Restoring a Museum’s Reputation

All spiffed up in Balboa Park, the San Diego Museum of Art is preparing to celebrate its 75th anniversary. The big day, Feb. 28, is still a month away, but there’s already plenty to see.

History buffs know the museum stands on the site of the fine-arts building for the 1915 Panama-California International Exposition, and that it served as a hospital ward for the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1947, but they will probably want to inspect the Spanish Renaissance-style building’s rotunda, which has been restored to its original glory with a fresh coat of paint and a careful cleaning of the coffered ceiling. Those who are more attuned to new attractions can shop in the museum’s redesigned store and check out the refurbished permanent collection galleries.

As for special exhibitions, “American Impressionists Abroad and at Home: Paintings From the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a show of 39 paintings by 28 artists, including Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and John Singer Sargent, opens today and runs through April 22. Lithographs from the museum’s holding of works by French printmaker Albert Belleroche will be on view from Feb. 24 to May 27. And on Feb. 28, the museum will inaugurate a gallery dedicated to its extensive collection of South Asian paintings, donated in 1990 by Edwin Binney 3rd.

But even as the public is invited to toast the institution’s long life, members of San Diego’s cultural community and the art world at large are celebrating another development at the museum: the success of the new director, Don Bacigalupi.

A 40-year-old native of New York and former director of the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, Bacigalupi took charge of the museum in August 1999. But he already seems to have restored the respectability of an institution that had long been denigrated in professional circles as a venue for second- and third-rate blockbusters.

Bacigalupi’s predecessor, Steven Brezzo, imported popular shows on the art of the Muppets, Dr. Seuss, “Star Wars,” Faberge eggs and the Romanov jewels, but the fine-art program suffered, and several members of the core curatorial staff left. Brezzo ended his 20-year tenure in 1999, following a series of scandals involving inflated expense accounts and nepotism, and left an impression that the museum had either sold out to commerce or lost its way.

Bacigalupi’s fellow museum directors say he has put the institution back on track. “He has been an absolutely brilliant director during his first year here,” says Arthur Ollman, director of the neighboring Museum of Photographic Arts. “He has done a huge job of patching fences and reestablishing the Museum of Art as a nourishing and collaborative force in the community.” Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, also praises Bacigalupi. Although it’s too soon to tell how the exhibition program will evolve, his handling of the inherited exhibitions “shows a much more scholarly approach,” Davies says. “And the way he has reinstalled the permanent galleries is a wonderful transformation of that formerly quite dowdy second floor. It’s now light and vibrant and has good labels; it’s just a complete make-over.”

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The San Diego Museum of Art is city-owned, with an eclectic, 11,000-piece collection of American, European and Asian art, an annual attendance of about 400,000, a membership of about 17,000, and an annual operating budget of $10 million. Financially sound, the museum has a hefty endowment of about $90 million, thanks in large part to a $30-million bequest in 1999 from the estate of longtime museum supporters Rea and Lela Axline.

When Bacigalupi was being wooed by San Diego--and two other museums that he declines to identify--he says he saw “a stellar location, a stellar facility, some missed opportunities and possibilities for greatness that hadn’t yet been capitalized on.” The splashy exhibitions had increased community awareness, attendance and membership, “but there hadn’t been systematic attention to the collection, community relations and educational issues,” he says.

He made the move, believing in the museum’s potential but also acquiring a batch of problems--some of which were not evident during the interview process. While formulating a long-term strategic plan, he had to respond to urgent physical needs by redesigning and enlarging office space on the lower level, removing asbestos throughout the building, replacing the antiquated air-conditioning system and renting space for an educational facility in the nearby House of Hospitality.

At the same time, he had to figure out how to make better use of the permanent collection. One approach can be seen in “Asian Crossroads,” an installation that explores the flow and exchange of styles, motifs and technology in religious and secular works from many parts of Asia. Another tactic is to bracket temporary loan exhibitions with related works in the museum’s collection.

