Acquisitions and Dealing with a Board of Directors

I would like to preface this post by saying that Jackson Hole is crazy beautiful. I get to see wildlife every day. The elk are just now getting their full antlers for the year and there is a big group of them that I see on my run every morning. I have seen moose, buffalo, foxes, coyotes, there are marmots, ground squirrels, and chipmunks everywhere (including the museum). I need to carry bear spray everywhere but it is so worth it.  

My internship has been amazing so far as well. Everyone has been so nice, it kind of freaked me out at first how friendly everyone is. It has been a little odd because I was given very little instruction. I was just given a list of things that I can be continuously researching while they do not need me for something specific, but the list is really as simple as “Artist biography” and stuff like that. 

For this post I would like to focus on what I learned about finessing a committee and convincing conservative people to invest in avant-garde art. One of the first meetings that I went to was something called Collectors Circle. The National Museum of Wildlife Art has two acquisitions events a year:  Collectors Circle and Blacktail Galla. Blacktail Galla is a big event open to the public, where everyone in attendance can vote on pieces that they think the museum should acquire, and they use the proceeds from the tickets to buy the top choices. Collectors Circle is a small group of people who pay a large amount of money to be a part of the Collectors Circle. It has a higher budget than Blacktail Galla, but everyone involved is an older person, and usually a member of the board. For this event, the curatorial team puts together a list of artwork that is available for purchase that they think could be important additions to the collection. Then the curatorial team presents the pieces to the committee and explain why they think they could be important to the collection. Then the committee votes on what they want the museum to acquire. 

So as you can imagine, these are all older people, and prefacing the meeting I was warned that historically they have really only shown interest in highly representational, traditional, cowboy style wildlife art, and mostly just art relating to this area of the country. The curator and associate curator are really working on diversifying the collection. In this meeting I feel like I learned a lot about how to deal with a committee and sway them in a subtle way. What they did was really very cleaver. Essentially, they included some options for traditional work, so there wouldn’t be any complaints, but they prefaced their presentation with a presentation from the Education Department. The Education Department specifically talked about a recent survey they did. the survey covered a lot of things, but what was of particular relevance to this meeting was that, when asked what the museum was missing, most people responded asking for more diversity in types of art (specifically contemporary/modern), and in artist (specifically asking for more women and Native American artists to be represented). This was only part of a large presentation, so it didn't come off as an argument or something added to intentionally sway them, but it hit home. They voted to purchase several contemporary works and two pieced by Native American artists.

I feel like I learned a lot in this meeting. In particular, I learned that sometimes, when dealing with a board, committee, or really anyone, you do not aways need to make your point with an argument. It doesn’t always need to be us vs. them. Sometimes convincing someone takes a more subtle approach. Frankly, this group of people took what the public had to say a lot more seriously than an argument that the curator could have made. Generally, I feel that this meeting thought me a lot about the politics of museums, and how to navigate them.

Until next time,

-Annalisa