Transcription of Mark Bessire for the show Architecture + Art #174
Dr. Belisle: Here on Love Maine Radio it’s always a great joy to have guests back in the studio who have spent time with us before because we all know that life is an evolution, and to have an ongoing conversation with someone is often even more valuable than an initial conversation. Today our conversation is with Mark Bessire, who is the director of the Portland Museum of Art. Mark has been a longtime friend of Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, and has done quite a lot in the community. We’re fortunate that you are willing to come in and have another conversation with us.
Mark: Thank you, appreciate it, Lisa.
Dr. Belisle: I would send people back also to our lovemaineradio.com site to listen to my prior conversation with Mark. It’s worth a listen. You have a lot of good things to say.
Mark: Thank you.
Dr. Belisle: Mark, you’ve been working with the Portland Museum of Art for how many years now?
Mark: It’ll be six March 1, 2015.
Dr. Belisle: That’s impressive.
Mark: It’s one of those things where it feels like it’s been a short time, and then some days it feels like it’s been a long time, but I still pinch myself. I think I have one of the great jobs in the state of Maine, which is representing great artists and great traditions and our museum is so fabulous and I love getting the opportunity to work with our members, with visitors from schools. It’s really, as you said, actually it’s a privilege that I get to serve our community as the director.
Dr. Belisle: It’s also enough time now that you have been able to sink into the role. You’re no longer new. You’ve seen what things work, what things need change, and you’ve been there for quite a lot of changing. Tell me, what is going on with the museum these days that reflects this ongoing transition that you’ve been able to be a part of.
Mark: It’s a really good question. I got my master’s in art history and I had fellowships, etcetera, and [Whitney 00:24:58] and went abroad for a while working in Africa, but I’ve always been very interested in management. One of the things that I’ve found recently in the last few years is everyday management is being ready for change at all moments and being ready for opportunities to reveal themselves and to have the right team to grab that opportunity as far as you can. Our CFO, Elena Murdock, and I talk a lot about museums and Moneyball, which is a book that I love, and she has great respect for.
We’re interested in data, but what we’re really interested in is having the right team that sees something reveal itself and then go for it in that opportunity space, and being sure there’s time in your everyday administrative work to be ready for that surprise. One great surprise was the number Seven sculpture. We were considering the number Seven by Robert Indiana to put in front of our building for a long time and then suddenly one appeared and within six months a donor made a challenge and we went after it, and the whole team was all hands on deck. It’s hard to gauge those long-term and short-term goals, but always knowing that you’ve got to be ready for anything that offers it to go for it.
Dr. Belisle: You recently also did some work with the Winslow Homer Studio, and that was a big project for you and has been successful.
Mark: That was a huge project. I think that was, in many ways, a really great watershed, and it’s something that Dan O’Leary, the previous director, began. I think he put forth a pretty great vision of the relationship of the Homer Studio to the museum. If you tie all the little pieces, I have a talk I give. It’s [this dumb 00:26:46] speech about Homer as the DNA of the PMA and so we’re founded in 1882. He shows up in 1883. He has John Calvin Stevens redesign the studio. John Calvin Stevens was a founder of our museum.
When Homer dies in 1910, in 1911 John Calvin Stevens’ first museum building connected the McLellan House opens, and then when the Payson Family gives their Homer collection to the Portland Society of Art, that transforms us into the Portland Museum of Art and suddenly we have the Payson Building. When there was an opportunity to bring the Homer Studio back into the fold of the museum, it tied our two key people, which is Winslow Homer and John Calvin Stevens. The other piece is it’s very hard and a labor of love to run something as special as a studio.
It’s an incredible experience, but one that’s really only made for 10 or 12 people. It’s not like Disney Art. I love Disney, but it’s just not that environment. You can go to Giverny, which is Monet’s wonderful place, but there’s thousands and thousands of people. It’s no longer that intimate experience. If you go out to see Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu in the O’Keefe Museum, this is kind of like that experience. There’s very few places where you can still go today and see a major artist site studio home that changed their entire art, because when Homer comes here everything shifts.
