Stewards of Legacy: Museum Directors’ Roundtable

Marion Maneker: I want to start by asking each of the panelists to give a brief description of their institutions and then we will move on to each museum’s strengths and challenges.

James Steward: I lead the Princeton University Art Museum, which is one of the oldest collecting institutions in North America. We acquired our first art object in 1755 when the college was only nine years old. We had to start over again a few years later when the college's collection was destroyed during the Battle of Princeton—I love that quirky American detail. From those humble origins, collecting objects was always integral to teaching, the idea was that we would bring the world to Princeton students through objects. We’ve grown to have probably the most globe-spanning set of collections under a single roof on any university campus, with objects from every continent and around 117,000 in total. 

The particular challenge of our recent times is that we've been closed for five and a half years as we build a new museum on the site of the old one, which will double the size of the museum and really tries to answer the question of what a so-called encyclopedic museum ought to be in the 21st century. I realize it's a very peculiar and interesting thing to remake a museum entirely as opposed to adding on to an existing building. From a mission point of view, we see ourselves as being a gateway to the university's intellectual resources for the wider world, including the communities around us. We're the largest cultural institution now in New Jersey, so between New York and Philadelphia, and that creates some really interesting tensions as well as opportunities. We often talk about ourselves as the ‘living room’ for the communities around us, built around the experience of art. 

Nora Lawrence: I am the director at Storm King Art Center, located in the Hudson Valley of New York, about an hour north of New York City. We are an outdoor museum with works presented across 500 acres of landscape as well as indoor galleries. We were founded by the Ogden and Stern Family in 1960. Over those many decades, Storm King has made a point of not only creating a unique space for art, but also always thinking of stewarding the landscape of our site and its surroundings. One story that I love is that they were able to negotiate the donation of 2,000 acres of a nearby mountain to New York state to keep the view and valley that we inhabit green.

On the art side, we are very well known for large-scale sculpture and we have a number of incredible commissions. One of my favorites is by the artist Richard Serra. We have some new commissions by artists including Sarah Sze and Martin Puryear that join perennial favorites by artists such as Andy Goldsworthy. As we think about the future, we're consistently working with artists who are new to the Storm King world. We can really provide a space for artists to think about works that have to do with the outdoors and environment in a way that's completely embodied and provide opportunities for artists to work in ways that are really different and special. 

We just opened a major capital project in May and have a new entry sequence that is a really gracious way of inviting people into our site. Because of that, we were able to move two parking lots that created a lot of traffic within Storm King’s site to the outside edge, so that people can fully walk around. We also built a major facility for the conservation of large-scale sculpture and artwork, including a paint booth that is 50-feet long. Basically anything that can go down the highway on a flatbed can be backed up into our paint booth, so I'm excited to continue trying that in the coming years. We're looking at what more we can do to support the infrastructure behind these major artworks that we hold in our collection. 

We fundamentally believe that artists are leaders and there's a great history of that coming out of these convenings in Aspen. So we're really focused on thinking about how we can invest in relationships and in the creative process. What I'm doubling down on at the moment is investing in the subconscious, so we are starting a new initiative that we've been piloting for the last five years, which we're calling AIR. We describe it as a week of radical imagination, art, and exchange that brings together artists, scientists, technologists, cultural leaders, and audiences to gather in Aspen’s alpine landscape. We want to shift the way that we're working with artists, how we’re directing our energy, and how we're creating atmospheres and energies and we want to use that to try and reimagine new models. We are incredibly proud of our exhibition program and we also do a lot of commissioning. This summer the most important thing that we managed to create was a dynamic and engaged audience—that is something that we don't take for granted and we're also aware that maintaining momentum is probably going to be the most engaging part of our mission and focus. I am very grateful that I get to do a job so far away from all the other pressures. Often we say that we have the reverse issues of everyone else, and that's sort of interesting in itself. 

Marion Maneker: So your weakness of being very remote is also your strength. The Aspen Art Museum and the Aldrich are not collecting institutions and Storm King and Princeton are both built around substantial collections that have very historic roles. I'd love to know more about how you add art to those very specific environments. Can you talk about how you see acquisitions fitting into the specific nature of your new museum building at Princeton?

James Steward: Despite the fact that we've been collecting for so long, we very much see ourselves as building on the past rather than being limited by it. The new building has given us extraordinary opportunities and we've been collecting toward it for quite some time. The challenge inevitably is thinking about how to collect objects that reinforce the connective tissues across collections of such diversity. Princeton has been in the business of acquiring or commissioning public art since the late 1950s, and we didn't want to become static. So, along with the new building, we have made the most monumental commission to date by Nick Cave as well as commissions by Diana Al-Hadid, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, and Jane Irish. 

