Derrick Cartwright?
All that I know about Cartwrights can be found on one of my favorite childhood TV shows. I could swear that’s Derrick, aka Little Joe, riding the range:
Thankfully, Jen Graves of Seattle’s The Stranger knows a lot more than I do about the future director of the Seattle Art Museum, having interviewed him yesterday and found him to be “a very pleasant person—or at least as a person who bothers to know his audience and to adapt to it….Not a chameleon (he exudes more spine than that), but a listener.”
He does looks quite pleasant:
Jen also reports that he admires Max Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which works for me. Derrick assumes his new post this fall. Director Mimi Gates retires on June 30.
But does he have a plan to overcome the WaMu Whammy? The Seattle Times tells us that the museum still hasn’t found a tenant for the eight floors above the new Seattle Art Museum expansion, which had been leased by the failed bank. That situation makes the following an unfortunate choice of words by the search committee’s head, SAM trustee Charles Wright:
Derrick was clearly the right leader to leverage [!?!] and build upon the remarkable foundation SAM has built under Mimi Gates‘ leadership.
The foundation is fine, but what about those upper floors?
Back at Derrick’s current home, the San Diego Museum of Art, the financial situation isn’t all that rosy either. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in February that the museum was to “lay off 23 employees from across all departments…It was reacting to a 30 percent reduction in its endowment,
from $77.5 million to $53 million, since the beginning of the fiscal
year on July 1, 2008.” The SDMA’s (reduced) budget this year was $9.12 million, according to the Union-Tribune, compared to about $25.1 million at SAM, according to the Seattle Times.
Fiscally and programmatically, it’s a big step up. But at least most of the nation’s art museum directors already know Cartwright: He’s the education chair of the 19-member board of the Association of Art Museum Directors and was one of the hosts at AAMD’s mid-winter meeting this January in San Diego.