Marjorie Schwarzer - Remarks On Sjma's 40th Anniversary

“Riches, Realists and Radicals: 40 Years at SJMA”

Marjorie Schwarzer Chair, Department of Museum Studies John F. Kennedy University, Berkeley, California Remarks delivered at the 40th-Anniversary Founders’ Brunch, May 31, 2009 San Jose Museum of Art

Thank you for inviting me to celebrate this 40th birthday anniversary celebration. I salute all of you – board, volunteers, staff – past and present – for reaching this milestone and doing such important work on behalf of the artistic and creative spirit, civic values and community building. In the life of an art museum, 40 years really isn’t old. Yet within the life of a burgeoning, rapidly-changing, fluid city like San Jose, a city ruled in part by Moore’s law, by the vicissitudes of the tech economy, and the start-up-sell-off culture that is Silicon Valley, 40 years as a community anchor is a remarkable achievement.

My role here is as someone who studies museum history and trends in the United States – museums of all kinds –and also someone charged with the daunting role of training the next generation of museum professionals. As a historian, I was honored when Deb Nordberg offered me the opportunity to think deeply about SJMA’s place in the great arc that is museum history. What I discovered in my research is something that you probably already know: SJMA is a unique case that emerged out of a defining moment in museum history that coincided with a defining moment in the history of this city. As a trainer of museum professionals, I also need to share with you that this can-do, grassroots,

supremely experimental and civic institution arising out of 1960s community activism and, yes, community organizing has inspired some of JFKU’s finest graduate students— at least ten, probably more—who have gone to accomplish huge things in the art world. One of your former interns (an alum of my program) is in Venice right now, opening the first Palestinian art pavilion ever to be developed at the Venice Biennale. She directly attributes her courage to showcase this artwork to her experience at SJMA. In two weeks, we are awarding masters degrees to two San Jose natives, one of whom is first generation from an immigrant Filipino family, both of whom directly attribute their love of art and museums to the role SJMA played in their lives. One can vividly recall exhibitions he’s seen here. The other speaks of the welcoming environment, the friendliness, the anchor SJMA has been in her life.

So in the spirit of both your history and your ability – that I have directly experienced -to inspire and change people’s lives, what I’m going to do over the next few minutes is three things. First, I’m going to breeze through a classical history of art museums in the US, to set a context of how and why art museums get founded. Then I’m going to talk about 1969 – a pivotal year both for the art museum field and for San Jose. Finally, I’ll conclude with some thoughts about why SJMA is such a unique case and what this might mean for the next forty years, and beyond.

Historically, the founding of an art museum typically combines the qualities of vision, ego, and hubris on the part of someone prominent and wealthy (say an Andrew Mellon or a Henry Clay Frick). This mythical robber baron typically loves art, collects it, and has

the political and financial clout to arrange it in a mansion, a monumental classical building, or some other kind of special building usually on a prime bit of real estate – usually in an upscale part of town -- with the idea of enshrining a family name and reputation for good deeds and, at the same time, doing the good deed of uplifting and civilizing the masses. We also need to give credit where credit is due: these museum founders are visionaries who recognized that their communities were at pivotal moments in their development – it could be a war; a new industry; a real estate development scheme; something was changing and civic leaders saw the value of museums – especially art museums -- to be anchors, inspirers, places that communicated permanence and continuity during times of great flux.

Thus it is no accident that the nation’s first museum, founded in Charleston South Carolina opened in 1773, before we even had a nation. Other markers for the founding of museums include: •

the post-Civil War and immigration boom in northern cities leading to the founding of museums like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,

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the cycle of world’s expositions in the 1900s leading to the founding of places like the San Diego Museum of Art and Albright Knox in Buffalo,

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the post-World War 1 economic boom that led to the roaring 20s and brought us museums like the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

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the Great Depression which birthed community museums funded as part of the Works Progress Administration like the Boise Art Museum and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis,

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World War II which I will get to shortly,

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leading all the way to the 1960s.

1969: Hippies, anti-war protests, rock & roll. Civil Rights. The Black Panthers march on Oakland City Hall. The United Farm Workers starts advocating a lettuce boycott in the Salinas Valley. The American Indian Movement plans its takeover of Alcatraz Island. Woodstock, Midnight Cowboy. Led Zeppelin, Scooby Doo. Flower power. These powerful media images from 1969 might lead a newcomer or outsider to believe that SJMA was simply an accidental love child of 60s alternative activist culture. It wasn’t.

Activism, multiculturalism and the environment of the 60s certainly played a role in SJMA’s founding, but the real story here hearkens to the visionary instincts and trends that I alluded to earlier -- minus of course the art collector, the egos and the wealthy backer. The founding of SJMA is about a group of citizens who realized that their post World War II community had reached a pivotal point and that there was deep hunger for a place that could restore faith in community, communicate human continuity, and that art – and not rampant real estate and freeway development -- could help to inspire people to do good deeds.

SJMA’s founding signals that this wildly growing city was trying to revive a downtown in the midst of wholesale modern sprawl through a grassroots coalition, and anticipating that the city desperately needed a vibrant community-driven space that would showcase and encourage creativity and artistic expression.

Think about it: At the close of World War II, the population of San Jose was about 90,000 – San Jose was a laid-back agricultural town. The end of World War II changed all that forever, with the opening of new military bases, a new freeway system – most significantly the 101 -- new state universities, new office parks, new shopping centers and other sprawling automobile-centric developments. These were famously steered by a controversial pro-development city manager. Between 1950 and 1969, San Jose’s population quintupled. Quintupled from less than 100,000 to over 500,000 in less than two decades!

