Pillsbury’s vision should live on

As members of the SMU faculty, we want to express our deep dismay about the loss of Dr. Ted Pillsbury as Director of the Meadows Museum. This is in our view a tragedy for SMU. In just under two years, Dr. Pillsbury has improved this museum immeasurably.

First, he made an awkward building look like and feel like a museum; he installed works of art on the first floor; he removed banks of ugly lockers; he moved the store to a more appropriate location, and he hired the keen-eyed entrepreneur Mary Bloom to upgrade it.

Second, through his example and experience, he taught the museum staff about what constitutes a professional museum.

Third, he reached out to the entire university community — not just the faculty and students of the Meadows School of the Arts.

Fourth, he mounted a series of exciting and stimulating exhibitions, creatively installed and appealing to a broad range of artistic interests and tastes.

And fifth, he brought the public into the Museum in unimaginable numbers and generated excitement in the community and nationally for what the Museum was doing. We faculty have been at SMU for many years and we have never seen a single individual accomplish so much in such a short time. The rest of the university community can surely learn from this. The momentum launched by Dr. Pillsbury must not be lost. But we wonder if SMU administrators can make the bold decision that is necessary, in our view, to keep this momentum going.

The Meadows Museum needs to be moved from under the authority of the Meadows School of the Arts and put directly under the Provost, or better still the president of the university. This is the structure at Yale and Harvard and Duke and Stanford — some of the best university museums in the country. This move will relieve the Meadows School of the Arts of the fiscal responsibility for the Museum. But, more importantly, it is only with such a move that the Museum can become what it should be, a university-wide resource, an institution that remains attractive and exciting to the DFW community, and something in which we can all feel pride.

Without this change, in our view, the Museum will never again attract a director of the caliber of Dr. Pillsbury, and clearly it is that caliber of leadership that we need.

We can imagine a Meadows Museum that hosts some of the most important art exhibitions in our community. We can imagine a Meadows Museum that becomes one of the premiere university art museums in the nation. We can imagine a museum a Meadows museum that brings an art-loving public to our campus on a regular basis. We can imagine a Meadows museum that becomes a crossroads for the intellectual life of this campus. We can imagine a museum restaurant (a campus favorite but closed early in Pillsbury’s tenure because he inherited a money-losing cafe), reopened with the member-based “Arts Club” that Dr. Pillsbury proposed to our central administration—that is a meeting place for faculty, staff and community members. We can imagine a Meadows Museum with a Spanish tapas cafe on Friday nights. We can imagine a Meadows Museum with significant lecture series such as the current one that focused on Dallas architects.

We can imagine such a museum. Our question is, can our administration?