Many artists know that the typical studio-workplace may be an environmental disaster in the making, a sort of Love Canal in a loft. But who could have imagined that a museum might be dangerously contaminated? A pigment used in Kazuo Katase's currently exhibited Eclipse of the Earth at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho was apparently hazardous to viewers' - and especially to staffers' - health. Documents obtained by the Voice indicate that museum director Marcia Tucker 1) was aware that Katase's materials posed potential health hazards, 2) overruled her own operations manager's recommendation that the pigment be replaced with a safer substitute, and 3) allowed the large-scale work to be exhibited for 12 days before the chemically hazardous compound was removed on May 23.

At the center of the story are Pat Kirshner, a whistle-blowing operations manager in charge of safety at the museum, and a red pigment containing three controlled substances; zinc sulfide, barium sulfate, and hansa red (a/k/a red pigment 3). According to Michael McCann, chemist and executive director of the Center for Safety in the Arts, zinc sulfide is a respiratory irritant that is poisonous when ingested in large quantities, and hansa red, in large quantities, can cause anemia in children.

On May 10, the day before the show opened, a lab report was finally received. Although it ruled out toxic lead or cadmium, it identified the three above materials described as hazardous by McCann. Kirshner - according to a retrospective account of events she wrote that was corroborated by several staffers who requested anonymity - urged that the pigment in powder form be replaced with the nonhazardous Crayola powder paint she'd purchased. She didn't yet know the specific hazards associated with Katase's pigment, but earlier discussions with McCann about red pigment led her to believe that it wasn't likely to be safe.

When the artist rejected the substitute, his desires were apparently supported by Tucker and some curatorial staffers. Although Tucker believes that "no decision was ever really made, there was simply agreement by everybody that the Crayola substitute did not work," a June 13 memo from assistant curator Alice Yang to Kirshner, intended to "clarify the sequence of events," reads: "At 8 o'clock the next morning on May 11, Alice phoned Marcia with this problem. A decision was made to try the original pigment."

Because of the known hazards of raw pigments, the registrar's staff and installation crew were unwilling to handle the pigment used in Katase's seductively lit installation, comprising a pigment-covered table, a light-box image of the sun, and a reproduction of David's Oath of the Horatii. Instead, the artist and some of the curatorial staff laid down the pigment, and Eclipse opened to the public on May 11, as scheduled. According to Tucker, alterations were made to the ventilation system, and a nearby sign warned about the hazards of pigment inhalation and asked viewers not to touch the red powder.

Unfortunately, according to Tucker - and to a memo Kirshner wrote that day - many did. The opening celebration took place as planned on May 16, with a large sign and a tape "boundary" drawn around the table. By this time Kirshner had had several conversations with Michael McCann, and he recalled that "she and I felt that using zinc sulfide was asking for trouble; she was opposed to its use."

Meanwhile, McCann's warnings about the potential for adverse respiratory reactions seemed well-founded. Part-time New Museum consultant Helen Carr says that she spent just two and a half hours in the building on May 21 and left with burning in her throat, nose, and chest. Six weeks later she claims, "I'm still sick and chronically congested. I lost my voice for 10 days and haven't completely regained it." On June 1, she quit to protest what she termed the museum's "irresponsible installation" of Katase's work. In a letter to Carr, Tucker and managing director Ellen Holtzman maintained that they made a responsible effort to assess the best course of action. Unimpressed, Carr a few weeks later asked the NEA to investigate unsafe working conditions at the museum. (NEA spokesperson Joshua Dare confirmed that an investigation is in progress.)

Other employees experienced problems. Bookstore coordinator Susan Stein is out on disability after spending three days in the hospital last month for gastric disturbances. Freelance installation-crew member Patricia Thornley told me that her jeans were covered with red dust after working in the gallery housing the installation, and that on May 15 she "was asked to clean glass in that gallery, something I don't normally do. Later I realized that everybody else had refused to work near the piece." A staffer (who requested anonymity) noted the possibly Eclipse-related ubiquity of respiratory difficulties at the museum. "I'd say 15 people - including Marcia [Tucker] - experienced headaches, laryngitis, sore throats. We weren't on the main floor either; the pigment had to have come through the ventilation system."

(Ventilation is a recurring vexation for the museum, which occupies the lower floors of an unfinished hotel project and is plagued with mold-producing subcellar floods. McCann considers the mold a "potentially much more serious" problem than the pigment; Stein's recent hospitalization was preceded by an earlier illness caused by the mold. On June 11, the museum's board of directors allocated $100,000 for ventilation system improvements.)

