The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, has named its next leader as Director and CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt prepares to step down after four decades. Graham Boettcher studied art history at Yale and the University of Washington, and has been with the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, for 20 years - the last nine as director and CEO. As Boettcher prepares to step into the role on August 31, he spoke with WAMC.
BOETTCHER: One of the things that I often say when I have occasion to speak to other nonprofit professionals in our community and elsewhere, is that if you want people to show up for you, you need to show up for them. And so I try to be very present and accessible to our community, to our patrons, and to our staff. Open door policy. I like to be out and about and building relationships. Oftentimes, the mistake that I see professionals in all sorts of nonprofits make, they don't take the time to build the relationship. When you've got fundraising goals to meet, I understand that that's stressful, but it can't ever be transactional, and you have to also understand what motivates people to support things that they love, and find where your own organization aligns with a person's passions.
WAMC: In Berkshire County, we have a lot of nonprofits all vying for a relatively limited pool of funding from key sources. This is a time where we're hearing a lot about the complications for nonprofits around federal funding streams in this tumultuous era we live in. You've had success in Alabama with maintaining a strong fiscal foundation for that institution- Can you tell us a little bit about your strategy to approaching that, and how fundraising plays into the larger goals of the museum?
Fundraising has to happen in a lot of different ways. Earned revenue is something that's really critical for institutions thinking about, how do you make money with the resources that you have, whether it's through ticketed programming, rental events are popular with a lot of museums. There's also, though, the opportunity to build support through corporate community, and that's not just on a local level. I think that the key opportunity for the Norman Rockwell Museum is the fact that it is a museum that, sure, is tucked away in the beautiful town of Stockbridge, surrounded by the gorgeous landscape of the Berkshires, but it is a museum that has a national reputation, and that's something that Laurie has stewarded and built so beautifully in her leadership of that institution. And it's so well known that I believe that there are individuals around the country that are interested in American illustration broadly, but in Norman Rockwell, specifically. I've even seen evidence of this in the people that have reached out to me to wish me well in the next chapter in my career, talking about how much they love Norman Rockwell's work, and I think there's an opportunity to look at increasing the base of national donors.
Now, in the last- God, well, it seems like America is perennially in a series of racial reckonings and efforts to promote social justice. In Birmingham, looking over some of the work you guys have done at the museum, you've addressed that in this city with a storied history in the civil rights movement in a variety of ways over the years. What are your thoughts about how to incorporate some of those themes around social justice and inclusion into the museum setting?
Norman Rockwell's work, in particular, is ideally suited to that work. And in fact, when I worked on the exhibition 'Norman Rockwell's America' at the Birmingham Museum of Art, which was organized by another illustration museum, the National Museum of American Illustration, we included a study for the iconic painting, 'The Problem We All Live With.' The completed work, as you know, is in the Norman Rockwell Museum's collection. It is, I think, really important to be forthcoming about America's history, and Norman Rockwell, I think his work is more relevant now than ever. He was a great progressive who really cared deeply about matters of social justice and the equality of all people. When he was at the Saturday Evening Post, he was censored, and he had to find clever ways, even when he was working with restrictions, he found clever ways of getting his point across in a covert or subversive manner. Then, when he went to Look magazine, though he was without those restrictions, really, for the first time, and got to show without limit how much he cared about humanity and about his belief in the promise of America. This country is deeply divided at this moment. Looking at the examples of the challenges that this country has faced in the past through the lens of Norman Rockwell and other like-minded illustrators, I think can be inspiring and maybe give us a sense of hope and a pathway forward.
