The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Bonus Episode 17: Dr. Mariët Westermann
In this bonus episode, we’re joined by the newly appointed director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Dr. Mariët Westermann, who is the first female appointed to the role. Mariët oversees the “constellation” of museums—four over three continents united, she says, in one mission, “to create opportunities for anyone to engage with the transformative and connective power of art and artists”. Mariët is inheriting opportunities and challenges, and we delve into some of those, from the back histories to the budgets. She talks to us about the future of the museum—from plans for the opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the nuts and bolts of balancing the books. One of the key changes Mariët advocates for is a shift in the institutional mindset. Rather than taking a defensive stance, where the museum might try to address gaps or criticisms reactively, she hopes for a move towards a more open approach. "We are learning communities," she says. "We're full of curious people. Artists are curious." All this and much more in this special episode, which brings to an end our second season.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of The Art World: What If…?! the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests]
In this episode, we’re joined by Mariët Westermann, the newly appointed director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation—and the first female appointed to the role. Mariët oversees the “constellation” of museums—four over three continents united, she says, in one mission: “to create opportunities for anyone to engage with the transformative and connective power of art and artists.”
Mariët is inheriting opportunities and challenges, and we delve into some of those, from the back histories to the budgets. She talks to us about the future of the museum—from plans for the opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the nuts and bolts of balancing the books. One of the key changes Mariët advocates for is a shift in the institutional mindset. Rather than taking a defensive stance, where the museum might try to address gaps or criticisms reactively, she hopes cultural institutions might move towards a more open approach. "We are learning communities," she says. "We're full of curious people. Artists are curious." She offers a blueprint for art institutions striving to balance popularity with purpose. By promoting learning and curiosity, they can evolve into spaces that not only house art but also nurture intellectual growth and cultural understanding.
I really appreciated Mariët’s candor—and her taking so much time with us just weeks into the new job. This is one of my favorites. Enjoy.
Mariët Westermann: I am Mariët Westermann. I'm the director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York.
Charlotte Burns: So Mariët, you just introduced yourself there. You're only a few weeks in. How does it feel to say that?
Mariët Westermann: It is wonderful to be here, and I'm still pinching myself to have been given this very special responsibility. It's really a calling.
Charlotte Burns: Does it feel that way to you? You were at NYU Abu Dhabi before and when you left there, you said you wouldn't have left for any other art museum. But You felt that there was a resemblance between the Guggenheim and NYU. What did you mean exactly?
Mariët Westermann: I had the incredible privilege and joy—and challenge—of developing, with hundreds of people, a new university: New York University Abu Dhabi, a university in and off NYU, and in and off this country on the Gulf.
It was a passion project of a lifetime when you're trained as an academic and a researcher, and a professor—an art historian, as I am. And I was involved with it for 17 years. I am NYU through and through. I did my graduate work at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. I later was the director of the Institute. I then got to develop this incredible university, and later on was asked to come back to lead it as the vice chancellor and chief executive. And so I would never really have left that. I had fully intended to stay another three to five years running it. I loved the job. I couldn't imagine leaving for another university.
Even though I always have worked with museums, and I always thought one day maybe I would run a museum or try to lead it, I could not imagine leaving for any art museum that was just an art museum—even though it's wonderful to be just an art museum, let me say that. The Guggenheim is much more than a single art museum. The Guggenheim Foundation works essentially across four art museums, four collections, individualized collections of modern and contemporary art that are brought to the public in four very distinctive architectural jewels, in four very different cities, in four dynamic countries, on three continents. In that, I have to lead across this constellation with wonderful directors in these various sites. I myself will lead the museum in New York directly, but I will work very collaboratively with these other directors in the three other places—in Venice [the Peggy Guggenheim Collection], Bilbao, and soon Abu Dhabi—to make sure that constellation coheres.
And in that respect, this constellation is a lot like New York University, which is the largest global private university in the world and works across all continents—except Antarctica for the most part. And so as the startup leader for NYU Abu Dhabi, and then later the head of it, I really learned how much there's to be gained from working across all these different sites where you have one university working around one set of shared values, but in very specific local instantiations. And in that regard, you could say that the Guggenheim is, in a way, the global NYU of contemporary art museums.
Charlotte Burns: It's a really interesting way of putting it because there's a difference though, in that NYU owns all of its properties.
This show is a ‘what if.’ It's very much about imagining new futures and it seems that you at NYU had this enormous ‘what if;’ what if you can create a new university—which you did. Whereas at the Guggenheim, you're inheriting a model and mapping a ‘what if’ onto something. So there was a model that was developed for a different point in time, according to a different set of values, and that comes with opportunity, but also with challenge.
So how do you approach that, because, of course, you're not just creating something from scratch?
Mariët Westermann: When I rejoined NYU in 2002 as director of the Institute of Fine Arts, the university was just beginning on this journey to truly become more cosmopolitan by going to all these different sites, including study abroad sites in Florence, England, Accra, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Tel Aviv. And the next step was building out of this still somewhat traditional university, something new, which was this global, integrated, interconnected, circulatory system of a university.