“I want to create a context for spectacular exhibitions of all kinds that come to us, in which there is lasting value for our permanent collection,” Bacigalupi says. “The museum has done a very good job of mounting major exhibitions and training the public to see them, but we haven’t done a very good job of making ourselves available as a daily resource for the study of all kinds of materials. I want to re-balance that in a program that includes our own materials in a very active way.”

If the San Diego Museum of Art was afflicted with box office fever during the 1980s and early ‘90s, it was not alone, Bacigalupi says. “We in the museum field have grown through the first generation of blockbusters, and I think we have learned a lot. In traveling down that path, something was lost, something of the soul of what a museum does, but I think we are in a different place now. We are trying to create that kind of excitement in ways that do better for us in the long run.”

Planning a well-rounded exhibition program is “like looking at one grid, then adding another and another,” he says. “The factors that weigh into almost every decision are so multifaceted, but once in a while you strike a perfect chord.”

His favorite example is “Power and Desire,” an exhibition of paintings from the Binney collection that appeared at the museum last summer as a sort of coming-out party for a group of exquisitely detailed paintings that had languished in storage. Both popular and critically acclaimed, the show is currently on view at the Asia Society in New York. “That simple exhibition prefaced the opening of the Binney Gallery here with the idea that you can come to the museum every day and have a kind of blockbuster experience that you can share with your friends,” he says.

It’s all part of “leveraging the collection into something that gains meaning in the future,” he says. “In conjunction with the 75th anniversary, we will announce acquisitions which are intended to stimulate interest in areas that we hope to grow.” Every gift or purchase isn’t a masterpiece, but each addition is part of “a mix that makes sense and creates a context for the masterpieces,” he says.

While getting acquainted with San Diego’s cultural community, he is also playing a leading role in the creation of a strategic plan for the 29 institutions in Balboa Park. It’s intended to help them operate more efficiently through collective marketing and purchasing, and by coordinating their meetings with city officials, he says.

In addition, he’s looking forward to co-produced programs, both inside and outside the park. “Because of the size of the city and the scale of its institutions, San Diego has a wonderful opportunity to be a model of civic collaboration,” he says.

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This isn’t exactly what Bacigalupi had in mind as a youth in New York. Although he was interested in art and music, he was headed toward a career in medicine. But while attending the University of Houston on a premed scholarship, he had “some major moments with art” that changed his direction. One of them occurred in the early 1980s on his first visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, when he came face to face with artworks that he had come to know as a child while playing the board game Masterpiece.

“I remember going into gallery after gallery, standing before every one of those paintings and realizing the magnitude of their power,” he says. “Not long after that, I started reassessing my career options. I was good at medicine, but it wasn’t driving me.”

He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1983, as valedictorian of his class, with a major in art history, then enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a master of arts degree in 1985. Returning to the East Coast, he spent the next three years writing art criticism and working in galleries in Provincetown, Mass., and New York.

“I loved talking about the art, but I didn’t love the selling part. All I wanted to do was share my enthusiasm,” he says. So he went back to the University of Texas to study postwar American art and got hooked on teaching. “There is a wondrous exchange that occurs in the classroom when you put out this energy and enthusiasm and it comes back to you in questions and alertness,” he says.

But in 1993, when he earned his doctorate and had to choose between teaching at the university or being a curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art, he decided to pursue museum work.

“I consider myself an educator first and foremost,” he says. “But I looked at it this way: The magic that happened in the classroom could only happen in limited numbers because I could only reach 100 students at a time, and it took a whole semester. If I could effect the same sort of magic in museum work and curatorial practice, I might be able to reach 100,000 people in a two-month span.”

From 1995 to ‘99, he worked at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery, first as curator and then as director. “I loved curating so much that I got pushed out of it,” he jokes.

“But directing is a lot like curating,” he says. “Instead of simply working with art, lenders and ideas, you are also working with the bigger factors--the facility, the community, the budgets, the collections, the exhibitions. The purely administrative aspects also have a kind of creative necessity about them that I have learned to quite like. I don’t feel that I have lost anything; I am just working at a different level.”