I think his best art was made when he came to Maine. The narrative goes away, the figures start to disappear, and the new religion is nature and he’s really pounding on the door of the 20th century and I don’t even think he knows it at the time. I think you can go out there, see the studio, and experience nature the way he did. It’s pretty incredible. I get pretty passionate. It was a great project. We put a lot of effort into it. I think now the great thing is we made a little bit of a transition from focusing on, I think, the studio.
Our big focus right now is what we say as kind of the mother ship, which is our wonderful buildings and our collection. While we spent so much time restoring the studio and raising the funds for it, we weren’t spending as much time on our collection, and we’re in a really wonderful project; it’s the collection reinstallation. In 2016 we’re going to shut down for about six weeks and we’ll reopen with a whole museum rehung from head to toe. Over time the galleries, they look wonderful, but they’re very much kind of “Greatest hits,” and the curator team we have now is putting together a full narrative of the entire museum collection and each gallery will be based on thematic representations, which ties to the collection.
Even if you come over now you’ll see some little spots. We just rehung the European galleries to do some tests. The second-floor gallery has this amazing gallery. We were looking for a gallery where if you were coming for the first time to Maine and you didn’t know Maine had this great art tradition. You’d walk in and see Homer, Henri, Hopper, Marguerite Zorach, William Zorach, Andy Wyeth … You’d see all that work. You’ll go, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t know all those artists worked in Maine,” and if you were a member and you come in it’s like comfort food. It’s like all your favorite artists in one room, and then you’d walk out to the museum and see the rest of it. We weren’t really pushing that narrative that’s our best foot forward, so that’s a big effort for us right now.
Dr. Belisle: I like the way that you’re describing a visit to the museum as being a narrative, as being a story, almost talking about it as playing a song, that there’s a relationship between what you do at the beginning of the song and what you do at the end of the song. You have to tie these things together, but you also have to know that people are going to come in at different parts of the song and they’re going to hear things their own way. That’s an interesting challenge.
Mark: It is a real challenge, actually. Museums are, there have been a series of articles even more recently about visitor experience, audience engagement, and in Dallas now there’s a real experiment about going free and what it means and they’re collecting data. You exchange data and then you get points, which gives you free parking and discounts and the store, but really what they’re doing is trying to get data to learn about visitors. In the museum world there’s kind of a, “Wait and see if this is the right model.” Some museums inherently have a demographic where going free makes sense and some do not. It depends on your visitation and how much you’re depending on earned revenue.
Museums are finally catching up to social media and actually, I think our social media program is very strong. It’s building. I think we’re getting ready for the future because I don’t think as many people know we have this whole social media machine running. It’s a good investment now so that when it builds we’ll be ready for that next generation to address the audience directly through social media because it’s much more participatory. What you’ll find as we’re redoing the collection, we’re thinking more about the notion of learning than old-school education.
Instead of doing three-part program, come in every Thursday at 12:00 and learn about the Portland Museum of Art’s collection. You’re going to come in and you’re going to have many other points of opportunities to have a staff pick; come in in here, one staff member. It could be security. It could be administrator talking about a work of art. You could have a curatorial lecture. You could attach talk to your phone and listen. You could be responding through social media. There’s so many new entry points to the art world and museums are like barges. We’re really slow to get it but once we get it we’re full steam ahead, and so we’re just getting into that mode. It’s exciting time.
Dr. Belisle: I’m thinking about my eighth grader who I will sit next to her while she’s doing homework and she’s pulling up something on The Gilded Age and she’s finding a picture of children who were in workhouses. It is just like that. You don’t start at the beginning of a workbook and move to the end. Instead you find something and you follow that theme for a little while, then it takes you over here and it takes you over here, not unlike the internet. Again, that is an interesting challenge to know where these entry points are and how you can help people reach them or how you can propel people forward from them. How’s the process [crosstalk 00:33:11] …?
Mark: I think we’re still learning. Museums are really good at collecting data and getting members. What we now need to do is be better at listening to our visitors. What are they interested in? What are the things that we can provide them? At the same time while we’re driving social media and having a conversation, I think museums are doing so well these days because it’s still one of the few places you can go with an unmediated environment in which literally you can have these points of opportunities to listen or talk about your experience in the museum, but you can still just walk up to a work of art and it’s you and that work of art. You can choose to read the label or just have that visual experience.
