Jane Pisano: The natural

I wish I could play with that cartoonish phrase and say, “Jane Pisano slept with the fishes,” but “slept with” here means “camped out under” and “fishes” is really a whale: the great Humboldt fin whale that hangs in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. It was under that skeleton that she and some donors unfurled their sleeping bags not long ago.

Pisano has been the museum’s president and director for nearly nine years. That’s not exactly an eon, but it’s a good piece of time in the history of a museum that turns 100 years old in 2013.

For a lot of her professional life in L.A., she was entirely about the future: as a vice president at USC, and before that as the head of LA 2000, a project strategizing the opportunities and obstacles for a future Los Angeles that is already upon us.

Now Pisano’s work is about both: the distant and the near past of Southern California — in the splendid museum in Exposition Park across from USC — and the region’s future, as the institution steps up its game with a $115-million makeover. That’s all the hammering and sawing inside. Outside, there’s the noisy work on Metro’s Expo Line, which will put two light-rail stops right outside the museum’s doors. And, still in the hard-hat stage, there’s the splashy July opening for the “Age of Mammals” exhibition — as it says, 65 million years in the making. Trust me, they don’t look a day over a million.

Was “Night at the Museum” like an educational video for you?

When I saw “Night at the Museum,” I laughed. [ Ben Stiller] is a very creative guy, and it reintroduced the public to natural history museums. By the time that movie came out, we were on the road in our transformation. We already knew that the experience had to be fun as well as educational, keeping that and jettisoning the stuff that doesn’t work so well. So we were able to laugh and enjoy the point.

Can it be said that this is Los Angeles’ Smithsonian?

It’s not far-fetched. We have 35 million objects and specimens here [about half of them research only]; we’re second in size only to the Smithsonian in terms of our stuff.

What’s one of the differences?

We’ve learned that the L.A. market is unique; that adults choose where they’re going and they do it based on whether they think they will have a good time. We try to understand who is our visitor, who are our potential visitors and what would make them come. We learned in doing work for “The Age of Mammals” that our visitors can’t tell you what a mammal is, but they want to know, and they don’t want the science dumbed down. They want to know why they should care, and we can do that. People want to feel smart, and the “aha” moment is the fun — “Oh, I didn’t know that!”

Who is your visitor?

A typical visitor is a multigenerational family. In school group season, our typical weekday visitor would be a teacher and students. Our paying audience is about 35% Latino, 10% African American and Asian, and the rest white. It’s very diverse.

The sign on the freeway says “Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.” The phrase “natural history” goes back to

Aristotle. Does the museum need rebranding?

One of the things we decided not to do was change the name. We need to infuse the words “natural history” with a new meaning for a 21st century audience. It’s about walking the talk of our mission, which is to inspire wonder, discovery and responsibility for our natural and cultural world.

Almost half of your operating budget comes from L.A. County, the rest from admission, endowment earnings and philanthropy. Is it harder to get donations because people think the county pays all the bills?

We’ve, I think, been pretty successful in making the case that the county provides enough money to keep the building standing and turn on the lights and open the doors, but all the things that make it beautiful comes from the money that the foundation raises or earns. Once you make the case that the institution couldn’t carry out its mission if it were reliant only on county money, that seems to be persuasive.

Why does L.A. sometimes seem like it’s a harder nut to crack when it comes to philanthropy?

I think it’s newer philanthropy. A founder is going to give to what interests them, and a foundation will establish a mission and categories of giving.

How did you end up in this job?

I walked across the street [from her job as a USC vice president]! I’ve been interested in this institution long before I joined this board. When I read Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” it really changed my life. I thought, “I really love this stuff. How come I didn’t major in biology?” When they asked me to take this on, I said yes because I felt like it was an institution that could be world class and that Los Angeles deserved a world-class natural history museum.

[It’s] an enormous amount of work, getting everyone on the same page about what a natural history museum is. The researchers think it’s a research institute, educators think it’s a place for moms and kids in strollers — everybody’s touching the elephant and seeing something different. With the work we did, with listening to our visitors, we were able to say, it’s not about our research collections; it’s about how our research and collections meet the visitor.

Did you find something visitors didn’t like, and change it?

The whole staff watched how [visitors] walked through galleries. Even things they said they came to see, like the dinosaurs, they walked through in two minutes. There wasn’t enough to engage them, to spend time or come back. So we’re going to have 15,000 square feet of dinosaurs, talk about how you find them in the field, this is what we think happened to dinosaurs and why. For anybody who wants to know anything about the natural world, this will be the place you’ll come again and again.

I hear you have the best Hollywood collection anywhere.

We do! It’s in storage, but it’s going to have a rotating presence in “Under the Sun: The Environmental and Cultural History of Los Angeles,” which will open in the fall of 2012. We have Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp costume, complete. We have the model for King Kong’s hand, when he grabbed Fay Wray. We have lots of costumes. We have Walt Disney’s desk where he made his animation cells.

OK, I’m hooked. Are there quirkier collections too?

We have a freezer that’s filled with roadkill and animals that died in zoos. We never know when we’re going to need one to taxidermy. We have pelts that have been given to us over time. The zebra downstairs, it came to us as a rug and has been made into this beautiful taxidermied specimen. We have drawers and drawers of birds from this area so we can study changes over time. We have a gun collection that I’ve never seen. We have refrigerators people gave us that are part of our material culture collection. It’s like grandma’s attic on steroids.

Is it frustrating knowing that so much is in storage?

Our goal is to put everything that’s really great out there, and I think we’ll accomplish that. We have stuff that can’t be out except on a temporary basis — Amelia Earhart’s flight log is very fragile, and she wrote in pencil, and it’s already very faded: It can go out for maybe three months. Our intent and our goal is that when visitors come, they are going to see our best stuff.

When you first came here, did you just wander around and look at stuff?

Yes, I did! I would go home at night and say to my husband, “I learned a new word today.” My first day here, I was introduced to the Lincoln Heights whale. I couldn’t figure out what the whale was doing in Lincoln Heights. Even though I knew it wasn’t near the L.A. River, I said, did it take a wrong turn in the river? The answer was no; it’s from a time when all of Los Angeles was underwater.

That changed everything for me about how I think about Los Angeles. Many days, I learn something I didn’t know before, and that’s really good, because running this place is hard. [Trustee] Kevin Sharer once said, is the view worth the climb? And at the Natural History Museum, the view is indeed worth the climb.

Is there something in here that’s your favorite?

You know, it changes. The Simi Valley mastodon is worming its way into my heart because it comes from a place that I know, I have a human connection with, even if it’s across thousands of years. I’ve been to Simi Valley and I could imagine something that big walking across it.

What do you do when people call and say, “My uncle left me a bunch of old pots. Do you want them?”

The curators will talk to them on the phone. If it seems like something that might be important, they will meet and look at the material. We’re not in a major collecting mode at the moment. [But] we certainly wouldn’t turn down a fabulous gift!

patt.morrison@latimes.com.

This interview was edited and excerpted from a longer taped transcript. An archive of Morrison’s interviews is online at latimes.com/pattasks.