• What went wrong at Art Walk and with Russell Brown
MAIN PETITION LINK – http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/stepdownrussbrown
On November 9, 2009, Executive Director Richard Schave and Treasurer/Curator Kim Cooper were forced to resign from the Downtown LA Art Walk non-profit they founded, due in large part to attacks on their credibility and false claims about the quality of their volunteer work from one man, Russell Brown. Mr. Brown serves simultaneously as President of the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council (a community service position), and as Executive Director of the Historic Downtown Business Improvement District (a consortium of major property owners). In a July 2008 editorial, the local Garment and Citizen newspaper called on Mr. Brown to step down from DLANC due to the clear conflict of interest in his holding these two posts.
After Mr. Schave’s resignation from Art Walk, Mr. Brown then made false claims about Mr. Schave in the Downtown News. A more accurate account of how Mr. Schave’s work was perceived is found in Ginny-Marie Brideau’s blog post and the comments from Art Walk volunteers who worked closely with Mr. Schave and Ms. Cooper. See also this Toronto Star article praising Mr. Schave’s vision for Downtown and Art Walk. A glimpse at how respected community members, including Mr. Brown, actively bashed Art Walk’s new leaders is found in this comment from a local gallery owner.
The comment at the bottom of this page was posted by Kim Cooper on Metblogs LA on 12/26/09 in support of Russell Brown’s nomination for Grinch of the Year, which had been made by someone else. This nomination was due to Mr. Brown’s bad faith dealings surrounding the Art Walk. After numerous attacks by anonymous trolls on Ms. Cooper and others who spoke out against Mr. Brown’s activities, blogger David Markland decided to end the Grinch competition and declare no winner, although he admitted that Mr. Brown had received more votes than any other nominee and no rules had been broken. Ms. Cooper’s Grinch of the Year nomination comment provides extensive background on why she was compelled to file a formal ethics complaint with the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment regarding Mr. Brown’s behavior as President of DLANC. It also explains the background for why, after Mr. Brown threatened to sue her and her husband for having filed this complaint against him, she then petitioned for Mr. Brown to step down from his elected position at DLANC.
[UPDATE: On February 5, 2010, The Garment & Citizen newspaper's cover story stated "DONE Boss Says System ‘Very Weak’ as Grievance Reveals DLANC Ethics Gap." On March 17, 2010, DLANC held a grievance hearing to look into the complaints about Russell Brown's behavior. Because Executive Committee member Patti Berman never posted the hearing on the DLANC community calendar or emailed information about it to constituents, the hearing violates the Brown Act and the results are invalid. During his grievance hearing, Russell Brown testified that he did, in fact, conspire with Bert Green to sabotage the Art Walk non-profit and undermine the work of its volunteer managers beginning in June 2009, one month prior to Bert Green handing over management of the event. Video of Mr. Brown's testimony can be seen at this link.]
COMMENT BY KIM COOPER ON METBLOGS IN SUPPORT OF RUSSELL BROWN’S NOMINATION AS “GRINCH OF THE YEAR,” 12/26/09: Russell Brown has been nominated for Metblogs Grinch of the Year. His bad faith, false claims and disdain for the community surrounding the Downtown LA Art Walk provide excellent examples of why Mr. Brown should receive this particular “honor.”
In early 2009, my husband Richard Schave and I agreed to take over management of the Art Walk from gallery owner Bert Green. After a half-year transition process, our first Art Walk was in mid July. We were excited about finally taking charge and bringing many new and exciting changes to the Art Walk and the downtown community.
On August 3, members of the very new and very busy Art Walk board met with Russell Brown, who had been expressing concern that he was not intrinsically involved in the work of this new entity. The board intended this meeting as a gesture of respect to Mr. Brown, who serves as volunteer president of the Neighborhood Council, and to alleviate any concerns that he had about where the Art Walk was going in its new non-profit role.
The meeting was also needed because Russell, in his other capacity as Executive Director of the Historic District Business Improvement District, was refusing to honor that entity’s long-standing commitment of an annual donation of $5000 to the Art Walk. It was hoped that this matter could be resolved for the financial benefit of this community event.
