How can museums remain relevant in the digital age, where visual imagery is more accessible than ever? What role do museums play in fostering creativity and innovation in their communities?
Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance and governance in museums across the U.S. He works with museums to create a financially sustainable strategy that is human-focused, centering on inclusion, diversity, and important causes like climate change. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Funded by arts patron David Booth with additional support by the Ford Foundation, Remuseum focuses on advancing relevance, governance, and sustainability in museums across the U.S. During his time as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Reily presented Promise, Witness, Remembrance, an exhibition in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, he co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition. As an active civic leader, Reily has been a part of numerous community organizations and boards, like the Reily Reentry Project, supporting expungement programs for Kentucky citizens, Creative Capital, offering grants for the arts, and founded Seed Capital Kentucky, a non-profit that aims to improve the food economy in the area. A Yale and Stanford Law graduate, Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before launching a successful entrepreneurial career, experiences he draws upon for public engagement initiatives.
STEPHEN REILY
When I left the Speed Museum after an orderly succession in 2021, I spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges of museums, how it's so hard to cover their budgets and their expenses outpace their revenues, how their assets often act like liabilities and how their own rules have sometimes made it hard for them to innovate. What I didn't know was how Alice Walton, with a great entrepreneur and philanthropist named David Booth, was having similar conversations at that time. 20 years ago, Alice Walton began with a crazy, bold vision, much like her father had when he began Walmart, although hers was in the arts. And she envisioned this place called Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened a little over a decade ago, and today attracts over 800, 000 visitors a year in a region, Northwest Arkansas, with only 500,000 citizens and in a town with only 40,000 residents.
So Alice thinks big, and she thinks differently. And she and David Booth started talking about why is it so hard for other museums to think differently. And they came up with the idea of putting together a project, which became Remuseum, which I run, in their words, “to help museums break out of these legacy systems and become more innovative.” So I joined the project early last year, gave it a name, and now I'm trying to figure out how we help museums in that effort of becoming more creative and more innovative, how to break out of their legacy systems, matter to more people, and thrive.
Transparency and Accountability in Museums
So, 30 to 40 years ago, the average American art museum said that its purpose, its mission, was to preserve objects for the benefit of the public. The public in a very passive role in that formulation. Today, it has dramatically shifted and our own research has documented that 90 percent of American art museums now center the public in their mission statements, not the object. They say that their purpose and mission is to serve and engage the public with art. Sixty percent of them don't even mention objects or collections. And yet, are they really doing the things to reflect and serve these new missions? In fact, when you look at them, they're often, their policies, their norms, their degree of transparency, which you mentioned, and their budgets seem to be much more anchored and aligned with their past missions than with their current missions. And as transparency itself goes, what we showed in a research project we released earlier this summer was that while the missions may center the public in the art museums per stated purpose, the transparency and the information they share do not center the public. And only 17 percent of American art museums share both their number of visitors and their consolidated financial statements. Something that's really kind of a base level of information. They all have this information. They all share it with their boards, but they don't yet share it with the public. So part of Remuseum's work is not just to promote innovation but to ask museums, and boards in particular, to hold themselves accountable to the missions and the public that they serve.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's a strange time because museums are fighting for eyeballs. There's all this digital distraction. At no other time, I think, has the average person felt so empowered, even without having art training, to create something. I think that, in some ways, this period of flourishing creativity outside the museum makes it so people aren’t necessarily drawn in to see the physical works of art with fresh eyes.
STEPHEN REILY
I think you've caught exactly the challenge and the opportunity for museums. The opportunity is that we have never had a public that is more passionate and obsessed with visual imagery. If the owners of the best original imagery in the world can't figure out how to take advantage of the fact that the world has now become obsessed with exactly these treasures that we have to offer as museums, then shame on us. You know, this is the opportunity to say that if you're spending all day scrolling on Instagram or other apps looking for amazing imagery, come and see the original source. Come and see the real work. Let us figure out how to make that connection.
At the same time, we need to be learning from them because there is a threat and there's a lot more innovation, frankly, going on in the visual world outside of museums. Whether it's apps like Instagram or Pinterest or whether it's commercial art enterprises. You know, many people are finding these immersive art experiences are a wonderful way to get to know and love the art of mainstream artists like Van Gogh or Monet. And the museum field generally looks down on that.
And I understand it's not necessarily deeply art-historical. It's not trying to transmit a deeper degree of knowledge. And yet, how can we learn from them? How can we learn from the Sphere in Las Vegas, which is employing artists to connect with musicians and give thousands, tens of thousands of people a day a way to experience visual art in a new way. The question is not, you know, museums might say, well, I don't want to sell out. That's not the question. The question is, how do you tap into that energy that the visual imagery is creating for humans all across the country that museums are failing and are not feeling like the places where the public can come experience. There are exceptions. I mean, I think that in the world of AI, museums are really doing interesting work. The Museum of Modern Art last year worked with the great artist Refik Anadol to create a work really grounded in the permanent collection of MoMA in a revolving, mutating kind of explosive giant screen of AI art. And I saw people sitting in the lobby at MoMA transfixed for hours by this work. It was a great new entry point. For young people, for people who might not have felt that the art at the Museum of Modern Art was for them to feel that, yes, this place was leaning into them. Many art critics scoffed at that, whether that was real art or not. But if you looked at the eyes of the visitors, it was becoming…it was art in their eyes. And that's why we have to be a little more expansive in what we share for audiences whose minds may be growing faster than museums are.
I certainly don't want to sound like the role of the curator is diminished in a reimagined role for the museum with its community. I think it asks curators, educators, and museum leaders to really lean deeply into their own missions and the communities they serve without fear. That's another thing. Artists don't have much fear, right? That's the amazing thing about them. And I think museums would do well to copy artists in that respect as well.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
As you think about the future and the importance of the arts, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
REILY
What I tell my children is to embrace the future and be prepared for the new ways of work, engagement, and citizenship that it may require because the only thing about the future is it shows us that many of the ways that we've been doing things are deeply flawed. And we have to always have the capacity to unthink the things we've been taught and the systems that we've adopted and embraced, which continue to create a lot of good, but also figure out how to balance them with better practices for the future.
