I recently gave the keynote talk for the Colorado Wyoming Association of Museums annual conference in Boulder, CO. This is the text of my remarks (you will understand the picture after you read the piece):
In thinking about what to speak to you about today, since you
are all experts in museums and I am more of an observer of museums, I decided
what might be most helpful is to share my personal reflections, based on my
experience and a lifetime of interacting with museums. There is probably
nothing I can tell you about the technical aspects of operating a museum,
dealing with curation, conservation and management that you don’t already know.
I grew up in New York City, in Manhattan, with parents who
while not working in the arts where stereotypical New York City culture
vultures. From a very young age I was being taken to museums – MoMA, the Met,
Museum of Natural History, the Whitney, Guggenheim. I also grew up in an era
when even New York City public schools had regular art class for all students.
Museums for me became these places of magic, of mystery, and also in many ways,
an alternative playground.
At a young age, perhaps about eight, I began taking art classes
at the Museum of Modern Art, which at that time had an art school as
part of their education program. This whet my appetite for art even more, as I
began actively making art, not just looking at it. A few years later, when I
was maybe about 11, my great aunt Selma took me on a visit to MoMA, when there
was a major retrospective of Diane Arbus – and this story has now become part
of my family lore. As we strolled through the show, my aunt became more and
more concerned because of the challenging nature of Arbus’s photographs. I,
however, seemed totally unperturbed until I looked at one photo, read the wall
signage, and then said “Aunt Selma, what’s a transvestite?” Neither of us
remember exactly what she answered, but it clearly caused considerable
consternation for my aunt as she struggled to find a way to talk to me about
transvestites. But isn’t that a great example of what is great about art? We
were enjoying an intergenerational bonding experience, and appreciating the art
of photography from an aesthetic perspective. But then we were also having a
serious, honest conversation about an important subject, gender identity.
When I was in middle school, I will admit I was not the most
diligent student and a group of us kids would sometimes skip school (I know – a
shocking admission!). Where did we go to hang out, especially if it was too
cold or rainy to go to the park? The Museum of Natural History, which was right
across the street. I spent many hours roaming the halls and exploring the
exhibits, and probably learned more than if I had been in class.
I later went on to attend LaGuardia High School for the Arts,
as an art major, so of course this deepened even more my immersion in art. I
remember we had a special January break program where we got to do special
projects outside of the school. One year I spent time experiencing the
conservation and storage side of the Met Museum. I also remember visiting Push Pin Studios,
the graphic design firm of Milton Glaser, a LaGuardia alum, giving me an
introduction to the commercial side of art.
This was also the height of the anti-war movement, the Black
Panthers, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Chicano movement, so we
were all steeped in both art and social action. I think this stayed with me as an
influence, and increasingly artists and arts organizations are working at the
intersection of art and social justice.
In some ways, this deep career-driven immersion in art from a
very young age also ended up in some ways damaging me. What do I mean by that?
I felt that if I were to be an artist I must be a Michelangelo, a Picasso, a
Jackson Pollack. Just making art and seeing where it might go did not work. The
pressure I put on myself as an artist eventually became so great I could no
longer really make art, and I began to explore other art forms like theatre. I
also became more interested in politics. I spent a year abroad in England,
studying British literature, theatre and cinema, and of course also visiting
museums.
But when I returned to the States and graduated college I
ended up working for a United States congressman, seemingly leaving the fine
arts for the political arts, though as the “arts guy” on staff I was given the
job or working on any arts-related issues. This included working on a project
that many years later became what is now The High Line. One day, the chief of
staff for the Congressman asked I would be interested in doing a side project.
A good friend of hers was directing the education department of MoMA, which was
presenting its first big blockbuster show, Van Gogh at Arles, and the education
staff was overwhelmed. So, I began moonlighting at MoMA, working to create
slide lectures to be used by teachers bringing in school groups. Remember slide
carousels? All of a sudden a light bulb went off – despite having grown up
around art as a consumer, and even as an art maker, I had never really thought
about the fact that museums were also businesses, that there were people
writing press releases, balancing budgets, creating education materials,
raising money. For me this was the “Toto pulling back the curtain and exposing
the Wizard of Oz” moment. This got me rethinking my decision to leave the arts
and I began exploring graduate arts administration programs. These programs may
be ubiquitous now, but back in the 70’s there were maybe half a dozen of them
in the country.