And so in a way, NYU Abu Dhabi, too, is a university born on the one hand out of an old university, but also in a new place out of a partnership—and it truly is a joint partnership with the government of Abu Dhabi, and we did something very similar in Shanghai. And so in this regard, you can compare that to how the Guggenheim has developed over time.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was created in 1937, always in the charter, already saying, we exist to steward and develop museums, plural. They even imagined then that there might be more than one museum. And they soon opened the Museum of Non-Objective Art [Painting], a way of talking about what we would more typically call abstract art now. And they opened that first one in New York City and soon then commissioned the building from Frank Lloyd Wright—that opened only in 1959—to become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. But there was always a sense that there might be more to it. The foundation fully owns and wholly owns the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Some 20 years later, Peggy Guggenheim decided—10 years after the opening of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue—in the late 60s, she decided from her beautiful Peggy Guggenheim collection palace, her little palazzo in Venice, that she wanted to deed it as a bequest eventually, with all the collection in it, to the foundation. So we also wholly own that as a subsidiary, you would say in business language.
And then we have these two other situations that are a lot more like NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, if you will, where the Guggenheim has long-term, very enduring, visionary partnerships with government authorities in the Basque Country in Bilbao and now also in Abu Dhabi to build the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
So the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao opened in 1997 and you see this journey continuing. But both NYU and the Guggenheim have really been on this journey and nothing is ever created exactly out of nothing. Just like art is never created out of nothing.
And so it really appeals to me this thought that how do you draw on traditional values in the case of a museum, in the case of a university, to build something new that didn't already exist?
Charlotte Burns: So there's option to keep creating something new.
So as part of your constellation thinking, do you imagine that there would be new Guggenheims or new partnerships?
Mariët Westermann: I started my job three weeks ago, so it might be a little premature to talk about that. And I am really, really focused on making sure that our constellation really coheres even better than it already does and becomes more visible in the world and legible in the world as one Guggenheim with a shared set of values dedicated to the art of today.
That is what I'm really concentrating on. How can we do that across our four sites? Really making that all work together, even more than it already does, in a way that's also locally specific in these four very dynamic cities that have interesting, diverse, and all maritime histories—which really connects them and appeals to me.
That's really the main challenge today. That means a different kind of thinking where not all roads go out from New York but there is really circulation through that whole system so that each of those global sites can be yet more than it already is in its beautiful local instantiations.
And so one of the really big tasks right ahead is building on the work of my two immediate predecessors, Tom Krens and Richard Armstrong. Visionary but very different leaders for the institution who took the institution global, out of the base of New York and Venice. And so opening the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which will happen sometime in the next couple of years—it's rising fast. That's, of course, an extremely high priority. So thinking beyond other sites would seem not the right priority right now.
Charlotte Burns: I understand. But I guess, not asking you to be specific, like “we're opening in Las Vegas.” Tom Krens suggested lots of different places that came and went. Richard was much more circumspect and would say “Mars,” as a way of shutting that conversation down. It seems that you're landing somewhere in between.
To extrapolate from what you're saying, that you think it's an interesting model, you just need to consolidate where you are, bring coherence to it, and then look beyond it once you get to the point of stability and opening the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?
Mariët Westermann: It's so important to see through commitments that you make as an institution. And as a director, you inherit them. And so I feel deeply committed to making sure that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens to the full benefit of this country and region that I've gotten to know so well over the last 17 years, and also at the same time, that it does right by the Guggenheim Foundation and helps us lean into what has been a very forward-looking, international global direction that is really in our DNA.
And just as the Foundation's charter talks about museums “plural,” you always have to stay open to other possibilities. But at the same time, you want to stay focused. I think it is not hard to look at my life's journey or my career to know that I deeply believe in trans-border, transnational institutions. And as Zora Neale Hurston, the great journalist, said in the 1920s: “You've got to go there to know there.” That really is very much in my personal background and in my life. And that also means that you understand that when you commit to building Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, you better go do that. And do that as a mutually beneficial learning project with members of that society.
So, I'm really very focused on that—I have to admit—but I will always stay open.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: One of the criticisms of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project is that it's been an imported model, that it's been much more a Western project looking at what it might mean to be global than the other way around. And the project has had problems. It was initially announced in 2006 due to open on Saadiyat Island, along with the Louvre Abu Dhabi—which opened in 2017—and other museums in the Emirates Cultural Quarter. It was stalled several times and then was scheduled to open in 2025. Stephanie Rosenthal was appointed project director.
I've heard that there have been problems. Can you talk to us about what you're going to be doing to bring the project to the point where it will be exactly what you want it to be?
Mariët Westermann: Of course, there's always stories out there and as a leader for NYU Abu Dhabi, I have noticed that there's always a lot of chatter about what might be the motivations for an institution from New York, or other parts of the world, to go to the Gulf—and particularly the UAE—to take advantage of the opportunity to build something new. And I've always said: ”Listen, no one should go do something like that unless it's aligned with your values and where you want to take your home institution. And unless you're curious and want to learn. You need to do it because you can do something there that you can't do at home.”
The question I was always asked in 2007, 2008: “How can you guarantee that we can do precisely in Abu Dhabi what we do on Washington Square in New York City?” And then I would say, “If you're talking about having academic freedom on campus, we've got that. We've worked that out in important negotiations, all sorts of walkaway issues that we took care of, tripwires, and so forth. But I think we should not be asking “What can't you do in Abu Dhabi that you can do in New York,” you should ask, “What can you do in Abu Dhabi that you can't in New York City?”
And when you flip that lens—as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has also done—you get to very interesting places, as it turns out. And so I wasn't there, of course, in 2006, 2007, when the Guggenheim was negotiating its arrangements in Abu Dhabi— although, I understand them very well now and they're very similar to NYU—but I assumed that was the same impulse that you could do something new.
