Shelburne Museum Cuts Ties With Architect David Adjaye

The Shelburne Museum campus Credit: courtesy of Shelburne Museum

Nine days after celebrated architect David Adjaye was accused of sexual misconduct, Shelburne Museum announced it will no longer engage the architect to design its planned Perry Center for Native American Art, a $12.6 million building scheduled to open in spring 2026 and intended to showcase a significant collection of Indigenous art.
The museum had chosen Adjaye Associates, a firm with offices in London, New York and Accra, Ghana, from a pool of 17 architectural firms’ responses to an RFP for the new building, according to director Tom Denenberg. Adjaye had visited Vermont to walk the potential site with Denenberg. The design was in the conceptual stage.

David Adjaye Credit: courtesy of Chris Schwagga

Adjaye, a Ghanaian British architect who won international acclaim with his design for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C., holds the 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
On July 4, London’s Financial Times released an investigative article in which three of Adjaye’s former female employees, all single mothers and Black, accused him of serious misconduct, including “sexual assault and sexual harassment by him” and “a toxic work culture.” One of the women alleged that Adjaye sexually assaulted her in a Johannesburg, South Africa, airport bathroom.

Described by Architectural Record as “a bombshell,” the Times article precipitated immediate disengagement by a number of institutions with planned Adjaye projects, including (in the U.S.) the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon; the Studio Museum in Harlem, N.Y.; and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Mass., which had planned to show a sculpture by Adjaye.

Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, meanwhile, is nearing completion of its Adjaye-designed building. The university released a statement saying the accusations were “enormously troubling” but did not scrub the architect’s name from its website, as the Studio Museum did.

In its statement, Shelburne Museum said the allegations and Adjaye’s “admission of inappropriate behavior are incompatible with our mission and values.” In his statement to the Times, Adjaye admitted to intimate “consensual” relationships with the three women, deeming them improper because they “blurred the boundaries between my professional and personal lives.” His wife, Ashley Shaw Scott Adjaye, is the head of global research at Adjaye Associates.

Shelburne Museum said in its statement that it “remain[s] committed to moving forward with the project.” The Perry Center is intended to become a “national resource for the study and care of Indigenous art.”