Following the outbreak of respiratory problems in the museum's offices, the pigment was finally removed on May 23. Why hadn't the director heeded the advice of the operations manager? (Indeed, why hadn't the museum followed the apparently effective guidelines for potentially hazardous art materials used in the "Cadences: Icon and Abstraction in Context" exhibition earlier this year and mentioned in its minutes of a May 15 curatorial meeting?)

Managing director Holtzman - who was not at the museum in early May - replied that "we took what we thought to be prudent steps." Director Marcia Tucker says: "It was a complicated situation, not an oppositional one where a staff member was overruled. We don't make decisions that way...It was a matter of balance, doing the best you can for an artist who's never shown in this country before. Certainly no one intended to endanger anybody."

Judgment - not intention - is what's at issue here. Given the apparent seriousness of the pigment problem, Holtzman's and Tucker's grasp of events is astonishingly incomplete. When I mentioned to Tucker, for instance, that installation and registrar staffers refused to handle Katase's work - certainly a statement that some museum workers saw potential for hard from the pigment before the show opened - she expressed surprise and likened the revelation to something out of Roshamon. Did errors of judgment occur? "I don't know," Tucker answered. Were mistakes made? "We did not have enough experience, we'd never been in this situation before...New art forms and materials raise new problems."

FOLLOW UP: New Museum, Old Problem
Village Voice, March 8, 1994 p.

When I wrote, in July 1991, that the New Museum of Contemporary Art "might be dangerously contaminated" by Kazuo Katase's apparently hazardous installation, I also described the museum's longtime environmental-health woes: subcellar floods that produce fungal mold and - according to some staffers - debilitating health problems. At the time, Center for Safety in the Arts executive director Michael McCann aptly characterized the then unknown mold as "a potentially much more serious" situation than Katase's use of zinc sulfide and other controlled substances. Now the toxic mold has inspired a nearly $400 million multiple-plaintiff suit against the museum.

The suit - news of it broke in the February 21 New York Observer - caps a tragically scuzzy saga in which employee health became a pawn in a long-running dispute between the museum and its landlord. The apparently irresponsible landlord (Realty Fund Partners) defaulted on the museum's 583 Broadway building last year, and the museum's apparently ineffectual director (Marcia Tucker) and board (including Vera List, Henry Luce III, and Arthur Goldberg) have been unable to solve daunting environmental problems of which they've long been aware. (Neither Tucker nor the museum's public relations director Charlayne Haynes would comment about the suit for this column.) The fungal culprit is Stachybotrys atra, a lethal mold that's been studied during the past decade by NATO and German scientists who worried that it was a Soviet biological weapon. When it decays, the black, sootlike fungus is toxic to those who breathe its airborne remains. Eleven plaintiffs in the suit - current and former museum staffers - complain of allegedly mold-related ailments ranging from asthma to immune- and central nervous system disorders.

Unfortunately, the New Museum's building is beset by ventilation and other infrastructure flaws so severe that the city has issued 18 code violations and withheld a certificate of occupancy. This by itself isn't unusual, however: many medium-sized arts groups in New York can't afford to bring their spaces up to code. But Haynes's assertion that there's no connection between the certificate of occupancy and the mold problems may only be half true. Although the "sick building syndrome" concept is so new that it's not yet reflected in New York's building code, an inadequate ventilation system was upgraded in part to alleviate the mold problem. (In June 1991, the museum's board allocated $100,000 for long overdue ventilation improvements, which apparently have not solved the fungus problem.)

But the building's impact on museum employees' health may be greater than even the plaintiffs imagine. A 1991 report by Clayton Environmental Consultants notes that the ventilation "intakes were covered with pigeon feces and a dead pigeon that can harbor pathogenic fungi." A former museum staffer - not involved in the suit - told me that he left the museum in 1993 because of both his AIDS diagnosis and the state of the building. His "pigeon serum" count, directly related to exposures to pigeon feces, remains four times higher than normal, and he's also developed histoplasmosis, a serious, chronic fungal infection often linked, as well, to pigeon feces. He grew alarmed about his health after Mount Sinai Hospital researcher Dr. Eckardt Johanning warned museum employees in 1991 that those with cancer and HIV should not be working in the building; several of the allegedly mold-affected now work outside the museum, at 627 Broadway.