HARTFORD — Susan Lubowsky Talbott, who has been director and chief executive officer of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art since 2008, will announce her retirement Friday, Talbott told The Courant.
Talbott will stay in the position until the fall, “in order to ensure a smooth transition,” she told the board of trustees. In the fall, the final stage of the Hartford museum’s $33 million renovation and reinstallation will be unveiled.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m 65,” Talbott said. “I’ve had a great career and I really like the idea of leaving on a high note, when the renovation is complete. … I feel so grateful for having had this experience in Hartford.”
Talbott and her husband, retired journalist Basil Talbott, live in Bloomfield. She said they have “a hundred different scenarios in our heads” about what to do after retirement.
David W. Dangremond, who is president of the board of trustees of the Wadsworth Atheneum and was co-chairman of the committee that selected Talbott, called her departure “a bittersweet moment for us in our evolution as a museum.”
The board will begin a search for a new director once an evaluation is done on the museum’s needs. A similar evaluation was done before hiring Talbott, Dangremond said, but a new one is needed.
“These last years have been transformative. It’s a different museum today than we were when she was hired,” said Dangremond, who has been on the board for 24 years. “We had gone through a very challenging decade, a succession of very short-term directors and had also lost some of our major corporate and private support. We were looking for stability and vision. … We have achieved financial stability. … And for the first time in our history the entire museum has been entirely renovated and brought up to date.”
Talbott added that if the board’s search for her replacement takes longer than expected, she might stay past her expected departure date.
Talbott is the tenth director of the nation’s oldest public art museum, preceded, in order, by Frank Gay, Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin Jr., Charles Cunningham, James Elliott, Tray Atkinson, Patrick McCaughey, Peter Sutton, Kate Sellers and Willard Holmes.
She is the second Hartford-area museum director to announce retirement plans recently. Douglas Hyland, director of the New Britain Museum of American Art, stated in October his intent to retire. Hyland, who also is 65, also will stay on in his position until the fall, when that museum’s expansion will be unveiled.
Talbott took over the Atheneum’s directorship on May 1, 2008. From 2005 to 2008, Talbott was director of Smithsonian Arts at the Smithsonian Institution, participating in planning for all nine Smithsonian museums. She was director and CEO of the Des Moines Art Center from 1998 to 2005 and executive director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., from 1992 to 1998. She was director of the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts from 1989 to 1992. The high point of her tenure at NEA was the “culture war” around Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography exhibit, “The Perfect Moment,” which drew nationwide demonstrations against public funding for the arts.
“Since I went through the whole Mapplethorpe controversy, I was so happy to come to a museum that showed the exhibition during that time,” she said.
Coincidentally, the new Atheneum exhibit that will open about the same time as Talbott’s departure will be “Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls.”
Talbott’s Legacy
When Talbott arrived in Hartford in 2008, the Atheneum had just scuttled a proposed plan to expand into the nearby Hartford Times building, and the museum needed to revitalize and redeploy existing space and upgrade the infrastructure at 600 Main St. Talbott has overseen the renovation project, which when done will increase public gallery space by 25 percent. In addition, a proprietary power plant and a new HVAC system have been installed and storage spaces have been repaired.
During her tenure, the museum’s endowment increased from $84 million to $101 million. Five hundred artworks have been acquired in her years, including Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Self-Portrait as a Lute Player,” to be exhibited soon, a large bequest of Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative arts by collector Stephen Gray and works by Richard Tuttle, Georgia O’Keeffe and Kiki Smith, among others. She also curated “Patti Smith: Camera Solo,” a 2011 photography exhibit that brought the rock icon to the museum.
Of all her accomplishments, Talbott speaks most fondly of her Community Engagement Initiative, a push to bring the arts to traditionally overlooked segments of the community. The initiative enhanced existing programs and founded new ones, including Second Saturdays, a monthly event that invites families into the museum free of charge and even sends buses to Hartford schools to pick them up. Since its inception in 2009, total attendance at Second Saturdays has exceeded 22,000.
“It was my way of reaching out into the community to all of those people, particularly in Hartford, who didn’t know that this was a museum and who didn’t know they were welcome here. If they did venture here, they weren’t necessarily, a decade ago, treated well. The programs weren’t designed to bring them in,” Talbott said. “We see enormous diversity, folks from the inner city speaking eight different languages and wealthy families from West Hartford, everyone here together enjoying all the programs.”
In an interview last year with The Courant, Marta Bentham, the ombudsman and director of family services for Hartford schools, who helps bring families to Second Saturday events, said, “Someone said to me, ‘This is the first time my wife and I have been here with our child; I didn’t know I could come in here.’ … A lot of people don’t think of the museum as something to enter. To them, the Atheneum is a bus stop. But they make you feel really welcome.”
Yvette Meléndez, chair of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, also praised the CEI programs. “What she developed and so beautifully executed was not only about bringing the arts to the Hartford public schools but also to bring the Wadsworth to the families of the children in the schools,” Meléndez said. “Families who never stepped foot in the Wadsworth, let alone any large museum like the Wadsworth, are feeling comfortable and engaged and are developing an appreciation of the treasures that lie inside the Wadsworth.”
Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, who has been friends with Talbott since they worked together at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in the 1980s, agrees with Meléndez. Armstrong said that Talbott “looks at the activities of the museum through the eyes of the audience. It’s not a strain for her. She’s gifted at that. She’s highly knowledgeable about art but also is an amazing democrat, with a small d, regarding the position of an institution within the life of a city.”
