Spirit of the Desert
New Executive Director Dr. David Breeckner is eager to keep Imperial Valley Desert Museum thriving
OCOTILLO — Sitting in a conference room wearing jeans, a khaki work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and frayed ball cap, not to mention sporting three or four days’ worth of beard, new Imperial Valley Desert Museum Executive Director Dr. David Breeckner looks like someone at home in the desert and the outdoors. There was a time, however, he pictured himself in a different outfit.
“Even as an undergraduate,” Breeckner recalled, “I had this dream of growing up becoming a college professor, one of those guys wearing a blazer with elbow patches on it, and that was always kind of my career pursuit.”
These days, Breeckner, who has held his position at the museum officially for less than a week after serving on an interim basis since February, still sees himself as an educator, but one who likes to get his hands dirty.
Hailing from a small town in Connecticut called Washington Depot, Breekner said he grew up with a passion for history — the older and more mysterious, the better.
“I blame my father for that, really, because he watched the History Channel and all these documentaries when I was a kid growing up, so that was always in the background,” he said.
Connecting with the past
Breeckner studied classics at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt., where he earned a bachelor’s degree. From there he moved on to an intensive, one-year master’s program at Trinity College Dublin, in Dublin, Ireland. It was at that point when his career ambitions began to evolve.
“The program took a little more of an artifact and material culture angle to its history rather than just teach the literature and the written history, which is where my undergraduate work was really focused,” he said. “And the transition of actually studying and then handling material artifacts of peoples — touching things that are thousands of years old — that opened my eyes.”
That summer Breeckner volunteered to participate in an archaeological expedition to study the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete.
“For four weeks, I was on this one site on the Mediterranean coast and scrubbing pottery with a tooth brush,” he recalled. “And I loved every minute of it. So that’s what sold me on the idea that you can make a personal connection with the past.”
Upon completing the master’s program at Trinity, Breeckner stayed on the following year to serve as the college’s ceramic pottery specialist and to begin work on his doctorate in classics and archaeology. While still working on his thesis, he returned to the states in 2014 to serve as an adjunct instructor at Southern New Hampshire University, near Manchester.
The land of Extremes
“After a year teaching there, I realized I wasn’t fully happy,” Breeckner said. “I wasn’t actualizing or realizing all the skills and the energies I had developed over the last few years, especially working with artifacts. I found I was telling people about history, rather than contributing to it.”
He start applying for curation jobs at museums and eventually landed a three-month curatorial internship at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum from then-Executive Director Dr. Neal Hitch.“I think Neal’s first words when I spoke to him were, ‘Why do you want to come out here?’ He tried his best to dissuade me, basically emphasizing the extreme temperatures, the isolation of the area and such. He really wanted to make sure that whoever came out here was fully aware but also excited by the opportunity. And the more he kept talking, the more excited I became.”
Breecker’s threemonth internship started in August 2017 and was eventually extended to a six-month one. Four months in, Hitch advised Breeckner he had accepted a job as executive director of Hawaiian Mission Houses in Honolulu and told him he was going to nominate the intern to hold the fort until a decision on a permanent director could be made.
Breeckner, 30, took the interim role in February and assumed the title outright effective July 1. About the only frustration he’s experienced with the role so far is that he doesn’t have as much time to work with the museum’s artifacts as he’d like. On the other hand, he developed a growing appreciation for the quality of the staff at the museum and the work they do.
“You have to surround yourself with the best and the brightest, and we have that here,” he said.
Something Breeckner recalled his predecessor, Hitch, used to tell him was that although Imperial Valley Desert Museum may be small, it is having a big impact on the community, as well as on museums elsewhere.
Just say yes
Last year, at the American Alliance of Museums annual conference in Phoenix, IVDM presented two papers, one on building an education program for a museum and another on archive building for small museums. Museum staff also sat in on a session regarding how to engage youth in local communities to get them more interested and involved with museums.
“The conversation was about how if you had teenagers in the museum, even if they’re the best and the brightest in their class, you’ve got to watch them like a hawk. You can’t do anything with them,” Breeckner recalls. “And our education coordinator, Marcie Landeros raised her hand and asked, ‘What about probation kids?’ And you could hear a pin drop in that room. One of the presenters actually said you can just say no.”
It turns out IVDM had not said no. The museum has been working with the Imperial County Probation Department since last year to provide education and arts-based content for kids in the system, as well as providing an outlet for required community service work.
“It’s been enormously successful,” Breeckner said of the program. “We’ve actually had a few of the kids after they finish the program come out and say, ‘I don’t want to leave. I want to come back and work with you,’ or ‘What’s going on next? When can I bring my family out here?’”
He said county probation officers have reported better behavior and lower recidivism from kids in the program. “No other institution in the country even wanted to touch that, and now we are demonstrating with hard proof that this is a viable alternative, and it’s great for the community.”
This is just one example of what makes the museum and the Imperial Valley special in Breeckner’s eyes. “It’s a great opportunity for people to come into their own and find their passion in a place that you know kind of makes it available to do things you can’t do elsewhere.”