A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

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Museums come in many different types and sizes, with varying missions, but it’s always a struggle, in any environment, to fund and support them. That’s especially the case now, given the uncertain political-economic-cultural landscape. So, earlier this month, the Independent 20th Century art fair organized a diverse panel of museum directors to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing their institutions—with yours truly as the moderator.

Among the four museums represented were two with permanent collections (Princeton University Art Museum and Storm King) and two without them (the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Aspen Art Museum). Their directors each brought different perspectives on acquisition, experimentation, and the relationship between artists and audience. Princeton’s James Steward and Storm King’s Nora Lawrence both oversee permanent collections, albeit in profoundly different spaces—one a university building, and the other a 500-acre outdoor museum in the Hudson Valley. Cybele Maylone, the executive director of the Aldrich in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and Nicola Lees, the artistic director and C.E.O. of the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, emphasized the freedom of lacking such collections, and what it means for their programming. As always, this excerpt from our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

We want to continue opening up the question of “voice” and who has it. Our job is not simply to be an incubator of future art historians—though we still want to be that—but to be a resource for the whole of the university’s community. One of the great challenges is thinking about how to create collections, and present and interpret them in ways that not only speak to diverse publics, but also bring them together.

We have significant endowments that we can only spend on acquiring works of art. That’s a gift, and it’s a big part of what led me to Princeton; there is not another academic museum in the world that can collect as aggressively and intentionally as we can. It creates both a responsibility and an amazing opportunity to think about how to give a voice to narratives that would not have been part of the museum enterprise otherwise. We’ve acquired 2,000 new objects in the last three years.

Nora, a lot of what you have at Storm King is site-specific. I presume many of the works there either can’t be moved, or you wouldn’t want to move them. So how do you think about adding to the museum’s collection long term?

Nora Lawrence: I think we can show, in a really nice way, this range of not only site-specific work, but also of the production of sculpture and outdoor artwork from the mid-20th century until today. There have been artists along the way that have shown us how they want their works displayed in our landscape. We can allow artists to have conversations over a really great amount of space—an artist’s work can be proximate to others without really taking up the same space. Visitors can take their time winding through Storm King at their own pace and in their own way, and can make these connections without necessarily having everything in their actual eyesight at the same time. It’s about the visitor completing the works for us. That’s really important. Artists and visitors are really the top two people we want to make sure we’re giving everything to.

Cybele and Nicola, since your museums are both non-collecting, can you give a sense of the strength and weakness of being in a very different position—not having to think about a permanent collection?

Cybele Maylone: We love not having a permanent collection. I recently had a conversation with someone who’s involved in the museum industry, and he said, I don’t really think of the Aldrich as a museum. You’re an incubator; you’re kind of a site for experimentation. Not having a collection allows us to take these risks with artists and have that be our central priority. We follow artists and their ideas, and there’s a great freedom to that. Not collecting is a central part of who we are, and it allows us to do the kind of work with artists that we do.

Nicola Lees: In many ways, it gives us an advantage, because we’re able to double down on how we can collaborate and reinvent what collaborating means. For us, it’s about collaborating rather than collecting.

Steward: I want to reassert the importance of collecting institutions, if we’re doing our jobs correctly and also being sites of experimentation. [At Princeton], we’ve re-curated the whole of our collections. There isn’t a single object going on view that doesn’t have a completely newly written interpretive support, of a kind that says, We’re going to challenge what you think about even your beloved friends. We refer to ourselves, to the aggravation of our humanists, as a laboratory. They seem to be annoyed that I borrow a term from science to describe part of what we do, but I think that’s critical. Most of the artists whom we’ve commissioned have really wanted to engage in dialogues with the past.

Maylone: At [Aldrich], we try not to think about driving audience during the conception of our programming. We’re in a very traditional community in Connecticut, so the things that we do, by our very nature, are somewhat off-putting to our neighbors. That’s by design; that was Larry Aldrich’s vision for the place from the jump. Our chief curator, Amy Smith-Stewart, develops a program that is true to our mission and the way we want to serve artists. We know that we bring audiences in, in service of the artists. But the scale of the Aldrich has always lent itself to intimacy with works of art. We love when people come to the museum, but that’s not the primary anxiety. We know the things we could do that would draw greater interest, but we want to follow our mission.

You can’t quantify the emotional experience of someone in the gallery, so I’m curious what metrics you use to alert yourself to either positive or negative things going on with the gallery?

Maylone: We have a document 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 artist feels—that’s a key measure of success for us, whether it was a positive experience for them. We look at it holistically, and use a lot of data points, because there are exhibitions that get great press and no one comes to see—and exhibitions that get no press and all the visitors love. I don’t feel it’s one thing in particular, except the artists’ experience.

Steward: Because we’re on a college campus, one of the measures I’m looking for is some direct evidence of how many students are actually experiencing our work. And it’s not going to happen in 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 so-called object study classrooms in which we bring students in 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 when I was fundraising, because it showed that the work we’re doing was directly impactful. Because we’re assuming those touch points were substantive ones. They were coming and having a deep dive with a faculty member, with a curator, and hopefully leaving thinking a bit differently.

Lawrence: We hear from artists over not just the short term, but over a number of years about what the experience of working with us meant to them. Almost every year, we do a project with an artist who’s not had a lot of experience working on a large scale or outdoors. That’s really hard to do when you’re an emerging artist. There’s no money for it, there’s usually not the place to display it; you’re not going to do that without the prompt of the invitation. We want to continue seeding this world of ours, with artists thinking on this grand scale.