Museum Docent Fired for Art Commentary to 5th-Grade Girls

There were predictions that heads would roll when the controversial artwork “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” went on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Thirty-three years later, it has finally happened.

A museum docent has been fired for leading a group of fifth-grade girls from the Central California city of Visalia on a gallery tour that included artist Edward Kienholz’s stylized depiction of a couple necking in the back of a car.

Tour guide Stephanie Riseley was dismissed after the students’ school principal complained that both the artwork and Riseley’s commentary about it were “clearly inappropriate for our students.”

Riseley is fighting her termination and has demanded “a full apology.”

Museum administrators are standing firm. They suggest that Riseley used poor judgment in discussing the theme of the artwork and the motivation of the artist with the young girls.

“I think it’s appropriate to take very, very seriously any charge of this nature,” said museum spokesman Keith McKeown.

“Back Seat Dodge ‘38” is crafted from a real 1938 Dodge. The life-size figures of a man and woman in what appears to be a drunken sexual embrace can be seen through an open door. The male figure is made of chicken wire; both figures are faceless.

The artwork was first displayed at the county’s Wilshire Boulevard museum in March 1966. But that exhibit was almost canceled when county supervisors blasted it as “revolting,” “blasphemous” and “way beyond the limits of public decency.”

When museum officials refused to eliminate Kienholz’s piece, supervisors threatened to dock their salaries. Finally, curators agreed to keep the car’s door closed and the amorous couple out of visitors’ sight. Guards were instructed to open the door “only if no minors were present.”

“Back Seat Dodge ‘38” remained in private hands until 1981, when the museum purchased it for $225,000. It was put on permanent display--this time with its door wide open--when new galleries for modern art were built in 1986.

The museum’s 275 unpaid docents research the background of artwork and artists for all pieces on their tours. They must undergo a year of training and have their commentary “scripts” approved before they may lead tours.

Riseley, a screenwriter and former actress and a docent since 1993, said she used her approved script in March when she led 10 girls from Hurley Elementary School in Visalia and several parent chaperons on a tour that included the Dodge.

Riseley said she warned the group: “What you are going to see next almost shut the museum down in 1966. It has to do with sex. Is there anyone here who hasn’t heard about sex yet?”

None of the three adults present “said anything to me or indicated disapproval in any way,” Riseley said.

“Since this particular piece of art is an expression of an artist’s first sexual experience, I assumed it was my job to make sense of it. I did the research: I know what Ed Kienholz said about it,” she said.

“I ask the students to look at how he’s presented himself. He’s made of chicken wire, with nothing inside. I ask them what they think he was feeling. Nothing. Why? We look at all the beer bottles. He was drunk. I ask them to find the girl’s face. She doesn’t have one, because in reality he didn’t even remember her name. I tell them it could have been her first sexual experience too.

“Then I ask them to look in the car and tell me who else is in there. They can see their own reflections in all the mirrors and they understand what I feel he was trying to express: That you only get one first sexual experience, so think before you act. Make it meaningful, make it special, make it beautiful.”

School Principal Doug Bartsch said parent chaperons were “stunned and confused by the docent’s comments” and regretted that they had not intervened.

In their letter of dismissal, directors of the docent council told Riseley that “you have lost sight of your role” as a tour guide.

“Instead, you have followed your self-appointed role as a teacher of subjects such as sex education, which may be consistent with your ‘agenda,’ but is not consistent with your role as a docent,” the letter stated.

Museum employee Diane Huntley, who helps coordinate the docents’ work, said Riseley apparently did not deviate from her approved script during the Visalia students’ tour.

“She was an excellent docent--I’m surprised she was asked to leave,” Huntley said.

But Sharon Bressler, head of the docent council, defended the action of her seven-member board.

“It’s not our place to teach religion or sex education,” she said.

Riseley suggested that the complaint may have come from unenlightened residents of “a county where teenage pregnancy rates are the highest in the nation.”

Bartsch acknowledged that Tulare County has a high teenage birth rate. But he denied that the place is populated by hicks.

“While we are conservative and careful about what we want to expose our children to, we are not reactionary,” he said.

Bartsch said his school has “a very enlightened sex education program. But this trip to the museum wasn’t part of it.”