Tom Krens was very gregariously curious, as Richard himself was, and it takes time to build these things. The Louvre Abu Dhabi faced delays as well. NYU Abu Dhabi opened on time in 2010—I'm very proud of that. But it's, in a way, easier to build a university because what you need is people, a good recruitment strategy, and a bunch of real estate. And we worked on all of that.
The real estate that's involved in museums is a very special thing. The Guggenheim could never build a museum anywhere unless the architecture was really just so. We have buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright. We have this Palazzo Venier [dei Leoni] in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. This magnificent Frank Gehry building in Bilbao that transformed that city. So there's always going to be an extremely high standard.
And I also want to say something about the ambition of the Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi. The way it's laid out is something like the Museumsinsel in Berlin or the National Mall on Washington. Those kinds of conglomerates of cultural institutions, those took more than 100 years to build. They're doing it there in what's now 17 years. And let's look at what they're building and what has been built: The Louvre Abu Dhabi. Next year or so, the Zayed National Museum—which is a history and culture museum for the Gulf and the Arab world and the country, designed by Norman Foster—will open. The Museum of Natural History will open. TeamLabs, from Japan, will open. And not long after, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open. And that would then be a span of about 10 years. That's pretty extraordinary.
And of course, seven years before the Louvre, NYU Abu Dhabi opened on Saadiyat in 2014. It is actually an incredibly rapid pace to build a cultural district of that quality and heft alongside a religious complex, that’s an interfaith complex involving a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, the Abrahamic Family House, also in that same district. That is a lot of projects to manage for a country that has one and a half million citizens. It's amazing when you think about it.
Charlotte Burns: You're going to be the director that gets it across the finish line.
So, what do you see that it needs to get there? Obviously, you're on a continuum. Obviously, there are things that you inherit, but there are also things that you will recognize that need to be different—that you want to do. What are they?
Mariët Westermann: The development of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi of course, is a relay race, like any institution is and so you're mindful of the histories and you learn them. And what's very distinct about the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as a contemporary art museum, is that it was not actually designed to be just another Western import to Abu Dhabi. Already over the last 15, 16 years, a collection has been built and this collection will stun people when it comes to the full light.
It is a very significant collection, a large collection, and a truly diversified global collection, grounded in the Gulf, in the Arab world, in the [Middle East and North Africa] MENA region, with these important crossroads connections that country really has to South Asia, across the Indian Ocean, to East Africa, across North Africa, to Western Africa, Southern Africa, into Europe, into Central Asia—and really with art from all continents from 1960 going forward. That really is the founding vision.
I don't think any other institution has done that to this day, and I want to continue to make sure that representation, as developed by our curators, which is a very joint project. We were building an entire curatorial team, or have been doing that, in Abu Dhabi, and it works closely with curators dedicated to the project in New York. It's very interactive and collaborative. I want us to continue to lean into that global vision and what I call, really, a crossroads vision. Global is such a large and globby term.
Charlotte Burns: Corporate, yeah.
Mariët Westermann: We understand what it means, but Abu Dhabi and UAE are really crossroads countries where people live from 195 nations and the country really has leaned into that. And we, as the Guggenheim, can, of course, also diversify our own thinking about what we do, including in our other museums. So, it's a kind of an interactive work that needs to happen.
What needs to happen to get it over the finish line, of course, is underway very rapidly. I've had the blessing of the last six months to be able to think about it on the ground in Abu Dhabi because I was still living there. And so you can see this rapid work on the development of the opening installation, including a wonderful program of exhibitions and commissions that, of course, I can't say anything about quite yet, but can I say will, I believe, stun the world, and indeed the ‘what if’ world of art in your community of listeners.
Charlotte Burns: One thing about the Guggenheim model is that it was so much about New York being the epicenter, with models spanning from there. Will the work that you're collecting, with a curatorial team based as a hub in New York and then in Abu Dhabi, will that work come back to New York? Will it travel to the other hubs? When you think about the constellation, do those constellations speak to one another?
Because the works are obviously owned by Abu Dhabi rather than the Guggenheim Foundation. Is there anything in the agreement that the assets, as in the collection, be shared in that way?
Mariët Westermann: The Guggenheim constellation of stars, and Abu Dhabi you can think of as the latest shining star joining this constellation—I love astronomical metaphors because I'm an amateur astronomer. But anyway, it appeals to me and I was already there. I've inherited it, which is great.
And what we've learned from the work between New York and Venice—the first, internationalization that happened after the creation of the Foundation and the work done with Bilbao—is that there is a lot of interaction, knowledge transfer, and collaboration, but also actual circulation of works. The Guggenheim Foundation always lends work. And we certainly hope that this similar circulatory pattern will develop.
But of course, in the first instance, it becomes now very important for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to be able to show its work. We already have more than enough to show in the building, but that we do this in a carefully curated way. But it is very much our hope that we will see that similar kind of circulation. Just because there are these different ownership arrangements doesn't mean that art doesn't travel and isn't shared.
One of the really great developments of the later 20th century and the early 21st century that we've seen is that we've moved, for the most part, from a history of almost frenetic collection building that museums did in the 20th century to collection sharing, joint ownership, long-term lending agreements and so forth. And I think that Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism has already shown how good they are at this with the Louvre Abu Dhabi. This truly can be done, these kinds of arrangements.
And, now you might say, “All right, you're building this collection in Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi is building national collections. Good for them.” Why shouldn't they? So much was taken away from the Middle East over the years, absolutely rapaciously by Western countries. So it's about time that those countries there build collections as other countries have been doing in the Gulf. I think it's not a contradiction to build a great collection in the country of modern contemporary art, where we are really the key advisers and consultants, and we do this very collaboratively with them under a shared vision, but that it's actually owned there. But that doesn't at all preclude the idea that we could be showing this work in other sites of the Guggenheim constellation.
