Boca director shifts art landscape | Palm Beach Entertainment ...

Art in Palm Beach County looks like it?s in the process of a decisive pivot. On top of the Norton Museum of Art?s new reorganization of its collection, there is a new director at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

George Bolge, Boca?s longtime director and a fixture on the South Florida art scene, retired last summer after working there since 1995 and overseeing construction of a new museum in Mizner Park.

Steven Maklansky, the new director, began July 1. He was the assistant director at the New Orleans Museum of Art before he became the director of the Brevard Art Museum. By comparison, Boca Raton is the big time, and he knows it.

Like all museum directors, Maklansky is coping with a landscape that eerily replicates the rich-get-richer atmosphere of the country at large. There are about 3,500 art museums in America. Of them, 41 percent of contributed money ? grants, donations, etc. ? goes to eight museums. All this is very nice if you happen to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it puts the squeeze on a lot of other places.

Maklansky wants to bring to Boca Raton some of the things that proved so successful in New Orleans, as with a show called "Katrina Exposed," where the museum was opened to anyone who wanted to pin a photograph of the storm or its aftermath on the walls.

" ?Katrina Exposed? is an example of the way the museum can act as a community platform, rather than in a more typical fashion where the museum selects particular photographs," says Maklansky.

"It was an extreme example, an extreme circumstance. But there?s a shift of approach; instead of an omniscient authoritarian provider of experiences, where you give people their art history medicine, we can also be a platform; we can be serious in our scholarship, but playful in our approach. We can occasionally wink at and with our audience."

Maklansky believes that the difficulty of this particular dance lies in retaining a sense of excellence and a consistent display of art that says, "This is worth your time."

"A museum?s overall role is to define what is worth exhibiting and what is worth preserving for future cultures. But a staff can get a little insular; it has to remind itself every now and then that there are lots of creative and thoughtful people in the community and that we need to reach out to them."

To give specific examples, Maklansky points to a collector?s forum at the Boca Museum, a group of upper-level members who regularly visit other collections and galleries. "I?ve told them, ?Bring this stuff to our attention.? Overall the idea is to make sure the museum is listening.

"I think the analogy is the Internet 1.0 and Internet 2.0. The original idea was to provide the content, decide exactly what was there. Internet 2.0, as exemplified by Facebook, is that you provide a space that manages content, but one of the ways to judge your success is the way people respond."

All this sounds suspiciously like a 180-degree shift from the museum experience as it has been practiced in Palm Beach County, but Maklansky says his job "is creating an evolution, not a revolution. What I want to do is eradicate the notion that a museum is an art castle with a moat around it."

Source: http://www.pbpulse.com/arts-and-culture/2011/10/10/boca-director-shifts-art-landscape/

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