Leading The Way: Lial Jones
We haven’t felt the full effect of COVID-19 yet. I think it’s going to be really bad. A lot of art museums are not going to survive. I think the Crocker will, but no one knows for the long term …
As Crocker Art Museum Director and CEO, Lial Jones watched COVID-19 hit Seattle and start moving into the Bay Area, she didn’t initially think she would have have to shutter the museum or change much of what she and her staff were doing …
At what point did you realize that you were going to need to pivot?
Crocker Art Museum is large. We have hospital-grade HVAC and filtration systems. We are one of the safest places for people to be when they’re social distancing. But once the counties in the Bay Area began to close, I thought, “Okay, this is going to happen here, too.” We closed on March 15th.
Pivoting is a challenge for us. Our work is about convening people, bringing them onsite and working with objects. We weren’t set up as a staff to work remotely so I had to figure out – Who can work from home? Who can’t? How many people do we need to maintain onsite for safety and security?
Museums are a lot of different businesses under one roof. In addition to exhibitions and programs, we rent the facility for events and weddings. We’re a publishing house and a retail store. We’re content providers. So our initial pivot was that we stopped doing everything in person and started doing it digitally.
We began offering online programming – classes, camps. We asked the staff to create digital content – talking about their favorite piece at the Crocker, sharing a piece of art they own, talking about their job. We established a video studio at the Crocker and began creating more original content in the studio like Zoom classes and workshops.
Exhibits are interesting. We’ve canceled some. We’ve rescheduled some. We have new exhibits on view right now. Hanging a show during a social distance environment is quite a challenge. It takes more staff and considerably more time than it would otherwise which makes the cost escalate. We had to hold a virtual opening for one of our current shows. We’re hoping that we haven’t hung our exhibits for naught, and that we don’t end up taking them down before anyone can see them.
Monetizing content online is a particular challenge. We were able to do it with classes but as far as exhibitions or talks about individual works, we’ve been providing those as a benefit to our members since they can’t come to the museum. We held our annual art auction online in July. We shared virtual tours of our exhibits and/or curator talks. I created a “Crocktail” (cocktail) that went with the theme of the shows. We answered questions about the show and invited the attendees into Zoom breakout rooms so they could talk to each other. Relationships are key to our work. We’re a convener. Strengthening the relationships between our members is important to us.
Because we couldn’t hold the event in person, the sponsors had private Zoom calls with me and the Chief Curator. We offered masked strolls so that people could see the works on display in the Friedman court through windows. We also set up a sidewalk sale for the store.
How did you handle the initial economic challenges of COVID-19?
This is a business about relationships. First and foremost. That’s how we survive as an institution. We’re primarily funded by philanthropy, not by services. I’ve been predicting for a some time that our funding model is a problem because of demographics and shifts in giving.
We haven’t felt the full effect of COVID-19 yet. I think it’s going to be really bad. A lot of art museums are not going to survive. I think the Crocker will, but no one knows for the long term.
Are you working with other museum leaders right now?
I’m the vice president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. We’re made up of the largest art museums in North America. We have Zoom calls twice a week. I also belong to a group calls PALS which is composed of local professional arts organizations that employ staff. We get together every month or so.
These calls remind us that we’re not alone. They’re also helpful because these jobs are lonely. There’s nobody else in your institution that you can really talk to about things. So having a strong network of peers across the country who are experiencing similar issues is extremely helpful.
Governor Newsom has gone back and forth about when museums can open. What's the impact of that on you and the staff?
We did everything we needed to do to open in July, and then the state said we couldn’t open. We put up an exhibition that we’re now taking down without anyone having seen it in person. You can’t plan; all you can do it react. What I’ve told the staff is, let’s get ready to open on October 16th and then we’ll adjust weekly from there on out. It’s hard. People want answers. They like certainty. I’m good with uncertainty; it doesn’t bother me as much as it does other people but at some point, you’d just like something to be known.
What does the Crocker's closure mean for the exhibition schedule?
We’re hanging Wayne Thiebaud 100 right now and hope to open the show on October 16th. We had planned to hold a fundraising gala in conjunction with the show. Instead, we’re hosting a small dinner outside in the courtyard for 70 early donors to thank them for sponsoring the show.
We had to cancel From Fragonard to David and the Louis Comfort Tiffany show. Instead, we’re producing a Dutch landscape show from a collection that was recently gifted to the museum. Al Farrow’s The White House was originally going to close the week of the election but we’ve extended it to Inauguration Day. It’s a model of the White House made of ammunition and gun parts, and it’s pretty fabulous. The Todd Schorr Atomic Cocktail show will also remain up until January.
What have you learned so far?
