An anonymous whistleblower has raised allegations of misconduct by leadership at California’s Palm Springs Art Museum, claiming violations of the law and institutional best practices.
The whistleblower claims that the museum improperly moved funds between various accounts in order to meet severe cash crunches. The whistleblower alleged that a former director was forced out based on trumped-up staff complaints, and that the museum failed to even interview two qualified candidates to replace him before promoting an internal candidate.
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In resignation letters that were reviewed by ARTnews, two board members said they tried to get financial problems and accounting inconsistencies addressed before being stonewalled by longstanding board members.
The whistleblower complaint was forwarded to ARTnews in the form of emails from July 2025 and December 2025, both of which were addressed to, among others, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and United States Attorney for the Southern District of California Adam Gordon.
Gordon’s office did not answer an emailed inquiry from ARTnews. Bonta’s office replied that it is “committed to upholding laws that protect charitable gifts and donations,” but added, “We are generally unable to provide information on complaints we may have received as they are considered confidential law enforcement records of the Attorney General.”
Some of the information in the whistleblower complaint emerged in a Los Angeles Times report from November 2025. That report included news that there were warnings from an accounting firm about financial statements being “out of whack”; that a search for the executive director position was subject to “interference,” per one board member; that several trustees had departed the board, leaving the institution with just 19 board members, fewer than required by its own bylaws; and that there was a $3 million discrepancy in the reported value of the endowment. At the time, the museum said that its financial reviews had been “thorough and deliberate”; that the director search was “conducted in the right way”; and that some board departures were unrelated to the director hire.
The whistleblower complaint sheds further light on the issues reported in November.
“Palm Springs Art Museum’s Board of Trustees has formed a Special Committee of the Audit Committee to review allegations that were raised from several sources in 2025,” said a museum spokesperson in an email in response to a detailed set of questions based on the whistleblower complaint. “The Special Committee has engaged a nationally recognized law firm and forensic accounting firm to conduct an independent investigation into the previously-raised allegations. That investigation is nearing completion, and Palm Springs Art Museum intends to release additional information at the conclusion of that investigation.”
Founded in 1938 as the Palm Springs Desert Museum, the institution narrowed its focus to art and changed its name in 2005. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, it also owns two historic buildings and operates a sculpture garden in Palm Desert. The museum, whose collection contains 5,000 works, has an endowment of about $23 million, per its 2024 financial statements.
Allegations of Financial Misdeeds and Cover-Ups
According to the whistleblower, cash was improperly removed from the museum’s acquisition fund as early as 2007. Two years earlier, the museum had undertaken to sell parts of its collection in the face of financial difficulties. Industry guidelines set by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) require such funds to go into an art acquisition fund. However, the museum allegedly used the funds to repay debt incurred to meet operating costs.
Auditors identified the misuse of funds and required the museum to report it to AAM and classify the money as a loan, says the whistleblower, with the museum’s top priority being to repay that money to the acquisition fund. Twenty years later, that debt, in the amount of $544,403, remains unpaid, says the whistleblower. “As of June 30, 2024, a balance of $544,403 remains to be reimbursed to the art acquisition account,” says a note in the museum’s 2024 financial statement.
The museum was again in a bad financial position in 2018, according to the complaint. Treasurer Richard Cain allegedly searched for donations that had been classified as restricted to certain purposes but could be reclassified as unrestricted, without consulting with the finance committee or auditors. In 2019, says the complaint, Cain reclassified $947,160, and in 2020, $3,154,596 more. (Both reclassifications are indicated in the museum’s fiscal year 2020 financial statements.) “Nearly all of these funds should not have been reclassed, and it was known at the time by everyone involved,” says the complaint. This reclassification was used to cover a deficit in the museum’s investment account, which was about $3.6 million in 2019 and $4.1 million in 2020, as indicated in financial statements. The museum’s auditor, Maryanov Madsen Gordon Campbell (MMGC), resigned in 2020, says the complaint, partly as a result. Cain says the whistleblower’s complaint is inaccurate, and that he did not join the board until 2020.
Similar problems arose between 2020 and 2025, according to the complaint. Due to financial straits brought about by the pandemic, industry guidelines surrounding institutional collections were relaxed, paving the way for museums to use money gained from art sales not solely for acquiring more art but rather for care of existing collections. In 2020, the Palm Springs Art Museum did just that, bringing a Helen Frankenthaler painting to Sotheby’s, where it sold for $3.9 million. According to the complaint, the museum went on to sell a total of $7.8 million in art, but the money allegedly didn’t always go to care for the collection, as it was supposed to. Instead, some of it allegedly went to operating costs and the purchase of the Aluminaire House, a historic house built by Swiss-born architect Albert Frey; the museum’s website, however, describes the house as a gift by the Aluminaire House Foundation.