Charlotte Burns: I think it's really interesting, this idea of a shared vision and advising. It came up on an earlier podcast that we did with Hoor Al Qasimi and I wonder to what extent, when the Guggenheim advises, is a Guggenheim collaborating on that advice? Where does advice become supportive and where should advice be collaborative?
How do you think about that as you think about this constellation?
Mariët Westermann: When you think about how museums do acquisitions, as collecting institutions do, it's always the curators. The curators bring forth ideas. The director, of course, will work with the curators and say, “This is the overall vision. This is where we fill in the gaps. This is where we want to develop new strands of our collection,” as the Guggenheim has done very well in the 21st century. It's also made its own collection in New York more global.
How does that work in museums? This is standard operating procedure. The curators bring it forward, they make the case, and in the end, the board of trustees decide. But the board of trustees does not say, “Thou shalt collect this way. Thou shalt buy this or that.” The board of trustees may approve a collection strategy. That's the governance level that should happen.
Now, as I understand it, in our Guggenheim Abu Dhabi relationship, and I've seen this because I've already been involved in some of these meetings, of course. Again, our curators are out there. They know the markets. They know our targets. There is a broad collection strategy that I've already indicated. It's global. It's crossroads. It's diverse. It's 1960 to the present. It's significant. It also looks at emerging artists, at Indigenous artists. It truly is as inclusive a contemporary collection, as will have been built anywhere. There's no question because we can do it from the ground up. But we, as the Guggenheim, make those seasoned recommendations, those creative recommendations, because our curators are unbelievable.
And of course, curators here in New York who see things may tell the team that is developing the collection recommendations for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi about those connections and help with that. I see that in action every day.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So I'm going to move us away from the satellites through a financial question. A larger portion, obviously, of the Guggenheim's budget comes from traveling and royalties than most museums, which is to do with its satellite arrangements. In its most recent [Form] 990, which is its public filings, it's stated that its contract liabilities are for $33.5 million and almost $34 million, respectively, and that they’re licensing deals that were payments made in advance, dating back to when those deals were made. Would that be a correct reading of those finances?
Mariët Westermann: I have to tell you, Charlotte, that is a level of detail I have yet to get into. So I truly wouldn't want to declare myself on the 990. I've seen a number of 990s, obviously, but I truly can't speak to that at the moment.
Charlotte Burns: But in general, so I can understand the function of the licensing arrangements, they’re payments that were made in advance to the Guggenheim, or are they payments made over time?
Mariët Westermann: I cannot, I can't speak to it. I truly am here too recently to know that precisely. But what I can say is that these arrangements between the Guggenheim Foundation and the authorities in Bilbao and in Abu Dhabi, that are building these institutions and leading them with us, these are long-term partnership arrangements.
I was often asked similar questions about NYU Abu Dhabi and obviously these things are really hard to read from 990s because they organize information in a way that works for the IRS but may not necessarily reflect directly at what time various transactions happen.
But the point being that these are very long-time, long-term arrangements, which is why the Guggenheim Foundation board felt comfortable committing to the name. We're committing one of our most precious resources. So you lend that name only if you feel secure in the long run. So that's how I would talk about any sort of details of these financial arrangements come underneath and support that long-term vision. Precisely how that's been enacted here over years, I honestly don't know that yet.
Charlotte Burns: Okay. Because for you, obviously coming into the Guggenheim, it's an institution that has a tough budget and that's obviously something you have to look at and that you will have looked at. And I'm not going to be grilling you on the specifics, but it's something that we do need to talk about because it is an institution that needs the books to be looked at.
A figure stood out to me when I was doing some research that, right now the operating budget is slightly more than $70 million. The endowment is around $123 million. And actually, I realized that the endowment is less than it was when Tom Krens stepped back in 2008. At the time, the New York Times reported that he'd grown the endowment from $20 million to $118 million, which if you adjust for inflation is around $170 million now.
In that period of time since Tom Krens stepped back, it's been a period of unprecedented wealth in the art world, but the Guggenheim's endowment is less. And I was wondering why the wealth surrounding the art world and the wealth surrounding the Guggenheim in New York hadn't translated into a culture of philanthropy at the Guggenheim in those intervening years.
And obviously that's not something you're responsible for. You can't go backwards in time, but it is something you're inheriting. And endowments are something that keep museum directors up, even the ones with the biggest endowments. Glenn Lowry said on a panel recently that he's had sleepless nights for over 20 years and he has a one billion dollar endowment at the MoMA.
So, to what extent do you need to grow your endowment? And other forms of revenue to feel financially secure?
Mariët Westermann: It's an incredible contradiction of New York museums, I would say, and cultural organizations, that they are among the most magnificent and richest organizations in the world when it comes to their real estate, their collections, their offer, their stature, the way in which they are loved in the world, and the extent to which all of them are at the same time undercapitalized. And this is something I, of course, got to know extremely well, not just when I was at the Institute of Fine Arts, where we did very well, but still I had some sleepless nights there too because there had been an over-reliance on endowment and I wanted to build it.
But I really got to know it in the nine years I spent as the executive vice president overseeing all the grant-making for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This huge private foundation. We were spending some $300 million to $380 million a year on these wonderful fields, and I really could see all the budgets, all these museums—including the Guggenheim—and I could see how they struggle to some degree because they have to find the mix, and the endowment is the holy grail.