I ended up doing the Masters in Arts Administration Program
at NYU, and thus began my professional career in the arts. Don’t worry, I am
not going to recount my entire career in excruciating detail. But I am going to
try and touch on moments, stories that relate to my feelings about museums.
After a few years and a few jobs largely in the theatre
world, I ended up with my first job in philanthropy, running the capital
funding program for the New York State Council on the Arts. This work proved
especially influential for me. It involved extensive travel for site visits
throughout New York State, including very rural communities, as well as
communities of color.
This is when I got to know museums and cultural groups like
the Adirondack Museum (now the Adirondack Experience) on Blue Mountain Lake, the Hyde Collection in Glens
Falls, the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, Eastman Museum in Rochester, the QueensMuseum, the Bronx Museum, the Corning Museum, the Fenimore Museum, and AliceAusten House on Staten Island.
I developed a much deeper appreciation of the riches
available in every corner of our country, and the outsized role that museums
and cultural center could play in the lives of rural communities, as well as
poor urban communities.
I also developed a deeper understanding of the facilities
aspects of museums. Perhaps more than any other art form, museums are about
buildings, about this envelope, this receptacle, that must contain and protect
the art, but also must be comfortable and welcoming. I remember one particular
project very well, where a major regional art museum had been renovated with a
new climate control system. Years later they noticed that some of their
paintings in certain galleries had developed a filmy coating that required
cleaning. After it became clear this was not an isolated problem but systemic,
they tried to figure out what was causing it and were stumped. Finally, a
maintenance person figured out that the climate control vents had been
installed along the edges of the walls in certain galleries, with the return
registers along the floor directly below. So, air was being, in effect, washed
along the surfaces of the paintings 24/7, where even minor impurities were
building up deposits on the canvas.
We also supported some very big projects, like the
restoration of the Guggenheim Museum. There I learned that on top of the many challenges
of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright Building, like the outward slanting walls
along the rotunda, that they were also having major water infiltration
problems. This was not just due to the age of the building. The big problem was
that Wright had designed the exterior of the building to be pure poured
concrete, but after it was built someone had decided the building needed a
waterproof coating, and this coating over time had trapped water in the
concrete, which with freezing and thawing had opened up cracks in the concrete.
Our support helped strip the offending coating, repair the cracks and restore
the exterior closer to the way Wright had intended.
Later jobs helped me develop an even broader appreciation of
museums and their extraordinary civic value, and also the growing diversity of
types of museums – places like Dia Beacon, Mass MoCA and Storm King that were
entirely about large scale art, or temporary installations or outdoor sculpture
and earth art. And working at the national scale allowed me to go far beyond
New York and get to know museums like the Milwaukee Art Museum, LACMA, the
Perez Museum, the Gardner Museum, Seattle Art Museum, SF MoMA, the Wing LukeMuseum, Art Institute of Chicago, National Museum of Mexican Art, again just to
name a few. I have probably visited literally hundreds of museums, large and
small, rural and urban, art museums, science museums, children’s museums,
history museums and historic houses. I was trying to calculate how many states,
and I think I have visited museums in about 40 states. I became such a
connoisseur of museum gift shops that a few years ago I actually wrote a whole
series of blog posts about my favorite museum gift shops through the country,
and became a connoisseur of museum gift shop ties, one of which I am wearing
today.
During five years in Philadelphia as Chief Cultural Officer
for the City, I served on the boards of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, so I developed a Trustee’s perspective as
well. Now I serve on the board of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which
our foundation played a major role in creating.
While in Philadelphia the board of PMA grappled with a major
leadership change with the sudden passing of a long-time beloved director, as
well as a serious debate about the merits of a long-standing huge capital
project designed by Frank Gehry. Would the $500-750 million total to be raised
for the capital project be better spent on investment in programs and digital
technology? Was the focus on the building distracting from needed attention on
innovative programming? Were these goals mutually exclusive? There was a serious debate about this at the board
level.
