30 Apr Collector’s Notebook: Telling the Story

According to the American Alliance of Museums, attendance five years post-pandemic is improving for many museums; however, most institutions are still struggling to bring back visitors and retain members, which is wreaking havoc on budgets. One theory is that people fell out of the habit of visiting museums. Another is that museums are competing with too many distractions, like smartphones. But the reality is that this downward trend began before the pandemic, which suggests something else is at play.

Growing up in Oklahoma City, Pat Fitzgerald spent a lot of time at the Cowboy Hall of Fame, now the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (NCWHM). “Back when I was a kid,” he says, “every third grader came here; it was mandatory.” Fitzgerald went more often than the average third grader because his father, who was an air traffic control instructor, loved the Cowboy Hall and would bring people from all over the world in to see it. Then, after taking in the art and artifacts, his dad would bring them back to the family home, where he’d parade out his two saddles, much to his wife’s chagrin. “He never owned a horse in his life,” Fitzgerald says, with a laugh. “But he loved the West.”

A guest stands among enlarged pages from the journal of real-life cowboy Jack Bailey, which is part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s permanent collection. His handwritten history comes to life through the immersive gallery experience. Photo courtesy of National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

Pat Fitzgerald didn’t study art or even work at a museum. His career was corporate; he was a “change manager” at Apple, Disney, and Citibank. “I was brought in at a senior level because there was a change needed, and it was not going to be an easy change,” he says. When he got the call from a headhunter about the opening at the NCWHM for a new CEO, he was semi-retired and living in Oklahoma, doing some consulting. But he admits, “I suck at retirement.”

Still, before agreeing to talk to the museum’s leadership, he spent two weeks visiting, anonymously, like a secret shopper. “I just watched consumer behavior, how they engaged or didn’t,” he says, and adds, “I asked questions. I became a member.” What he saw at the end of those two weeks gave him an idea.

Fitzgerald is a tall, gregarious, dyed-in-the-wool Westerner who gives off the vibe of a kid given the keys to Disneyland, a place he did have plenty of access to at one point in his career. In his office hangs a reproduction of Albert Bierstadt’s Emigrants Crossing the Plains, which I can see on the Zoom screen just over his shoulder when he sits back in his chair, momentarily resting his hands on his desk before leaning forward again to launch into another great thing about the museum and his staff.

“I think museums have to look at new business models,” he says. “And they have to see if their business model meets their objectives. Do they have guests coming — guests who will be coming back in 10, 20 years? And has there been a consumer change? I think, if everybody’s honest with themselves, they’re going to say, ‘Wow, there’s a consumer change. We’re not getting the young guests in here like we used to.’”

Visitors of all ages explore rolling plains and wide-open vistas inside The Cowboy: An Immersive Journey, where art, storytelling and technology invite guests to experience the beauty of the American West on an unprecedented scale. Photo courtesy of National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

While this might not seem like a big issue — the 40- to 70-year-olds still visit — if a museum isn’t engaging younger audiences, they’re not nurturing the next generation of members and donors. The NCWHM board knew they needed to rethink their approach, not because anything was terribly wrong, but it’s hard to ignore a worldwide sea change. And yet, when Fitzgerald was hired, there was concern over what he might do to the beloved establishment.

“When I first got here, everybody thought I was going to bring in all this technology,” he says. But he didn’t. Instead, he addressed a more pressing issue in a most refreshing way. “The very first thing I did was bring in humans because in our galleries nobody was telling a story. We trained gallery hosts; they had to take tests and know the real stories because otherwise, people were making things up.” After that, he started considering other ways to tell stories that would engage and excite more guests.

IT’S THE STORY

Fitzgerald is both a marketer and a storyteller. “I’m an ex-Disney person; I loved the movie industry because it allowed me to tell stories,” he says. And while, yes, museums are keepers of stories, Fitzgerald saw a disconnect. So, he studied guest behavior to determine what could enhance engagement, excitement, and education.

This approach was something Disney did exceedingly well, as did another company he worked for. “I learned a lot from Steve Jobs about behavior. He looked at things differently than we did in the rigid marketing world. Because his technology was so far advanced, he had to really look at the behavior of consumers, and he built things to solve a problem based on that behavior,” Fitzgerald says. “It’s very similar here.”

The big problem Fitzgerald spotted right away is an industry-wide issue: On average, 70 percent of a museum’s funding comes from donations. “That’s not a good business model; it’s not really sustainable. You’ve got to find a way to make this operationally sound on its own, number one; and number two, you’ve got to give people a reason to engage with your story.”

Ultimately, no one needed to panic about bringing a nontraditional boss into the museum mechanics. “We’re still a museum; we’re still about the art and artifacts,” he says. “That is the center of our story.”

Case in point is the museum’s headliner, the Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition & Sale. “The artists are phenomenal because they’re the best in Western art, and they all tell great stories through their art. When you have a great event like the Prix de West and the artists are here, do potential buyers just buy the art? Some do, but most people are buying into the story.”

And so, Fitzgerald the change maker didn’t upset the system; he simply brought it back to basics. “In this business,” he says, “it’s the story. I think many museums forget that. They think about the object, and everything around the object, and they’re putting the story third or fourth down the list of priorities when, in fact, it should be first.”