But what do we know about endowment? And it is important for the long-term sustainability of an institution, the longevity, but there's also a real challenge with them because when you have a crash, as there was in 2008 and they are underwater and they cannot use their endowment at all because you can't dip into the principle by law. All of a sudden, the bottom falls out.
So, I became less completely addicted to endowment thinking than I had been, in terms of the security of that. So, I think when you come to lead a cultural institution, even MoMA [The Museum of Modern Art] or the Met[tropolitan Museum of Art], which have magnificent endowments, you always have to think about a broadly diversified resource base. And I thought about it that way at NYU Abu Dhabi as well, frankly. You cannot be dependent on one resource.
I do think that I would love for all those New Yorkers, and many people come to us from around the world, to love the Guggenheim yet better, I think, and to show the love. I think that's important. And I think our board is very focused on that. We have definitely strengthened the board in recent years with great financial acumen, which is a good thing.
But also thinking much more creatively, maybe about how the world of museums has changed from what was essentially an exhibition economy where you say, “Here's my exhibition. Look how great it is. Please come,” where it becomes an experience economy. And so leaning into that so that you find other sources of revenue around your programming seems very important.
There's another very special value proposition that the Guggenheim has to offer—around which I truly hope to be able to raise significant resources—of being a transnational, global museum that really believes in artists today and what they bring into the world, and that connects that art to people of all stripes anywhere. We are the only modern and contemporary art museum that does that in these four very distinctive buildings and sites and cities that people are excited about. When you go to Abu Dhabi, you are in the gateway to Asia, and to Africa, and to Europe, and, of course, the entire Arab world.
So that is a very interesting proposition that I also find many people, and in places with resources, are interested in. Not only in New York, in London, Paris, Beirut, South Africa, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore. Just as the Guggenheim needs to think of itself not just as a base in New York with satellites, it's really an interconnected system from which you have jump-off points, of course, to art, but also to people who care enough about art and artists and how we bring it to the people that want to support the institution.
So the global aspects of the Guggenheim also translate to global fundraising opportunities that I became, of course, very aware of in Abu Dhabi.
Charlotte Burns: Do you mean an expanded single board or international councils or something like that?
Mariët Westermann: Even today, the Guggenheim has a wonderful group of councils dedicated to the arts of Latin America. We have an Asian art initiative that we've long had that also includes an Asian art council. We have an international directors council. A photography council. So I think there are real opportunities there of connecting those dots. We have wonderful traveling programs that people can join. Our board members are excited about that. We already have international board members, and I hope that, again, we will expand those possibilities for those potential donors and people who love the Guggenheim, but also for our institution in New York.
Charlotte Burns: It's interesting because during your time at the Mellon Foundation, that comes down to the philanthropy of one man. And so much of Krens’ ability to fundraise also came down to the largesse of one man, which was the most prominent backer at the time, the Cleveland philanthropist, Peter [B.] Lewis, who had given the Guggenheim around $77 million, which was, obviously in today's money a lot more and even then was around four times the amount of any board member in the museum's history. There's something so interesting if you remove yourself from the specifics of the Guggenheim just to look at what that says about cultural institutions that they can be so dependent on the largesse or otherwise of their board members.
Having been inside philanthropy and now working inside an institution, how do you think about that philanthropy? How do you think about how to corral and make more robust the cultural institution in terms of cultural philanthropy within the US and internationally?
Mariët Westermann: I think people will only support institutions if they see themselves connected to it, engaged with it, believe in that institution’s mission, and the people who lead and do the work inside those institutions. I also believe that it is the responsibility of a chief executive of a cultural institution to make sure that this is properly resourced in a diversified way that de-risks that dependence on the one great person.
I love your question because I am in many ways a historian of museums. You become that when you're an art historian. And it is remarkable to think about the J. P. Morgans, the Andrew W. Mellons, the Henry Clay Fricks, and how wealthy they were, how large a share of the American economy they commanded. You can do that analysis too, retrospectively, and you can see that on a share of the economy basis, these guys were wealthier, by far, than Bill Gates or [Mike] Bloomberg or [Jeff] Bezos or any of them. And so just as wealth has become much more distributed, so needs the resource base of museums and cultural organizations and universities to be much more diversified from the very small to the huge contributions that you can garner.
From my time at Mellon, of course, I got to see that the traditional 501(c)(3) grant-making foundations, which the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It's a perpetuity foundation, it wants to be there forever, so it spends only roughly 5% of its value of its endowment every year—there are now all these other instruments. There are foundations that wind down, they're not perpetuity foundations. They're urgency foundations. That's an opportunity, when you think about it for museums.
People may be less inclined to fund endowments for the reasons that I've mentioned. They want the money out there now to do new things, to build new business models, to build a new experience model for museums. I think there's massive opportunity to look into that new kind of philanthropy that lives in the so-called DAFs, the donor-advised funds, which is that new, relatively young, tax advantage structure for giving that is a lot more flexible for the owners or for the donors because they don't have to give it away quite as fast as you have to when you create a 501(c)(3) foundation.
But I think there is a lot of under-explored, developed capacity there. And the number of those foundations that have been created over the last 15 years is unimaginable. The transfer of wealth that's happening at the moment around the world, but especially in the United States, is very significant. The amount of wealth that's been built in the tech venture sector has barely begun to be tapped by cultural institutions. And as we know, artists are very interested in these new technologies. They often lead the way to see where technology can go. This was true in the 15th century with Jan van Eyck and his oil painting. It was true for Rembrandt and what he did in printmaking and painting. It's true for artists today.