At the same time, around the nation – from the freeway revolts up in San Francisco to the historic preservation movement championed in the eastern United States – an antigrowth, pro urban downtown movement was gaining traction. San Jose citizens – new and old -- who had seen orchards razed, villages annexed, watersheds endangered -- were especially motivated to control and curtail the growth. The foundational efforts of SJMA became a rallying cry that people could get their hearts around. When the old post officeturned-library that is part of the building we are now in, was slated for demolition, citizens along with members of the city council seized the moment and banded together with artists, faculty from San Jose State University, oldtimers, some of the people who

are here in this room today and rescued the building in order to turn it into an art museum. As Susan Hammer recalled later, “In the guise of urban renewal, the city was going to tear down the wonderful sandstone building that now houses the museum … a central motivation in creating the museum was to kindle a spark for the renovation of the downtown.”

But why a museum? Why not turn the building into a hotel, a restaurant, a bunch of shops, a movie theatre, a gym and other number of other possible uses. This is where museum history comes in. In 1969, museum was in the air. Around the nation museum leaders were working hard to shed their elitist, hands-off images and position museums are more diverse, populist, community-centric places.

1969 is the year that the Exploratorium was founded in San Francisco. It is the year that the Oakland Museum opened its museum campus that combined three existing collections in crumbling facilities in to a modern centralized structure. It is the year that the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its controversial exhibition Harlem on My Mind exhibition, reaching out to a historically excluded community. Likewise it is the year of Smithsonian’s experimental Anacostia Museum that placed itself in an abandoned movie theatre in a poor African American neighborhood.

I’ll bet you didn’t think you were going to hear about tax codes today. Well, think again. 1969 was also the year of a pivotal lobbying effort in Washington led by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Field Museum in Chicago that included museums in the 1969

revised tax code. In 1969 --for the first time since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s—the IRS gave museums tax-exempt status, allowed them to incorporate as nonprofit organizations, and released federal funds to museums. 1969 was a big year then that opened the floodgates for donations of art, and funds for museum outreach, education, exhibitions and other kinds of programs that would bring museums to the people.

But let’s give credit where credit is due. In 1969 no one equated “art museum” with downtown revitalization the way SJMA’s founding body did. This was because as supreme visionaries you recognized the educational, outreach and other practical aspects of museums, hooked into the discourse of the times that was going on in Washington, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, etc., but also recognized the unique needs right here.

These foundational impulses – of combining national impulses with local needs – is what I think has made SJMA tick. Let’s go back to our timeline. During the 1970s, we saw the rise of educational outreach, alternative art forms, blockbuster shows, some controversial exhibitions and the like, and SJMA was a healthy and active participant and player in those movements, always on the side of public access and free speech. During the 1980s, there was retrenchment coupled with a new focus on marketing and corporate sponsorship, and SJMA weathered that storm, capped off by Loma Prieta in 1989. Amazingly, at a point when the Bay Area, due to Loma Prieta and then the East Bay fires, seemed to stop still, SJMA did something else that no one was doing – you built an addition. And amazingly, a few years later in the late 1990s at a point when everyone

else in the Bay Are and beyond was talking starchitecture, you managed to dodge that bullet so that you continue to operate in a sustainable, reasonable – if too small for your big ideas – space. Instead during the dot.com bubble, SJMA focused on experimentation, community building through educational programs, collections exchanges, experiments with interpretation and admissions policies and so on.

The unique foundational attributes of SJMA – the demographics and sprawling city; the grass-roots development without a deeply pocketed backer – inform who SJMA is for and why it was founded, but where does this leave us today? Almost back to why SJMA was founded in the first place. Since 1969, the population of SJ has doubled again; it is now one million, while San Francisco and Oakland’s populations have remained static. With all the changes in communication technology, the economy and immigration to name a few, people are once again hungering for community, for places that communicate continuity, beauty, creativity, anchors that can moor us in these exciting yet fluid times. Where can we grow and feel inspired? And why does a civic art museum – in an old post office with an understated modern pre-starchitecture addition – matter? Again it goes to the unique situation here in SJ and let me sum this up with three observations. 1. SJMA operates in a sometimes struggling downtown set in the midst of a sprawling rapidly-expanding multi-ethnic booming region, on the southern edge of a more established city – San Francisco. This means that, more than traditional art museums that have a set constituency and play by set rules, SJMA has had to function as an anchor, a center, an attractor, a respite and an invigorator of artistic expression all at the same time and amidst constantly changing population and cityscape;

2. SJMA is a completely grass-roots community-driven art museum and community anchor, giving you a broader reach, a more important role than most art museums, but calling on much more innovation in terms of financing and planning; and

3. SJMA is part of the culture of Silicon Valley, the sweeping communications and creative engine driving the 21st century global social network and economy. This is why SJMA has been a leader in showing internationally significant media art as well as using podcasts, Youtube technology, handhelds, and other innovations that you have pioneered and have been copied around the world. But it also sets up the ultimate challenge – what is the role of the art museum within a community like Silicon Valley? Is this a time to do something really radical – like build a new building, change your brand, delve into new kinds of collections, artforms, educational strategies? Maybe. You know better than I do.

But I want to close by putting my museum studies professor hat back on and going back to that young woman who was born here, grew up here, and whose life was changed because she saw SJMA as a friendly, welcoming place that intrigued her and captivated her. It’s for people like her – who was so motivated by experiences that she had right here that she has gone places where she never thought she would go. And that is why SJMA matters.