The Future of Museums
Facing Tough Times, Museum Leaders Call On Their Creativity to Keep Their Institutions Going Strong
By Cynthia K. Buccini
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"We are constantly on an international stage and viewed by the world as setting the standards for museology," says Emily Rafferty (CAS'71), president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by Vernon Doucette |
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In the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2004 exhibition Dangerous Liaisons, mannequins wearing eighteenth-century finery — lavish gowns of pale blue, ivory, or pink silk taffeta and satin — lounge and flirt in the museum's opulent French period rooms. A coquette poses with a fan before her face; a music tutor leans a bit too close to his student at the harp.
The show — a novel collaboration between the Met's Costume Institute and its European sculpture and decorative arts department — raised a few eyebrows. "Normally, people see period rooms in museums around the world as sacrosanct, where the curtains aren't moved aside and everything's perfect behind the rope and stanchion," says museum president Emily Rafferty (CAS'71). "And here for the first time you saw an integration of the actual look of the room with the people in vignette settings who would have inhabited it in its original form."
It worked. Dangerous Liaisons was so popular that the show was extended, drawing more than 420,000 visitors over four months. "It turned out to be genius," says Rafferty, but not just because of the audience. "It was spectacularly, beautifully done," she says. "It was humorous, it was provocative. So, in addition to being perfect from a historical and an art history point of view, it then went on to speak to people in a different way."
To Rafferty, the show was an example of the creativity, inventiveness, and collaboration necessary to keep the museum running — and relevant — in a changing world.
That's not easy today. Museums like the Met are grappling with the challenges of fundraising and a decline in international visitors, and they're competing for the public's precious leisure time. Cities like New York offer myriad options; the number of art shows alone has quadrupled in the last decade, Rafferty says. The Internet has made it easier for people to get out of town for a long weekend. Or they may just decide to go to the local multiplex.
Museums also face complaints from the public over pricey blockbuster exhibitions, criticism from the media for catering to clients who may make sizable donations, and questions about the content of some exhibitions.
Daniel Ranalli, director of the graduate program in arts administration at BU's Metropolitan College, sees a museum world divided into two camps, one with administrators motivated by "the enchantment of art and the importance of art in terms of our own humanity and history through the cultures of many different civilizations," and the other with those driven by the bottom line. The latter group, he says, has adopted the vocabulary of big business, with the focus on revenue, customers, and marketing.
This way of thinking dates back twenty or thirty years, when most museum directors came to their jobs with Ph.D.s in art history, Ranalli says, but little training in running nonprofit institutions. As a result, arts administration programs emerged, many of them adopting the principles of efficiency and revenue-enhancement found in M.B.A. programs. "The whole point is that you're mission-driven," he says. "We should be evaluating ourselves not only on how much money or how many people we brought in, but on how well we are accomplishing the mission of the museum, which is to collect, to preserve, to conserve, to exhibit, and to interpret for the public."
But as a trustee of Provincetown Museum on Cape Cod and a working artist himself, Ranalli (GRS'71) is well aware that museums are struggling for funds. "If you don't have enough revenue to heat the rooms and pay the guards and the curators, you don't stay in business," he says. "The government hasn't been very good at providing those funds." The nonprofit arts sector receives about 6 to 8 percent of its total revenue from the federal and state government, mostly from the National Endowment for the Arts and various state arts councils. "So, it's a very complex scenario," Ranalli says. "We're in a period where we have to think creatively."
Those involved in running some of the most respected museums say they are doing just that. They're reaching out to new audiences, coming up with imaginative exhibitions, offering free hours, developing a wide variety of educational programs, and, yes, even marketing themselves, all the while staying true to their institution's mission.
The Experience of a Lifetime
If anyone knows the Met's mission, it's Rafferty. She grew up five blocks from the museum and joined the development staff about five years after earning a bachelor's in African and Middle East history at BU (she minored in art history). She became vice president for development, then senior vice president for external affairs, responsible for visitor services, admissions, and multicultural audiences, in addition to fundraising. Taking over as president — number two after director Philippe de Montebello —on January 15, 2005, Rafferty oversees the administration of an institution with a $169 million budget, two million works of art, and 1,800 full-time employees and 900 volunteers.
Fundraising, she says, is the toughest in thirty years. Natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 tsunami cut into arts giving. The Met's attendance, at 4.5 million in fiscal 2005, is still below what it was before September 11, 2001, in part because of the drop in international travel. "The city of New York has done very well in the last six months in terms of tourism, but we are in a much more tenuous spot than we were prior to 9/11," Rafferty says. "I don't think any of us anywhere will ever again think that we can sit back and count on any kind of traditional situation."
The Met, she says, has had to look for new sources of revenue. Three years ago, it threw open its doors on some national holidays. In addition, $50 (the suggested entrance fee is $15) buys admission on Mondays, when the museum is otherwise closed. It's tapping family audiences, and it has special programs and events for college students and young professionals.
Still, if the museum is going to meet its objectives, it must do more than increase the number of people who visit. This winter's Fra Angelico, the first retrospective of the Italian early-Renaissance artist in fifty years and the first ever in the United States, was a success on many levels, Rafferty says. "There hasn't been a Fra Angelico exhibition in decades, so not only was it a landmark, but the loans that were secured were extraordinary," she says. "The work that's been done on Fra Angelico since the last exhibition has revealed whole new aspects of the artist himself. And then, I think the extraordinary, sheer visceral beauty of Fra Angelico overwhelmed people when they saw the works together. . . . If very few people had come to see that exhibition, it would have been a success just on those merits." (It was more than a few — 254,000 visitors saw the show, which ran from October 26 through January 29.) "It was an experience of a lifetime," she says.