And so I think, for example, making the connection between artists already very interested in what art and these new technologies can mean and connecting that to people who have made a lot of money in that sector is something that really interests me and one area that probably is still rather underdeveloped for most museums.
Charlotte Burns: But generally the tech industry hasn't been that interested in culture. It's a nut that a lot of people have been trying to crack, for want of a better way of putting it. Do you see an opportunity to interest tech?
Mariët Westermann: The great collectors who support museums historically are a little older. They've had time to do their big moves in business, to create enterprises and value, and now to convert that value into what is that very special asset class called art that they're developing, also because they have a passion for it. And so I think it is not so unusual that we haven't seen that much of that unlocking of resources built in the tech community, because many of these people are still quite young and very busy running their businesses, seeing new opportunities and beginning to collect. But I believe, therefore, that since we have a Young Collectors Council, for example, developing in that area is a long game, and we should be in it now and not wait until those people reach a certain age.
That said, there are also some collectors right now that we very much have in our sights and are in conversations with.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: So a priority for you would be diversifying the programs in a sense, because right now more of the Guggenheim's revenue comes from admissions than most of your counterpart museums. I think it's 23% of your total operating support and revenue is from ticket sales, whereas for other museums, it's around 13%, 14%, 15%.
Mariët Westermann: In many ways, having a large percentage of gate in your budget is a good thing. It shows that people want what you have. And so making sure that people continue to come and enjoy the offer of a museum is really important. And we're always working on that, of course.
But there also are these other programming opportunities, including in the space that I think we haven't fully developed or optimized, and in fact, no museum has, and that is the fifth site of the Guggenheim, which is the Guggenheim anytime, anywhere, the online space. And I am very interested in this because, of course, in universities, you're very close to that, and you're constantly offering things through your internet and social channels. And so there is opportunity there.
I think the experience economy has not been fully embraced by museums. Frank Lloyd Wright built a theater into this museum. He built a restaurant, The Wright, into this museum. He was ahead of his time, thinking about the museum as a space where you come together to look at art, but also to see other people looking and engaging with art. And that's something that I think we'll be leaning into quite a bit so that you will see that alternative revenue, that is not just the gate, but also how do people like to shop? How is that connected to our global and local brands in any one of our sites? I think that's something I'm very interested in.
How can we tap better into the tourism economy of New York, for example, is something to think about. Very few people know that we are one of only two official World Heritage Sites in New York City. And it's very personal to me, which is why I feel so excited to be here, because the Guggenheim in 1980 was the first art museum when my mother brought me to New York. She took me to this museum. And I had no idea what to do with this museum. I thought it was such an unusual-looking thing. Like the Statue of Liberty, a sculpture that's a building. How crazy. When I asked her why she took me there first, she said, “I wanted you to know that only in America, and really only in New York, would they build such a creative museum.”
That kind of register, I want to bring back that sense of the magic of this museum that was commissioned to be, in the words of our founders, a temple of the spirit and a museum for the future. That is a magnificent history that's taken us eventually back to Europe in Venice to Bilbao and now soon to Abu Dhabi.
Charlotte Burns: I love this idea of bringing it back to your biography because I was reading when you were appointed to this role, the New York Times headline was “Guggenheim Selects Director, First Woman to Lead the Museum Group”. And I thought that was really fitting because in 2015, when you were vice president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, you wrote for a staff demographic data study that you commissioned that, “since museum staff had become 60% female over the past decade or so, with close attention to equitable promotion and hiring practices for senior positions, art museums should be able to achieve greater gender equality in their leadership cohorts within the foreseeable future”. The fact that you were in that position yourself around a decade later was lovely in a way.
Did you imagine seeing yourself in that leadership position when you were commissioning that data study? Was it something you wanted for yourself as a ‘what if?’
Mariët Westermann: As a ‘what if,’ Charlotte, you and I share a real commitment of doing the work, not just to talk about diversity, inclusion, and equity in museums by making sure that it is not just about your offer to the community and inviting people in, but seeing yourself as part of the community and therefore making sure that the inside of museums, and especially the C-suite, is populated with people of all stripes and all walks.
When I was asked by the Guggenheim to consider this role, at first, I thought, “Why would I go do that? I love my job at NYU Abu Dhabi.” But then I thought, “Wow. While I was at Mellon, I was working with all these museum directors and constantly encouraging them by asking questions, but also pushing them a little bit to be true to what they were saying: to walk their talk about their interest in diversity and inclusion by promoting women, by promoting people who hadn't been so well represented.
So, when I was told that I might have this opportunity, I thought, “Wow, now it's being put to you. You should step up. You should do this.” And then the opportunity to do it across this constellation as the first woman CEO, but frankly, I am actually the first CEO as a title for that constellation, that was just a great opportunity. And I do want to say that I took on that role and it feels like a calling, honestly. I'm also very aware of the very foundational role of women in the Guggenheim.
Charlotte Burns: Can I ask you about the timing? Because of course, there are more women in leadership positions than there were. But some of those women in leadership positions are also saying that they are witnessing a backlash. Are you aware of that?
And a question I've asked other guests on the show this season is how do you better support leaders? How does the board support leaders who might be vulnerable? And of course, it's not just female leaders, it's leaders of color, but how do you foster better support?
Mariët Westermann: I think it's a given of history—I'm a historian—that power is never ceded voluntarily, or even when it is ceded voluntarily up to a point, it's never done so terribly willingly. And so backlash against the presence of previously minoritized or previously marginalized communities is always going to be there. And it is therefore very important to stay resilient to that and to support each other across institutions.
