Sharing the Smithsonian

Only six weeks ago, when Lawrence M. Small was installed as the 11th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, he vowed that the 153-year-old organization would reach “new standards of service to the public.”

That’s a tall order. Fondly known as the nation’s attic or, as Small puts it, “a monument to American curiosity,” the Smithsonian is the largest museum and research complex in the world. With 14 museums and galleries, Washington’s National Zoo and two museums in New York City under its wing, the Smithsonian attracts 30 million visitors a year.

An additional 5 million people visit the institution’s traveling exhibitions, while an estimated 8 million read the monthly Smithsonian magazine. Still others participate in educational programs such as this week’s Smithsonian Week in Long Beach, which has brought experts and exhibits to local public schools.

“It’s a big deal,” Small said of the multifaceted institution during his recent whirlwind visit to Los Angeles. The 58-year-old former president and CEO of Fannie Mae is determined to increase the Smithsonian’s national outreach.

“The Smithsonian has become the undisputed, most extensive provider of authoritative experience connecting the American people to their cultural, historical and scientific heritage,” Small said. “What we intend to do now is to make the Smithsonian virtually ubiquitous throughout the United States.”

The primary method he has in mind is through Affiliations, an initiative established in 1998 to form partnerships with museums and other cultural organizations. Its mission is to make the Smithsonian’s vast and varied collections more accessible through long-term loans.

“We have 141 million items in the Smithsonian collections. Fewer than 2% are on display,” Small said. “Let’s say you have just started an African American museum to bring your community together by tapping into the roots of African American culture. We have objects that relate to your part of the country, to African Americans, to art, history and science, and we want to be your partner. The same thing is true of Hispanics, Pacific Islanders and so on.”

The United States has had a huge influx of immigrants during the past decade, so extending the Smithsonian’s outreach is both logical and useful, he said. “If you fundamentally believe that it’s a good thing to have an institution that can cause the public to connect with the various elements that make up a national identity, then having the Smithsonian touch many more lives is clearly a healthy thing to do.”

The fledgling Affiliations program allows partners to use items in Smithsonian collections for exhibitions, research and educational purposes--and to add the tag line, “in association with the Smithsonian Institution” to their names. Open to all nonprofit cultural institutions, the program has signed up about 25 organizations so far, ranging from the American Jazz Museum in St. Louis and the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland to the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

“Museums are hot; everyone is starting one,” Small said. But they don’t necessarily have much to display and that’s where the Smithsonian can help. “It not only has the objects, they are the objects. The Smithsonian has been around since 1846 and it does everything with the utmost scholarship and authority,” he said.

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At the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, director Gregorio Luke said he is “looking forward to having a strong relationship with the Smithsonian, not only to present art from their wonderful Latin American collections, but also to bring in their experts and events they organize.” The association will also facilitate new cooperative arrangements among Affiliates with similar missions, he said.

The Smithsonian’s collections include more than 50,000 American artworks, 14 million documents on American art and the world’s largest holdings of biological specimens and air and space artifacts. “Essentially you have the entire breadth of American history and culture at the Smithsonian, so the number of ways that you can tap into it is limitless,” Small said.

But he also has a financial motivation for sharing the wealth of objects. Getting more of them out of storage and into far-flung museums will demonstrate the Smithsonian’s value to the entire country, the secretary said. The Smithsonian had a budget of $570 million in fiscal 1999, of which $412 million was an appropriation from Congress. The rest was raised from the private sector and revenue from gift shops, catalog sales and admission to Imax movies.

Smithsonian Affiliates typically pay costs of packing, shipping, insuring and installing loaned objects, but they do not compete with the Washington behemoth for public and private support, Small said. Indeed, he insisted, the arrangement will be mutually beneficial in terms of fund-raising.

“If the government sees us doing more where the constituents of elected officials are voting, they are going to be helpful to us. At the same time, if our privately supported Affiliates become more attractive [because of their association with the Smithsonian], they will get more from the private sector,” he said. “The last thing I would ever want to see us do is go after the same donor. I believe there is more than enough to go around.”