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Walters Art Museum’s job is to ‘get out of the way,’ says Director Gary Vikan [Q&A]

Gary Vikan, the director of the Walters Art Museum, says something that probably not many museum directors or curators willingly say. “You might say our job is to broker, to facilitate,” he says. “Our job may be to just get out of the way.” For Vikan (it rhymes with pecan), that’s an attitude that has […]

Gary Vikan, the director of the Walters Art Museum, says something that probably not many museum directors or curators willingly say.
“You might say our job is to broker, to facilitate,” he says. “Our job may be to just get out of the way.”
For Vikan (it rhymes with pecan), that’s an attitude that has slowly formed in him since he took the reins of the Walters in 1994, and then enacted a series of policies—changing the name from gallery to museum and doing away with an entrance fee in 2006, to name a couple—that has transformed what seems like a stodgy gatekeeper of historic culture into something that better represents the spirit of its late benefactor, Henry Walters.
“He gave his collection for the benefit of the public,” says Vikan.
In the wake of July’s Art Bytes hackathon, which the museum hosted, the first-ever such event at the Walters, Technically Baltimore spoke with Vikan about how, more recently, technology is helping to reinforce—and reshape—the mission of the Walters Art Museum.

TB: At Art Bytes, were you pleased with what people came up with?
GV: I was very pleased with what they came up with. Sid Meier said how surprised he was there weren’t any ringers in the group or any duds. And I was too. Because as the teams were forming, it wasn’t obvious to me—I mean, I don’t know most of those people so how would I know what was coming? I was just amazed. But it all fit. … It was quite amazing to me. Just the basic ingredients of giving up ownership on agenda, of letting people define the problems as they can identify them and applying their intelligence.
TB: One thing I think is interesting as I’ve understood your history with the museum: since you became director in 1994, you’ve enacted certain changes that make the Walters more open to the public. And it almost seems like technology is an appropriate last stop.
GV: When I arrived here, there was one computer in the building. I do not recall when I started using word processing. I gave up my analog camera in 2004, so I’m always a little bit behind. I got an iPad only last spring. But what’s happened is the things that I thought were inherently right, the right thing to do—access, community service, acknowledging who really owns the art, and who we really work for—that’s what the Internet draws us toward anyway. … There’s a huge democratization. You know what was interesting about those presentations of those eight teams [at the hackathon]? It wasn’t who they were; they weren’t up there to tell you who they were. They were up there to show you what they were trying to solve. And that’s so different from a traditional authoritarian setting. … To have Scott [Burkholder] up there, running the show in effect, in a place that he doesn’t work for? That I think, I hope, sent a very good message. I’m very proud it was here.
TB: Really, it’s a movement—a shift—that the Walters has made.
GV: Our movement toward open access, intellectually, financially, across the world through the Internet, just seemed to harmonize. Or we seemed to harmonize a teeny little note here in Baltimore with a symphony that’s going on. And the symphony is not technology. Technology is the thing that creates a whole new way of interacting … technology is an enabling ingredient in that … that everything gets flattened out, which is really kind of nifty.
TB: Do you get a sense from speaking with colleagues or curators that some people are anathema to this new movement? That they still want to have some sort of credential, or feeling that having a credential is important? Is that hard to separate people from?
GV: Yeah. Some people. I think it’s much harder in an academic setting. … There’s still a long way to go. When we begin to see an audience in this museum that matches the [Enoch] Pratt Library, that will be interesting. We’re certainly much more diverse than we were 10 years ago. When we went free, that was a huge change. We tripled the number of African Americans using the museum in a year, which means to say we are getting fairly close to the regional demographic. … One thing that’s very hard, and we’re beginning to work on it, is the feel you get coming in. Everything is so sparkling. … I hope the museum continues down that path [of becoming more inviting]. I don’t think there’s any other path ultimately you could take. I think it’s a necessary thing to sustain yourself. [If] people don’t use you, they don’t know who you are, [and] they don’t care about you. And if they don’t care about you when times are tough, they’re not going to support you.
TB: How much do you think you’ve been changed as you’ve evolved with the museum?
GV: Totally.
TB: Yeah?
GV: I didn’t come here to make this place free. … Only later, probably, I would say maybe 12 years ago, everything started coming together in terms of the boundary. I first became interested in lots of people using this place because I thought we could charge them money, [and] we could make some money, [and] we’d get more computers. Sort of like a business.
… But then I just got more turned toward the values side of the equation. When we changed the mission statement in 1999, or 2000, that was a very decisive time for my thinking. And at that point, we were reinstalling the art and doing it contextually that way people could understand it more. And then going free, which I wanted almost immediately. I wanted to do that 10 years ago.
There were a lot of discussions around here about whether or not derelicts would come in the building, whether or not rich old ladies would be offended by it and stop giving us money. I wasn’t afraid of that. In fact it irritated me that [staffers at the Walters] ever brought that up.
TB: What the Walters is doing now—Art Bytes, photos on Wikimedia—it’s almost like a natural fit with a startup community, the whole idea of embracing risk and allowing it to shape you.
GV: But the thing is once you give up that control, it liberates you. Much more important than that, it just liberates the talents of other people. …
The transformative day was probably six months ago. Newt [Fowler, of the Walters tech committee] had already put forward this idea of a hackathon. I had never heard the term. … Newt said for that to happen, you really have to let it have its own life. And so, as the practical issues began to emerge, the staff that were there were very anxious about the safety of the art.
They wanted to circumscribe a task—define what the work to do was. And every time one would raise an objection to or an anxiety about, Newt would say no. For this to work, you not only have to give up control—you have to give up your own ego and say, I tried to figure this out, but I can’t. We failed. … I mean, if they had told me we had to put sleeping bags out there [during Art Bytes], I would’ve said fine. I didn’t see any risk in it at all.

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