The Directors: Joyce Tsai & Anna Boatwright
We will thrive when we understand ourselves as drivers of social progress, not alone but as part of an extended community.
4 QUESTIONS WITH Joyce Tsai and Anna Boatwright
Director and Deputy Director & COO, Clyfford Still Museum
Denver, CO
Joyce Tsai, PhD is director of the Clyfford Still Museum. She is an internationally acclaimed curator, scholar, and teacher. She arrived at CSM in 2021 from the University of Iowa, where she served as Chief Curator of the Stanley Museum of Art and Associate Professor of Practice in the School of Art and Art History. During her tenure at the University of Iowa, she led initiatives that have positioned the museum as a major catalyst for innovative, high impact teaching, research, and outreach. Dr. Tsai is trained as an intellectual historian and art historian -- Princeton, AB (History, cum laude); Johns Hopkins University, MA (German), PhD (Art History and Humanities). Tsai’s book, László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography (UC Press, 2018) garnered critical acclaim for its integrated approach to avant-garde art, practice, and theory and is winner of the Phillips Collection Book Prize. She has published extensively in the field of technical art history with conservators and conservation scientists at the National Gallery of Art, Harvard Art Museums, Guggenheim, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
Anna Boatwright joined the Clyfford Still Museum in November 2021. Anna moved to Denver from New York where she spent the past 9 years helping institutions including The Frick Collection, The Brooklyn Museum and the Met Museum with strategy, operational management and development. While at the Frick, Anna led planning and management of the museum’s renovation and expansion project with design partner Selldorf Architects. Anna also executed the Frick’s two-year residency, Frick Madison, in the iconic Whitney Breuer building. Anna completed undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College, her Masters in Art and Museum Studies at Georgetown University, and her MBA at Columbia Business School.
About the Clyfford Still Museum: Designed by Allied Works Architecture to display the revolutionary art of one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, the Clyfford Still Museum opened in November 2011 in Denver’s Golden Triangle Creative District. Considered one of the most important and mysterious painters of the 20th century, Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was among the first generation of abstract expressionist artists who developed a new and powerful approach to painting in the years during and immediately after World War II. The Museum’s collection represents more than 93% of the artist’s lifetime output. As the steward of Still’s art and legacy, the Museum’s mission is to preserve, exhibit, study, and foster engagement with its unique collections; generate outstanding exhibitions, scholarly research, educational and other cross-disciplinary programs that broaden the definition of a single-artist museum; and be a gathering place for the exploration of innovation and individual artistic endeavor. Connect with the Clyfford Still Museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or at clyffordstillmuseum.org.
1. You both joined the museum last year and this spring celebrated the 10 year anniversary. What successes do you hope to build upon, and how do you aim to “broaden the definition of a single-artist museum”?
Clyfford Still forged an unlikely path for an artist. Gallerist Betty Parsons positioned Still along with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko as her four horsemen of abstract expressionism. His work was sought out by curators like Dorthy Miller at MoMA; Peggy Guggenheim was an early and important supporter. But despite his critical and commercial success at mid-century, Still decided early on that he didn’t want to play by art world rules, neither as they pertained to galleries nor to museums. He left New York and bought a farm in Westminster, Maryland where he would spend the rest of his life painting, rarely selling. He did this to retain the integrity of his vision. When he died, he willed his entire collection to an American city. Denver vied for it twice and when it succeeded, the city and county became the owners of over 93 percent of everything he ever made. The museum was established to steward this extraordinary resource. The first decade of the Museum’s history sought to reintroduce the world to Clyfford Still’s extraordinary paintings and his contributions to the history of modern art. The museum itself, designed by Brad Cloepfil is a rare, exquisite example of where the collection and building resonate so powerfully with one another that the space resounds with beauty.
We are so fortunate to inherit such a remarkable institution, home to a collection of artworks that belongs to the City and County of Denver. The civic identity of this museum is significant and foundational to our identity. Still willed his collection, not to an existing art museum nor to a commercial gallery. He sensed or hoped that his life’s work could become a resource from which a community could draw strength. One of the most thrilling opportunities is for us to lean into this defining feature of our institutional identity. We don’t actively collect, but instead can invest thought and care in exhibitions, programs, and interventions that invite different members of our extended community to engage with us and show us how we activate this collection anew. Put differently, precisely because of the fixity of our collection, we have the chance to treat the museum like a Kunsthalle for ever changing ideas. It becomes a space we can gather to bathe in the beauty of his works and find a rhythm of being that is different from the frenetic pace of our everyday, connected lives. The museum with its archives and collections can also allow us to ask difficult questions, test out differences with one another with civility, and cultivate new habits of civic behavior.
2. With regards to diversifying audiences and engaging communities beyond traditional arts constituencies, what are some of your priorities in this area, and what opportunity do you see for increased support of local arts ecosystems?
