As published in the April 1, 2012 Toledo Business Journal
Dr. Brian Kennedy
Toledo Museum of Art
Museum advancing visual learning
Toledo Business Journal recently interviewed Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) director Dr. Brian Kennedy. He shared the following thoughts.
Toledo Business Journal: After coming to the TMA in the fall of 2010 you initiated a strategic planning process and began its implementation during 2011. Can you share the five strategic objectives that were established?
Dr. Brian Kennedy: Let me put this in context. I was invited by the board to come up with a strategic plan within 90 days and this was building on work that had been done prior to the economic downturn. So there had been some work and analysis done but not much more than that. What we engaged in was a process of multiple meetings of gathering of thoughts and so the five objectives were the result of this work.
These are not in priority order but the first objective was expanding access to the collections. From a personal point of view this was probably the museum that had the least engaging technology in terms of promoting the collections. And Kelly Garrow, our director of communications, who had been here at that stage a year and a half, had started to engage social media so we moved very quickly to digitize our collections.
We also wanted to focus on something that had perhaps been the reason for my appointment. At Dartmouth College I engaged the concept of visual literacy across the academic curriculum. This changes the way a museum is perceived from a collection of works of art as the reason why someone would go there to instead, learning how to see better by looking at works of art.
Half the population does not come to art museums. But half do. How would the other half be interested? Well if they’re not particularly interested in art, they’re certainly interested in learning how to see better. And so we have focused on trying to teach visual literacy.
The third objective was to raise our reputation; raise knowledge and awareness of the quality of our collections, the quality of our staff, the history of our museum, the City of Toledo, and our region through increased visibility.
The fourth was to think differently about our assets. Art collections generally are regarded as the primary asset of art museums. But in my view the primary asset is the staff and the intellectual property that the staff has obtained over the years. And so, this changed the way we looked at our assets; staff, intellectual property, and then, of course, our art collection and our buildings.
Leveraging that financially then becomes a multiple opportunity – not just a special event opportunity in buildings but the ideas of trading the capacities that our staff has and making our intellectual property available on the net. For example, we have multiple catalogues of our glass collections that are out of print, but if they’re available on the net they can be leveraged and potentially monetized.
The fifth objective was working with artists. This is something I’m very keen on personally – working with living artists – because they’re the best people to talk about art. We’re also in an unusual position in that, unlike other cities around – Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati – we do not have a museum of contemporary art. So the Toledo Museum of Art has the capacity to be that – to engage with living artists. Not just in the obvious way – the glass artists – but all the other artists it allows us to bring.
TBJ: Two of these objectives involve expanding access to the TMA art collections and increasing the visibility of the institution. Can you explain these objectives and discuss specific efforts that are being undertaken to accomplish this?
BK: Let me explain access to the collections. The Toledo Museum of Art is in a wonderful position in American art museums. It has long been said that we have the highest visitation as a percentage of our metropolitan population as any city in the country. That was the “lore.” We’ve gone and checked it and actually, the most recent report that was done on this was the Indianapolis Museum 2010 on figures for 2009 and sure enough, aside from the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which are hugely leveraged to tourists – if you edit them out – Toledo is far and away number one in per capita attendance. In fact, 51% of our metropolitan population, on average, will come to the Museum. The next highest city is actually at 21%. So we’re between 300,000 and 400,000 people, on average, for the last 20 years.
So all our work is really on building that community and that loyalty by continuing to provide new activities, but then digitizing our collections as images and as content information on the Internet so that the billions of people across the globe who are online can access that information. And we’ve done that already by putting our masterworks catalogue up – 300 works – and we’ll be announcing shortly that we’ll be expanding that by working with Google. And we launched a mobile app for our sculpture garden. You can walk around the sculpture garden with a mobile application on your smartphone. You can stop at any sculpture and press a button and up comes a video.
