Pecci Center of Prato, fired director Cristiana Perrella. Who is contemplating legal action

Suddenly fired is Cristiana Perrella, the director of Prato’s “Luigi Pecci” Center for Contemporary Art. In a note that arrived at 7:59 p.m. Friday, the board of directors of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in Tuscany let it be known that it had “decided to revoke the appointment of Cristiana Perrella as General Director of the Foundation, in line with the provisions of the contract signed by both parties on February 16, 2021.” The Board, the note reads, “thanks Dr. Perrella for her commitment and work in these years at the direction of the Pecci Center and wishes her all the best for her future professional activity.” The “selection procedure to appoint the new Director, which is expected to be concluded by the end of this year,” has also already been initiated. Finally, the Foundation announced that the new director “will have the task of relaunching the activity of the Pecci Center as a point of reference for contemporary art in Italy.”

The point is that Cristiana Perrella did not take the dismissal well: only six months ago she had been renewed her contract until 2024. “The termination of my relationship with the museum, moreover by ways and terms in serious and obvious violation of the contract,” the former director said in an interview with the Tirreno, “is certainly the result of a difference of vision between me and the Board of Directors on the programming and function of the museum. But the unexpected way in which things have precipitated and the tone used to communicate what was decided undoubtedly does serious and unjustified damage to me and the museum. I can defend myself; the museum cannot. And it is really sad that, after having worked hard and with great enthusiasm together with my team to reposition it on the Italian and international art scene and open it to the city, now Pecci has to know, again after the stormy closure of the relationship with my predecessor, a moment of discontinuity and crisis.”

The Livorno newspaper reports rumors that the board of directors dismissed the director for failure to achieve certain goals. However, unfounded reasons, according to Perrella, who refers to the reporting of the museum’s activities. And now, he announces legal recourse: “The conditions of my possible early termination, which I had been asked for, were still to be defined and, in any case, conditioned on a serene evolution of relations and the maintenance of strict conditions of confidentiality. Prerequisites that the Council did not comply with. The relationship between the three-year renewal of the contract and any commitments of mine that contradict it will in any case be a matter evaluated by our lawyers.”

“I did everything in the interest of the institution,” Perrella later said in another interview, given to The Nation. “I believe that I have made it closer to the city, that I have involved new audiences thanks to the increased visibility of Pecci not only on a national level. All this with very few resources and with the accounts in order. I’m sorry. Two directors in a few years, maybe the problem is not me and Cavallucci. The problem is Pecci.” A museum that, according to Perrella told the Tirreno, “fails to have an identity,” and where “there is no political project.” “It is useless to think about big names in art without money and if not even those who live in Prato have ever set foot in the museum,” he concluded in the interview with La Nazione. “For big exhibitions we need resources that the board of directors has never brought, we need important advertising campaigns, instead I was not facilitated and in spite of everything with my team we realized many exhibitions and initiatives, even during Covid. The museum belongs to the citizens, it is neither mine nor the board’s, it belongs to the people: evidently this aspect escapes us. It is incredible how this place does not find peace.”

Pecci Center of Prato, fired director Cristiana Perrella. Who is contemplating legal action

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