Q&A with Portland's Brian Ferriso

Last week I was amazed to read new Portland Art Museum director Brian Ferriso say things that many museum directors want to say, but don't. They were the kind of things an August Personage can get away with -- but Ferriso has only been in Portland for ten months. "Either he won't last the month or I'm ready to deify him now," I wrote. Yesterday Ferriso and I talked about whether he was expecting to receive unemployment benefits anytime soon.

MAN: Last week you told the Portland Oregonian, "If there aren't enough people visiting the museum to satisfy the board and others, then maybe I'm the wrong guy." How do you get away with that? How do you know you can say that publicly?

Ferriso: Maybe I don't. Maybe I'm just foolish. I worked at the Milwaukee Art Museum for a number of years and was part of that expansion project. I remember the conversation that was happening there. I was the director of curatorial affairs and people were saying, 'Get us exhibitions! Get us exhibitions! We've gotta get the gate!' -- but they didn't know what it took to get great exhibitions, that you had to have great people, strong curators and a more cohesive strategy. That experience made me a little more thoughtful.

MAN: I know lots of museum directors who want to say that, who might say it over drinks or something, but very few who will say it when our ties are still on. And it certainly countermands the Krensian wisdom that you have to do splash to be relevant.

Ferriso: I guess it's interesting to hear your thought on that. Maybe that's a bold statement, I don't know. When I came to the [job] interview here, I talked about the economics of exhibitions and I laid that out to people. The percentage of admissions dollars that contribute to the overall budget isn't that much. [Indianapolis Museum of Art director] Max Anderson and others really drove down on this and really tried to understand methods and costs. There's obviously been a metric here in Portland that has looked at admissions, numbers of members and aggregate dollars raised [as a way of justifying the previous exhibitions program]. Ultimately I think you're maybe not fulfilling your mission or really not trying to come to terms with your nonprofit education mandate if you think in terms of admissions dollars. I think I've been fairly consistent on this with the board, in my interview and with the community.

MAN: I ran some of those numbers in a very rough way and put them on MAN a number of years ago. Museum directors emailed, told me I was wrong. I said, OK, here are the tax forms from which I took my argument. What am I missing?

Ferriso: I guess that the counter-argument is that the gate drives people coming to the museum for the first time, which drives memberships, repeat visits and so on?

MAN: Yes, but I've never seen a study that validated or proved what seems like a fanciful theory.

Ferriso: Yes. I love this field and I love museums. I think it's a very important time for us. This shift of really understanding - as I think Max [Anderson] said, we are not an attraction. We are an educational institution. We have been positioned at some levels [to be] attractions and if we continue to go that way we will make ourselves insignificant very quickly. We need to really change the conversation, and the conversation needs to be: We are a non-profit. We are something that is essential to the human experience. Art is why we exist because art is essential to the human experience. It's not cancer research versus the art museum; you need both to have a healthy mind and a healthy body. I believe in that. Museums need to have newly defined metrics or perhaps just metrics that reach back to what they used to be.

MAN: You also did something else that you don't see too many new directors doing publicly: You picked an ethics battle right off. That is, you severed a contract because you saw ethical problems.

Ferriso: I actually don't know if I picked it quickly, but it was an observation I had about the institution. It's my opinion that there was a compromised position, that our individual who was consulting on acquisitions in a certain area had a husband who was a highly-respect dealer in that same area. That's my opinion. Other colleagues may feel differently. I do feel that Penelope [Hunter-Stiebel] has done an excellent job for us and I have no qualms about saying that. I feel I can be supportive of her and her role here and what she's done, and I can see her perhaps providing guidance on major exhibitions. I feel very comfortable speaking highly of her to my colleagues and about her professional qualifications. It's just this idea that perception and the compromised position she was in on acquisition is something that we need to have clarified, and maybe have a clean line of understanding on what her role was.

MAN: What was the impetus for your prioritizing the issues about which we're talking?

Ferriso: I had a friend who worked at Enron and I saw what happened there. I've watched and observed what Christopher Knight has written about several Los Angeles institutions, what has been written about and what has happened at the Smithsonian. I think we need to be very clear about values and what you believe in.

Related: The paper to which Ferriso refers several times is Metrics of Success in Art Museums. Anderson wrote it while doing a stint at the Getty. Here it is in PDF form, here in HTML.