We understand that our job is not simply to be an incubator for future art historians, though we still want to be that, but to be a resource for the whole of the university community. When I invoked the idea of being the community's living room, it's in part the idea of third spaces, which we’ve talked about for decades now, but most of them fail. It’s the idea that these are convening spaces in which we can actually have conversations with people who don't already agree with us, I think is an incredibly important part of what we can—and right now I think, must—do. We are an aggressively collecting institution, abetted not least by our financial capacity, and we've acquired 2,000 new objects in the last three years. We have significant endowments that we can only spend on acquiring works of art. It creates both a responsibility and an amazing opportunity to think about how to give voice to narratives that would not have been part of the museum enterprise until very recent times.

Marion Maneker: Nora, many of the works at Storm King either can't be or you wouldn't want them to be moved. So how do you think about adding to the museum's collection long term?

Nora Lawrence: We're not really lacking for room, there are fields that are still part of our site that we haven't ever displayed things on. We can allow artists to have conversations over a really great amount of space, so when we acquire a new work it can be approximate to others without really taking up the same area. A visitor taking their time winding through Storm King can make these connections without having everything in their eyesight at the same time. We're all thinking about the visitor experience and what it means to be in the space that we're creating for people. That's something that is really important at Storm King. It's about the visitor completing the works for us—artists and visitors are the people we want to make sure we're giving everything to.

It was—and I rarely say this—an incredible exhibition. It became very emotional, with people who knew the work coming and crying in the space. The only reason it was an amazing show is because there were collecting museums who had these Warhols that were not in the last tour in America and Monica was able to do a quite radical thing with all this incredible work. We're a tiny team, around 18 people, so this was a big show for us, with $600 million of art and around 436 objects in our building. 

We also then worked with the Whitney—Adam Weinberg was very generous during the pandemic and actually lent us his film and video department. We were aware that a lot of incredible curators were having their shows delayed and postponed so wondered what would happen if we collaborated. We were the only venue for a full show that Chrissie Iles curated on American video art from the last five years. When the Whitney’s director Scott Rothkopf came he said it was highly unusual—it was not a touring show, not really a collaboration, but it was something quite remarkable. I think it is really about how we can do more together—collaborating rather than collecting.

James Steward: I have a couple of thoughts. One is just to reassert the importance of collecting institutions and to say that, if we're doing our jobs correctly, they should also be sites of experimentation. We have curated the entirety of our collections—there isn't a single object going on view that doesn't have, for example, completely newly written, interpretive support. Thinking of Warhol, for example, we have what purports to be Warhol's first painting of Marilyn Monroe. He painted it three days after she died and Alfred Barr bought it directly out of the studio. He was a Princetonian, class of 1922, and gave it to us some decades later. But we're not installing it in the Modern gallery, we're installing it flanked by a 14th-century, gold-ground Italian Madonna and child and a series of medieval stained glass windows in order to shock people into looking at Warhol freshly. I think one of the great problems with Warhol is he can become a bit like wallpaper as far as museum goers are concerned. We don't see them anymore for what they actually were. And so we want to bring out Marilyn Monroe’s iconicity in a radically different kind of way. 

I just wanted to reinforce that experimentation. We refer to ourselves as a laboratory. Most of the artists I mentioned that we have commissioned, of their own volition, really wanted to engage in dialogues with the past. Al-Hadid was provoked by a number of objects in our collection that led her down a path I would never have predicted when we commissioned her, which is one of the great thrills of commissioning. 

Marion Maneker: All four of you are destinations, rather than a tourist attraction in a major city. So when you do your programming, I am assuming you're thinking about what is going to bring people to your institution but there are also huge constraints, now more than ever, with the cost of shipping, insurance and so forth and getting loans. Do you have any wisdom about how programming works? 

Nicola Lees: I try to pretend I don't think about audiences, but it's all I think about. Because we’re a temporary exhibition space, we really think about the exhibition as an event. We’re working to conjure an energy and atmosphere, which comes from the history of curating and collecting museums, and the art historian Alexander Dorner's concept of “Atmosphere Rooms”. I think we have been able to increase our audience at a moment when a lot of institutions might be struggling with that. We are also prioritizing a younger audience as well, but also in terms of philanthropy and board members. I am jealous that Princeton University Art Museum has all the students on campus and that the Aldrich and Storm King are closer to the incredible art communities in New York. It is a struggle for us to bring artists to Aspen. There is an incredible history of artists being in Aspen—you hear stories of the 1940s to 1960s, when you could just roll up in a car and pitch a tent but it’s not quite so easy these days. So one thing we are working on is raising money for, and investing in, artists being able to come multiple times to Aspen so that they can really engage with the very specific community we have. 

James Steward: I want to ask a question. How many of us are free admission institutions?

