Steven Nash still loves the smell of oil-based paints and turpentine, but he realized early on in life that he had no talent as an artist.
“Where I do have a good eye for art, I do not have a good hand at making it,” said the executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Nash arrived at the museum nearly three years ago, passionate about bringing in big-name exhibits and increasing the donations received.
On a routine walk through the museum, he admires pieces of art that he's seen a hundred times before. Nash is active in acquisitions for the museum and still pens pieces about art.
But Nash also is running a business. In an economy that's unforgiving to most businesses — not to mention the arts — he talked about his vision for the future of the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Question: How have your membership and admissions revenue been the past couple of years? Are they growing?
Answer: They have been. That's one good sign that even in the last year, membership and admission income have all grown. Not tremendously, but we've been growing at a 10 to 15 percent pace per year. For us, with the community size we have, that's a pretty strong rate.
That surprises me. It seems like public entities — the arts, theaters, museums — in other parts of the country are struggling.
It's not that we don't have our concerns. Balancing any museum budget — unless you're The Getty, and even The Getty's having problems — is a challenge.
But I think there's a real story here that is slowly infiltrating the region that there is something important happening, that there are exciting things going on.
We've been pretty aggressive in our programming with taking in these traveling shows and a steady stream of exhibitions, programming lots of events around those.
We've done something which is particularly important I would say on the education side by continuing our free Thursday nights. It's a traditional, popular event.
But thanks to funding from the Berger Foundation, we've added a free second Sunday. The main demographic we're aiming at is family visitors. A Sunday afternoon at the museum with a lot of special activities has proved to be very popular. We get over 1,000 people a day, which is a lot for us.
When you got here in 2007, you expressed a desire to bring large national and international exhibits here, Picasso and Matisse, for example. Do you have plans for those still?
We will continue along that track. We've been really experimenting to some degree to find the right level, the right exhibition that will play well with our audiences.
We know, for instance, outstanding art glass exhibitions have a very, very big draw here. We are working long-term. It's not easy to nail down some of these exhibitions which have those kind of international, stellar names to them.
No. 1, there's a lot of competition to do those shows. No. 2, they're amazingly expensive. We're talking still about shows of that variety.
We have a 75th anniversary coming up in a couple years, so the programming for that will be quite stellar. I don't want to mention any of the possibilities at this point and jinx myself, but there will be a couple of exhibitions any museum in the country would be proud to have.
What's your strategy in approaching people for bequests and gifts to the museum's collection?
People are interested in giving works of art to places that are worthy of receiving them and have the right environment to fully take care of, exhibit and publish them.
The groundwork had to start with renovating the institution physically so that we had better exhibition spaces, more handsome galleries for display of works of art, working on a program in (growth areas).
Photography is a real growth area for us. If there is staff expertise, someone on staff who knows what this material is and has scholarly background in it, the proof of program that is dedicated to honoring photography, then you have a chance for photography gifts.
So we started fairly early on knowing that photography could be a real growth field for us. We hired a curator with strong credentials in photography; we booked a couple of photography shows; announced our intentions; started a photography collection council at the museum — and this has really caught on in a very big way.
It's one segment where people are now paying attention to us. We've been given hundreds of photographs in the last couple of years.
Nothing succeeds like success. It's an old proverb I love because the more energy you show, the more important the place becomes as a museum.
And the more likely people are to take you very seriously, to become excited themselves and find you to be a worthy home for things that they love.
You mentioned the museum's upcoming 75th anniversary. What would you hope the museum to look like by its centennial?
It's going to be a much bigger place.
It's certainly going to grow physically, one way or another. There are various scenarios we're thinking of now that could be quite long-term.
I think this museum should always be the home base, in Palm Springs. We have a great building here, and it would be the home of the collection.
But I would really like to see it grow to some degree as — for lack of a better phrase — a franchise museum with satellite locations in other parts of the valley.
It's hard for schools in Indio to get to us, for instance. It is possible for us to have a satellite location farther down valley, in the east valley.
Especially for education purposes, it would give us a platform in those communities where we can much more easily get to the schools and get the schools to us.
There is no question that education is increasingly a dominant factor in our mission. Twenty-five years from now, it's going to be even bigger.
What is your motivation?
It's a three-letter word.
Art.
I started out in college as an economics major, and I had a little bit of business school. I have a business perspective. I'm not a great business technician. But I do have a mind that looks at charities and nonprofits as a business operation.
But I never for one minute forget what the place is about, and that is art.
The joy of creation, the absolute brilliance and overwhelming awesomeness of great art — once you get that bug, why, it never goes away.
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