And the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the nation’s
oldest art school and oldest museum, historically devoted to classic figurative
art like Eakins and Cassatt, had to grapple with two big decisions – would they
begin teaching and exhibiting new art forms like digital art, conceptual and
performance art? And the acquisitions committee proposed the purchase of a
major work of video art (Bill Viola's Oceans Without a Shore) – the first piece of video art ever to be acquired by
the museum (and a piece I happen to love). In the end, the board authorized the acquisition, but not without
considerable debate and concern. Here we had two major museums with deep
histories grappling with how to best serve the art and communities of today.
This change is not easy, and there are often Trustees who may resist change,
who see themselves as the keepers of a tradition, a legacy, who may not
understand or appreciate new art forms or new ways of connecting art to the
public.
Over the past fifty years or so we have seen an incredible
geographic democratization of art, with important museums and collections much
more uniformly distributed throughout the country. There is no such thing as a
flyover state from an art standpoint anymore.
We have seen the growth of single collection museums – not a
new phenomenon of course. Institutions like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
have been around for a long time – in their case since 1903. And in
Philadelphia we had the Barnes Collection.
But now we also have the Nasher, the Broad, the Brant Collection, and
here in Denver the Anschutz Western Art collection. I am not sure this is
necessarily a bad thing – as I said, it has always been with us. People who
amass large collections will sometimes want to donate it to existing museums,
but I can understand that sometimes they may feel they assembled work with a
cohesive collecting vision that would be lost if it was absorbed into an
existing museum, and if they have the money and ego to build a building and
properly fund staff and endow their own museum, why not. Personally, I really
enjoy getting insight into a collector’s personal, idiosyncratic vision of art.
Whether Barnes, or Gardner, or Broad, it is just a different kind of museum
experience.
Here are some of my museum memories – images or experiences
that have stayed with me…
- The extraordinary beautiful collection of classic Adirondack lake boats at the Adirondack Museum
- The beautiful setting and eclectic collection of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, especially the folk art circus collection
- The wings of the Santiago Calatrava designed Milwaukee Art Museum opening on a beautiful sunlit morning, reflected in the water below.
- The Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, where you have no sense it essentially extends on a bridge over a highway.
- The awe-inspiring Richard Serras at Dia Beacon
- The Gees Bend Quilt exhibition at the Whitney
- The Aboriginal Art Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne Australia
- The Asian Art collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including the pillared temple hall from India and the Japanese teahouse
- The diorama cases at the American Museum of Natural History – as old-fashioned as they may seem, I still love them – part of my childhood
- The medical oddities of the Mutter Museum
- While it is more about the architecture than the art, walking up the staircase at the Aspen Art Museum between the outer woven wall and the inner wall of the museum.
- Watching my toddler daughter fall in love with Nick Cave’s art at the Denver Art Museum
- Hanging out on the roof of MCA Denver with Mark Mothersbough listening to a local band play, and talking about art, music, and cities.
I feel like museums have been a thread, a through-line for my
life, the imprinted memories functioning almost like invisible tattoos that I
carry with me. I am sure if I was younger, I would be covered with actual
tattoos! I wish that experience for everyone. And while I have had the
privilege of growing up in a family that nurtured my love art, and also have
the privilege of special access through my work, this is not an experience, a
way of life, that is reserved for the privileged. What do I see as the trends
in museums, from my vantage point as a funder, a policy person, an avid
consumer of museum content? What are the barriers to having museums for all
people as much a part of life as going to work, or going to the supermarket –
or to speak to the specific community we are in, as much a part of life as
skiing, hiking or mountain biking? Here is a list, in no particular order:
·
The cost barrier – While it is not just about the
money, we can’t ignore that money is a factor. When the Denver Museum and the
Children’s Museum of Denver eliminated price barriers for kids and families,
visitorship spiked. On SCFD “free” days, visitorship at the major museums
reflect the diversity of our communities, and they are so crowded that members
and other donors try to avoid those days. How do we ensure that every day is
like that? I know it is complicated, that having a cost can place a sense of
value on something, and that having admission also drives memberships, where
free admission is a key benefit. I don’t have an easy answer but I do think we
must continue to explore how we can eliminate cost as a barrier for those for
who cost IS a real factor.