I want to say that coming back into the museum community, it's been absolutely heartwarming how the support for me personally has felt. I have felt nothing but a warm welcome and offers of support in all these different ways and in different countries where I've worked. I have heard a little bit about, of course, these challenges for women in museums and leaders of color in museums. I need to learn more about it. I've only just returned from Abu Dhabi, of course.
I will say that looking at what happened to new women presidents of universities, of top universities, of whom, of which, we have more than ever—and after all, I led a university as the first woman to lead that university, NYU Abu Dhabi. I think it is an interesting question, an interesting observation, to see that in what's happened in the past year or last seven months, say, is that all of a sudden these new women leaders were in these extremely harrowing circumstances and had wealthy donors, sometimes board members, sometimes not, and even congressional leaders leaning on them and holding them so-called accountable, but it's essentially just really also engaging in very aggressive behavior towards them. Sometimes being a little bit remote from it in Abu Dhabi, of course, where I would say to myself, “Would they be saying these exact same things if those presidents were men?” I think that's a question that many of us as women, but many men as well, have been asking.
To what extent this is playing out in the museum sphere, I think I'll find out soon, but I can say that personally, I feel extremely well supported by our board, and I agree that it is up to boards to support the leaders that they appoint. They have to hold them accountable, of course, but they also should support them and not that the first sign of trouble makes things difficult for them. So, I hope that I will find it really that the progress isn't just notional and nominal, but that there is actually warm and sustained support for women in leadership positions of our cultural institutions.
Charlotte Burns: In that same study you did at Mellon, you found that there was no comparable “youth bulge”, you called it, of staff from historically underrepresented minorities, particularly in the job categories most closely associated with the intellectual and educational mission of museums—which was 84% non-Hispanic white. And your finding was that even with the most intentional promotion protocols, it was going to be very difficult to create more diversity without a simultaneous increase in the presence of historically underrepresented minorities on museum staff altogether. But more broadly than that, that the nation needed more programs encouraging students to consider museum work.
I wanted to talk to you about that from where you are now at the Guggenheim, which has had such a tumultuous few years with its own racial reckoning. It's been accused of a culture of institutional racism. In 2020, there was a letter signed from the curatorial department to the Guggenheim Museum, sent to its leadership, demanding urgent change to what was described as “an inequitable work environment, enabling racism, white supremacy, and other discriminatory practices”. There've been some changes since then, but you're inheriting, to some extent, troubled past circumstances that haven't been fully resolved. How do you plan to move forward?
Mariët Westermann: Diversity is a baseline. It's a given. Humanity is diverse, so that's not a goal in itself, but you can track, of course, which is why I commissioned those studies and I did it again three years later, and we saw some progress. But then you have to act on that to make sure that you get that diversity inside the museum. It’s so critical if you really want to make progress. And that is a little bit of a slow progress because you can't just switch out the entire staff that you have.
So you need to build pathways for people to see themselves in museums and then support their ambitions, which is why we created a wonderful program, a curatorial development program for students in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Kansas City, in Houston, in Philadelphia, where we worked with the major museums there, who could also connect to local strong universities that had diverse, student populations. And that has been a quite successful program.
And in a way, we modeled it on the remarkable work of Thelma Golden, of all those years in the Studio Museum [in Harlem], who showed the way, how you do it. And then to scale up the kind of mentoring and training that Thelma has done for the entire country and the world, frankly, and support her vision. And having her vision enacted by all these historically white institutions seemed very important.
So we've done a lot of that. And I think looking at where the Guggenheim has been, where, of course, I inherit all the beauties and all the challenges of the past, but also need to move on and move forward, I want to say that there has been remarkable progress. If you look at some key hiring decisions that Richard Armstrong made in our curatorial team where, especially some of the exhibition programming that we've done in the past years, with Only the Young[: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s] on Korean arts of the ‘60s, and Going Dark, the wonderful show by Ashley James, that kind of work really helps change the learning within the institution. It isn't just signaling.
Of course, the world comes into these shows, they're popular, people like them, but it is also fostering learning within the institution about these neglected histories, these beautiful histories, these interesting histories, and changing the conversation, which I think the Guggenheim still needs to work on more, and I'm happy to be doing it with everybody. Changing the conversation from one where the institution takes a defensive posture and says, “Oh, but wait, we'll run around and do this, we still need to do that,” to one of learning.
We are learning communities. We're full of curious people. Say, let's not see this as all traumatic, but let's see how do we use our learning to become truly as diverse as this city is in what we offer. It won't ever be a precise proportional representation, but you can just make that a very important lens: diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. You can make that a lens through which all decisions are filtered in some way. Make sure that you broaden the lens.
Charlotte Burns: There's been something of a backlash to that too in recent years, this idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion is somehow separate to the great art of the past, rather than it being also great art of the past that we just have ignored. Do you feel that you have to foster that support?
Practically speaking, how do you do that? When I read your bio, people say you're an empathetic leader who brings out excellence in people and moves people along. How do you actually do that as an institutional leader, create that culture change?
Mariët Westermann: It's very nice to hear that about oneself, but you have to do it. Obviously, you have to do it. I think it is thinking about leadership structure and about leadership as distributed through an organization. There's leadership at all levels of an organization and making sure that your leadership team has diverse viewpoints represented, and diverse personal experiences represented and that those experiences that can be given a voice.
