A distant park, an ocean liner and a truck with rocks: Museum visions and the much-desired change

In 1917, John Cotton Dana, director of Newark Museum, wrote that “Today, museums of art are built to keep objects of art, and objects of art are bought to be kept in museums. As the objects seem to do their work if they are safely kept, and as museums seem to serve their purpose if they safely keep the objects, the whole thing is as useful in the splendid isolation of a distant park as in the center of the life of the community which possesses it.”

In 1990, Elaine Heumann Gurian compared big museums to huge ocean liners. “Turning the ocean liner (even slowly)”, she wrote, “is a ponderous and an uncomfortable affair. (…) Change by itself is so uncomfortable that institutions don’t do it voluntarily or for noble reasons alone. They change because they fear the consequences of not doing so.” At that time, in 1990, Elaine was asking for diversity in boards and staffs, shared leadership, a broadening of our collections, the adoption of explicit points of view, giving up anonymity and welcoming behaviours and interests that do not match our assumptions.

In 2000, Stephen E. Weil asked us to imagine this: “It’s the first Saturday morning in November, bright but brisk. You pass an open field where some thirty or so sweat-streaked men and women are loading a truck with rocks. You pause to watch them at work. While you watch, a person who appears to be their leader walks over to ask you if you might care to lend a hand. Before responding, you will naturally want to know why these people are making such an enormous effort to gather such a big load of rocks. And you ask: ‘Why are you doing this?’”.

Creating mental images of the three scenarios I just mentioned – a useless museum in the splendid isolation of a distant park; a big ocean liner turning painfully slowly; a bunch of hard-working people loading a truck with rocks –, some of us might feel sorry for the three visionaries: John Cotton Dana, Elaine Heumann Gurian and Stephen E. Weil. They envisioned a much-needed change, but the change didn’t happen. Otherwise, their words wouldn’t be ringing a bell the way they do with many of us today. I see it slightly differently. In my view, it is precisely because their words ring a bell that these three museum people – and others – are a fundamental part of the change that is happening. Ocean liners are big, they are turning very slowly, but they are turning. Thus, I don’t feel sorry or disappointed; I feel grateful, inspired and energised by these three museum leaders. I also feel concerned, as I believe that the majority of the people working in museums today have never heard of them. And I will come back to this.

Since we are here to discuss museum leadership, perhaps we should start with the question of who is a leader. In our field, as in any other field, we shouldn’t be mistaking a director for a leader. It’s not a question of hierarchy, it’s not a question of who’s at the top of a pyramid. It’s a question of who has got a vision, a dream about making the reality they live in better and the capacity to inspire, motivate and involve others into making that dream come true. A leader is not a dreamer in the sense of someone who’s cut off from reality, someone who lives in an imaginary world. A leader is sensitive to and has got a good grasp of people’s desires and anxieties, an understanding of the change that is longed for and the capacity to see and to follow a path forward.

So, what should we expect of museum leaders in the 21st century? Each period in time has got its own characteristics and needs. The pandemic has unquestionably defined the time we are living in, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement or activism regarding the climate emergency or the crisis of our democracies. Thus, I would like to put into your consideration the following thoughts:

A museum leader knows what the mission is, why it is that they do what they do. This is how they can gather support. And I would also like to add that mission, vision and definition are different things. Consider those people Stephen Weil told us about, loading a track with rocks, and the person that appears to be their leader asking you for help. “Why are you doing this?”, you ask. In my experience, many (perhaps most) museum professionals, either directors or working in other positions, are unable to answer this question. They might tell you what it is that they do and how, they might classify it as “important” or “of interest”. But they cannot tell you why it is that they do it, why what they do matters - not just to themselves and their own professional interests, but to others.

A museum leader looks for ways of being useful to the community. John Cotton Dana was already questioning this when he wrote about museums seemingly serving their purpose if they safely kept the objects. Stephen Weil took this further by saying that a good museum is an institution that is operated with the hope and expectation that it will make a positive difference in the quality of people’s lives – and this positive change may relate to behaviour, skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, condition. Most museums today do not ask themselves the question of whether they are a good, useful museums. They live in that splendid isolation of a distant park, even when they are at the heart of a community, convinced of their importance. For most museum professionals museums are good just because they exist.

A museum leader understands what makes a community. Most of us understand the community as a group of people sharing the same territory. Unfortunately, a shared territory does not turn us into a community; a common cause does, a common purpose, the creation of an environment where we feel that we are welcome to belong and to contribute, to give and to take, to be taken care of and to take care of others. As Mike Murawski rightly remarks in his book Museums as agents of social change, “We have been trained to think of museums as separate from communities”, hence the term “outreach” when we design programmes that will supposedly take us to people that don’t normally come to museums.