There are very few unmediated experiences left in this world, and granted, the moment you walk into a museum it’s slightly mediated because we’re an organization, we have a mission, we have members, but it’s one of the last places where you can go and find that quiet moment, look at a work of art, and walk away. A symphony would be like that, if you’re going in and you sit down in your chair and you’re there to listen, or to go to Portland Stage and sit down, you know? We feel very strongly that we still provide a unique experience and that no matter how digital we go, and how much we’re going to create those opportunities for people to approach us, the key experience is still you and the work of art.
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Dr. Belisle: As you’re talking about this I’m thinking about some of my own museum experiences and being up in Rockland and seeing the photography of Paul Caponigro and really, really impacted by that in such a way that it almost shifted the way that I was thinking for some period of time. That does go back to the actual impact of a face-to-face encounter with art, which is something that you can’t really get off the computer.
Mark: You can’t. I think you can find entry points in the computer and find interests and I think that’s why museums have done well. It’s because our websites are basically a portal to drive interests. Basically a lot of people just want to find out when you’re open and how to get there and where to park and we’re always going to provide that information. I know the library here has done such an amazing job. I can’t remember, I gave a talk on the death of the library and the museum 15, 20 years ago. We were all going to be dinosaurs.
Look what the library’s done. They’ve tripled their attendance. They’ve opened themselves up. The book is as strong as ever. It might be in a different form, and one people might not love so much, but people are still reading and the library, like the museum, I think is becoming much more of a community and collaborative environment where we have our hardcore books and reading, art and viewing, but at the same time we don’t have the capacity to compete in the entertainment industry for advertising.
The way in which we build audiences is we share audiences through collaboration, so if we work with The Telling Room or we work with Space or we work with Mecca or USM, they’re sharing our audience, we’re sharing their audience, and we’re broadening our capacity to grow. We don’t have the money to be in the advertising arena. I’d love to have every PMA show on every bus in every location to remind you to come to the museum just like the symphony or the stage. The way in which we’re finding a place for us is to collaborate and partner with other organizations and sometimes it’s a young organization, so take Space.
They have a different demographic than the Portland Museum of Art. The Space would love to have more of our demographic and we’d love to have more of their demographic, so why compete when we can share audiences and we can have some of our audiences learn more about space through the partnership and then we can send a group down to a special space event and then they can get themselves attached to some other groups that they couldn’t normally find. I think we’re very fortunate in Maine and in Portland where the organizations aren’t competing.
When one of us do well we all do well. Watching Colby College Museum of Art is the greatest thing that could happen to me and having that collection grow, if someone’s going to come to me and go to Colby to see that collection they’re probably going to come see us. They’re going to go to Bowdoin. They might go to Bates. That’s good for all of us. If the library’s doing really well, that bodes well for the Maine Historical Society. I think there’s an ecology in Maine that’s very healthy.
Dr. Belisle: It seems to me that with this shifting, with this moving, with this moving away from the old guard, just like moving away from straightforward print media, or straightforward library the way it used to exist, you know, a depository of books, or straightforward, “Here’s a museum. Go look at a painting.” I think there’s some intense feelings that have arisen in the sense of who owns the art, who owns the art, who has the right to make the art, who has the right to determine whether the art is valuable, and it has created some strong feelings in the community.
There was a recent article actually about our collector Maine in the Portland Press Herald, which has created quite an interesting forum and some intense things have come about as a result of this. There’s a quote from a former gallery owner in Portland who was on the art scene for 15 years and he says with regard to the Portland Art Gallery, “It’s not curated. It’s based on your ability to pay. Most people who come to town to visit in July or August will see this bright, well-lit space in the old port and think, ‘These guys must be somebody.’ They are trying to become the face of Maine art, but their artists may not be the best and the brightest, they just have the ability to pay.”
That, to me, speaks to something. I feel like there’s a deeper hurt. We’ve had artists on our show. I’ve interviewed artists for the magazine. I know artists in my medical practice. I feel like there’s a deeper hurt that there’s something precious that we’re trying to put out into the world, and somehow it’s not being valued and because this hasn’t been working for such a long time, the standard gallery or the standard museum, people are angry and upset and not sure what the future holds.