So what does that mean? It means not only having one-on-one meetings all the time but bringing the groups together and letting people sit with the discomfort when someone says, “You know what? I actually don't think this is true, what you say because I experienced X, Y, or Z.” So often in the conflicts that you see now within organizations or within our society, people say, “Well, that can't be true.” Just recognizing that people need to be able to speak their truth to you. I really believe that. And not immediately believing that they're just making something up just because you haven't experienced it yourself.
That's something I learned in America, to be honest, because America is so diverse. You need to open people's minds and their dispositions, really. It's not their minds, it’s their dispositions. Being willing and sit for a few minutes with what someone is saying that may feel threatening, or you may feel that it attacks your identity and your sense of yourself as empathetic, maybe. That's what leaders can do and they can do it at all levels. It isn't just in the C-suite.
And so working with that kind of learning culture, collaborative culture was something I really enjoyed at NYU Abu Dhabi. And I hope to be able to work with the community here in similar ways. And so far I feel that really is possible. I've had very good reception to the kind of chat conversations I've been trying to have informally so far.
Charlotte Burns: What if museums could listen? You think they can, you have hope.
Mariët Westermann: What if museums could listen to what people say to them who have not historically been part of their main core structures? And I think they are doing that. They are trying to do it. It isn't easy. We know that within our own families, some people we like to listen to more than others. But that is the job of a leader, I think, and then also making the discernment. Just because everybody speaks doesn't mean that everybody is right or that everybody has something of greater value to offer than someone else. I think you have to really be discerning. But in the first instance, learning by listening, learning by walking around, which I do a lot, is valuable.
Charlotte Burns: I read that about you. What happens on the walk stays on the walk. So if people want to catch you, they have to get you on a walk, right?
Mariët Westermann: They don't have to just catch me. At Abu Dhabi, I organized it. We had total free sign-up walk with Mariët, and I did it in the mornings to get everybody into the environment of Abu Dhabi because I felt they stayed too much on our beautiful Rafael Viñoli campus and got too locked into studios, almost. I would walk with 20 students apiece, maybe bring another professor, a community leader, and we'd walk for an hour. Not to be competitive. No, if people couldn't walk fast, we’d walk slow. If people couldn't walk, they could join the breakfast afterwards.
The idea was just that I would answer any question they would ask me to the best of my ability. And of course, there's often institutional constraints, but I would try to be as transparent as I could be in a way, in a good way, I hope. And I would also listen to them and ask them questions and all that would stay on the walk, almost like Chatham House rules. We could use the information, but we wouldn't attribute it or say precisely where we heard it or how we heard it.
And I acted on so many things I learned from our very diverse students at NYU Abu Dhabi. 125 countries. I acted on so much of it in the other things of that job that I had to think about as we built and grew the institution and got it through Covid, frankly.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: Mariët, thank you so much for your time. I'm going to ask you a couple of ‘what ifs.’
What if you were the newly appointed CEO of a constellation of museums and you had in 2010 ran a conference called “Art Museums Here and Now” and in 2020 you'd co-convened “Reframing Museums” and now in 2024, you had to think about the future of museums. What would you say were the most pertinent issues thinking of the future of museums?
Mariët Westermann: I would hope that when I do this conference again in 2030, that we would find that the entire constellation had become a lodestar for how art museums enact their mission of bringing art of today and the recent past to all people who wander into museums or come to them intentionally without regard of the backgrounds or preparations of those people.
And I would hope that the museum would be so well resourced that it could be free almost all the time for any people who couldn't afford to come in and that we would welcome in these people and that any people who might have been suspicious of art would see art as a value, not something threatening, not something holding back, but something provocative. That they would see works of art as really good things to think with, and really good things to see new possibilities with and to feel through, in a way that historically has been reserved to rather a narrow elite of people.
I hope that we can accomplish that by really going global. That is what this hypothetical director would be achieving.
Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Mariët Westermann: I sleep very well at night, so I'm having a really hard time answering the question.
What is the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night? It tends to be more about personal matters for me. I'm a very purposeful person, and therefore I have a vision for what I want to achieve, and I get up every morning very much intent on making whatever I do that day be joyful or manageable at least. There are many hard things you have to do, but always keeping in view that it is for the greater good of achieving something with this institution—and institutions are always communities.
So usually I wake up in the morning saying, “what if I figure out a way to raise another $5 million today?” That's probably the big ‘what if.’ And you could say that could keep me up at night, but it doesn't really because I really do believe in good sleep as the thing you need to get up in the morning to fulfill your ‘what ifs.’
Charlotte Burns: You did say you were an astronomer, so I'm imagining that if you are up at night, you're probably looking at the stars, Mariët.
Mariët Westermann: That's right. Absolutely.
And one of the things I'll miss most about Abu Dhabi is that it's clear skies 95% of the time so I truly could follow the movements of the moon, the planets, and the stars, and the sun through the year. But we will make sure that aspect, in fact, of Abu Dhabi also will shine a bright and starry light onto our entire constellation.
Charlotte Burns: What a perfect note to end on. ‘What if’ indeed.
Thank you so much, Mariët. I appreciate you being so frank with us today and making the time just a few weeks into your new role.
Mariët Westermann: It was a pleasure to have this wonderful ‘what if’ conversation with you. Thank you very much.
[Music interlude]
Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Mariët Westermann.
If you enjoyed this series and want to delve into our back catalogue, there’s plenty to enjoy. This season we’ve had illuminating conversations with the artist Alvaro Barrington. And we were blessed to spend time in a rare—and the final—interview with the late, legendary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, whose recent passing we mourn.
This interview brings our season to a close.
This podcast has been brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.