Collections and Deaccessioning in a Post-Pandemic World

Conversations with Museum Directors

Stefanie S Jandl, Mark S Gold

• Verlag: MuseumsEtc
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781912528370
• Thema: Negocios y empresa
• Thema: Administración de museos

Conversations with Museum Directors isabout farmore than the deaccessioning of museum and gallery collections. It'sabout how museumswill be - must be - different after Covid-19. About a transformed environment, both social and financial, and museums' totalresponse to it. Ina changed and chargedreality, deaccessioning isone element of afuture in which issues of social justice, inequality, race, pay anddecolonisation will impact collections asnever before.

It is part of a major new 950-page resource which draws on the experience and thinking of some of the world's most experienced and respected museum and gallery professionals, with aForeword by Melody Kanschat and Antoniette M Guglielmo of the Museum Leadership Institute.

Contributors include:

• Christine Anagnos | Director, AAMD
• Christopher Bedford | Director, Baltimore Museum of Art
• Thomas Campbell | Director, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco•Michael Conforti | Former Director, Clark Art Institute
• Adrian Ellis | Director, AEA Consulting
• Kaywin Feldman | Director, National Gallery of Art
• Linda Harrison |Director, Newark Museum Art
• Glenn Lowry | Director, MoMA

The three volumes in the collection (available separately) are:

• Conversations with Museum Directors (this book)
• Towards a New Reality
• Case Studies

Scott Stulen

Director
Philbrook Museum of Art
Tulsa, Oklahoma

EDITORS The pandemic and its devastating economic consequences pose an existential crisis for museums on an unprecedented scale, and we’d like to hear your thoughts and responses.¹ So, we’d like to focus, first of all, on whether and how this existential threat has changed your views on the use of deaccessioning proceeds, and in particular, for direct care of the collection and beyond.

We’d also like to ask you about your perspectives on museums potentially using deaccessioning proceeds in their response to the Black Lives Matter movement. So, how about if we start by asking you about your thoughts on deaccessioning before Covid-19 was a word.

STULEN Yeah, sure. I would comfortably say I am at more of a liberal end of this topic than some of my colleagues in the field. And as you know, whenever this topic comes up, people are very passionate and have very strong feelings about it. My approach hasn’t changed that much post-Covid-19 and pre-Covid-19. I believe a collection should be something that serves your community, and serves the mission of the museum, and connects people to the stories you’re trying to tell. The museum should not merely be a repository holding things for the end of time, never seen by the public and never used for any educational purpose.

We know that things come into museums’ collections for a whole variety of purposes and reasons. The practice for a long time was to collect in mass. We’ll just take it all. And there’s a certain point when you just don’t have a place to put everything. Philbrook and a lot of museums are close to this point. So, a practical part of this too is thinking about how we reassess our collection, how we’re actually using it, and how we’re able to take care of those items. But also, how is this serving the mission of the museum? So, in a more practical sense with Phil-brook, when I came in, we’d started a process of going through the collection and assessing it. What do we have? What do we know about? What do we not know about? What do we need to have some experts come in and tell us more about? And then, what fits and what doesn’t?

Philbrook is an encyclopedic museum. We’ve collected a bit of everything. Some with focus and depth, but often adding objects due to opportunity, rather than purpose. Going forward there is a practical challenge. Do we try to fill in all those holes over time or do we concentrate in the areas that we think connect to our mission and community and speak to other pieces in our collection? We chose the second option, to lean into our strengths and bring in pieces to create those connections.

I’m a little bit off on a tangent, but that is our process and thinking. And it has been good because it gets the curators and our entire staff, including the collections committee on the board, to ask and truly consider, “What is our collection? What are the strengths in that collection? And with our limited resources, and we have limited resources, how are we going to enhance and leverage that collection going into the future?”

The thing that everybody is looking at, or they should be looking at right now, in my opinion, is how do you diversify your collection? And what are the areas that have been ignored over the years? And for most museums it’s been a heavily white, Eurocentric focus. Obviously, that is not just Philbrook. So, before the pandemic hit, we revisited all of our collections documents and policies and created a collecting plan that didn’t exist prior. Part of the process was reviewing what had been accessioned or not, including the historic home that is part of the museum. As part of this process, the Villa was accessioned into our collection.

