After an unusually long tenure of nearly 30 years as president of the American Museum of Natural History, Ellen V. Futter on Wednesday announced to the board that she will step down next March, following the anticipated opening of the academy’s new Richard Gilder Science Center, Education and Innovation.
Futter, 72, said in a phone interview: “It was an incredible run and I feel very proud and cherished my time. “The opening of the Gilder Center marks the completion of my work and is a good time for the museum to get new leadership.”
The Board of Directors will immediately begin the search for a replacement for Futter. Scott Bok, the museum’s president, said in an interview: “They’re giant shoes to fill, no doubt about that. “But she put us in a position to find someone great.”
As for whether the council would seek to appoint a person of color, given the current emphasis on diversity in the museum world, Bok said that an outside executive search firm – has yet to be hired. – “will be guided to bring us a diverse medium of candidates. ”
Given the size of the museum – it has an operating budget of about $178 million and more than 1,000 full- and part-time employees – and its public role as an organization that occupies a building and land owned by the city, the location would require Bok to add.
“We wanted someone who was a great leader who was collaborative, collective, and an effective liaison with key constituencies, including New York City,” he said. “We’re going to want someone with strong fundraising, because we can’t do all the things we want to do simply with the admissions revenue and the support we get from the city. That is a big job. ”
For the past three decades, Futter has presided over a museum that seems both frozen in time and driven by change. On the other hand, the dioramas – some of which include Indigenous tribes – with which the museum is closely associated have been long standing, trustworthy to repeat visitors and at the same time symbolic for organizational retardation, especially in a new world sensitive to stereotypes and cultural inaccuracies. (Scenes that were finally modified in 2019.) Last month, Northwest Coast Hall open again with a new emphasis on indigenous life.
At the same time, the museum has had some major new developments, such as the opening of the new Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000 and its Gilder Center.
To carry out these projects, Futter had to navigate often fraught city politics. With a glass dome jutting between pre-war buildings on the Upper West Side, the Rose Center for Earth and Space was originally considered a sacrificial offering by some residents. But in the end, it was widely celebrated by critics and welcomed by the community.
“This is a rare case where time, place, function, architect and client (hero Ellen V. Futter, museum president) have come together perfectly to create a design. Clever design will also appeal to people of public taste,” said architecture critic Herbert Muschamps Written in the New York Times in 2000. “It was like finding another world.”
When the museum in 2015 announced the plan to build the Gilder Center, a neighborhood group opposed the project’s intrusion into the adjacent Theodore Roosevelt Park, which is owned by the city. In light of these concerns, the museum decided to demolish three of the existing buildings to make room for six additional floors, rather than protruding further into the tree-lined space along Columbus Avenue. And the curved stone and glass – designed by architect Jeanne Gang – is Almost finished.
Adrian Benepe, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, said that during his years as the city’s park commissioner, he was impressed by Futter’s ability to balance tensions like “urban mantle” without serious need. “She’s always been very clear: ‘We don’t own this park, it belongs to New York City,’” he said, adding that her board meetings, which he attends as a full member, is “a high school class on how one runs a major cultural institution in New York City. ”
In 2020, the museum announced that its bronze statue Theodore Roosevelton horseback and has a Native American man and an African man – has presided over the entrance since 1940 and has come to symbolize a painful legacy of colonial expansion and apartheid – will come down. After years of protest by activists, the decision proposed by the museum and agreed by the city, comes amid a racial reckoning prompted by the killing of George Floyd.
Futter also had to navigate traumatic events around the world that took a financial toll on cultural institutions across the country, like the September 11 attacks, the 2008 recession, and the coronavirus pandemic. .
And Futter drew on the museum’s potentially important role as an educator in a time of growing concern about climate change. Since 2008, the museum, through Richard Gilders Graduate Schooloffered a PhD in comparative biology, and in 2011 the museum established a separate master’s program in science teaching.
Currently, in New York City, half of the public school teachers hired each year with an elementary degree in earth sciences are graduates of a master’s program, the museum said.
The integrity of the museum’s view of science as paramount was tested by protests against one of its board members in 2017. Rebekah Mercer. Mercer has used her family’s millions to fund organizations that question climate change, a cornerstone of a conservative agenda she has championed as a member. influence in the transition team of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
After being pressure by scientists and other scholars, Mercer quietly step down in 2019.
Futter arrived at the museum after 13 years as president of Barnard College, at the age of 29, the youngest person to take the position of principal of a major American college. When she was appointed president of the museum in 1993, she was First the woman who heads a large museum in New York City.
With a no-nonsense style, Futter is a solid, deliberate manager who manages to lead the organization without fireworks or performances. She has also largely avoided controversy, such as surviving, 2010 Revelations that she lives without rent in a $5 million apartment the museum bought when she started (she will move out when she leaves the museum).
Some people can certainly criticize Futter for being so slow. But in the end, others say, she moved a museum floor forward as fast as she could.
“How many million kids have been on classroom tours and staring at that one giant buffalo or that herd of elephants?” Benepe said. “Perhaps museums today wouldn’t consider taxed animals a star attraction, but she understands this is part of the history of this museum and they love coming to see it. Ellen understands the need to keep certain things completely tied to the museum in people’s minds but also to modernize and deal with social issues.”
For her part, Futter said she is very conscious of having to balance between preserving the past, dealing with the present and preparing for the future. “When I first came here, people would tell me it was their favorite place, but nothing changed,” she said. “I’m proud that they still joke that it’s their favorite place, but things have changed. It is not the essential mission of science and education, which is fundamental to us, but the way we do it. “
