The New Guard

In the first two weeks of January 2008, an unprecedented transfer of power will take place in the Twin Cities arts community. During that time, the new director of the Walker Art Center, Olga Viso, and the new director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Kaywin Feldman, will both report for duty, ushering in a new era of leadership for our two most prestigious art institutions.

Viso and Feldman are not the only newcomers on the scene. In the past six months, the Ordway has sworn in a new president, Patricia Mitchell; the Children’s Theatre Company has appointed a new managing director, Gabriella Calicchio; The Museum of Russian Art has recruited former state auditor Judi Dutcher as its new president; The Loft Literary Center has hired a new executive director, Jocelyn Hale—and in February, the Minnesota Orchestra will welcome its new president, Michael Henson.

These names may not be familiar yet, but they nevertheless represent the new guard of leadership in the local arts community. Never in the history of our metropolis have so many top posts in the arts changed hands. By virtue of their positions alone, all will become major players in the cultural life of the Twin Cities—and their collective impact will be impossible to ignore. They will, after all, be responsible for sustaining and extending what has become one of the nation’s great civic success stories—our beloved and burgeoning arts scene. And this historic change in leadership comes after an unprecedented period of investment in, and expansion of, the very institutions in flux. Fortunately, this also may be an opportune time to hand off the leadership baton.

Most fortuitous of all may be that Olga Viso and Kaywin Feldman, two of the most dynamic arts executives in the country, have managed to land here at exactly the same time. Aside from the personal stamp each will inevitably impose on their respective institutions, Viso and Feldman are the same age (forty-one), they already know and like each other, and from the start both have said they will be looking for ways to work together.

“I think we have to collaborate,” says Viso. “The economics of the art industry are making it necessary, not just in Minneapolis but all over the country. It’s a new attitude in the field—a way to share efficiencies and expertise. I’m eager to understand where the opportunities lie, not just with the MIA but with other local museums and arts organizations as well. We all have different missions, so there’s no reason we can’t work with and help each other.”

This is huge. For almost a generation, the MIA and the Walker have kept their distance, largely because the MIA’s previous director, Evan Maurer, and the Walker’s outgoing director, Kathy Halbreich, were not exactly kindred spirits. When outgoing MIA director William Griswold came on board two years ago, however, he and Halbreich immediately began forging a strategic relationship between the two museums, starting in June of 2006 with the Walker loaning the MIA Franz Marc’s 1911 painting, The Large Blue Horses, which still hangs in the MIA’s Darwin and Geri Reedy Gallery.

The future of this nascent relationship had been uncertain until Viso and Feldman were named. Now, the prospect of constructive, ongoing cooperation between the Walker and the MIA appears to be a foregone conclusion, and it could be a boon to both institutions. Joint exhibitions, shared education programs, artist and curator exchanges, cosponsored events, broader community outreach, greater negotiating clout for coveted big-ticket exhibits—all are potential offspring of a strong working friendship between the two women.

Viso and Feldman know each other primarily through their membership in the Association of Art Museum Directors, an invitation-only organization of elite North American art museum directors. There are more than 14,000 museums in the United States; only 180 of them are represented in the AAMD. When search firms and committees are looking for the art world’s best and brightest, they start here. In landing Viso and Feldman, the Twin Cities has hit something close to the arts management jackpot, says Millicent Gaudieri, executive director of the AAMD.

“They were both great choices,” says Gaudieri. “The Twin Cities is very lucky to get both of them. They are both extremely talented individuals. They bring different backgrounds to each institution, but each appointment is a great fit.”

Certainly, both women have demonstrated an uncanny knack for making the most of their professional opportunities. Olga Viso was born in Florida to Cuban émigré parents and attended Emory University in Atlanta. She began her career at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and worked as a curator at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Twelve years ago, Viso joined the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian’s museum of contemporary and modern art, where she began as a curator and worked her way up through the ranks until she became its director three years ago.

Kaywin Feldman took a somewhat different route to the top, by practically starting at the top. Feldman attended the University of Michigan, where she got a degree in classical archaeology, then boosted her academic credentials with a master’s degree in art history from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, as well as a master’s degree in museum studies from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London. Though she didn’t have much managerial experience at the time, California’s Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art, History, and Science took a chance on her when she was only twenty-eight and hired her as director of exhibitions/curator, then promoted her to executive director. At thirty-two, she accepted the director position at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, where she has been for the past nine years.