Mark: It’s definitely a sensitive issue and I think the notion of who gets to show art and where they get to show it, who gets picked, who doesn’t pick, who sells well, and who doesn’t sell well is really difficult. You say there’s a difference between art and science, you know, the art world is definitely a work of art. It is not a science, and I think that there’s multiple ways to enter into, so to speak, the art world. There’s the self-taught artists, there’s the over-academic artists, there’s the opportunist artists, there’s the artists at the right place at the right time, there’s the, “naturally gifted artists.”
There’s the notion that artists shouldn’t make too much money. I think artists that have one job then more people put more baggage on that’s their own baggage about art, and it’s not the artist’s baggage. Most people come to art because it just was their chosen field just like you might come to radio or someone comes to being a doctor. That’s why they’re artists. There’s something that people have a visceral opinion about, what is good art, what is not, who should be an artist, what it takes to be an artist, and what’s the criteria for becoming a good artist.
The classic is, “Do you have to be really nice to be a good artist?” It’s that minutiae of … I look at art and I really, often the biography is interesting, but it’s one element. If the biography is relevant to the making, to the piece that’s actually provided, then it’s relevant. Sometimes the biography has nothing to do with the type of art that someone’s producing and I think the art world has become, particularly now because of the hype in terms of the values, if you look at the high end of the art market, it really is very tied into wealth management and major, major gifts from major people to major museums.
It’s a moment when people look at as being incredibly different, but if you look historically, you can go back to different periods. Twenty years ago the art market had a big moment. It’s the turn of the century. Americans were taking art from Europe and bringing it here. Before that kings and queens were buying art. Before that the church was a major player. There’s an incredible longevity of the art world and it doesn’t necessarily have a specific trend that you can follow, but you can guarantee it will always surprise you.
In this time I think it is so hard to enter into this thing we call the art world. It’s so morphic. I don’t think there is an art world. People like to define that there’s an art world as though it’s a conspiracy or an establishment. It’s so balkanized that there is no one centralized government deciding what is great art or not. That’s one of the reasons I love our museum. It used to be, “I think we are very proud to be, I think, aspire to be a great regional museum.” That used to be a patronizing title for a museum. I like it because I think that we have a fantastic, local story and local history that is part of a national conversation. Our region is relevant locally and also important nationally and that’s why Maine is so important.
In terms of looking more specifically at the context you’re providing about artists in the marketplace, every artist has to make their own choice how to enter the art market whether you’re going to make your own art for yourself and that’s good enough and have another job, or you’re going to pursue a gallery career, or you’re going to pay for marketing to get your work out there. Those are all different entry points into getting what you want. I’m not sure any one is better than another one. It’s so hard to get your art out there that any mode that an artist chooses, that’s their choice, and I’m actually fine with that. It’s up to the artist to make the choice how they’re going to deliver their art to an audience.
Dr. Belisle: Mark, do you have children?
Mark: Two kids.
Dr. Belisle: How old are they?
Mark: Fourteen and sixteen.
Dr. Belisle: Do they have any interest in anything artistic?
Mark: Yes. I think growing up art, you know, what we do is go see museums or cultural organizations wherever we go and we do a fair amount of travel together, so indeed.
Dr. Belisle: What I’m wondering is with my own children whether they choose to come back to Maine or not, and I know that you originally, you’re from New York.
Mark: I’m from New York.
Dr. Belisle: Yes, so you may be fine with your children going to New York to live?
Mark: My family’s still there so we’re there a lot.
Dr. Belisle: That is fine, but it also, and my family is from Maine, I don’t know where my children will end up. Two of them are in college, one is younger, but I would like them to be able to come back to Maine to have the opportunity to be what they would like to do, to be. If they are artists, I would love to have them come back to a place where it is possible for them to engage in art, engage in music, and make a living out of it. I think for me, seeing that so many people feel passionately about art, they value it at the PMA. They want to go to Mecca. They want to become artists themselves, and that this exists. There’s a groundswell, and it’s an ongoing thing since the time of Winslow Homer and before. That gives me great hope.