When Palm Springs– and Joshua Tree–based collector Kevin Comer, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank in New York, joined the board and finance committee in July 2024, he focused his attention on the reclassification of funds from restricted to unrestricted, a move that he found highly questionable. Comer, in an undated document containing notes on board meetings that accompanied the whistleblower complaint, said it was agreed in a board meeting that the museum would form a committee to investigate the reclassification as well as the museum’s finances more generally, since it was unknown how much money was actually in the endowment. He noted that it was agreed that a legal opinion on the reclassification should be solicited as well as a forensic accounting review. Comer declined to comment for this article.
A task force was formed, says the complaint, but certain legacy board members “derailed” the review despite a unanimous board vote supporting it. The review was not completed until March 2025. In another board meeting, according to the complaint, Comer said the review had not been conducted properly and had focused on matters other than the reclass. He ultimately resigned in protest in November 2025.
Jack Peirce, deputy director and chief financial officer, then reviewed the reclassification, says the complaint. He found that it had been an attempt to improve the museum’s cash position, and moved the funds back into the restricted category “as a prior period entry.” Peirce found that some $2.4 million had been improperly transferred, according to the complaint. He did not answer an email seeking comment.
‘Irreconcilable Concerns’
In July 2025, according to the complaint, Peirce transferred another $267,000 from the museum’s investment account to cover operating expenses, without the transfer being mentioned in the museum’s budget. That transfer “was done in violation of California law governing the maximum permitted percentage draw from an endowment in a three-year period,” says the whistleblower, adding that California law restricts the amount to be withdrawn from an institution’s endowment to no more than 7 percent per year on average for three years, or 21 percent in total.
The prior auditing firm, Maryanov Madsen Gordon Campbell (MMGC), allegedly resigned from their auditor position over “irreconcilable concerns with the lack of financial controls and financial skills of the PSAM finance department,” says the complaint, which adds that some longstanding board members withheld this information from the rest of the board. MMGC partner Don Keesling did not respond to a request for comment.
The complaint alleges that $3 million is “missing” from the museum’s investment account, saying the September 2020 balance was about $18.6 million and the balance the following October was about $15.6 million.
The Palm Springs Art Museum.
Lance Gerber, courtesy Palm Springs Art Museum.
A December 2025 complaint makes further allegations. It says that more than $2 million raised to support Q+, a program founded to champion LGBTQ+ artists, has been used for general operating costs. The whistleblower says that the same holds for incoming funds intended for the Architecture and Design Center and the Latinx Program and a donation from the City of Palm Springs.
The museum has also allegedly not conformed to the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA), which requires trustees to manage an endowment so that its spending power is maintained. According to documents supplied by the whistleblower, the 2006 principal of the permanently restricted endowment was about $42.3 million, but by the end of fiscal year 2024, that number had dwindled to just $12.1 million. The whistleblower says that an additional $2 million was moved from restricted funds to unrestricted funds in fiscal year 2025, which would leave that number at $10.1 million. For the fund to have maintained its purchasing power from 2006, though, that number would have had to be some $68.2 million.
“If the AG doesn’t act quickly,” says the whistleblower, “the PSAM will close.”
The notes from Comer outline numerous problems and back up some of the whistleblower’s claims. In them, Comer notes that Peirce told him the museum was going to run out of cash imminently. When Comer learned about the $3 million reclass, he looked back over a decade of audits and uncovered numerous other issues, with financial records in disarray and operating losses hidden away or classified erroneously. Of the reclass, he writes, “This should be technically unable to happen,” adding that he did not believe or understand Peirce’s explanation.
Regarding the resignation of the auditing firm, writes Comer, “In the accounting world this is always a red flag, especially when the client is an institution such as PSAM.”
At this point, Comer felt compelled to talk to his attorney, Eve Fromberg, “to discuss any personal liability exposure I might have to past issues.” For him, one line of her reply, referring to the California Attorney General, stood out: “restricted endowment funds reclassed into unrestricted is low hanging fruit for the AG.”
Comer writes that he warned of potential bankruptcy if a market downswing eroded the investment account. He called for a task force to get the museum’s finances in order, and noted that if the reclassified money was improperly spent, even if the impropriety of the reclassification wasn’t previously known, that officers would be liable to charges of “willful misconduct and gross negligence.” The reclassification, he notes, could be viewed as “a criminal matter” by an attorney general.