According to the AAMD’s Gaudieri, both women have distinguished themselves by balancing the four pillars of excellence in any great museum director: the ability to create programming that is both challenging and accessible; the social acumen to associate equally well with artists, curators, patrons, and the public at large; the managerial savvy to attract and energize a talented staff; and a gift for charismatic and effective community outreach, including the ability to raise large amounts of money. At the Hirshhorn, for example, Viso successfully managed the museum when federal funds were being cut and more fiscal support from the community was necessary—not an easy thing to do in Washington, D.C., where most museum-goers are tourists from out of town. And one of the feathers in Feldman’s cap was the securing of a single-donor $5 million gift (the largest in the Brooks’s history) to kick off a recent capital campaign.

For all of their similarities, however, there are plenty of stark differences. Olga Viso is an expert in Latin and contemporary art; Feldman’s field of expertise is seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. Viso’s primary commitment is to new work and the support of current artists; Feldman is a history buff whose palette of interests extends to distant cultures in Asia and the Mediterranean. Both seem to have landed at institutions that fit their talents extraordinarily well, and a look at their accomplishments so far may shed some light on what Twin Citians are likely to see from them in the future.

In choosing Viso, the Walker has selected someone whose artistic, aesthetic, and managerial sensibilities appear to be very close to those of her predecessor, Kathy Halbreich. The Hirshhorn itself is similar to the Walker in many respects as well, including the fact that it has an attached sculpture garden and is housed in a building that gets regularly derided in the press as “a drum on a stool” or an example of “Sputnik modernism.”

For these and many other reasons, Viso was one of the Walker’s top choices for replacing Halbreich from the beginning. According to Mike Peel, who was cochair of the Walker’s international search committee, thirteen other candidates were considered, but Viso remained at the top of their list throughout the process. “We already knew Olga well,” says Peel. “She and her staff have collaborated with the Walker on several projects [including the current Frida Kahlo show], and the Hirshhorn has a similar programming philosophy. I think we were very fortunate to get her. She’s one of the stars of her generation.”

Viso herself says she was attracted to the director position at the Walker partly because it is one of the highest and most influential positions in the world of contemporary art, and partly because it offers her an institutional tool for seeding partnerships and collaborations between artists and institutions in different disciplines. “The Hirshhorn is strictly a visual arts institution,” says Viso. “What is appealing to me at the Walker is that its performing arts [theater, dance, music] components allow the opportunity to foster cross-disciplinary work in so many different arenas. That’s what contemporary art is all about right now—multidisciplinary explorations between artists who are breaking down familiar barriers to create work that is new, different, and exciting.”

Outgoing Walker director Halbreich deserves at least some of the credit for making that last statement true. During her nearly seventeen-year tenure, she was known for programming that was both eclectic and esoteric, often bringing in artists who were barely known in the United States, much less the Midwest. By doing so, she raised the Walker’s national and international profile to such a degree that “Minneapolis” and “Walker” are practically synonymous in many parts of the world, especially Europe. During the Halbreich era, 12.7 million people visited the Walker and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and more than thirty Walker-organized exhibitions traveled around the world, reaching more than 4 million people at seventy-five museums, in sixty cities, and fourteen countries. In addition, it has acquired 4,000 works for its permanent collection, presented more than 1,600 dance, music, and theater performances, and featured more than 3,500 films, documentaries, and shorts. Subtly, cleverly, and sometimes controversially, through deft handling of an astonishingly broad array of artistry in every conceivable medium, Halbreich also educated Twin Citians to be much more sophisticated consumers of global art and culture.

Olga Viso also has a reputation for doing “challenging” and sometimes “daring” shows that garner as much respect from academics as they do praise from the public. At the Hirshhorn in 2004, for example, she curated an exhibit of Cuban-American performance artist, filmmaker, and sculptor Ana Mendieta, who, in the 1970s, was one of the first artists to use her own body to explore issues of gender and identity, and who was fond of using blood for its symbolic shock effect. In one piece called Body Tracks, Mendieta filmed herself dipping her hands in a mixture of red paint and blood and smearing it on a canvas, an act of organic rebellion that seems almost quaint in comparison to what other artists have done with their bodies since then, but which—in the context of a Smithsonian building—was rather bold, considering the United States’ unfortunate and ongoing legacy at Guantanamo Bay.

Her willingness to take such risks is one reason Viso is known as an “artist’s director”—one who understands artists, believes in them, trusts their judgment, and supports them in any way she can. Those who criticized Halbreich’s regime may not find Viso’s sensibilities any more appealing, but those who value the Walker’s ability to continually perplex and surprise may rest assured that Viso is no stranger to the bizarre, head-scratching sorts of contemporary art that found its way here during the Halbreich era. In fact, Viso has had a hand in some of those exhibits. As far back as 2000, Viso helped organize the renowned retrospective of Robert Gober for its installation at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Regular Walker-goers may remember the Gober show: It was the one that included a fixtureless kitchen sink mounted on the wall, a child’s playpen arranged into an “X,” and the most notorious piece of all: a rendering of two three-foot-long sticks of butter called Sex.