Mark: I think there’s great hope. I think in the long run the most productive conversation that we can have for the art scene in Maine is thinking about broadening the base of collectors, and collectors is like a word, “Oh, I’m not a collector.” What I really mean is people who want to have art in their home. These days you can buy a poster and frame it for the same price you can buy a nice small work on open studio night. Buy a nice poster at a museum for 40 bucks, go have it framed, and before you know it, it cost more to frame it. Go out and look at works of art. They don’t have to be expensive. Buy a small drawing. Get it framed. Put it on your wall.
I think the real conversation around town and around Maine has to be about breaking the boundaries between the experience of entering into a space where art is available for sale and the purchase and helping artists and dealers and create the relationships and moments where we can attract more people to purchase art. The only way the great art of Maine will perpetually be great is if we continue to have and support living artists. To me that’s much more important than any conversation we can have and that’s one of the reasons we do the biennial.
Like the conversation you’re talking about, the biennial always sparks a lot of emotions, whether it’s the Carnegie International, it’s the Whitney Biennial, everybody loves to go and most people love to critique it, but they still want to see what’s up. The bottom line is we’re looking for the best possible work to show and often people find fault at it. A biennial is an imperfect beast. It will always be. It’s just what it is, but we still think it’s relevant to our community to do a biennial. I think again it comes back to personal choice, but I think anytime we can get more people to be out there thinking seriously about buying art, we all win.
Dr. Belisle: I appreciate your thoughtful answer to that question. I know it’s a complicated thing to wrap one’s mind around. For me it still does come back to what art does for us and the fact that art inspires us, that we actually feel something. It actually can contribute to wellness, or maybe not. Hopefully it can contribute to wellness, so it’s actually important to have great art, whether it’s in our home or in a museum or even expanding out into the community at large because it does something good for us. Your [thoughts 00:49:05]?
Mark: I think it does. In particular I think contemporary art, which I think can be a little bit more difficult to approach sometimes because the contemporary art world today, again, whether it’s conceptual, it’s performative, it’s performative-based photography, it’s drawing, it’s a new photo process. The wonderful thing about post modernism is that it opened up all these possibilities for new media, changing styles and trends, and it’s harder to read, I think, for the casual visitor of contemporary art because there’s so much information and it’s really much more about a conversation.
Contemporary art is much more, in a way, engaging. Traditional art that had a narrative base or had a perspective or it looked historical or it was about a moment, you can sit in front of and really read, in many ways, the intention of the artist, and there’s always depth to it. There’s always farther you can go. Contemporary art is much more conversational. It asks a lot more of the visitor. You really have to take your time and figure out, “Why did they choose that piece of wood to put it together? Why is that part of the canvas finished and this one’s not?”
Every aspect of that work of art had an intention, but it’s a little bit harder to access unless you’re willing to take the time to have that conversation. I think in many ways, you know, we talked about wellness a little bit before, but I think there’s a component in the arts and culture where wellness has a role to play and I think that’s going to the theater and watching the stage and seeing dialogue. I think it’s going to symphony and listening to music. I think it’s going to the library and participating in conversations about books. I think it’s going to the museum and taking your time and slowing down and looking at work of art for a visual response and that conversational aspect.
When you’re going to these places you’re going to places where inherently there’s a social aspect and so it’s looking at a specific part of culture but it’s also participating in a greater social fabric. Free Fridays to me is kind of the ultimate wellness moment where you can go alone, you can go with a buddy, you can take a date, you can take your family, you can see a museum, you can go to a gallery, you can shop, you can grab a bite to eat; all of those things in about five square blocks in Portland. In every other block you’re going to find a friend you haven’t seen for a week or two months.
There’s a wellness to that whole culture of getting out, you know, that interaction with people, that unexpected sighting of an old friend, a conversation with a friend over a work of art, trying a new restaurant, seeing somebody, knowing the waiter or waitress. There’s that whole social interaction that I think the cultural location, I think now, is a place where that can take place. I think as we talked about libraries changing and particularly museums, we are becoming more social spaces.
As we’re developing a campus master plan, the one thing we recognize is we love all three of our buildings, and they’re you know, 1802, 1910, 1983. The Clapp House next door is 1840 and the studio is 1883, but we do not have the spaces to provide our growing membership and audiences for social interaction. The Great Hall was actually built to be free, not to have a store and not to have a café, so we’re placing into a space a store and café, which are now expected in every museum, and now we have events with our [contemporers 00:52:42].