Russell Brown came to the table that day with a litany of strange, inaccurate complaints about the Art Walk, and it seemed that all he wanted to do at the meeting was to hash over these complaints. When asked directly what could be done so that we could move forward in a positive way, Mr. Brown had no suggestions, but merely stated he would be going back to talk to the community about his unhappiness with the Art Walk.
These complaints were actually nothing new, as very similar claims against the new Art Walk management were made by Russell Brown and DLANC’s Brady Westwater at a gathering of gallery owners on June 17. This was before the new management team was in charge of the Art Walk or had had any opportunity to accomplish anything, and already Russell Brown and his colleague was objecting to their work.
In this August meeting, Russell Brown stated that the Art Walk’s management did not return phone calls — but when this was disputed by the people who dedicated part of each day to returning calls, he could provide no concrete examples beyond objecting to the event’s volunteer staff’s use of a voicemail system rather than answering incoming calls.
He stated that the Art Walk’s map was not available and could not be used. This claim was due to a since-resolved matter involving large PDF files that some computers could not download, which had been corrected before the July Art Walk. Russell spoke of this as a continuing issue which made the new Art Walk management unqualified in his eyes.
He told the board that the Art Walk website didn’t work and was unacceptable to him. However, he could not explain what the problem was. At this point the Art Walk website was called up on a laptop, and it was discovered that Mr. Brown was confused about how to utilize the common type of location-based website that uses a zoomable map. The Art Walk’s redesigned front page–which was already returning as the #1 Google result for “art walk” — opened to a map of the Historic Core, with clickable links for each gallery at its actual location.
Mr. Brown said that this was not what the website looked like when he had visited it, and it was discovered that he had clicked the zoom-out button repeatedly, resulting in a view of the entire Planet Earth. We showed him how the website was supposed to look and function, and apologized for the confusion. But he still was not happy, and due to his continued complaints, we went back to the drawing board and redesigned the site simply to placate him.
What about the $5000 annual donation from HDBID? Russell suggested that rather than give this money to the brand new and entirely unfunded Art Walk non-profit, he intended to fund a new gallery owners group to be managed by former Art Walk manager Bert Green, and give some of it to DLANC member Brady Westwater for his Fashion Walk. And in fact, Russell soon moved to remove another source of funding that had been promised to the Art Walk, DLANC’s $500/month for the Art Walk shuttle (canceled in November); this money was also diverted to the new gallery owners group.
Unfortunately, the August meeting was not a positive one, and concluded with Mr. Brown stating that he did not expect he would be able to work constructively with the new Art Walk board, no matter what they did to try to find a common ground. Despite the fact that the board had just taken over the event, with only a single Art Walk under our belts, Russell Brown declared that the new Art Walk management was a failure that he would not be able to support.
And indeed, Mr. Brown continued to undermine the Art Walk in his words and actions, including interfering in a problematic event sponsorship proposal from Cadillac; he personally worked with Cadillac to place their cars on view at the November Art Walk, despite the objections of the non-profit’s Executive Director and Curator.
Finally, in October, Mr. Brown’s complaints reached a fever pitch. He sent an email to the board of the Art Walk stating that due to the failures of Art Walk management to address his complaints – all of which were false or had long since been addressed – that he would no longer be seeking to work with the Art Walk, but would instead… well, let’s let Mr. Brown speak for himself. Please note that the truth is that we printed thousands of maps, returned all phone messages and sent regular press releases, and that the board was well aware of these facts.
“In this tight economy, we can no longer afford to have an organization that does not have maps printed, does not answer phones, does not send out press releases, or folks do not feel comfortable with the follow thru. But more importantly, we just needed a common sense partner, business associate and organizer who worked with everyone to grow this as a successful, art focused, neighborhood business focused event. That has not happened after many months of trying. So we are moving on to create that with a new set of partners who share that common vision.” (Russell Brown, 10/27/2009)
Just days after this email, members of the Art Walk board informed Executive Director Richard Schave and myself that the board wished Richard to step down from his position of authority so that someone could be brought in who had a better working relationship with community leaders.
This statement made no sense to us, and suggested that the Art Walk board had decided to capitulate to Russell’s campaign of false complaints. Rather than remain and try to do our volunteer work in an environment in which bad faith, false claims and rampant hostility would be rewarded, we chose to resign from the Art Walk.