·
The image barrier – Museums, especially art museums,
are perceived by people who did not grow up with exposure to them, as
intimidating, as scary – not something that could ever be a comfortable part of
their life. A blogger just wrote a piece called “Ten things in the arts that shoulddie” and one of them was hovering gallery guards who treat you as a criminal
and not so discretely follow you around the museum, like a security guard in a
department store who stalks you as a potential shoplifter. This is real, and I
have seen it happen, most recently when I was at MFA Houston. Here is a non-museum
example: I was attending a meeting at a country club with several other people.
Three of us happened to arrive independently but at the same time, all walking
from our cars to the front door simultaneously. One of the group was a woman
and the third an African American man, dressed, as I was, in a jacket and tie.
The guard at the front door walked straight up to this man and asked him why he
was there. Did not even attempt to question me or the woman. The moment the
guard saw that I and the woman knew this man he backed off, but it was a stark
reminder that people of color, no matter how successful, deal with these
“micro-aggressions” every day. So while this phenomenon is not always about
race, it can be. Museums must relentlessly impress upon their staff and
volunteers to always make visitors feel welcome.
·
Related
to my previous point, everybody is part
of the customer service team – my experience at a museum is immensely
enhanced by staff that seems happy, enthusiastic, knowledgeable – but not too
pushy. Many larger museums may outsource security, custodial or food service to
outside contractors. Even if in the short run this is cost-effective I think
this can be a huge challenge as you lose control of the customer service piece.
They are no longer part of your team, but part of someone else’s team.
·
It’s OK to have kids in the galleries – abouth three years ago Judith Dobryzinski, an art critic
and blogger, wrote a piece about how too many art museums these
days were overrun with children, making it harder to enjoy quiet contemplation
of the art, specifically citing an experience at the Denver Art Museum - I pushed back a bit in a comment [you can see the whole exchange in the link]. My position is that while it can sometimes be distracting, and some
parents can do a better job of ensuring their kids don’t treat museum galleries
like playrooms, I will take those downsides ANY DAY. Please do not limit kids
and family programs to specialized education areas far away from the galleries.
I LOVE that the Denver Art Museum has family activity areas spread throughout
the museum, and their backpack program where young children can explore
sections of the museum with their accompanying adults through a sort of
activity treasure hunt. And I see the delight on the faces of most visitors
without kids when they see kids doing an activity in a gallery. We need MORE,
not LESS of this.
·
Get out of your building – Museums are by their nature
place-based, about buildings and real estate as well as art. And we spend so
much time trying to get “THEM” into our buildings. But one thing research has
repeatedly shown is that poor communities, communities of color, really want
cultural opportunities in their neighborhood. Figure out how you can get more
programs, even less fragile/valuable objects from your collections, out into
the community. Think about community satellite locations, or touring
exhibitions to community centers, schools, social clubs.
·
Take Equity seriously and make it a
total organization commitment – This can be difficult work and can make many board and
staff uncomfortable. Someone commented recently about the growing presence of
“diversity, equity and inclusion” in arts conferences, that “this is not a
track,” meaning conference should not be creating equity tracks, where
attendees can choose whether or not to attend such sessions. It should be woven
into the fabric of the conference – keynotes, staffing, sessions NOT on equity
topics. I have often heard from the staff-people running diversity or community
outreach departments at museums that they feel marginalized. They may be the
only professional staff of color. They may feel a “box was checked” by hiring
them and creating such a program. Does the organization, from the Board, to the
President or Director, to curators and department heads, embrace this work. Are
these issues something you think about in hiring, in vendor selection, in
marketing and communications, in wayfinding and facility design? And related to
this, if to reach communities of color you partner with organizations from
those communities, truly partner with them and pay them for their time. Another
thing I hear often from smaller, culturally-specific arts organizations is that now
every major arts organization in town wants to partner with them on both
programming and marketing. However, there is little recognition of how much
these partnerships involve in terms of staff time, for organizations already stretched
thin with less access to resources.
·
Have Fun and Take Risks – Museums can be thought of as
stuffy, serious places. How to you blow up that stereotype? Adam Lerner at MCA
Denver has been a master at this, and in fact they just got a big grant fromMellon to sort of share that secret sauce with museum staff from around the
country. Not to be flip, but “Be Like Adam.” I remember when I was in Philly
the Philadelphia Museum of Art did very traditional opening gala receptions for
all major exhibitions – business attire or black tie, cocktails and canapes,
maybe a chamber ensemble playing lovely classical music. The guests were
trustees and patrons. Average age of probably 75. But one year they decided to
give their first ever solo show to a local artist – photographer Zoe Strauss.