HEART AND SOUL

After taking a good 90 days to really learn the museum’s inner workings, Fitzgerald brought his team together to envision a refresh he calls the “Heart and Soul Initiative,” which he anticipates will take a total of six years to complete. “We’re doing a gallery a year, and we’ve done two already.”

If Fitzgerald is the catalyst, his curators are the true agents of change. Led by David Davis, chief curator and, as Fitzgerald says, “chief storyteller” and overseer of strategy and exhibition development, along with Johanna Bloom who specializes in Western art and artifacts; and Dr. Eric Singleton who holds a PhD in Ethnology and is an expert on Native American tribes and cowboy culture. “The biggest change we’re seeing is how we’re looking at our galleries. There is some technology used, but it’s still about art, artifacts, and telling the story. We’re blessed here because we have three amazing curators who are great storytellers, so they get it. They’re tremendous as is the exhibit group and people leading art sales. And it makes everybody look at this place in a different way.”

The key to instituting change, Fitzgerald says, is melding the old-school museum world and how curators were taught to present art and artifacts with the new ways people take in information. “Humans love to engage with humans. We call it the ‘lean-in effect.’ You’ll have a group of five or six listening to a curator or gallery host telling them about a wonderful piece of art. And next thing, there are 10 people around that person, leaning in because they want to hear.”

TRAIL MARKERS PAVE THE WAY

As for the “how” of telling those stories, Fitzgerald says that they, like most museums, only show a small fraction of their entire collection, and what they did show was presented in a traditional way. “We have 13 percent of our art and artifacts up, and 87 percent is in our vault. It’s great to have the best things up, but we had to think about the best rotation of those things, and how to tell a new story and engage with that story,” he says. To do this, he challenged his curators to rethink how they present art and objects, which meant bringing some phenomenal objects out of storage.

“We’re calling it ‘Trail Markers,’” Fitzgerald says, explaining that now galleries in the museum are centered around themes that tell broader stories of the West by combining art and objects from across mediums. “We create this big collective to tell a much richer, more cohesive story. And by doing that, we don’t have to write as much text either, because it’s logical.”

And they can tell many stories in their 220,000-square-foot museum space. Now, instead of walls of paintings, you might also see a pair of spurs and a gun nearby, as well as clothing to tell a more robust story. Currently, the new galleries focus on telling the story of Western expansion, using these “Trail Markers” as the vehicle that pulls visitors through various eras toward a glorious, towering Bierstadt landscape at the end. “It looks like this magical window that you want to get to, but you’ve got to go through these other stories first. And it’s all logical because it explains through the art and artifacts the how, what, and when people were migrating west and what they encountered on their journey.”

A LITTLE DISNEY IS A GOOD THING

Fitzgerald’s fresh approach includes folding in people from different walks of life who bring skills not traditionally considered for museum jobs, such as tourism and sports entertainment. And then there’s Bob Miller. “He’s our ‘Imagineer.’ He worked at Disney, Apple, Nokia, and Boeing. He was an engineer who worked on really great projects and developed solid solutions,” Fitzgerald says.

Which gets us to the Disney part of this revamp. A few years ago, Fitzgerald and his wife went to an immersive Van Gogh experience, and a lightbulb went off. Not long after, that headhunter called to ask if he would apply for the CEO position at the NCWHM. After taking two weeks to really think through what was possible, he threw his hat in the ring by presenting his take on where he believed museums were going. “I presented to them the impact of storytelling through these immersive stories and technology and how new, young, and older audiences all were flocking to this newer storytelling technique.”

What Fitzgerald was presenting was more than glitz. And while some people thought he was trying to justify his Disney sensibility — a comment that doesn’t bother him one bit — he was really looking at static presentation, from the lighting to sound, and introducing some fairly dynamic tech to enhance the experience. “It was like a library in here and at many museums,” he recalls. “You couldn’t have sound, and I thought, ‘My gosh, folks, what are we doing here?’ Sound doesn’t distract; it brings emotion and enhances the experience.”

So, while his curators were reimagining how to present these stories, Fitzgerald worked with Lighthouse, the outfit behind Immersive Van Gogh, to create The Cowboy: An Immersive Journey. “It’s a 40-minute show, written by our curators and a few of us, and narrated by Tom Selleck,” he says. “The biggest reason our younger audience didn’t see themselves here was because they didn’t see the old Western movies and they didn’t see any artists they knew. We needed to change that and also to bring in new storytelling techniques to attract new audiences.” And yes, it did cost a pretty penny to produce, but the museum owns the intellectual property and is set to travel The Cowboy: An Immersive Journey around the world, to tell their story and generate revenue, which they earn from every ticket sold. Now that’s thinking outside the box.

The biggest challenge they faced: not ostracizing their core audience. Turns out everyone loves to be awash in art: Their attendance numbers more than doubled since January’s launch of The Cowboy, as have revenues.

Fitzgerald says he plans to stay six or seven years, then turn things over to the next visionary. “I’ll probably retire for good after that.” But for now, he can’t wait to get into the office. “It’s not that we haven’t made some mistakes or tried some things that didn’t work,” he says. “We have. But for me, the biggest thing is, if you are not evolving, you are slowly going extinct.”

Curator and writer Rose Fredrick shares her extensive knowledge about the inner workings of the art market on her blog, The Incurable Optimist, at rosefredrick.com.