A museum leader cares. When discussing what a community is, we tend to forget, or even disregard, our internal community. Who are the people working next to us? What makes them get up and come to work every day? What are their values, aspirations, needs and hopes? What are they thinking? What are their strong points? How can they get better? How can we support them? These are the questions a museum leader should also ask about the wider community.

A museum leader identifies the broken rules and writes their own. In other words, we need museum leaders that know how to be more pirates. “Writing a pirate code is about closing the gap between intention and action”, writes Sam Conniff Allende. Leadership is not about putting the right words together, it is not about performative statements. A pirate code is about building culture, living and acting according to your values, assuming a responsibility publicly and becoming accountable. In my mind, this is exactly what Mike Murawski challenges us to do when he questions: “What if love was the core value that steered the radical change needed in museums today?”.

At this point, I would like to stress that leaders can be found at all levels of an organisation, not only at the top. We should reconsider the structure, the decision-making processes, we should take each member of the team into account and make sure they have the opportunity and the support they need to be the best they can and happy about it. Thirty years ago, Elaine Heumann Gurian was encouraging the field to train gifted, undereducated, often minority, staff for new positions; to recruit widely in places we are uncomfortable; to promote museum service as a viable career; to mentor and set up staff support. Good, capable, excellent members of staff, at all levels, are not a threat to their directors, they are an asset for an organisation.

Which brings me to training. We often talk about “born leaders”, but, in my view, leaders are not just born, they must be trained too. Our field needs to invest on leadership training, on people who will understand the importance of defining a mission, of making its fulfilment a firm priority and of using it to orient their every action. But it is not only about that. It is also (and urgently, I should say) about learning how to implement all this by also training one’s capacity to listen, to maintain one’s humanity and to be empathetic. Recently, Robert Weisberg, author of the blog “Museum Human” and a persistent thinker about museum leadership, was rightly questioning whether we are more obsessed with training and not ‘being’. “It's interesting”, he wrote, “how many organizations, which no doubt have been training leaders for decades, still have terrible leadership practices, especially when these practices are imposed upon groups who traditionally have little to no power.” It’s not about pretending, it’s about being.

Regarding training, training “to be”, I would also like to reaffirm something I have been insisting upon for some time: I expect those among us who have the ambition to lead a museum to be familiar with names such as John Cotton Dana, Stephen E. Weil, Elaine Heumann Gurian and others, in different positions and with different responsibilities, who have taken our thinking and practice further. I expect those who have the ambition to lead a museum to invest in studying museology and become acquainted with the theory and practice produced in the last century around the subject of museums (John Cotton Dana, for instance, created the first course for training museum professionals in the 1920s…). Being an expert in a museum collection is not enough for leading a good museum, a useful museum (it never was). A museum is not ‘mainly’ about collections, it’s about collections ‘and’ people (it’s the “museum ‘and’”, advocated by Elaine Heumann Gurian). People do not come to museums to become experts on subject matters. They don’t come with the ambition to study art history, archaeology, history, sciences. People, all of us, come looking for meaning, trying to understand better the world around us and ourselves in it. A museum leader is sensitive to this; knows how to give voice to these needs, wishes and anxieties; is able to understand museums in their entirety, not just part of what they are.

I am taking the opportunity of this presentation to acknowledge the many and different people in the museum field who have been showing us (showing me) possible ways forward, who have been inspiring and guiding us. Looking at them, I think of my museum leadership wishlist:

·       I wish to see museum leaders prepared to take risks

·       I wish to see museum leaders ready to embrace discomfort

·       I wish to see museum leaders who are curious to learn from others, to move beyond their certainties.

·       I wish to see museum leaders respectful of others – in their team and beyond

·       I wish to see museum leaders investing time not in producing more but in doing better

·       I wish to see museum leaders who support others in being the best they can and find happiness and meaning into what they are doing.

·       I wish to see more museum leaders asking themselves and others: “What if love was the core value that steered the radical change needed in museums today?”

Leaders are not just exceptional heroes, they are also everyday people. As Sam Conniff Allende and Alex Barker put it in How to be more pirate, “Small bold actions are worthwhile because, frankly, even if it feels like a minor act of resistance at the time, you have no idea where it could lead.” Sometimes, one finds a leader in someone who simply knows when and how to say ‘no’.

Why are we doing what we are doing? I´ll conclude by quoting Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher to whom I often refer, especially as we are witnessing the assault on the teaching of humanities subjects in different parts of the world. We do this because we are here “to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own.” My museum leadership wishlist is not a utopia. It is a reality, practiced by different colleagues in our field. We need to know who they are and to support them. Together, we can create a much-needed, long-desired, different museum culture.

Presentation at the International Symposium ICOM 2021 in Prague, on 26.8.2021

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