New Leader, Old Challenges at the Southwest Museum

The new man at the Southwest Museum is wide awake. He has heard all the bad news about Los Angeles’ riots and earthquakes, the recession’s impact on museums and problems he faces as director of the venerable institution in Highland Park. But anthropologist Thomas H. Wilson isn’t alarmed; instead, he sees an opportunity.

“Museums have a critical role to play in these days of racial and ethnic tension,” Wilson said, contending that institutions with ethnographic and anthropological collections have a special opportunity to take the lead. With its treasure chest of American Indian art, housed in a city of staggering ethnic variety, the 85-year-old Southwest Museum is poised to be a star, he said, in an interview in his office.

Wilson, 44, who has succeeded retiring director Jerome R. Selmer, views museums as intermediaries between academia and the public. As cultural interpreters, museums are crucial to the communities they serve, he said. The challenge at the Southwest Museum is not only to work with Los Angeles’ American Indian population--the largest urban concentration of American Indians in the United States--but to enlighten the city’s other ethnic groups through exhibitions and educational programs.

“This is a research facility, but there has to be a public payoff for research,” said Wilson, who currently serves as president of the American Anthropological Assn.’s Council for Museum Anthropology. “We have to present relevant, snappy exhibitions based on a close relationship of objects and ideas. With good research and good objects, we can present a visible message.

“Given the strength of the collection, we can offer many points of view--historical, anthropological, aesthetic,” he said. But regardless of the approach, it’s essential for exhibitions to have both “an intellectual punch and an artistic punch. We are capable of doing that, and I think it’s a winning mixture,” Wilson said.

With all the enthusiasm that might be expected of an energetic new director on his first day on the job, Wilson talked of turning the museum into “a national pace-setter” that will collaborate with other Los Angeles institutions and with museums of its kind across the country. The Southwest is already perceived as “a gem” by those who know its collection, he said. “They know the museum is important and that it deserves national standing and a high prominence in Los Angeles.”

As to financial and physical problems that have plagued the museum, Wilson appeared unperturbed. The museum’s $6.5-million endowment and $1.2-million annual operating budget must grow, but the Southwest is in better financial condition than many other museums, he said. “We need the wherewithal to run programs, but funds are available from foundations, the corporate sector and private sources, and we intend to pursue them in an aggressive way,” he said, noting that fund-raising will be a major component of his job.

In accepting his new position, Wilson has inherited an ongoing controversy about whether the museum should renovate and expand its beloved old Spanish-style building on Mount Washington or move to a new facility. With no air-conditioning, minimal laboratory facilities and grossly inadequate storage, the valuable collection is at extreme risk, curators and board members say. But neighbors, museum supporters and members of the art community are sharply divided about the course the museum should follow. The possibility of moving the museum out of the neighborhood is a particularly sensitive issue.

A study initiated by the museum’s long-range planning committee earlier this year has proposed three alternatives--minimal renovation, major expansion on the present site and relocation. The museum invited public input after the study was released. That response is now in the hands of the planning committee, which is expected to present its findings to the board of directors later this month.

“I have a completely open mind about all possibilities, as does the board of directors. We will look at all options,” Wilson said. “What’s most important is long-term planning. I can tell you that the Southwest Museum is going to be a preeminent museum in the United States in 50 years. This will be a very strong museum in the 21st Century.”

(Another lingering question at the Southwest concerns Patrick T. Houlihan, director of the museum from 1981 to 1987. The museum has sued Houlihan for allegedly removing 127 items--valued at about $3 million--from the collection and selling or trading them for personal gain. The trial is scheduled for October.)

Wilson’s arrival in Los Angeles is a return to the city of his birth--and to an institution that he became well acquainted with in the ‘80s while he was a program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities. (He was responsible for NEH grants for the museum’s Plains Hall project and for the computerized documentation system in the Braun Library.)

However, the new director is not one of thousands of Angelenos who have fond childhood memories of the museum. Wilson left the city when he was 2 and grew up on his aunt and uncle’s 18,000-acre ranch in Southern New Mexico. Indian pottery shards and other artifacts, which were part of the landscape on the ranch, inspired his enduring interest in native culture. “I turned a hobby into a profession,” he said.

Wilson first studied anthropology at the University of New Mexico, then did graduate study at UC Berkeley, writing his doctoral thesis on “Architecture and Chronology at Chichen Itza, Yucatan.”

He had specialized in North American and Central American anthropology, but he soon expanded his area of expertise to include Africa. During a nine-year period, from 1975 to 1984, he was a lecturer in archeology at the University of Nairobi, a research associate at the International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute for African Prehistory, and an archeologist and senior research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.

Wilson met his wife, British computer scientist Rowan Lindley, in Nairobi. The couple’s two children, Manda, 13, and James, 12, were born in Africa.

The family moved to the United States in 1983, when Wilson became a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University. He worked with the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington from 1985-90, then become deputy director of the Center for African Art in New York.

Despite Los Angeles’ bad press, the family had no fear of moving here--only the usual concerns about housing and schools, Wilson said. As for his new job, “I have no doubts about the museum,” he said.