Zoe specialized in photographing the people of Philadelphia who the patrons of
the museum probably never see, as well as the people of poor, challenged
communities in places like Mississippi and Louisiana. To Director Timothy Rub’s
credit, he realized the traditional opening party would be wildly at odds with
the values and work of Zoe. So, he assembled a cross departmental team of the
20-somethings on staff, gave them the opening reception budget and said – throw
the kind of party you and your friends would want to go to. And they did.
Tickets were $10 and it was promoted entirely via social media, selling out
easily. Patron types and board members were basically told, if you don’t like
it, you don’t have to come. The people who came were almost entirely in their
20’s and 30’s, many of whom had never been to the museum before. The
entertainment began with one of the city’s top drumlines and dance teams from a
local largely-Black high school marching through the crowd and parting it like
the Red Sea, followed by a dance party DJ’d by Questlove of the Roots. It was
an amazing party, like nothing the museum had every done before, and opened it
up to a whole new audience.
·
Signage – I know a lot of curators don’t like
to distract you from the art with signage or labels that are too large. But
speaking as a fairly sophisticated museum-goer, I like signage that helps give
me more info and more context, and is large enough to easily read. Now imagine
the experience of someone less comfortable with the museum experience. I also
really appreciate signage that helps put work into historical or cultural
context. I think sometimes curators or exhibit designers take too much for
granted. Because something is obvious to them they forget it may be less
obvious to others. I think they also tend to shy away from what can be
difficult conversations. An anecdote here – a museum mounted an exhibit of
beautiful paintings of Southwestern scenes from the early 20th
Century featuring many paintings of local Indians. The artists were not
themselves native. While I very much enjoyed the work, I found it interesting
that there was no signage talking about the issue of cultural appropriation.
What did the Indians feel about being painted in this way? I happened to run
into the Director and asked what the Indian community
thought of this work, or the show, and was told “Oh, they hate it of course.”
Now I am not arguing that this means the show should not be done. But what if
there was an information panel in the exhibit that presented a contemporary
Indian point of view on this work?
·
Hours and Amenities – Be Starbucks. Now by that I don’t
just mean serve over-priced coffee – many of you probably do that already. What
I mean is take a cue from the famous Starbucks “third place” goal – being the
third place for people to hang out, after work and home. Have free WiFi in all
your public areas, have comfy sofas and chairs. And stay open later. Can’t tell
you how many times I rushed to get to a museum by 3:30 or 4 and then am hustled
out at 4:45 as the museum tries to clear the galleries by 5. I know there are
costs to this, but I am urging you to find a way to make it happen, and not
just on a first Friday once a month, or even every Thursday or Friday as some
museums do. Experiment, find out what works, and don’t forget to also let
people know you are doing it. And be patient – it takes time for people to
modify their default behavior. A non-museum example. When the Guthrie Theatre
in Minneapolis opened their new theatre a few years – a significant very cool
building that included a glass bottom cantilevered bridge over a river – they
designed it to welcome people all day and late into the evening, even on days
and times when there were no performances. The building had full free WiFi
throughout. It also had many seating areas. You did not have to have a ticket
to get into the building, only into a theatre space itself when there was a
show. They had one or two coffee stations that switched over into bars in the
evening. They had a full service restaurant that again was open regular
restaurant hours, not just ties to when there was a show. The Guthrie became a
hugely popular place in the city just to hang out, to meet people. Now I don’t
have stats on whether it led to a measurable increase in audiences, but I can
tell you being in that building just felt right, and when I did see a show the
audience looked more like the crowd hanging out in the lobby areas, sipping a
latte and working on their laptop.
Of course, many museums already do many if not all of these
things I am recommending, but many do not. And as I said at the outset, I speak
as a passionate layperson, as a consumer and supporter of museums, not as a
museum professional.
I believe deeply in the power of museums to educate and
enlighten us, to challenge us, to spark dialog and conversation, to connect
us with the sweep of human civilization and natural beauty this world has to
offer.
So, I close by saluting all of you, for what you do, day in
and day out, to make that magic happen, often toiling hidden behind that
curtain like the Wizard of Oz.
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