‘Encyclopedic’ Brooklyn Museum Vies for Contemporary Attention

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/arts/design/brooklyn-museum-contemporary-art.html

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Brooklyn’s time may have come. But what of the Brooklyn Museum’s?

With art enthusiasts and donors increasingly enamored by contemporary art, and the borough now officially hot, the Brooklyn Museum is struggling to preserve and promote its identity as a serious encyclopedic institution that spans thousands of years. As leaders there are finding, it isn’t easy to attract paying customers with historic collections.

While many museums with comprehensive collections face similar challenges in keeping up with trends, the Brooklyn Museum is also facing serious financial pressures. To deal with a budget deficit of about $3 million, the museum has undergone two rounds of buyouts and halted acquisitions.

The museum’s board seems to have bet on a contemporary emphasis by choosing a new director with a background in that field, Anne Pasternak. Yet she needs to find her own balance between recent art and the museum’s vast holdings in pre-20th-century work.

Ms. Pasternak says she favors “contemporary thinking,” not contemporary exhibitions, but that approach — along with a notably accelerated effort to rethink the museum’s presentation of its American, Egyptian and European collections — has inevitably required some internal adjustment.

“It’s hard to make a turn; it’s not always comfortable,” said Catherine J. Morris, senior curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the museum.

It didn’t help that Ms. Pasternak’s star hire, the highly respected contemporary art specialist Nancy Spector, who came from the Guggenheim Museum last spring with great fanfare, decided to return to the Guggenheim less than a year later. Though the Guggenheim, according to many accounts, made Ms. Spector an offer she couldn’t refuse, her departure nevertheless suggested that an encyclopedic museum — or perhaps one run by Ms. Pasternak — was not for her. (Ms. Spector declined to comment.)

At the same time, as cultural institutions grapple with how to make a case for themselves in an age of increasing internet competition and dwindling philanthropic funding, outside observers say the Brooklyn Museum has no choice but to try to change with the world around it. The city’s other encyclopedic museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to which the Brooklyn Museum is often unflatteringly compared, has been wrestling with the same challenges. Last week, the Met revealed that it was considering charging admission for visitors from outside New York to raise revenue.

“Like all encyclopedic museums, the Brooklyn Museum has to divide its attention between balancing its costly obligation to care for, present and pay for artworks and experiences across 5,000 years of history and snagging the attention of price- and time-conscious smartphone users,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, who has served as director of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Brooklyn is booming, and the museum is therefore striving to tap into the borough’s energy and support while siphoning audiences from across the East River and around the world.”

Even trustees acknowledge the pressure to attract contemporary art audiences and collectors.

“It is hard to compete because contemporary art is a very hot ticket,” said Ms. Sackler, who preceded the board’s current chairwoman, Barbara M. Vogelstein. “We’re looking at a new landscape.”

In light of its financial situation, the Brooklyn Museum is regrouping, even as Ms. Pasternak continues to settle in. She faced a steep learning curve when she arrived in 2015, having never run an institution with a $39 million budget — eight times larger than that of Creative Time, the public nonprofit she ran for 20 years.

“Anne certainly came into the museum drinking from the fire hose in terms of getting up to speed on the entirety of the operation of the museum,” said Sharon E. Fay, who last fall became head of the museum’s finance committee and treasurer. “Kudos to Anne; her eyes were wide open.”

In part, the museum has been scrambling to replace a five-year, $43.8 million fund for programs and other needs, which was underwritten largely by Robert S. Rubin, who remains on the board.

“That fund is now over,” said David Berliner, a real estate executive who last fall stepped into the newly created position of president and chief operating officer. “We’ve expanded the program and driven audiences here but did not execute well enough to have the financials keep up with the program.”

Ms. Pasternak, 52, who succeeded the 18-year veteran Arnold L. Lehman, said the museum is heading in a positive direction, though she admitted that the financial hurdles are real.

“We have an opportunity as an institution to think in very current ways,” Ms. Pasternak said. “Everything gets questioned right now. And how exciting is that?”

Although the Brooklyn Museum’s suggested adult admission price is $16, half of its 465,000 annual visitors pay nothing, which Ms. Pasternak called “a hardship.”

“I hope eventually the city will be open to other ideas — I think admission policy should be looked at,” she said in an interview that preceded last week’s revelation about the Met. “Maybe we’re free to our community, but we’re not free to people outside of New York City.”

Still, Ms. Pasternak points to early signs of progress, like admission revenue, which is up 10 percent over last year; revenue from public programs that has “quadrupled” since she arrived; and school group tours that are up 40 percent over last year, proving, she says, that the institution is “vibing right now.”

Mr. Berliner also said that annual attendance is 10 percent higher than it was a decade ago and trending upward. And the museum has added 10 board members, in part bolstering the representation of contemporary art collectors.

While Mr. Lehman also focused on contemporary art, Ms. Pasternak has presented some experimental programming more akin to the type she championed at Creative Time, such as having artists interpret the rock star Iggy Pop’s nude body in a life drawing class.

Every category of operations is up for reconsideration, from the costly basement printing press for in-house publications (Ms. Pasternak got rid of it) to how long-held artwork should be presented. Ms. Pasternak has already reinstalled the American collection and refreshed the European as well as half of the Egyptian collections, and plans to reopen the Korean gallery, which has been closed for eight years, she says.

The museum reinstalled the entire American collection in six months, a rapid overhaul Ms. Pasternak called “totally taboo in the museum field.” In the process, she added, the museum explored current issues like immigration and Black Lives Matter.

“Why can’t we rotate our collections every two years? We could do it more often if we had more money,” Ms. Pasternak argued. “There is not one right way to tell history.”

In covering the colonial period, for example, the museum now features masters like Gilbert Stuart alongside the self-trained black artist Joshua Johnson. “We want to make sure that our audiences are seeing themselves as part of the history of this country, too,” Ms. Pasternak said.

Some curators in more traditional areas say they do not feel neglected. “We’re looking at historical material through a contemporary lens in a way that feels urgent,” said Lisa Small, who Ms. Pasternak recently promoted to senior curator of European Art.

Admittedly, there is one obstacle the museum will never be able to overcome: being in Brooklyn, where tourists and Manhattan patrons will always be less likely to go.

But rather than bemoan its longtime status as stepchild to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ms. Pasternak said the Brooklyn Museum should celebrate its otherness.

“Historically, people have said, ‘Poor Brooklyn Museum: we’re not as big as the Met, we’re not quite as encyclopedic as the Met, we don’t have the same number of great masterpieces as the Met, we don’t have the endowment of the Met, we don’t have the board of the Met and — guess what? — we’re not even in Manhattan; we’re in Brooklyn,’” Ms. Pasternak said. “And I thought to myself, ‘What if just the opposite were true? What if all these things were really kind of strengths for us?’ And that was a very sort of creative and generative thought exercise for me.”

“If we were in any other city in this country, we would be a huge destination,” she added. “And the truth is, Brooklyn’s time has come.”