I’ve always been a “piler.” That’s my organization method. Instead of chronological piles in my office at the Crocker, I’ve got piles in three locations, some of which have tipped over and gotten interfiled with other stacks. So what did I learn? Don’t do it the way I did. Try to keep your systems in place. Understand that there’s a normality to the way you work. Follow the systems that have worked for you regardless of where you are physically, and don’t try to put a new system in place because it will fail.
Looking back, what's one thing you did well and one thing you wish you had done differently?
We set a goal of calling every one of our members to check on them. We helped one woman find a place to get groceries because she didn’t know where to get them or how to navigate ordering them.
We’ve been honest about the Museum’s situation and shared what information we had, but I wish we had communicated more with staff. We sent out daily posts but they didn’t always sound like the institution’s posts, leaving the staff somewhat adrift.
How has the pandemic changed your plans for the Crocker?
In a recent survey of over 150,000 art museum patrons, the number one reason people said they would visit a museum is because there’s a vaccine. The earliest we’ll get a vaccine is next year, nearly a year from now, possibly 18-24 months from now, maybe never. We don’t look at this as a short-term weeks problem; we see it at a years problem. It will probably be three years before we have a new kind of normal for operations. We are working on recalibrating the museum, and I expect we will be a considerably smaller institution than we are now.
If you are a mission-driven institution, and your mission is to change people’s lives, you’re going to do whatever you can to allow your members and the community to experience the museum. If a good portion of your population can’t come to the museum or sit in an auditorium because of COVID restrictions, you have to find a way to bring the museum to them.
When the pandemic hit, we were in the middle of a capital campaign, Crocker Next. There are four parts to the campaign – building a parking structure, developing the unimproved lot across the street from the museum into an art park, growing our endowment and creating much needed collection storage. Our need for parking is going to be less of a priority right now. Instead, we’re going to focus on growing our endowment through planned giving in order to create a steady stream of income over time. After the first of the year, we’re going to revisit Crocker Park. Having usable, exterior space that allows you to deliver programs and services is more important than ever right now.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Museum staffs have been talking about income inequality, transparency in decision-making, about the fact that most museum staffs tend to be white. The Crocker has one of the most diverse staffs of any art museum in North America. Yet we are still a predominantly white institution although I think I have one of the most diverse senior staffs of any art museum. We’ve done a lot to diversify our collection and to provide a variety of different exhibitions. Part of that comes from my desire as a child to see myself in art museums and finding it hard to do without a lot of study and searching. We understand that people want to see themselves here, and if they do, they’ll have a sense of belonging. We want the museum to serve everybody. At the same time, we have had some turmoil among our staff. They want us to do more about diversity, equity, inclusion and access. George Floyd’s murder and the local protests ramped everything up and brought the issue to a head. It’s what art museum directors across the country are spending most of their time on. Not the pandemic or the economy, but the fact that their staff are in revolt.
What's been the biggest surprise?
How much we’ve had to deal with. I keep asking when the locusts are coming. A major health crisis, a major social injustice crisis, a racial crisis, the economic crisis, the wildfires. All this on top of having a model that isn’t going to survive the changing demographics of the country. The people who give to art museums are dying. Over 50% of our operating budget is pure philanthropy. We’re a staff-intensive organization, and those costs continue to escalate. When your funding source is shrinking, and it’s becoming more challenging to find funding and more expensive to support your staff, you’ve got a problem. We’re a system under pressure because we’re under-resourced. We do a lot. We do more than other American art museums with the same size budget. We serve more people, we have more members, we offer more exhibitions and programming but we’ve built a system whereby our programming fuels our attendance. If you don’t have that programming, you don’t have that attendance. We’ve done all this on the backs of staff, but any time you’ve got a system with pressure, eventually it breaks, and we’re at a break.
What's next?
We’ll continue to offer virtual content but we’d prefer to offer our classes in person. The challenge is that I think there are an awful lot of people who will never want to come to a museum again over a fear of mixing. If you’re older, if you’ve got an auto-immune disease, you’re going to think twice about consuming the museum in person, even if you care deeply about art. We’re going to look at how we can continue doing curator tours, talks about collections and exhibitions. Our Block By Block program is still working in the community, even though there are no large convenings. The team created “Color Me Hopeful,” a coloring book that’s being distributed through food banks and community organizations to the neighborhoods we work in. They also just produced an art activity guide that went to our members.
We have resized the museum to something sustainable yet still of service to the community and still able to fulfill our mission. We want to continue providing the greatest benefit to the most people in a way that is sustainable, at least for now.
Appointed executive director in 1999, Lial A Jones has set the strategic vision for the Crocker Art Museum's emergence as a leading cultural institution in California's Capitol Region. In 2010, Lial oversaw the planning, construction and opening of a 125,000 square-foot addition that tripled the size of the Crocker. During her tenure, the size of the collection has grown by 100 percent, attendance by 150 percent and membership by 400 percent.