We also considered candidates for deaccession. We identified areas in which we felt that we had some maybe odd pieces that didn’t fit the collection or pieces that we didn’t feel like we could collect around. This leads up to our biggest example and probably why we’re having this conversation.

Early in my tenure we asked Christie’s to look at the Asian pieces in our collection. We received a gift back in the 1960s from the Taber family here in Tulsa of about 600 Asian objects. It’s a wide variety, as you’d expect, including objects made for market that are not very valuable, some nicer pieces, and a few truly exceptional pieces. The collection as a whole has never been displayed due to the lack of specialists at the museum and not fitting with anything else in the collection. The collection was gifted to the museum without any restrictions attached, for the betterment of Philbrook.

Within the collection was one key piece: a truly beautiful Chinese vase which was on display for a few years in the late 60s, and early 70s, and had been in storage since. The reason being it is an outlier and doesn’t easily fit within the collection.

So, as beautiful as it may be, it didn’t really have a home. There were efforts made a couple of times to purchase work to build around it, but that was attempted when the Asian market started to take off, and it became almost impossible to do so. The vase was appraised by Christie’s in the late-80s for, I believe, about $150,000, which was significant at the time. And there was some conversation at the time about what to do with the piece. Ultimately, they decided to wait.

So, when I had Christie’s come back in, they appraised all of the Asian items in this collection. And we learned a lot more about what we had, and particularly about the vase, including the new appraisal of between $9 million and $12 million. This was due to the market shift and the unique quality and nature of this piece, including tight provenance. It had checked all the boxes.

As unique as it is, it was a not a piece where people are going to drive across the country to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to come and see it. It’s not that kind of draw. It belongs in a collection where a better story can be told around it and be seen widely. Prior to this we had updated our collection philosophy, getting all the documents in place and outlining a plan forward. The vase presented an opportunity that needed to be considered. As a director, I guess, there are three different things that you can do.

Option one, pretend I didn’t see that. Put it back into storage, and go on your merry way. And knowing that nobody’s going to fault me for that, and that’s no harm done. Right? The second thing is we could put it out on display, give it its own room, and try to do some interpretation around it, have it be a piece unto itself, but have a minimal impact. And we really didn’t want to dedicate a whole room to one item of this scale. Or we could consider deaccessioning. We chose the deaccessioning route and brought it to the board. It went through all the processes starting with the board collections committee, executive committee, and finally the full board of 60.

We also contacted the family who had originally made the gift. It was only second and third cousins still living, but we reached out for their blessing. This is one of those rare instances where all of the things lined up, and we didn’t have any of the normal pitfalls or restrictions. Finally, we asked Christie’s, “Is this the right time?” And they said that if you’re going to do it, the market is probably as good now as it’s going to be. So, we chose to put it on the Hong Kong sale in May of 2018. It was the headline piece for the sale, had its own catalogue, even a bus wrapped with its promotion. It was pretty surreal.

And I wasn’t able to go, but had a board member in the room. I sat at my kitchen table watching the livestream, fielding text updates while doing the Hong Kong dollar conversion. I was thinking, “What do I need to get to, so I don’t get fired?” We set a minimum which it blew past quickly. It ended up going for $17.5 million. Not bad. After fees a bit under $15 million came to Philbrook.

That sale accomplished several things. First, the vase is going into a Chinese museum where it belongs and the story can be told. So, that’s wonderful. Second, it instantly increased our accession fund, which prior to this, earned around $75,000 a year, to nearly 10 times that overnight. And that’s just taking the earnings. It is set up as a fund, not as an endowment. So, the idea is that if we came across something that we really had to have for $3 million, we could do that with that fund. But the intention is that we’re able to have it for many years going forward.

What that means for a museum the size of Philbrook is huge. It’s transformative. Now, we can look at those holes in the collection, areas that we know that we need to strengthen, particularly, artists of color, women, contemporary art. Add works that speak to our community and enhance the overall collection. And we can go get some of those pieces, and not save up for four years to just get one piece. For example, we bought a large Kehinde Wiley painting just prior to this sale. We got a really good deal, and it still took three years of funds to acquire.