Our current exhibition, Clyfford Still, Art, and the Young Mind, is an exceptional example of how we’re diversifying our audiences by integrating their perspectives in our curatorial planning process. Over the past three years, most of which unfolded at the height of the pandemic, in the face of real uncertainty, our associate curator, Bailey Placzek, and director of education, Nicole Cromartie, worked with 8 schools, including head start and institutions that receive title 1 funding. They earned the trust of these teachers and they organized this current exhibition with the children of the Front Range. Informed by deep research on early childhood development, they gathered selections of Still’s paintings and presented them to children as young as 8 months old to 8 year olds and invited them to make selections, create arrangements, and produce interpretations that we’ve integrated in our galleries. The exhibition invites us all to bask in these paintings and breaks down any preconception that you might need a PhD to understand abstract expressionism. It shows us how much we have to learn when we attend to the perspectives of children. More broadly, it shows us what’s to be gained when we open ourselves fully to the community. The result is stunning. Our wall texts are fully bilingual in English and Spanish; deaf children produced ASL interpretations of Still’s work; and twice a month, our educators lead an Art Crawl that introduces new parents and caretakers of infants to museuming with a baby. We did this not for the cuteness or novelty factor. We believe that this museum belongs to our community. And a sense of belonging has to be cultivated and is perhaps most effective when a child knows that they can derive joy, thought, and care at our museum. When that child feels drawn to us, their extended families do too.
This is just one example of how we’re diversifying our audiences from the ground up. Our programs also have the capacity to highlight the rich diversity of perspectives in different media. The Music in the Galleries program is well loved and is mounted in partnership with local organizations like Swallow Hill Music, Friends of Chamber Music, and Youth on Record, all of whom are committed to creating sustained long-term opportunities for and amplifying the talent of underrepresented artists. On this front, we’re lucky to be part of an artistic ecosystem that is deeply collaborative. We’re in a city that values culture so much so that our residents have voted every 12 years to tax itself. The SCFD, which distributed over 72 million dollars last year to three hundred cultural organizations, helps to sustain the diversity of institutions and perspectives here in Denver. This funding does not replace private philanthropy, but does provide institutions with the stability needed to create compelling programs that attract high impact, sustaining support. What we find in Denver is unusual – institutions in different fields, from the biggest to the smallest, often share major and lead donors. I think because of the culture of collaboration, the philanthropic landscape here in Denver is generous, cooperative, and constantly looking for ways to link our different non-profits together.
3. Year after year, arts giving has remained stagnant at 4% of overall private charitable giving. Next era donors — those inheriting the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history — are turning away from the arts to support areas they see as greater drivers of social progress. (This is one reason arts giving decreased by 8% during the pandemic.) In your views, how does cultural patronage need to evolve to strengthen 21st century arts institutions, how can the sector best engage the next era of donors, and how can the sector better articulate its social value and impact?
When we frame the problem of funders turning away from art and toward other areas of giving, we treat charitable giving as a zero sum game. From our perspective, the Clyfford Still Museum has a unique opportunity to identify areas of shared value, commitment, and enterprise in alliance with nonprofits doing high-impact work that advances social progress. Take for example the work we’re doing in early childhood, especially in the space from infancy to pre-K. What we’re providing is a sense of community for caregivers and parents, new ways contributing to the success of a child by intervening upon what research has shown us to be some of the most critical periods in their development. We have partnered with university researchers, early childhood organizations, and are looking to build strength and expertise in this area. For a project like this, we’re not asking donors to limit their giving to us but can show that by investing in us, we’re also advancing the work of many beyond the walls of our institution. We will thrive when we understand ourselves as drivers of social progress, not alone but as part of an extended community.
4. What legacy do you hope to leave at the Museum?
The perspective we’re taking goes beyond the next five to ten years; we’re thinking about the impact this institution can have for generations to come. We have the opportunity to position the museum as a space that strengthens our ties to one another, enables new perspectives, and incubates transformative multi-disciplinary research, practice, and ideas. We are home to an extraordinary resource that belongs to the City and County of Denver and we become a place of belonging for us all.
The Clyfford Still Museum is poised to advance innovative practices in everything that we do. As we embark on our second decade, our responsibility is to make decisions from the position of strength that has been built in our first ten years and use that strength to take risks, to experiment and to bring our field and our practices forward in the ways that are most needed by our communities. We will be doing this in our programs, in our funding methods, in our curatorial practices, and in our operational systems. It is my hope to leave the museum with the structures in place that will continue to self-perpetuate a culture that takes best advantage of its resources, that listens boldly and responds to the needs of its communities and embraces the freedom that has been granted by our very origin.
The Path Forward interview series, an initiative of MCW Projects LLC, investigates how cultural and philanthropic leaders are re-envisioning the future of the arts.