Three museums seek replacements for women of vision
In a single week last month, a trio of veteran arts executives announced their departures, launching the search for a new executive leader at Fallingwater and at two major art museums in Western Pennsylvania.
Lynda Waggoner, Fallingwater’s director since 1996, retires at age 69 in February, ending a 40-year tenure that started when she was a high school student and summer intern.
Judith Hansen O’Toole, 64, is the director and CEO of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Ms. O’Toole retires on June 1, ending a 25year tenure.
Lynn Zelevansky, 70, left in September after nine years as the director for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland.
“The three women leaving jobs in Pittsburgh’s museum world are all stars in their own right. Each in her own way has truly contributed to increasing the relevance of their institutions,” said Janet Sarbaugh, who oversees art and culture grants as vice president of creativity for the Heinz Endowments.
“Judy O’Toole with the new and welcoming face of the Westmoreland, Lynda Waggoner with the creation of the Fallingwater Institute and Lynn Zelevansky with her introduction of new social programs, the Hillman Photography Initiative and internal restructuring to better connect curatorial and educational
objectives,” Ms. Sarbaugh added.
The job of running an art museum or an internationally known house like Fallingwater — the region’s top tourist draw — has changed during the past 20 years. The to-do list is daunting. Arts executives must provide a vision, set a creative, collaborative tone in the workplace, woo donors, make sure the community is engaged and appear at events while also sometimes answering questions about exhibitions or their institution while shopping at the supermarket.
“It used to be that you became a museum director and your job was to keep on keeping on, to nurture and incubate the institution,” said Kaywin Feldman, president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and a past president of the American Association of Museum Directors, representing 220 art museums in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
That’s still part of the job, Ms. Feldman said, but trustees expect more.
“The most important skill today is agility and the ability to work across short-, mediumand long-term projects simultaneously.”
Museum leaders must focus on attracting and retaining new audiences. That’s because younger visitors “aren’t buying memberships the way that their parents and grandparents used to,” Ms. Feldman said. “You have to change your exhibition schedule. Exhibitions that might have been sure hits in the past — no longer. You have to become super adept at social media.”
Older museum visitors might still attend an hourlong lecture, she said, but younger people prefer to visit the museum on a Thursday night when they can talk, stroll the galleries, hear a live band and drink a glass of wine.
Whether a museum leader is standing in a gallery or a grocery, they must be a consistent, passionate advocate for their organization and its mission.
“You are always ‘on’ and representing the institution and selling the institution. There are definitely some nights where you just want to put your jeans on and be a real person, which is hard to do,” said Ms. Feldman.
In the past 10 years nationally, art museum staffs have become 60 percent female, according to a 2015 study by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. That major increase could provide a pipeline of qualified women for leadership positions here. Yet a glass ceiling remains, Ms. Feldman said.
Trustees at larger museums are reluctant to hire women for the top job because they often define leadership in male terms, she said.
“My favorite one is gravitas. ‘ We can’t hire her. She doesn’t have gravitas.’ ”
At the Carnegie Museum of Art, Ms. Zelevansky hired a whole new team of curators, including chief curator Catherine Evans, deputy director Sarah Minnaert, photography curator Dan Leers and Eric Crosby, who oversees modern and contemporary art.
A regular at the East Liberty restaurant Dinette, Ms. Zelevansky lobbied hard for a renovation of the museum’s cafe, now led by Sonja Finn, a James Beard Award nominee who started Dinette. The renovated cafe opened in fall 2016.
Ms. Zelevansky came to Pittsburgh after working as a curator at both the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“MOMA was populated by women and run by men,” said Ms. Zelevansky, who organized bat mitzvahs for her two daughters without taking any time off. Moving to the Los Angeles museum was a real sea change. The director, Andrea Rich, hired her and the workplace culture was more accommodating to working women who had children.
During her tenure, Ms. Zelevansky curated exhibitions about artists Paul Thek and Helio Oiticica. She also worked with a team of three curators to organize the last Carnegie International in 2013.
Under Ms. O’Toole’s leadership, the Westmoreland museum initiated a $38 million capital campaign, expanded its collections with three major gifts from donors and added a 3,000square-foot wing in 2015.
The new wing holds 85 artworks donated by Richard Mellon Scaife, the late newspaper publisher. Another major gift — a collection of contemporary American art from Diana Jannetta and her late husband, Peter — allowed the museum to expand its collection beyond 1950. Michael Nieland gave his collection of more than 50 classic figural sculptures by American and European artists.
Ms. O’Toole also oversaw the rebranding of the museum and a name change — from the Westmoreland Museum to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.
“We’d love to clone Judy,” said Bruce Wolf, the immediate past president of the museum’s board of trustees. “She could work with the staff, the community and the foundations. She had a real knowledge of art history. She was a great administrator.”
When Ms. O'Toole succeeded Paul Chew as director, she was 39 and running a 1,500-square-foot university gallery. She had published and had academic credentials.
“What I’m most proud of at the museum, it’s not the building, it’s not the collection, although those things are really really important to me. But it’s the culture I’ve been trying to instill within the organization. We have a free-wheeling conversation. If it’s about an exhibition, then Barbara [Jones, chief curator] is the one guiding. If it’s about marketing, then Claire [Ertl, director of marketing and public relations] is the one,” Ms. O’Toole said.
At Fallingwater, Ms. Waggoner’s first goal was to preserve the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house and its collections. Last year, the Fayette County site set a record with 180,000 visitors. That means 14 people were going through the door every 6 minutes for most of the year. Fallingwater closes in January and February and for half of March. It’s only open on weekends in September.
During a 1995 conference in Chicago, she recalled, “we were presented as a model case of preserving the building and collections and ignoring the landscape. A master plan was created for the landscape by Andropogon Associates from Philadelphia and it took 20 years to accomplish all of the changes, including reworking pathways, redoing the landscape and installing a new parking lot.
Ms. Waggoner founded the Fallingwater Institute in a building called High Meadow. Set on a hill overlooking the Youghiogheny River gorge and about a mile from Fallingwater, High Meadow is a venue for retreats and a place where scholars, students and teachers can gather to learn. The building, finished last year, uses a screened-in porch to connect a four-bedroom farmhouse with a new structure built on piers that holds separate sleeping quarters and a community room.
Fallingwater has grown from a handful of employees to a staff 110 people, 50 of whom are full-time while the rest are seasonal.
“It’s time for someone else to create a new list of things to do,” Ms. Waggoner said.