Letter From The Director
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, is the author of this tri-annual letter.
In addition, he is featured weekly on WYPR radio's Postcards From The Walters podcast.
He also writes a blog, called Culture Comment, published by the Baltimore Sun.
My decision to step down from my position as Director of the Walters and to leave this wonderful museum, after what will be 28 years of service, was difficult. But in the end, the deciding factors were two: my desire for a fourth chapter in my career and my awareness that new leadership will bring new ideas to carry the Walters forward. Chapters one through three in my professional life comprise ten years as a scholar at Dumbarton Oaks, followed by nine years as Chief Curator and eighteen years as Director here at the Walters. Each chapter built on the one before it, and my hope is that the same will be true of what lies ahead.
As former Board President Bob Feinberg reminded the assembled Trustees on the day I made my announcement, I was a reluctant candidate for the directorship back in 1993. I thought of myself as I had thought of my father, as an introvert of the Scandinavian sort, and very much a product of the quiet little farming town in northwest Minnesota where I grew up. I could not then imagine wanting to or being able to play the public role that I knew the Walters directorship required. Just as the search was opening up, my father suddenly died. He had run a weekly newspaper in our little town of Fosston for fifty years, and like any good newspaperman he kept a clipping file, one on himself. I read through those clippings to write his obituary and as I did I discovered another side of my father. As treasurer of our local volunteer fire department, president of our Community Club and Rotary Club, and president of the Lutheran church in which I was raised, Franklin Vikan had a hand in shaping much of what our little town was all about. Certainly I knew all of that on some level, but I packaged it all within and behind the quiet demeanor and self-effacing manner that was my father’s. As Bob reminded the Trustees that day, it was the writing of that obituary and the epiphany that came with it that propelled me into the competition for the Walters directorship, and over the last 18 years has sustained me in it.
Among the many phone calls, e-mails and notes that I received in the days after my announcement, one in particular brought its own realization. It came from a scholar friend from the past and was headed with the enthusiastic subject line “Congratulations.” My step was worthy of congratulations because, as he said, “you will have time for yourself and your work.” This was hardly an inappropriate thought for someone who had known me in the scholar chapter of my life, but I realized immediately how much I have changed and how thoroughly I had become my father’s son. For after all, the Walters is my work, and it has been now for nearly three decades.
Gary Vikan, Director
P.S. At a time of increasing concern about equity and democracy within society, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, I’ve been thinking more about the role of museums not only to act as expert but also to encourage civic participation in our exhibition process. Our summer exhibition, Public Property, aims to be socially engaging and to work with the public in a collaborative manner as an experiment and experience for both the participants and the museum itself.