Nicola Lees: Everything the Aspen Art Museum does is free.

James Steward: Princeton University Art Museum is free and I think that is one of the most important things that we can be, open to everyone. We don't charge for temporary exhibitions and we try very hard not to impose that barrier on participation. I can pretend I don't think about attendance because it doesn't affect my bottom line but, like Nicola said, I think about audience all the time, not least because we don't want to be the tree falling in the forest and no one hears it. But I'm curious if the other museums are dependent on earned income from admissions? What are some of the things you do to both be destinations and not have those admissions become barriers to participation?

Nora Lawrence: I don't think we're looking at programming specifically based on admissions—there's a lot that we say no to that we are not interested in doing but that I know would bring in a lot more people. But I think there's probably not that much of a divide about the reasons that we all want people to come, which I think are pretty great and lofty no matter what: we all want people to engage in our spaces and see the products of what these amazing artists have done over so many years. 

We do strategize—I think museums are all probably strategizing—to meet the people who we want to come. We stress so much about when those damn leaves are going to turn color in the fall and when they are going to come out in the spring, we try to maximize on those popular seasons. This year when we launched our capital project, we also opened exhibitions with Kevin Beasley, Sonia Gomes and Dionne Lee. We think about the fact that people probably aren't going to necessarily come up to Storm King three different times if we're having three different opening days for exhibitions in the spring, so we have one big celebration. We also think about the timing of art fairs and other events in New York City and when people will come. We think about things like at what times it is a little too cold. We want the artists to be as happy as they possibly can be with the works and to really to feel like they're complete. It is a blessing and an eccentricity about Storm King that the landscape really does complete the artwork, but it also makes it hard to have touring shows or to collaborate in certain ways. The site can be amazing in terms of our audience offerings. For example, a number of years ago, we started an after-hours event called Moonlit Walks, and people love it. We're trying to think about the types of things that people want as ways to bring them in and reach new audiences. We were featured in an episode of the TV show Master of None in 2017 as the perfect date spot and our attendance went through the roof. We want people to be thinking about this place as part of their lives and their loves. So, of course we're thinking about attendance, but not just for that monetary line.

Marion Maneker: I think what you're all saying is that attendance is not the metric that you're looking at; it might be gratifying, but the goal is not just to get people through the door. But to run any organization, you have to have ways of measuring the positives or negatives. So what are your specific metrics?

Cybele Maylone: I think everyone on our staff hates it, but we have a document that we complete at the end of every exhibition where we tally up how the exhibition performed against the budget, how successful it was for fundraising, and how the artists felt. A key measure of success for us is whether it was a positive experience for the artist. We really try to look at all the data holistically. 

James Steward: Because we are on a college campus I always describe our audiences as a series of concentric circles and our student body is at the core. So one of the measures I'm looking for is some direct evidence of how many students are actually experiencing our work. It doesn’t happen in only one way—there's the classroom experience, there's what I call the co-curricular, and then there's the social. The curricular experience is the easiest to measure because we have six ‘object study’ classrooms in which we bring students into direct dialogue with works of art. And when we grew those numbers from something like 700 students a year to 6,000 a year, that was a really lovely metric that not least was super persuasive for me when I was fundraising because it showed that the work we were doing was directly impactful. The students weren't just passing through on their way to something else, they were coming and having a deep dive with a faculty member or curator and hopefully leaving thinking of an object differently.

Marion Maneker: Isn't passing through also potentially a metric? What's great about the space you've built is that it's open to the campus and it's centrally located—you've designed it so that students can pass through in a hurry to get to dinner or to go to a class. So even if they don't know about the art, they see it, experience it, and maybe over time develop some relationship to it. 

James Steward: We are using technology to measure how many people just pass through. But as you said, I hope it really does lure people to come back and do something more substantive. Maybe one of the most radical things we're doing is opening from 8:00 a.m. to 10:45 p.m., seven days a week. This is partly because we house all of our students on campus, so we have 8,000 students within a ten minute walking radius of our building. And, as I always say, when are they ever going to have a more intimate experience of art than when they are with us? We want to create lifelong behaviors that hopefully cause them to then go to other institutions and be curious forever.

Marion Maneker: You're just gunning for that ‘best date spot’ title.

James Steward: Actually, at one point our alumni association did a survey of the alumni and asked to name your favorite place on the Princeton campus and one of the leading contenders was this little, tucked-away gallery space in our old building that everybody remembered having gone to for a date. Even our head of communications took his now wife, who was a Princeton student there and remembers making out in that room! So when we were designing our new building, we asked our architecture team, led by David Adjaye, to give us these comfortable, tucked away spaces that people can feel they've made their own. I think you have to meet your audience where they are.