We have 300 people at an event. We can’t even hold them in the museum because we have too many members. We want to do collaborative events where we might get messy. Museums really don’t like messy events. We need a space where we can come together and make food, because food’s becoming such an art form, but we don’t have that in our space, so as we think about the future of our museum we need to not only think about the museum and the basics of storage, an art study room to show work of art to classrooms and education.
We need more space for collaborations and partnerships, and I think the library has shown us how positive an experience you can transform a building we all dreaded going in, but loved the experience, opening it up, making it more transparent, and making it community-based institution has changed Monument Square in Portland forever and I think the museum wants a piece of that change. Luckily we’re not in a hurry. We’ve got great resources in terms of our properties, but we’re trying to think about how a museum should look like in 25 years and how do we build out to that model so that we can meet the needs of our members and our visitors.
Dr. Belisle: It really makes me happy that you have so many members of your contemporaries group, which is a younger crowd, that you can’t actually fit them in your space anymore. That’s not a bad problem to have, right?
Mark: It’s the best. We even have six members from the contemporaries group who are now on our board. One of the fortunate things, and I know cultural organizations, in particular, are very interested in the intergenerational exchange because the old-school cultural organizations are worried about the future and we have faced that by putting a lot of time and energy in building our contemporaries group and we have a wonderful steering committee. It’s really run by the group, which is also that engagement with the audience. What does a young group want out of a museum? They help us create the programs that they want and then we create the space to do that. In many ways it’s kind of the farm team for our future, and that’s a real asset for us.
Dr. Belisle: Mark, I know that there are multiple different ways that people can be a part of the museum that can support the museum. I know that you have that contemporaries group. You have a directors’ circle. People can become less than that, more than that. There’s lots of different ways. How do people find out about the Portland Museum of Art?
Mark: I hate to be traditional, but you can definitely go to our website, which is fresh and ready for you to come enter and please go there and learn more about the museum. Again, our social media platforms are growing so find us on every social media platform, and follow us and help us be the museum that you want to have. The other thing about access is we are incredibly fortunate to have Free Fridays. Cyrus and Patty Hagge as well as L.L. Bean support Free Fridays and in many ways it’s the greatest gift the museum gives to the state of Maine.
If we do roughly 130, 160 thousand people in a year, right now 30%, 35% of those people come in free on Friday nights, so that’s, again, roughly 25 to 35 thousand people have a free experience at the museum. To have donors and supporters like the Hagges and also L.L. Bean, it changes our environment. Maine is losing very few corporations, but the ones that are staying put, including Unum, are so supportive of our community and they should be really recognized and I don’t want to have this being advertising, but it’s really important to recognize those organizations and families that are supporting the arts in Maine because without them we could not be as strong as we are.
Dr. Belisle: I know that Maine Magazine and Maine Home Design feel very strongly about their support, also, of the Portland Museum of Art.
Mark: Absolutely. We love to partner with you all and really do feel that in some ways we share a vision of communicating to new audiences and broader audiences, that the identity of Maine is based in tradition and old culture, but that we are so alert, whether it’s farming, food, issues of the ocean, education, cultural organizations. We’re actually in a really great position to lead the country in so many ways. I find it phenomenal that we have so little bureaucracy that you can get things done here.
You don’t need to wait for someone to tell you it’s okay in Maine. If you got a good idea you can go do it, and if you really want to go see someone you can. It’s probably one of the few states where if you had a great idea, and I don’t want to have everyone call our senators, King and Collins, but if you had a great idea you can go talk to your legislators. It’s not that hard. Things can get done here because I think there is such a thin bureaucracy and if you really have a great idea you can accomplish great things.
Dr. Belisle: Mark, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you again.
Mark: Thank you, Lisa.
Dr. Belisle: We’ve been talking with Mark Bessire, who is the director of the Portland Museum of Art and I look forward to seeing all the wonderful things that you’ll be bringing into the Portland community as things continue to evolve.
Mark: Please come visit.
Dr. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 174, Architecture and Art. Our guests have included Scott Simons and Mark Bessire. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemainradio.com. Also, read about Scott Simons and Mark Bessire in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our enewsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram.