar event in the museum lobby, that a dead rat had fallen out from a ceiling panel and staff quietly worked to remove it during the party.
Our house guest was working as a volunteer for the museum summer camps and came face to face with an FBI agent as he entered the museum. The exhibit was slated to close much earlier that the June 2023 date due to the controversy surrounding the works in question. The owners wanted to move the works off to another exhibit in Italy. The OMA exhibit might have given the paintings some semblance of credibility making it possible to sell them for millions. The raid came a week before that truncated exhibit closing. According to staff accounts provided to the New York Times, more than 12 FBI agents entered the open museum on Friday, June 24, 2022 and took the paintings down from the exhibition walls and into cars waiting outside. The museum was promptly closed to visitors.
The provenance of the paintings fell apart under close inspection. The owners claimed that the works on cardboard had surfaced in an abandoned storage unit of a California screen writer named Mumford who is now dead and can not confirm the story. The claim was that Basquit had sold the paintings for $5000 and today they would be worth hundreds of millions. In a 2014 meeting with Mumford, FBI special agent Elizabeth Rivas learned that he did not purchase the paintings, did not know about their existence in his storage unit, and was pressured into signing documents that stated his ownership.
Another oddity is that one painting was done on a Fed Ex box. The FedEx logo was designed six years after the artist’s death from a drug overdose. The museum director Aaron DeGroft was fired by the board.
In a statement, OMA board chair Cynthia Brumback said the trustees are “extremely concerned about several issues with regard to the [Basquiat] exhibition, including the recent revelation of an inappropriate email correspondence sent to academia concerning the authentication of some of the artwork in the exhibition”. Brumback adds, “We have launched an official process to address these matters, as they are inconsistent with the values of this institution, our business standards, and our standards of conduct.”
Should the board also be held accountable for allowing such a travesty? OMA lost all credibility as an institution. The museum has become the laughingstock of the art world. Can they ever regain some credibility?