Museum funded director’s portrait

W. Richard West Jr., the recently retired founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, spent $48,500 in museum funds to commission a portrait of himself and selected a non-Indian artist to create it, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The portrait of West by New York painter Burton Silverman hangs in a fourth-floor lounge of the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is dedicated to the arts and culture of American Indians.

West has come under fire recently for travel expenditures. No other museum directors have commissioned portraits of themselves, according to Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas. Silverman, of Polish descent, was chosen after the Smithsonian “couldn’t find a Native artist who did formal portrait sittings like this,” St. Thomas said.