Most of the exhibition catalogue for our current show, Small Worlds, is now on the Internet. You can buy a hard copy version of the catalogue, but it sends you to the material that’s on the Internet. We’re publishing an online catalogue for each of our works on paper exhibitions to provide more information on what is an under-utilized collection.
The glass collection went online in January. So the aim is to have our collection online. That’s been a huge effort. And we’re already ramped up from hundreds of works to thousands of works and we’ll have 50% more of our collection online next year than we have now.
And finally we’ve really leveraged social media and YouTube. We won this competition last year for America’s favorite art museum on Facebook and that way we drove our Facebook visitation – last month I think we were #42 for museums – in the world. We had over 30,000 Facebook fans. And people are leveraging that in different ways and we will, too- especially with the Manet exhibition at the end of the year.
On the “increasing visibility” we’ve really put a lot of emphasis in this strategic plan. We’re trying to be very transparent about what we do. So the strategic plan, in its first iteration, on December 6, 2010, went up on the Internet that day. We’ve been using lots of opportunities on the net – Slideshare to present PowerPoints on the net – and that’s an example of the multiple ways we’re engaging to bring further attention to what we’re doing.
One of the best ways, and I think this is of interest to your readers, is by effectively being lead drivers for the Toledo Area Culture Leaders Group that meets once a month. The leaders of the cultural organizations that include the Metroparks, the Zoo, and so on, not just the Museum or Symphony, meet regularly. We’ve been doing this, literally, every month with a mild summer break since the first month that I came here. It was sporadic before that but we decided to make it part of what we do. Because of that we’re leveraging each other.
TBJ: The TMA staff was challenged to examine actions and initiatives that they have never done before. Can you explain this?
BK: We’ve identified, as have some other museums we are working with on a business model we’re developing, to establish three basic needs for museums. One is to recognize that we have old financial models. I mean we’re anachronistic, of course, in desiring to be free. But there is no such thing as free. We’re totally private, but we do get some minimal funds from the Ohio Arts Council. But we’re the institution in town that gets no public levy. And we’re not looking for one.
But how do we leverage our assets better? We have a large endowment where we have the capacity of unrestricted endowment to leverage debt at extremely low interest rates. And these sorts of things are new for museums – to think this way.
The second challenge to our staff is sustainability. We’ve done a huge amount of work on that. Not only on issues impacting the environment, but sustainability in terms of staff retention and sustainability in terms of generating intellectual property into a monetized asset.
A third challenge to the staff involves innovation. And that’s the challenge to the staff to think differently about everything. For example, to think differently about our Classic Court and Ancient Art and to think differently about our Peristyle. We’re opening our Peristyle to the public during museum hours in a month’s time. It is the best gallery in the place but it hasn’t been one you could look at.
So there are multiple ways in which we are challenging ourselves. It’s not, “think about things we haven’t done before,” It’s “think about things we’ve done in the past that really worked and update them for the present.”
TBJ: Can you discuss plans to evaluate the performance of TMA staff on the effectiveness of their efforts to implement the strategic plan?
BK: We had a period where there wasn’t a formal staff evaluation. There had been in the past and I think it was partly because of the rocky economic circumstances that it stopped. But it’s something I’m very keen on and we implemented a new evaluation system last year and that included both a self evaluation and a supervisor evaluation – everybody’s performance, including my own, with the board, was evaluated with very frank feedback and because we are now working cross functionally and in teams – in other words we’re working horizontally rather than vertically – because everything that happens here is related to one of our strategic objectives. So it used to be that departments had plans – vertical plans, if you like. Now we have strategic objectives that are horizontal across departments. So that means we have to have a team evaluation. And that allows the executive team that meets every Wednesday to make really informed decisions based on a lot of feedback from team members who were not necessarily their own direct reports but with whom they work because they are in their team as an executive team leader.
We’re also working on goal setting for employees. Not just part of their self review but goal setting for their own personal development.
TBJ: Can you discuss the results of energy use management initiatives for the six building TMA campus?
