Could benefactor’s racist practices lead to name change at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art?
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is “reflecting” on its own association with William Rockhill Nelson after The Kansas City Star’s recent report highlighting how The Star’s founder helped lay the foundation for decades of racial segregation in Kansas City.
The Star then announced it was removing the name and image of Nelson from its newspaper and website.
That prompted several readers to ask if the art museum might rebrand itself and no longer honor Nelson, even though his newspaper fortune was the foundation for the museum’s creation.
A Nelson-Atkins spokeswoman did not give a direct answer to that question when a reporter sought comment last week. But she did acknowledge that The Star’s decision to distance itself from Nelson and a series of articles last month that recounted the newspaper’s failure for much of its 140-year history to fairly and adequately cover the Black community have led museum officials to discuss their association with the institution’s namesake.
“Museum leadership, along with leadership of our Board of Trustees and staff, read the Star’s recent piece, along with the many pieces published on the Star’s own history in late 2020,” Kathleen Leighton, the museum’s manager of media relations and video production, said in an email.
“We are reflecting on all of this and reviewing the museum’s own history.”
Part of the impetus for that bit of reflection was The Star’s decision to remove a small photograph of Nelson from its masthead. Since 1998, it had run at the bottom of the editorial page along with a quote attributed to Nelson in which he described the newspaper’s mission as “A Paper for the People.”
That ended last Sunday with an announcement from The Star’s editor and president, Mike Fannin, who said “Nelson’s words were lofty but ultimately dishonest. The Star was not ‘A Paper for the People’ through much of its history. It was a paper for only some people, namely white people. Those values don’t square at all with The Star newsroom of today.”
The move came after Fannin’s public apology last month for The Star’s failures covering the Black community for many years. Along with the apology, The Star published several articles focusing on how the newspaper had fallen short in covering the Black community over the decades. Those areas included its early coverage of the civil rights movement and failure to write about Black cultural figures from the area who became famous, such as jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker and baseball legend Satchel Paige.
One article focused on Nelson’s mentorship of pioneering Kansas City real estate developer J.C. Nichols, who excluded Black people and other minorities from his housing developments with legal restrictions written into the deeds. During last summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations nationwide, the city’s parks board decided to strike Nichols’ name from J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain near the Country Club Plaza shopping district, which he developed, and rename J.C. Nichols Parkway.
“No person accelerated white flight, redlining and racial division in the Kansas City area more than J.C. Nichols,“ Mayor Quinton Lucas said at the time. “The time has long passed that we remove Kansas City’s memorials to his name.”
Supported segregated neighborhoods
Nelson was one of Nichols’ biggest supporters and also built neighborhoods with deed restrictions forbidding the sale of houses to Black people. While Nelson was also known as a reformer who employed the newspaper as a bullhorn for community betterment and focused a spotlight on public corruption, he was an unapologetic segregationist and directed a news operation that ignored the troubles and accomplishments of the city’s Black residents during his life and for many decades after his death in 1915.
Those values clearly don’t square with those of the art museum that bears his name, either. The Nelson-Atkins’ Mexico City-born director and CEO, Julian Zugazagoitia, has built a reputation during his decade in charge promoting multiculturalism and inclusion both in terms of choosing art exhibits and encouraging a diverse array of visitors.
After George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in May, Zugazagoitia was disturbed to learn Kansas City police officers were using the museum grounds as a staging area for policing protests at the nearby Country Club Plaza.
He asked the police department to move operations elsewhere and the museum tweeted out its support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The optics, the picture with the police stationed in front, with the background of the museum,” he told The Star at the time, “does break the trust that we have worked for many years to establish with many communities, of course, people of color — making sure that they feel welcome at the Nelson. So the image was something that was hurtful.”
But what of the implications of having the institution he runs named after a man who, Fannin said, was “an architect of some of the structural racism that still exists today?”
Zugazagoitia did not make himself available last week to discuss that, nor did board chairman Richard C. Green, but Leighton said they and others are giving the issue some thought.
“The issues you are asking about are large and complex, and our Board of Trustees, as well as museum leadership, are taking a careful and measured look at the museum’s history,” Leighton said in an email. “I’m sure you appreciate that this takes time and thoughtful consideration, so any comment at this time would be premature, as these are continuing conversations.”
To many in Kansas City, the museum is simply known as “the Nelson.”
His heirs specified that the museum share Nelson’s name as a condition for them donating much of the funds to build the 87-year-old iconic Beaux-Arts architectural shrine to the fine arts that sits atop a slope overlooking the grounds of Nelson’s former estate at 4525 Oak St.
His own bequest paid for the museum’s initial art collection, and the museum continues to receive financial benefit from the William Rockhill Nelson Trust through its support of the Nelson Gallery Foundation for the museum’s operation and additional art purchases, according to their joint financial statements.
Arts supporter
Among Nelson’s community betterment projects was his interest in exposing Kansas Citians to fine art. In the late 1890s, he donated 20 exact copies of important paintings for display in the former public library at 500 E. Ninth St., now home to the Ozark National Life Insurance Co.
He did so with two conditions, according to newspaper articles published at the time: that admission be free and that the gallery be open on Sundays, which was the only day many average people were off work back then.
The display space for the facsimiles of works by European Old Masters was known as the Nelson Gallery of Art. By the time he died, the collection had grown to several dozen pieces. But in his will he outlined greater ambitions.
It set up a trust that initially benefited his heirs. But after the deaths of his wife and daughter, Nelson’s will instructed that The Star and its sister paper, The Kansas City Times, be sold and the proceeds invested in real estate and bonds.
Income from those investments, Nelson specified, was to be spent to buy “works or reproductions of work of artists who have been dead at least thirty years,” according to a book published to celebrate the museum’s 60th birthday, “High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1933-1993” by Michael Churchman and Scott Erbes.
Nelson’s wife, Ida, died in 1921, and daughter Laura Nelson Kirkwood died in 1926 at age 43. Within a month of Kirkwood’s death, the trust’s three trustees, J.C. Nichols among them, put the papers up for sale, which sold for $11 million, or about $160 million in today’s dollars.
That sale wasn’t completed until 1929 because of a court challenge, after which the trustees went on a buying spree. It was the Great Depression and the art market, too, had collapsed and masterpieces could be bought on the cheap.
Where to put all that art? Nelson’s widow and daughter both left money for a building that Ida Nelson said should be named the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art.
It opened on Dec. 10, 1933, alongside the also brand-new Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts in a shared building on 22 acres where Nelson’s mansion, Oak Manor, had once stood.
Atkins had been a Kentucky school teacher when she married a wealthy Kansas City real estate developer. She was widowed in 1886 in her 40s and died in 1911, leaving $300,000 for construction of a proper art museum.
Wise investments helped that sum more than double by the late 1920s, but it wasn’t enough to build a world-class art institution. So trustees of her estate partnered with the Nelson trust.
The museum was given its current name in 1982, in the midst of a board reorganization and change in leadership, and it was a surprise.
“On the eve of its 50th anniversary,” The Star’s art and architectural critic Donald Hoffmann wrote at the time, “Kansas City’s art museum has quietly changed its name to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.”
The rebrand was done without any public announcement, explanation or discussion of what legal maneuvers, if any, might have been necessary to give Atkins equal billing and satisfy the requirements of the wills of Ida Nelson and Laura Kirkwood Nelson.
