January 9, 2003 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Cyclone country might not be the ideal place for a person to try her first building project, given the way structures sometimes get picked up and torn apart. But for Linda A. Downs, the location is not as key as the opportunity.
In September, after 13 years as the education director at the National Gallery of Art, Ms. Downs, 57, left Washington to become director of Iowa’s Davenport Museum of Art and its soon-to-be constructed successor, the Figge Arts Center.
“It’s the navel of the universe,” she says. “That’s what I’m calling it. When I made the decision, I was telling colleagues, and they were like ‘where?’”
‘Why’ is more important to Ms. Downs than where.
“I’ve got a museum to run and a museum to build,” she says. “It’s a tremendous opportunity. I can shape a new institution, the programs and exhibitions, and I can work with the community.”
In leaving Washington for Iowa, Ms. Downs went from working as a middle-ranking administrator at a high-profile institution to her first job as a chief executive at an institution that gets far less attention than the National Gallery. Still, the job comes with much more responsibility: She’s got to boost interest in the Davenport Museum even as the larger Figge Arts Center grows to replace it. Designed by the London architect David Chipperfield, the $30-million, 100,000-square-foot museum is scheduled to open along the western bank of the Mississippi River in 2005.
And she’s got to do it with tighter resources. At the National Gallery, she had an operating budget of $4-million and a staff of nearly 50; in Davenport, the annual budget is $1.9-million and she oversees 12 people.
While operating with less, she gets to do more: apply the ideas about running museums that she has gathered through professional experience and academic study.
“Museum people are notorious for forgetting about the history and significance of their institution,” she adds. “It’s something I’m cognizant of here. It makes me much more aware of how important a sense of purpose, mission, and community relations are.”
The capital campaign to raise the money to build the new museum is well under way. A local philanthropy, the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Foundation, provided the first $10-million (plus a $2-million operating endowment); the city of Davenport provided $6.5-million and the state is putting in another $3.5-million.
With $4-million in private donations and corporate sponsorships lined up already, Ms. Downs has to find another $6-million.
As if the fund raising and oversight of the building’s construction weren’t enough, further complicating her new responsibilities are a reorganization of the museum’s board structure — she is working to combine three boards into one — and a possible move, being discussed by Ms. Downs and museum trustees with city officials, to turn the museum, currently a city agency, into a private entity.
But challenges are nothing new for the Detroit native. Throughout her career, she has accepted new responsibilities and broadened her skills.
While working at the Detroit Institute of Arts, she organized a retrospective in 1989 on the works of Diego Rivera, at the time the largest exhibit in the city’s history in terms of both revenue and attendance.
She left for Washington, she says, because “after a big project like that, you want new challenges.”
Now she’s found yet another one — turning a regional museum, albeit one that is Iowa’s oldest, into something that can both attract visitors from across the country and sustain local interest.
Ms. Downs and the trustees hope the Figge Arts Center will become the premier cultural outlet for the Quad Cities region, and will use its large Mexican Colonial and Haitian art collections to draw people from beyond the area. The Quad Cities area, which has a population of 225,000, encompasses the western Illinois cities of Moline and Rock Island, and Davenport and Bettendorf in eastern Iowa.
In an interview, Ms. Downs discussed her new role:
What is your day like?
I feel stretched every day. As a department head for a large institution, I had time to think about and plan fund raising, meeting major donors, organizing projects. Here, I’m doing that on a daily basis. There isn’t the lead time for planning that I used to have.
There’s also a tremendous learning curve here: meeting the community leaders, the arts-organization leaders, the donors, becoming familiar with the area’s cultural institutions. I’m out and about a lot. It’s important to develop relationships, and not just be seen.
What is it like to be in Iowa after so much time in D.C.?
Easterners have no conception of the Midwest. It’s amazing how provincial the view of the U.S. is from D.C. Whenever anyone was referring to the masses, or what could be done by people in D.C. for the rest of the country, they’d say, ‘Well, maybe it would fly in Iowa’ — without having any idea what Iowa was about.
People are friendly in Washington, but they’re sort of overwhelmed. There’s just a different culture here. People have been enormously welcoming, inviting us to their homes. There are so many cultural and educational organizations who are interested in partnering with us in terms of the new arts center. In D.C., you really had to work for partnerships. Everyone has their own agenda.
Which do you prefer: a big job in a small city or a smaller job in a big city?
I would be happy in any art museum. But for now, I really prefer a smaller city and a bigger job. I was looking for new challenges, and I’m certainly facing them here. I like dealing face to face with the community. At the National Gallery, the whole country was the community. Our extension program [videos, computer discs, and other materials developed to explain the collection], for example, went to 35 million people per year, and we would get evaluations back. Now I get to see, face to face, the people who are using the extension program. That’s part of the pleasure of having a bigger job in a small town.
What kind of skills have you had to develop for your new role?
I’m still working on people skills, but you always work on people skills throughout your life. Also, it’s a new role because you’re at the top, but in the middle. Directors direct staff, but they’re also being directed, to a certain extent, by the trustees. In my case, I have two people I report to: the president of the board of trustees and the city manager.
In one of the books I have read about art-museum directing, it talked about how directors kind of do a tango between leading and following.
That’s something I’m just beginning to learn. How far can I go in leading the trustees or the city manager, and when should I follow? Because if you’ve ever danced the tango, you know that issues of leading and following frequently come up.
How do you build a local clientele and attract people from beyond the region at the same time?
One of the things we’re considering is partnering with a larger arts organization, preferably an international organization. It might not be a financial arrangement, but it might be a programming arrangement. We could bring artists here, or share exhibitions, or share acquisitions, and have that kind of international stimulus that’s brought in. More and more organizations are doing this, but we’re not there yet.
ABOUT LINDA A. DOWNS, DIRECTOR OF THE DAVENPORT MUSEUM OF ART AND THE FIGGE ARTS CENTER
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wayne State University and a master’s in art history from the University of Michigan. She is currently on leave from a Ph.D program at American University, where she is studying cultural history.
Previous employment: Worked at the Detroit Institute of Arts from 1973 to 1989, serving as curator of education since 1976. During her years there, she was an adjunct art-history instructor at Wayne State University. She was education director of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington until September.
Hobbies: Yoga, jogging, growing herbs, and making tinctures and salves.
Book she’s currently reading: The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida.