In a board meeting, Comer later found that no progress had been made on the task force’s action items on determining the accounting and legal realities of the reclassification. “Linda Killinger [the audit chair] made the statement ‘I don’t see why we should poke the bear’, twice,” Comer writes, “and also said that it was inevitable that ‘If we hire attorneys they’ll dig and find something and then what do we do’.” Killinger did not respond to a request for comment.
The complaint alleges tax fraud, saying that when donors purchase a work of art and donate it, they typically give the money to the museum, and the museum charges them sales tax on the amount, even though the museum is tax exempt, and never files a tax return for that amount.
A Difficult Search for a Board Chair and a Director
There were also major problems surrounding the choice of a board chair and a museum director, says the whistleblower complaint.
Without specifying a date, the complaint says that a nominating process for the board chair position turned up a majority of votes, by a wide margin, for Patsy Marino, as well as support for Kevin Comer, but that the nominating committee leaned toward Richard Cain over concerns that Marino would institute a financial review. Board member Phil Smith asked Marino and Comer to put their names forward, but the nominating committee then removed Smith, allegedly in order to block Marino and Comer. (“That statement is not true,” said Smith in an email. Cain, in an email, said the whistleblower’s claims regarding him are not correct.) Marino and Comer declined to be interviewed on the record. Marino, who lives in both Palm Springs and La Jolla, is a trustee and adviser to various art institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego and the Stuart Collection at UCSD. She joined the museum’s board in July 2023.
The complaint claims that executive director Adam Lerner, who was brought on in 2021, did not resign in April 2025, as was reported in the media. Instead, he was pushed out for bogus reasons, according to the complaint, in order to make way for chief curator Christine Vendredi to assume the post. (In an April Instagram post, he said, “I feel that I’ve largely done what I came to Palm Springs to do,” and put the departure down to personal reasons, among them, “I’m excited to become a dad.” He did not respond to emails seeking comment.)
‘Poor Judgment and Bad Governance Are the Constants’
The whistleblower supplied copies of Marino’s and Comer’s resignation letters. In hers, Marino, who joined the board in July 2023, relates her experience on the search committee for a new director, which she describes as having been “fraught with outside inappropriate interference and attempts to influence the process and outcome from the Board Chair, individual Board members not on the committee, staff, donors and community members.” It took a great deal of work to even get support for posting the job on industry websites, she says, in order to meet the board’s fiduciary duty of getting the best candidates to apply.
According to Marino, because the museum didn’t have the resources to hire a search firm, her professional network repeatedly asked her if the search was legitimate. If the job was posted only for appearances’ sake, with a favored candidate already in place, she says, it would “further damage PSAM’s already poor reputation.” An internal candidate was rumored to already have the job, so she had to promise people in the field that the search was in earnest. Only two highly qualified résumés were received, she says, both recommended by the head of AAMD. A majority of the search committee pushed for Vendredi without even interviewing those candidates, she says. She was traveling when the board made its timeline for announcing the choice, leaving her no time to contact parties she had pledged to inform about the choice before it became public, including the head of AAMD.
“Over the last several days, I have had some of the most uncomfortable and difficult professional conversations in my career,” she writes in her resignation letter, from October 2025. “To be frank those conversations have been brutal… I have listened respectfully while the head of the AAMD told me this is a blatant case of bad governance, and that despite a large number of new players, our Board has not evolved at all in its practices and is being run the same old way. I nodded my head in agreement when she explained that she had gone out on a limb for PSAM and me, personally referring us two of the best candidates she knows. In return for her generosity and bringing her network to bear for PSAM, we made her look like a liar as well.”
In his resignation letter, Comer starts out by saying, “There are entire textbooks written on the proper steps to be taken when an organization finds itself in our situation.” He outlines what he believes should have happened as soon as a whistleblower complaint was received: implicated board members should have recused themselves or been voted off the board, investigative committees should have been formed and a forensic accounting firm and law firm brought in, implicated staffers should have been placed on leave, and the museum should have contacted the attorney general to plead for time to complete a review.
“My own counsel has advised me to resign, and has indicated, in her words, ‘this is clearly not an institution whose leadership is interested in fulfilling their fiduciary obligations’. I agree with her,” writes Comer. “We are at risk, not daily but hourly, of the press calling or the AG showing up in force, and despite having advance notice, we have not taken the most basic of steps. Instead, we were told at the beginning of the meeting that all press and other inquiries should go to the chair, one of the subjects of the complaint. This would be a disaster, and exhibits very poor judgment.”
“Poor judgment and bad governance are the constants in my experience with this institution, from issues large to small,” writes Comer.
The museum suffers, Comer writes, from “a shattered moral compass.”
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