Art Scoping Maxwell L. Anderson

This episode has us bouncing from Harvard to Washington to the Netherlands to Mali, led there by Dr. Cynthia Schneider, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. She began her career with a PhD from Harvard in Dutch art, serving as Assistant Curator of European Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, then a professor of art history at Georgetown University for two decades, during which she was appointed Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Netherlands by President Clinton, followed by her appointment as a Distinguished Professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. In addition to her teaching duties there, she is Co-Director of three endeavors: the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, MOST Resource; and Timbuktu Renaissance. Her recent and very candid assessments of the Trump administration’s diplomatic blunders are required reading.

Art history has of late been more art and less history. University enrollment in pre-contemporary art is dwindling, and cost-intensive mega-exhibitions of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are stilled as the pandemic roars on. For perspective we turn to one of the world’s leading experts in 19th century painting, Dr. George T.M. Shackelford, Deputy Director of Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum. He shares anecdotes about our shared summer as interns at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after we graduated from Dartmouth, along with details about reopening the Kimbell, how training in art history is faring, his experience with debunking a would-be masterpiece, the urgency of recruiting students of color to the museum profession, and upcoming shows in Fort Worth.

For truth-telling in the world of finance, we turn to Lola C. West, co-founder and partner of WestFuller Advisors, a boutique investment advisory firm in New York City that builds legacies of wealth for individuals, families and institutions. A trustee of Souls Grown Deep Community Partnership and Foundation, she shares insights on the intersections among social change, culture, and finance, and the alleviation of poverty in the Deep South, and lets us into the rarefied world of investing—leavened with the determination of a woman seeking a more progressive America.

We’re lucky to have a chance to hear from Arnold Lehman, senior adviser to the chairman of Phillips auction house, and director emeritus of the Brooklyn Museum. We dive straight into some very timely topics, including the slow pace of change in art museums grappling with their responsibilities in furthering racial and social justice, how media coverage influences the field, if and how New York will bounce back after the pandemic recedes, and his forthcoming book on the exhibition Sensation. We even pull back the curtain to discuss the nominating committees of art museum boards—and close with the moving account of his enduring attachment to a particular work of art.

We take a step outside into the world of horticulture, and then back into art museums, safely masked, for a conversation with Dr. Carrie Rebora Barratt, CEO and William C. Steere Sr. President of The New York Botanical Garden, and previously deputy director for collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We cover a lot of ground, from how cultural institutions began in New York City starting in 1870, to the social responsibilities of all kinds of cultural institutions, changing visitor experiences in compromised spaces, the disappearance of tourism, prevailing approaches to American art history, and her star turn a few years ago as a guest of the Colbert Report.
 

Art museum directors are challenged as never before, confronting the pandemic, demands for social and racial justice, low morale among staff who have survived layoffs, and evaporated earned revenue. The woman of the hour to sort it all out is Dr. Elizabeth Easton, former chair of the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, the first elected president of the Association of Art Museum Curators, and Co-Founder and current Director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, who is preparing a new wave of hires to tackle these and other challenges. Our wide-ranging conversation includes the different challenges facing contemporary and encyclopedic museums, trends in scholarship, how boards think about hiring—and firing—directors, the search firms that elevate some candidates above others, and likely shifts in the articulation of art museum missions.