©SUZANNE ISA/ISA DESIGN
Artforum reports today that Babacar M’Bow was officially fired from his post as executive director of MoCA North Miami on December 31 following a multiple-week suspension stemming from sexual harassment claims. City chief of staff Natasha Colebrook-Williams will temporarily serve as director as the city council begins an official search for his replacement.
The decision comes in the wake of an investigation centered around a complaint made by the museum’s outreach and programming manager, Tiffany Madera, who alleges that M’Bow frequently used graphic innuendo in the workplace and freely broached sexual topics ranging from Madera’s sex life to the director’s own genitalia. At one point, according to the complaint, he advised employees that they needed to “get laid.” Artforum also had this to report:
“Her complaint cited several incidents, including a museum staff meeting on December 8 where M’Bow allegedly told the museum’s assistant director, Alan Waufle, to take a female vendor out and ‘show her a good time.’ Waufle called the woman a ‘skanky bitch,’ which Madera objected to, and asserts that M’Bow then interrupted her and told her to stop using ‘feminist rhetoric.'”
In an interview with investigators, M’Bow denied all allegations and stated that “I am married to a feminist scholar, this complaint is not part of my intellectual development, I have strong feminist politics.”