At this point we felt we could do better work off the board than on it, and so with great regret we walked away from the non-profit we founded. Unfortunately, almost all of the volunteers who we brought into the Art Walk organization chose to also withdraw in sympathy to us, and as a gesture of non-support for an Art Walk board that would place the desires of so disingenuous a person as Russell Brown ahead of the Art Walk’s devoted managing Director and Curator.
And so you see that Russell Brown made the same false complaints about the Art Walk on June 17, on August 3 and on October 27. In June and in August, the Art Walk board agreed that his complaints were unfortunate and without merit. But in October, something changed, and the board decided to listen to Russell Brown. That led to the process by which Richard was asked to step down from his position as Director, but to remain on hand as a full-time volunteer manager. We chose instead to walk away from the Art Walk entirely.
And this is why the downtown community has had to hear so much debate and complaint surrounding the Art Walk over the past weeks. This is why the very young Art Walk non-profit has had to go back to the drawing board and bring a new Director up to speed, during which time the galleries and the community have been without a leader. If Russell Brown put one tenth of the energy into creating positive change in his community that he spent undermining my husband’s and my volunteer work with the Art Walk, who knows what great things could happen?
The Art Walk was not our first experience trying to work with Russell Brown. For several years Richard and I had come to him regularly with suggestions for how DLANC or the BID could better serve the community. Unfortunately, Mr. Brown never wanted to follow up on any of our suggestions, and seemed to feel that the community didn’t need these tools. It was in part because of his failure to act that we felt the need to form a non-profit to run the Art Walk and to provide these specific benefits to the downtown community.
Once that non-profit was formed to support the Art Walk, at considerable effort, Russell Brown conspired to drive us out so that he could take credit for and control the tools that we put in place for the benefit of the community.
This technique is typical of Russell Brown’s political machinations. He creates an environment in downtown Los Angeles where the community is told that the only way to accomplish anything is to work within the DLANC system that he controls, and with the support of the HDBID for which he is the public face—but if anyone shows ability or leadership, he does all he can to undermine and eject them, as happened with the Art Walk. Russell Brown then moves into the vacuum he has created, further consolidating his personal power.
Let me speak directly on the matter of Russell Brown’s complaints about the Art Walk website, which he could not understand how to use and so derided to the community and to the Art Walk board. The fact is that Russell’s own organization DLANC has struggled with the development of its own website, seeking to provide much improved functionality and features needed by its community and its elected leadership.
Several years ago, Richard volunteered to help Russell Brown get the DLANC website updated with a open source content management system, Drupal — what the Art Walk website is built on — which would be interactive and community-driven. Richard offered to organize a group of community-minded programmers to raise the framework (provide the heavy lifting) for a new DLANC website, but stated that Russell would have to provide a few dedicated people from DLANC who would maintain the site and edit its content. This offer was never followed up on by Russell Brown.
The website that was eventually built by Richard for the Art Walk was very similar to what Richard wanted to provide to DLANC and that Russell Brown was not interested in. This is a site that many different people can use, with different levels of permissions, that with use will begin to reflect what’s actually going on in the community, and become an important tool. For Russell Brown to complain so vehemently about the Art Walk website is unfortunate in the light of DLANC’s long struggles and high expenditures with its own website development.
Some people have suggested that now that Richard and I have resigned from the Art Walk we ought to stop talking about what went wrong with that entity, and that our insistence on speaking up is simply sour grapes. We don’t think so.
We believe we were put into this difficult position in order to shine a light on things that are broken in downtown Los Angeles, and to speak up on behalf of the many committed community members who have approached us privately to express their support, and share their stories of Russell Brown’s years of bullying and abuse of power.
Russell Brown doesn’t just run the BID and DLANC. He sits on numerous community boards, including ones that oversee the troubled Pershing Square redesign process, and Bringing Back Broadway with its streetcar component. We believe downtown will have a much better chance of moving forward into the new decade in a spirit of good will and good work if we call Russell Brown out on being the bully that he is, and give the community a chance to screw its courage to the sticking point and let people speak their minds.
Until the community begins providing better people to do the important work we all want to see done, the status quo will remain intact. Nothing will change until we all start talking about what’s wrong, and do something about it. We think this Grinch nomination, which has people talking, is a start.
What comes next is up to you.
yours sincerely,
Kim Cooper
formerly founding Curator and Treasurer of the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, a California Public Benefit Corporation
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