“Choosing Olga is more of an evolution than a revolution,” says Walker board member Peel. “The long-range goal of the Walker is to create a pioneering twenty-first-century multidisciplinary arts center, and Olga Viso is someone whom we think can take the Walker to the next level of greatness.”

Like Viso, Kaywin Feldman was also the “unanimous choice” of the selection committee, which was headed by MIA board chairman Brian Palmer, who also headed the committee that chose outgoing director and president William Griswold, who is leaving to become director of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Griswold’s primary contribution to the MIA was completing a $100 million capital campaign and guiding the museum through an expansion and renovation that included thirty-four new galleries, as well as a new classroom, an art library, and some public archives of prints and photographs. Though no one anticipated that Griswold would leave after only two years, Palmer says the rigorous process the board went through in hiring Griswold made the search for a successor much easier.

“We spent quite a bit of time establishing criteria for Bill,” says Palmer, “and after examining those criteria again, we found that we were looking for the same type of individual. Our priorities have not changed.”

Chief among those priorities, says Palmer, is raising the artistic stature of the museum and building stronger ties to the community: “Our top priority was hiring someone with excellent artistic credentials—as opposed to a business director. Our financial house is in very good order, so we felt we needed someone who could instill a great deal of enthusiasm in the curatorial staff, as well as someone the curators could respect. It also had to be someone who could talk intelligently to collectors and build those relationships, because it’s so difficult to go into the art market and buy right now.” The MIA’s yearly acquisition budget is a little over $5.5 million, for example, but rich collectors are driving prices for individual pieces up into the tens of millions of dollars. For museums, the only hope they have of sharing these pricey works of art with the public is through gifts or loans from the collectors themselves.

Feldman’s star has risen in the arts management world because she took over a struggling museum in Memphis and transformed it into the cultural center of the city. In so doing, she also built lasting relationships with the city’s African-American community, which accounts for 60 percent of the population of Memphis. During Feldman’s tenure, the Brooks’s membership tripled, attendance rose 35 percent, and she significantly expanded the permanent collection, notably by investing in the work of many Tennessee artists, particularly African-Americans.

“The Brooks was a museum that was forgotten by its community,” says Brian Palmer, “and Kaywin Feldman turned it completely around.” One notable example of Feldman’s ingenuity was a show put together around the acquisition of 220 photos from the Memphis World, an African-American newspaper published between 1940 and 1970, when “white” papers didn’t publish photos of African-Americans. That kind of resourcefulness endeared Feldman to Memphis’s African-American community and earned her a great deal of respect in the city at large. Perhaps the greatest praise for her abilities may have come from Mike Fryt, president of the Brooks board of trustees. After announcing Feldman’s departure, Fryt told reporters that the museum’s succession plan was “. . . we are looking for another Kaywin Feldman.”

What’s Feldman’s secret? One look at the Brooks’s programming over the past few years suggests she has both a commitment to serious art and a serious commitment to—for want of a better word—fun. Last year, the Brooks developed a program for Elvis week called All Shook Up at the same time it was screening a documentary on Nazi art destruction. In honor of the screening of Whole Hog, a documentary on Tennessee barbecue culture, the museum hosted an outdoor barbecue featuring some of the cooks in the film.

“It’s important for museums—particularly encyclopedic museums like the Brooks and the MIA—to be accessible to all kinds of people,” says Feldman. “I also think it’s important for museums to relax sometimes and bring art down out of the clouds. Why shouldn’t people have fun at a museum?”

Though she obviously has a populist streak, it’s Feldman’s commitment to art, her reputation as a scholar, and her successful managerial experience that got her the job, says Palmer. “Kaywin is young, but she’s had more museum director experience at forty-one than almost anyone in the country. She also had exceptional references. We talked to people from her days in Fresno who said they respected her so much that if they had the opportunity, they’d go anywhere to work for her. You don’t hear that very often.”

None of the new wave of arts leaders got the job by being a slouch, of course. But how each institution will fare under new management is still an open question. There is plenty of reason for optimism. None are in crisis, all are financially healthy, and all have active, engaged boards. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges ahead. As our arts institutions grow, both individually and collectively, they need to generate more revenue to sustain themselves, and they need continued support from a donor community that has already dug rather deeply into its pockets to come up with the cash necessary for all of those impressive building projects. No one knows how stretched local philanthropists are, but the reality is that larger buildings require more money to run and larger audiences to fill them, and it’s not altogether clear that the philanthropic pie is getting any larger.

Another issue that could arise in the coming years is talent poaching. No one wants to go through another Griswold episode, but the caliber of talent our arts institutions have been able to attract is very high, and there is a danger of the Twin Cities becoming a steppingstone for coveted arts positions elsewhere, particularly in New York. But this is a risk that has arisen because our arts institutions are so strong, says Walker board member Mike Peel, a vice president of human resources at General Mills—and it is a risk gladly taken. “It varies by institution, but when you hire brilliantly talented people, you always run the risk that someone else will scoop them up,” says Peel. “But that’s a better risk than hiring someone who is less talented in the hope that they will stay longer.”

We have been lucky in many ways. The average tenure for an arts director in this country is five to seven years, which makes Kathy Halbreich’s sixteen-plus-year tenure at the Walker seem like an eon. Linda Myers spent thirteen years turning The Loft into a model organization for literature and literacy. Before Bill Griswold came to the MIA, Evan Maurer guided the museum for sixteen years.

These have been unusually long runs that produced several extraordinary achievements, not the least of which was raising the national and international stature of the Twin Cities as an “arts town.” In November, when asked what she was looking forward to most in her new position at the Walker, Olga Viso said, “I don’t know if Twin Citians realize this, but I have to go to New York to see the work they see at the Walker. I’m looking forward to not having to travel so far.”

Are We Finally Gender-Neutral? An interesting side note to the new wave of Twin Cities arts leadership that Olga Viso and Kaywin Feldman are spearheading is that, with the exception of Patricia Mitchell, who is sixty, all are in their early to mid-forties and the only man is the Minnesota Orchestra’s Michael Henson. Furthermore, when Viso and Feldman take their posts, five of our top museums will be headed by women, including The Museum of Russian Art’s Judi Dutcher, the Weisman Art Museum’s Lyndel King, and the Minnesota Historical Society’s long-time president Nina Archabal. Kaywin Feldman will be the first woman ever to head the MIA, once a notorious men’s club—a fact that was noted by the selection committee but, says MIA board chair Brian Palmer, was not a factor in her hiring: “The best candidate got the job, I’m happy to say.”

OLGA VISO Director, Walker Art Center Age: 41 Previous Job: Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Expertise: Contemporary and Latin American art Walker Art Center: Annual budget: $20 million Acquisitions budget: $1.8 million Current endowment: $216 million Projected 2007 attendance: 718, 000 2006 attendance: 631,128 Full-time employees: 125

KAYWIN FELDMAN Director/President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts Age: 41 Previous Job: Director, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art Expertise: 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting Minneapolis Institute of Arts: Annual budget: $24.2 million Acquisitions budget: $5.5 million Current endowment: $192 million Projected 2007 attendance: 502,000 2006 attendance: 465,654 Full-time employees: 214

PATRICIA MITCHELL President, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts Age: 60 Previous Job: President, Literacy Network Ordway Center for the Performing Arts: Annual operating budget: $17 million Current endowment: $14 million Projected 2007 attendance: 350,000 Full-time employees: 65

JUDI DUTCHER President, The Museum of Russian Art Age: 44 Previous Job: President, The Minnesota Community Foundation The Museum of Russian Art: Founded: 2005 Annual budget: $1.5 million Acquisitions budget: $0 Current endowment: $0 Projected 2007 attendance: 60,000 2006 attendance: 45,000 Full-time employees: 8

MICHAEL HENSON President/CEO, Minnesota Orchestra Age: 46 Previous Job: CEO, Bournemouth Symphony, UK Minnesota Orchestra: Annual budget: $30.7 million Current endowment: $191 million 2006–07 attendance: 404,000 Full-time employees (including musicians): 172

GABRIELLA CALICCHIO Managing Director, Children’s Theatre Company Age: 43 Previous Job: Managing Director, Marin Theatre Company, Marin, California Children’s Theatre Company: Annual budget: $12.5 million Current Endowment: $6.2 million 2006–07 total attendance (all programs): 321,284

JOCELYN HALE Executive Director, The Loft Literary Center Age: 44 Previous Job: Manager of Twin Cities giving, Best Buy Children’s Foundation The Loft Literary Center: Annual budget: $2.1 million Current Endowment: $2.3 million Projected 2007 attendance (events, classes, workshops . . . ): 30,000 Full-time employees: 17 Contract instructors: 100+