BK: This has been quite dramatic. We have a few thousand solar panels on the roof of this building. The net result of all the efforts that have been made in solar energy and also in efficient turbines and chillers that have been introduced here in recent years – that we’ve continued in the last year – we’ve reduced our electrical consumption from the grid by 79% over the last 20 years. This is pretty interesting because our main building is 100-years-old this year. It opened in January 1912 – free to the public for 100 years – very thick walls and a lot of issues of an historic building. Then with the Glass Pavilion and the Center for Visual Arts and the other outlying buildings that we have – we’ve got a lot of physical plant to manage – and Carol Bintz has led this, she’s been our COO for 15-16 years.
In addition, we have about 2,000 lights here and on average they would need to be replaced twice a year. We’re moving to a systematic installation of LEDs which are from 7 to 15 to 40 year lifespan which will put off a lot of maintenance over the years and save a lot in energy. And we can already see that happening.
TBJ: Can you discuss plans for bringing the Manet exhibition from Europe to Toledo this coming Fall?
BK: The Toledo Museum of Art has had a history of major exhibitions, but they have been sporadic. We’re now in a programmatic phase. We’re not trying to build a building and so we’ve already started a number of exhibitions that are aimed to build visitor attendance and promote the Museum as part of the community. This will bring revenues to our hotels and businesses and hopefully improve accommodation possibilities in the area. And that’s been kicked off with the first major exhibition of Edouard Manet. And it’s an exhibition that has never been done; on his portraiture. We have a fabulous portrait by Manet, who is often considered the father of Impressionism, although he wasn’t an Impressionist. He was a great artist that all the Impressionists looked to. And we’re combining with the Royal Academy in London to show this exhibition.
We’ll be the only US venue. Paintings will be coming here from around the world. The show is going to examine how Manet looked at Paris in the late 19th century. This was at the time of the birth of photography – when Manet was still the great portraitist.
TBJ: Can you explain the Museum’s “It’s Friday” event and discuss the new connection with the Family Center?
BK: The “It’s Friday” events have been supported for about 20 years by Fifth Third Bank and it’s been very successful. The Museum has a history of having been innovative in the education field and one of those areas was the idea of offering programs in a more social setting on a Friday evening. Many museums now do this, but Toledo was one of the first to do this. And the Family Center has been brought in as part of “It’s Friday.” It was open on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, but we’ve added another day recently so it’s open also on Fridays.
From 3:30pm until 8:00pm we have people lining up and we have a significant effort being made on the part of visual learning as an objective to engage children. Research shows that the first five years of our lives influence us hugely as to what happens in our future. So we wanted to make this available and free to all so that we could provide an aesthetic experience.
We’ve recently hired, from the University of Toledo, one of the world experts in early childhood education, Dr. Kathy Danko-McGhee, as our director of education. So this is one of her initiatives. The Family Center brings in about 25,000 children a year and it’s supported by The Andersons. Surveys show that if we expanded it to correspond with these other times it would be very much appreciated. It’s already a great success.
TBJ: As a relatively recent new resident to the area, can you share your thoughts on the issue of regional “self esteem?”
BK: My wife, Mary, and I have lived in Ireland and Australia and America and coming here from New Hampshire I can say we’ve certainly found this region to be the most delightful experience. The biggest asset of this region is the people who are the warmest that we’ve encountered anywhere. They are very kind; very generous. They love to go out at night. They are very supportive of each other, especially with charitable activities. If there is something that needs to be done or solved, they do it. And I suppose in terms of self esteem I’m a “glass half full” person.
I especially appreciate Mayor Bell and his insistence on being very publicly positive about Toledo and the area. There’s a spirit of cooperation at work.
I’m here to work with the Museum and be part of the community and make what the Museum does – which is promote visual learning, how to see better. This requires that we work with everybody. And so it’s been a terrific time that we’ve had.