Now, we’re able to be far more active in the market and also commission living artists to create work specifically for us. And we’re going to be doing some of that going into 2021 when Tulsa is commemorating the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. We will be acquiring the work of several Black artists through our related programming and exhibitions. This new fund is allowing us to not only show the work of important artists, but support its creation and inclusion in our collection aggressively. So, that’s a long way of saying, this is exactly what needs to happen at a museum like Philbrook. The impact of this move on our community is so much more than having the one vase in a gallery.

EDITORS We’d like to follow up on that because, as you discussed, you’re known for access and community engagement. You said, “The collection serves the community.” And you also said you take a more liberal view of the uses of proceeds. Receiving almost $15 million is transformative. So, our question is, if you were free of ethical constraints to use this for the benefit of connecting the museum to the community, would we be surprised to hear you say that you would use it in other ways than acquiring objects for the collection?

“These are questions that none of us want to be having to ask. We wish that financially everything was so wonderful that we never have to make hard choices. But, at times, the field has been very slow to adapt to what’s happening around it. ”

STULEN No, we would. I absolutely would. And if we were free of those constraints, we would use it for more programming and outreach efforts to connect and enliven the collection. We wouldn’t build a wing onto the building or anything like that, which would be wrong, but the ability to expand the use for extensions of the collection like education make sense. So, obviously, we’ve adhered to all of the guidelines that are currently in place, but there should be a serious conversation about change.

Our endowment is separate from the fund for the collection and care of art. During the Covid- 19 pandemic, the board voted to increase our endowment draw and use the earning from the collections fund for 24 months when AAM and AAMD relaxed the restricted fund rules. They put that two-year moratorium in place that you could use some of those funds without sanction. So, it’s a two-year move that will expire and go back. This money is going to general operating, directly supporting people’s jobs in this time of crisis.

EDITORS So, if we could just dig into that for one more minute. STULEN Of course, absolutely. Yeah.

EDITORS The intriguing thing about that seems to be that what AAMD said is, “We’re not changing our standards, we’re just doing a moratorium on sanctions and censure.”

STULEN That’s right.

EDITORS So a theme that we’ve been seeing through this is the label of ethics. Ethics are things that should guide us in difficult times, not just easy times. So, if it is unethical, which is what AAMD and AAM say, to use this money for anything other than the collection, does it help to label it that way? You’ve talked about what you would use it for if you weren’t constrained by these standards, which most people would define as highly ethical, and what you’re using it for now. By their standards, both of those uses are unethical according to AAMD and AAM, even if AAMD isn’t going to censure.

STULEN That’s right.

EDITORS How do you accommodate all of that?

STULEN Honestly, I think it’s highly inconsistent. I’m pretty outspoken that the field has been very slow to catch up with what has actually been happening in society. And what’s actually happening in museums, and with living artists. There are a lot of things, rules, policies, processes in place that have not evolved to how the work has changed. Think about social practice, performance and related work. So much is still object-based and not thinking about work that has no object. How do we support this work? And this is the space where much of social justice work that is happening. Artists that are doing things in the community that may not produce an object for the collection but in my opinion is just as important and absolutely on mission.

And there’s always the thing that comes up in this conversation, particularly amongst directors behind closed doors – this is the slippery slope. The minute you go down this path, everything’s gone. Board members will sell off the entire collection to build a new wing on the building or pay off debt or whatever it might be. And I think you have to be cautious. You absolutely need to have safeguards in place so different leadership, a different director, a different board president, whomever doesn’t come in and raid everything.

I think that’s why you have bylaws, that’s why you have the processes in place. There are several layers to protect against abuse. But to your core question about the ethics, I believe if you are serving the mission of the museum, then it should be the most ethical thing that you could possibly do. And if the gift or funds were given to serve the mission of the museum there should not be a question. It may just look different.

Our board, in conversation with our staff, decided if there was ever a time to make these moves, it is now. And the big thing is that if we don’t make some moves now to protect core assets, the impact would be more severe. Those assets are not just the objects, it’s also our people. And if we don’t do that, then we can’t do our mission. And then what are we? We want to assure that we will be here two years from now and keep executing our mission, which is a very real th...