Executive Director of Utah Museum of Fine Arts: Museums Are as Much About People as They Are About Art and Objects
Date：2023-06-08
Gretchen Dietrich, Executive Director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), discussed the current practices of art museums in the United States during the third dialogue of the China-Europe-America Museums Cooperation Initiative. She highlighted the UMFA’s role as a comprehensive art museum and its commitment to industry standards while considering the local community. Gretchen also emphasized the importance of museums focusing on people as much as art and objects. She noted the historical neglect of visitor needs but acknowledged a positive shift in recent years, with curators and educators increasingly valuing audience engagement. She believes that collaboration between community-centered curators and art-centered educators leads to more meaningful and impactful exhibitions.
Gretchen Dietrich is executive director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The UMFA is the flagship fine arts museum for both the state and the U. Under Dietrich’s leadership, the UMFA has flourished, with increased attendance, audience engagement and community outreach, higher revenues and new institutional support. Dietrich began her career as a museum educator and has held positions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 2015–2018, Dietrich served on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and oversaw AAMD’s Education & Community Issues Committee. In fall 2019 she was selected to join the inaugural board of directors for Art Bridges, a new foundation dedicated to expanding access to American art across the country.
Full text of the speech
Hello. My name is Gretchen Dietrich and I serve as the Marcia and John Price Executive Director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts – also known as the UMFA.
I’m delighted and honored to be speaking with you and I am grateful for the opportunity to engage with museum professionals in China and across the globe to share some thoughts about current art museum practices at my institution and more broadly in the United States.
First some background about our wonderful museum and where we are in the world. The UMFA was formally established in 1951, and it’s Utah’s only institution that acquires, interprets, and exhibits a comprehensive fine art collection of more than 20,000 art works from the ancient world to global contemporary art. We are accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors. We therefore uphold industry standards in our field while always considering the people, history, and geology of our community here in Utah when acquiring art, designing programs, curating exhibitions, and engaging people in art and humanities education.
The state of Utah is located in the western United States and currently has 3.2M inhabitants. It is one of the fastest growing states in the US with an estimated 160 people moving to Utah every day. Utah is renowned for it’s incredible outdoor and recreational resources – boasting world-class skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and known the world over for its five astonishingly diverse and beautiful National Parks. You can land in Salt Lake City and be skiing within the hour – or you can go south and get lost in the red-rock canyons and beautiful landscapes of the high dessert. In 2019, 1.8M Chinese tourists visited the state of Utah – mostly, I’m told, to explore the National Parks.
The UMFA is situated on the campus of the University of Utah – the largest, public university in the state with a current enrollment of 32,000 students. The University is located in the heart of Salt Lake City, the largest city in the State, home to more than half of the state’s residents. The UMFA serves as an essential cultural resource for a growing and increasingly diversifying community across the region. The mission of the museum is to inspire critical dialogue and illuminate the role of art in our lives.
Like any organization that strives to be relevant to its public, the UMFA must be responsive to the ever-changing dynamics of local and global environments. As challenges continue to emerge around us, we embrace opportunities to think more deeply about what we do and how we might better serve our community, effect positive change in the world, and help create a more just society.
I wish to focus my brief remarks today on the future of art museums in the United States. An interesting and challenging thing to think about and something museum leaders are called to do often. It isn’t hard to imagine our organizations three to five years from now. It is much more challenging – and in my estimation, more important - to imagine what our organizations will look like and focus on, fifteen to twenty years from now.
• What will the work of the art museum look like in the future – what will be the same or different from how we approach our work now?
• What will our priorities and opportunities be?
• What will our audiences look like and what will matter most to the people we strive to serve?
• And, perhaps most importantly, what conversations should we be having today and what work should we be doing now - if these dreams are to become a reality?
The essential place to begin this conversation with you today is an idea that has always been the core of my work in museums. The simple idea that museums need to be as much about people as they are about art and objects.
