“In a museum people can have harsh conversations through the lens of Art and it is safer.”

🎙Interview of Miriam Newcomer, Head of Communications, de Young Museum, San Francisco, USA. (Also in French here 🥐)

This interview is part of a series where multiple museum stakeholders speak with their own voice, without formally representing their institutions. The same questions are asked and are intended to draw a range of opinions on the role and social impact of museums in France and around the world. If you want to propose a speaker or enrich this corpus, send me a message!

MUSEI.ON: What’s the point of a museum?

Miriam Newcomer: Their role is really changing. Museums are at a point where the same things that have been working for the past hundred years isn’t working anymore. We cannot be still talking to visitors and not with them. Typically in the US, museums have somewhat of a negative perception, a reputation of being elitist, playgrounds for the rich, and losing sight of why they’ve been originally founded, which was for the people and the community to see masterpieces that they wouldn’t encounter anywhere else.

The actual mission of a museum is to protect and collect the arts, so they can preserve it for generations to come. Why I personally like art? It’s how we understand culture, that’s what is left behind. We understand the Greeks and the Romans thanks to the literature or sculpture they left behind.

I think museums in the US are aware that they need to make a pivotal change, not just in their collections but also their programmes, their space, their mission policies. But I think everyone is testing and trying to do that and that no one has ever cracked the code.

To me, museums are meeting places, where you can encounter different people and cultures, and talk about complex and evasive things in a safe environment. Especially now, potitics are so divisive in the States… and everywhere. In a museum people can have harsh conversations through the lens of Art and it is safer. People living in cities currently crave public spaces.

“People living in cities currently crave public spaces.”

Our museum, the de Young, was founded during the Midwinter Fair of California (Universal Exhibition of 1894). It was built not only thanks to wealthy donors but also with the contribution of the people of San Francisco.

We’ve always been the Museum of Fine Arts of the San Francisco City so technically, this art doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to every single resident of the area. And the City pays a part of our operating budget and is part of our governance. The Asian Museum is the same and the rest is private.

We’re trying very hard to make sure that every person in our community is represented in our collections, exhibition, programme, etc… for some areas we’re doing very well and for some others, we have work to do.

What’s your definition of “community”?

We use the term “community” to generally mean “the people of San Francisco”, but truly there is not one community but several communities. It’s really a self-identifying term, you could perceive me to belong to this or that community, I could consider myself to be part of totally different ones, based on my interest, family, income… any identifier that you claim makes you who you are.

How do you measure the success of opening up to “communities”?

That’s the $1 million question. Surveys are part of the solution. I think there are different ways to measure. Attendance numbers, zip codes (the Bay Area, California, foreigners…), race, religion, income level, age… But the first step is to understand who are your visitors to see who is not coming. If we don’t get 2 year olds, it may be because of our stroller policy that is very restrictive.

Then we try and make sure we have spaces or programmes or collections that would be of interest for different audiences. We’re an encyclopedic museum, so theoretically there’s something for everyone. But we don’t need visitors to love everything, if you loved everything you probably haven’t been paying attention. One needs to form an opinion.

“If you loved everything you probably haven’t been paying attention.”

Why are museums safe places?

We have this physical place where we represent different opinions in the artwork and programming, we show different artists side by side so they have conversations. We recently launched this series in which contemporary artists riff off of the old Masters, at the Legion, our sister museum. We invited contemporary artists to create bodies of work to be paired in our incredible Rodin gallery. Urs Fisher created life-size wax sculptures that melted in the gallery and Sarah Lucas’ works, considered very vulgar, depicted lower body parts very vividly : half of the visitors loved it and half hated it : “how dare you defile the galleries of Rodin”. But when Rodin’s works came out they were scandalous too, and people tend to forget this, once pieces, hundred years after are accepted and revered. We did that intentionally to try and shock people to have the feeling that they might have had in front of these works when they were new.

How essential is volunteering for de Young?

We rely heavily on volunteering, who represent close to 300 people. To be honest, our museum wouldn’t function the way it does if we didn’t have volunteers. Most of our volunteers are docents yet you find them in every department and at every level. We’re so lucky that they are so engaged and committed to work with us.

There is 1 person on staff to overview them plus several sub-committees.

Who are they ?

A lot of them have retired or semi-retired, or had a child and don’t want to work full-time, or it might be people with temporary visa issues. They donate their time and energy for us.

How does it work ?

All year long, for example, our flowers committee puts fresh flowers in different locations like the bathrooms for example.

Once a year, Bouquets to Art, one of our fundraiser events, is entirely run by a committee of volunteers. At the latest edition, 125 floral designers came in and created flower bouquets inspired by the masterpieces. 40 000 visitors in 1 week, it is one of the most beloved events in the City.

Why are these people so engaged? What keeps them coming ?

It is different for each person so we try to give everyone what they’re looking for. In general, I would say a sense of purpose. A lot of people also like to spend the day somewhere like here. They also have special access to galleries. I confess I also love being in the galleries by myself!

When our docents do private tours at the Monet show for example, imagine 3 people surrounded by 50 Monet masterpieces… What price would you put on that?

What other museum inspires you?

One of my favourite museums is the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. They are an Art museum but they also have about 300 public programmes a year, 3 out of 5 nights a week, they’ll have lecture series, film screenings or kids events and they really stay relevant on issues that are happening into the world. It’s a priority to them, it is run internally, they invested in a theater, they have an AV team on staff… The director wanted this gathering place and make people think “It’s thursday night, I want to go out, there’s always something happening at the Hammer Museum”.

What are your plans to open up your governance?

A lot of committees, we are discussing, working to opening that up, have more sub-groups.

One focused on technology : we have an exhibition coming on AI and we would like our neighbors at the Silicon Valley to think about the ins and outs of technology in society.

We’re also thinking of a youth board of people less than 30. Boards tend to be composed of mostly older people who are wealthy enough to sit on a board ! But our visitors are more mixed. For instance we have a teen advisory group creating programmes for kids throughout the year and special events (parties, tour guides, school groups…), and we actually pay them to do so, as a student job.

We acknowledge we don’t know what’s interesting to them. If the museum is really a place for everyone, then people in a position of power and leadership need to represent all those groups.