Women Directors Need to Succeed for Museums to Succeed

There are at least 20 openings for directors of major American art museums now (the MCA Chicago just got added to that list with Madeleine Grynsztejn’s announced retirement last week – another big pair of shoes to fill). While openings occur for different reasons – some result from retirements and some from directors moving to other museums […]

Museums and Marketing: It’s Complicated

I was excited to return to the Museum Confidential podcast to talk about Remuseum’s report on museums and marketing. In that report, we cite that museums invest, on average, less than 3% of their operating budgets on marketing, which is a level consistent with the American mining and construction industries. Listen to the full conversation

L.A. Museums are Rethinking the Rules of Art Ownership. Will Others Follow?

Permanent collections are growing at an unsustainable rate, costing museums—and the public—millions. Could joint ownership be the solution? The following was published as an opinion piece in The Observer on April 2, 2025. Museums continue to collect art, but most of it sits in storage indefinitely. A new model in Los Angeles is challenging the

Re-imagining Museums

I joined the Season 9 debut of the “Museum Confidential” podcast, with Jeff Martin at the Philbrook Museum of Art. We talk about Remuseum, my time at the Speed Art Museum, and how to reimagine art museums to meet the many challenges they face. Listen to the episode here.

Stephen Reily appears on Heidi Zuckerman’s “About Art” podcast

I joined Heidi Zuckerman on her podcast “About Art”, to talk about museums as legacy businesses, the unsustainable nature of the current economic model of museums, innovation, the Director’s role, artists and what we can learn from them, new ideas and initiatives, what’s working, and of course why art matters! Listen to the episode here.

3 million images to honor Barry Bingham Jr. and the Courier-Journal

My father-in-law, Barry Bingham Jr., was a visual person. One of his first jobs was making documentaries at CBS; he always had a camera with him, made and edited videos for us, and printed large-scale photographs until his last year; and when he moved back to Louisville in the 1960s he considered himself lucky to

“Promise, Witness, Remembrance” is now a Book

Since I left the Speed Art Museum a year ago I’ve been working to document “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” – the exhibition built around Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor. That work is now a Speed-published book, co-authored with Curator Allison Glenn and Community Engagemnt Strategist Toya Northington and with contributions from many. What made this exhibition was the people

Artist Amy Sherald Shows us the Way

Artists are the most generous people I know, and I can’t think of a more creative philanthropist today than the amazing Amy Sherald. When the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates invited Amy to paint a portrait of Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020 for the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, she reached out to Breonna’s mother,

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