When I began my career in American art museums thirty-three years ago, this was largely not the case. The museum’s visitors - their needs and ideas and desires were simply not valued. They were rarely studied. They often did not enter into discussions about the programmatic work and priorities of the museum. Those decisions - about what art the Museum should collect and exhibit - have historically been the purview of the museum’s curatorial team. The idea that the museum should strive to meet the needs of its audiences, to answer their questions, and present art in ways that work best for them, was very much looked down upon. The work of engaging with visitors and finding ways to help people connect to the art on display was often perceived as an after-thought and was often secondary in importance to the desires and ambitions of the curatorial team.
In the last twenty years, in the United States and Canada, I’m delighted to say I’ve seen a shift in how Museum professionals now view the intersection of the work of the curatorial and museum education teams. Increasingly today, excellent museum curators are as deeply knowledgeable and mindful of the needs of the people who visit their institutions as they are knowledgeable about the art they study and research. And great art museum educators, the people who make our collections come alive for our visitors - are as deeply knowledgeable about art collections and objects of their institutions as they are about the communities they serve. When community-centered curators work collaboratively and respectfully with art-centered museum educators, the resulting exhibitions and installations are always so much more meaningful and impactful than they would be otherwise. Combine this essential work with a more welcoming and visitor-centered experience, and we find museums like the UMFA – well-loved, trusted and well-visited by people living in our community – perceived to be an important and essential part of the cultural landscape
of our city, state and region.
Recently, we’ve pushed this work even further by engaging more closely in collaboration with community members to create new installations of parts of our collection. I’m excited to describe a current project that we are very proud of. It’s called – in Spanish - Transformación Cultural: Nuestro pasado es presente, which means in English: Cultural Transformation: our past is present.
Beginning in the Spring of 2022, the UMFA has been working in partnership with a non-profit organization in Salt Lake City – Artes de Mexico en Utah. With their essential and engaged participation, we are in conversation with members of Utah’s Mexican and Mexican-American community to re-envision aspects of UMFA’s permanent collection with the aim of celebrating the rich and flourishing cultures of Mexico, past and present. Currently, the UMFA holds 75 archaeological objects from Mesoamerica – the historic region which comprises art from the modern-day countries of Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize and central to southern Mexico. Additionally, we hold 70 artworks dating between the 18th and 21st centuries that visualize diverse aspects of life in this region. The goal of this exciting project is to create a new installation of these collections that highlights the intersection of the past and the present, and celebrates the ways in which people living today carry ancestral knowledge that shapes our collective ideas of life, family, creativity, and culture.
This project is unusual in the degree to which we – the art museum - have welcomed and embraced community-knowledge about the art of this region. We’re not saying that such community-knowledge usurps art historical or archaeological knowledge. Rather we are certain that doing this work together with members of our community who identify as Mexican and Mexican-American will create a new installation of these objects that this is richer, more nuanced and more meaningful for all of us.
We have regular community meetings to better understand what these objects mean to people of Mexican descent and in March 2025, we will create a new installation of the collection that will share this learning and these stories and present these fantastic artworks as part of the ongoing living tradition of the people of present-day Mexico and central America. I hope you can see that this work represents a shift in our museological thinking about the ways in which an art museum can and should work in dialogue with community members to make smarter, more culturally sensitive and impactful installations and exhibitions. This project in particular will connect the people of the past and the beautiful objects they made and cared about to the people of the present. We’re excited to build authentic, long-term community relationships with people who identify as Hispanic and in so doing, we hope to become a more trusted and much-loved resource for this community in particular and for all people living in this region.
With this small example in mind and the spirit in which this work is being done, it isn’t hard to imagine the future of the UMFA as an increasingly loved and trusted cultural resource. A place where people can find themselves, their stories and histories, while they also come into contact with art from other parts of the world through time and space. And while art and objects are and will always be at the heart of what we are and what we do as an art museum, it’s the new ways of working with people – and communities – with humble hearts and a willingness to challenge the old ways of doing museum work that I am most excited about and that I believe will change the art museum for the better.
Thank you.
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