Among the special exhibitions at the Met this spring: the works of contemporary American artist Kara Walker and panels of the final altarpiece, along with other artwork, painted by Raphael. In May the museum will present AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, in its English period rooms. Like Dangerous Liaisons, Rafferty says, this exhibition will be evidence of the resourcefulness of the Met's curators. "I think the important thing is that museums remember what their mission is," she says. "It's our job to make sure that we remain accessible, that we preserve these collections, that we interpret them, that we exhibit them, that we publish them, that we are part of the intellectual and the international community that continues to study them and advance scholarship."
Museum as Missionary
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| "Our job is not to give answers, but to ignite thought," says James Welu (GRS'77), director of the Worcester Art Museum. Photograph by Vernon Doucette |
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During the first half of the twentieth century, the Worcester Art Museum in central Massachusetts counted on the support of local corporations and their CEOs and the wealthy families who'd helped create the institution. When those companies were bought or shuttered and the prominent families began to dwindle, the museum had to come up with a way to broaden its base of support, says James Welu (GRS'77), director of the 108-year-old museum since 1986.
"One thing was clear: we couldn't be looking at art just from the standpoint of aesthetics and connoisseurship and art history," he says. "We can't expect everyone to know that Romanticism follows Neoclassicism and Realism follows that. We wanted to look at art from a much more interdisciplinary perspective."
That way of thinking has led to many successful shows. For example, the museum worked with scholars from four colleges for its 2005 exhibition Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, which included a lecture series on topics such as the ways artists used painting to cope with the effects of the plague, the science of pestilence, and the religious culture of the time. The popular show received national attention in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor.
"Our success is in partnering," adds Welu. "When you partner with an institution, they bring whole new audiences to you." A case in point: the museum collaborates with Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts, on Flora in Winter, an annual exhibition of fresh flower arrangements and the art that inspired them. This year, the four-day show drew 6,000 visitors. (Annual attendance is 120,000.)
Attracting visitors has always been a challenge, says Welu. He has been teaching classes on the history of the Worcester Art Museum, which today has a collection of 35,000 works of art covering fifty centuries. "When you look back at the annual reports, they were always so conscious of attendance, and growing attendance," he says. "It's just the missionary aspect of an institution like ours."
Another way the museum builds its audience, and brings in revenue, is through educational programs. Approximately 7,000 children, teens, and adults take classes not only in traditional subjects like painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, but also in comic art, Web page design, and computer animation. "By working with their children," Welu says, "you keep the adults involved during those busy years — while they're in their thirties, forties, and fifties. They have more time when they retire, but if they've not been used to going to museums, it's foreign territory."
The museum's educational philosophy is one of the most important aspects of its mission, according to Welu. "Our job is not to give answers, but to ignite thought," he says. "It's to enable artists and those great works of art they left behind to speak."
From Wild Things to High Drama
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Exhibitions that combine art and social history are a hallmark of the tenure of Joan Rosenbaum (CAS'64), who has been director of the Jewish Museum for twenty-five years. Photograph by Thaddeus Harden |
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As director of New York's Jewish Museum, Joan Rosenbaum (CAS'64) has seen her budget grow over twenty-five years from $1 million to $15 million, and the museum's space, in a former home at 1109 Fifth Avenue, double. The growth has enabled the museum to create a permanent exhibition for its collection and to expand temporary shows, among other things. What hasn't changed is the pressure to raise money. "It feels like there is a much bigger competition for the cultural dollar than before," Rosenbaum says. And yet, her outlook is far from gloomy. "If you enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art or MOMA on a Saturday or a Sunday, it's so crowded," she says. "And it's the same with us if we have a show that has large appeal. You'll see a line around the block."
One group the museum targets is families with young children. Crossover shows, like the 2005 exhibition Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak, attract adults and kids. "We have ideas for two or three other shows that I think will draw that kind of audience," Rosenbaum says.
Rosenbaum, who was honored in March at a gala celebrating her twenty-five years leading the Jewish Museum, says one theme of her tenure is exhibitions that combine art and social history. A recent example of such shows was Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, which included costumes, photography, theater posters, and furniture and personal effects of the French actress. Flickering on monitors along one wall were films in which Bernhardt starred.
Rosenbaum notes that an emphasis on exhibition design is important to drawing visitors of all backgrounds. Design, such as the juxtaposition of films and costumes in Sarah Bernhardt, she believes, is a critical aspect of presentation. "I wanted to expand the audience of visitors to the Jewish Museum," she says. "I wanted the general public to feel highly engaged, and great exhibition design is key."
Among the upcoming shows are sculptures of Eva Hesse this spring and a 2008 abstract expressionism exhibition, focusing on the competing ideas of art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The museum's broad scope has kept her at the helm, Rosenbaum says, and will keep visitors coming through the doors. "I think having the freedom to introduce social history as a context for art often gives us even greater breadth than other art museums," she says. "There is seemingly an infinite number of exhibitions and projects than can be done within our mission."
With Rosenbaum, as well as with Rafferty and Welu, the conversation always comes back to the mission. "Your mission means you have outlined some core values as a public institution, where your collections are in the public trust and you're dedicated to education through art," Rosenbaum says. "That's at the heart of who we are."
