Fireside Chat

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan: Hi, everyone. I'm Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the Rose Marie and Eijk van Otterloo executive director and CEO of the Peabody Essex Museum. Welcome to another episode of Fireside Chats. In this series, I am speaking from our historic structures and special places across PEM's campus to provide updates and insights about the museum.

In each episode, I welcome a special guest to share their ideas and perspectives on specific topics. Today, we're here in PEM's East India Marine Hall, which celebrates its two hundredth anniversary this year. East India Marine Hall was the foundational building of our museum, designed to bring people together, to connect and learn about the wider world and their place in it.

Originally known as the East India Marine Society, our museum has been keeping this bright spark of curiosity and wonder alive through our exhibitions, programming, research, and collections. Two centuries later, PEM's mission to provide thought provoking experiences of the arts, humanities, and sciences feels more urgent and relevant than ever.

In a complex and ever changing world, we seek to activate an understanding of our shared humanity and empower imagination and learning through experimentation. I'm so pleased to have doctor Kurt Steinberg, PEM's chief operating officer, here today to talk about some of the major initiatives we have underway and what we can look forward to in the coming year.

A respected arts leader and former president of Montserrat College of Art in nearby Beverly, Massachusetts. Kurt joined PEM's leadership team two years ago. Since then, he's been actively collaborating with me, our staff, and our constituents to help usher in PEM's best chapter yet.

Welcome, Kurt. Thanks so much for joining me here today. I'm very much aware that Lunar New Year is coming up on January 29th, and according to the Chinese zodiac, the year of the snake is 2025. I gather that that symbolizes a year of wisdom, introspection, and transformation. How does that strike you?

Kurt Steinberg: I think introspection and transformation, we can key on because there's been some really exciting things as we wrapped up 2024 that both you and I have been involved in. You were over in Korea for a period of time reconnecting and trying to get support for the Korea Gallery opening up in May.

Then Yao and I, Yao is our new Chinese curator. We're over separately in China, again, trying to rekindle those partnerships in a truly post COVID space now, and they're very much open and open to that.

I was able to do a second visit to the Palace Museum. I was there earlier, met with the director. They're very excited and have said over and over that they want to explore even a deeper partnership than they had before COVID.

Lynda: Which is great.

Kurt: We've done some really great things with them, so it'll be great to follow up in the new year over that. Then, did a great visit to the caves out in Dunhuang, which is out towards Mongolia.

Lynda: Your photographs were amazing.

Kurt: [laughs]

Kurt: That was a great thing. I was able to go to the Mogao Caves, Yulin Caves, and then go out to the end of the Han Dynasty portion of the Great Wall. I think the conversation we had there is the Chinese government really wanting to push that story out beyond the borders.

Not easy because you can't move a cave, but it's, how can museums with the artifacts tell the story? There's some opportunity for us to potentially do that, which could have some real draw for people.

Then the last part, I was in Guangzhou and was able to go to Thirteen Hongs Museum and the Guangdong Museum, and really look at partnerships there. I know Yao was looking into that as well, and that connects to our Asian export art collection and the deep roots that we have in that area.

Lynda: That getting out there is just so important. It's too bad that we still have to think about the post COVID world. That personal connection is incredibly important. On that note, you and I have been thinking a lot about PEM's existing role in the community and what that role could be going forward.

We've been asking ourselves things like, how can we have or what kind of impact can we have, and how can we be a catalyst for positive change in the community. What's up on that front?

Kurt: With that, we've got a number of areas within the museum that are working on that and doing great progress. Specifically on my end, we've been running two community oriented programs in the fall networking event, and then we do a spring event that's connected to what we talked about in the fall.

We'll be doing it again, which is more of a roundtable, small, problem solving kinds of conversations. The mayor of Salem has been a part of that. A number of other people have been a part of that. That's in our partnership with the Creative Collective, which has been great.

We've had 150 people at the networking event. We limit it to 50 people in the spring, and the buzz around that has been great.

The big takeaway for me is proving the concept that we can be a bridge within the community where these conversations can take place, where people feel comfortable talking about challenging subjects, and that we can hopefully move the ball forward on a lot of different things.

Our main area, though, what I've been doing has been really dealing with the creative economy and the creative sector and trying to get artists, cultural representatives, and creative people and businesses talking to each other about how they can network and how they can become more about a fabric of the community as we move forward.

Lynda: There's that power in the many quite frankly, and the connected, many. You've also been very busy on the historic property front thinking through what we can be doing, and I'm curious about what's going on in that arena.

Kurt: With that, we've been doing some really interesting things. Just so people understand and know, we have probably close to 20 historic properties that we are the custodians of in this point in time. They came to us in all different ways and formats.

[laughter]

Kurt: We've been trying to look at it as a group internally about, how can we connect the community again in a responsible way to the historic properties. It's not just about opening up the doors and having people walk through, but what is the takeaway? What are we trying to learn from these properties? That's what we're trying to bring to it.

A couple of things that we started doing was, walking tours, which were very successful. We're looking right now at starting the walking tours again probably in May, and run for a longer season. It'll be exciting, I think.

Lynda: The demand is there based on the success of the pilot for sure. There is the comprehensive campus plan.

Kurt: We just rolled that out. A big portion of that is actually about how do we connect what everyone sees as the main museum. We're in that complex today. How do we connect that with these other assets that we have? These really important things that there's a common thread between them, and the story is the totality of all those properties and not just the main museum itself.

The plan is going to get us focused on that, and there were a lot of good possibilities and ideas that have come out of that. Over the next couple of months, we'll be rolling out sections of that to the community and also to our board as we discuss the next way forward on a number of fronts.

Lynda: It's not just the buildings, is of course, it's our grounds, our landscapes, our gardens, and after all, we've just become an arboretum, and that's a really exciting development.

Kurt: Really important. Very, very important. We get probably some of our biggest visiting is in the gardens. We finally have created a mechanism for us to focus responsibly and how to interpret those spaces and how to care long term for those spaces.

Lynda: We're building real excitement about what that potential represents for the staff, for the community, and certainly for our board. One last question. What are you looking forward to in the coming year?

Kurt: Coming year, we've got some really exciting things. Just before we even leave the next few months, we'll be opening as you know, the Korean gallery in the May, which I think is a culmination of a lot of effort that you and Sue and others have been engaged in as well as June.

The opening of this space next year, East Indian Marine Hall with a collection of objects from our founding that I think will give people a hint of what used to be and how it was in here. I hope, and I know it's your hope, and I know the team is working on a more modern interpretation of that.

With a tip of the hat to the past, and to try to give some modern insight into some of those objects. It's sort of we're looking back. They were interpreted a certain way and as we know, as we learn new things, we can start to change that interpretation and modify it and make it more modern for our audience today.

Lynda: The relevance piece is.

Kurt: That'll be really exciting.

Lynda: Is really important for people. We were founded as a resource for the community. Again, to have that happen in this East India Marine Hall is is really important.

Kurt: Then the last thing that I think is exciting on the radar screen is we've got Salem 400. There's also Beverly 400, our neighbor, and we have Rev 250, which is the American Revolution, 250th anniversary.

We've been working on programming across the entire museum and how we're going to intersect. We've been working very hard with the city on how our part fits in with the larger celebration, and we continue to do that and are excited to be partners with a number of other organizations on making that happen.

Lynda: Lots to look forward to, for sure. Thanks so much for being here, and we'll just keep working hard and fast and energetically.

[background music]

Kurt: Absolutely. Thank you so much. [laughs]

Lynda: To come full circle on the year of the snake, be sure to join us on Saturday, February 15th for our beloved Lunar New Year celebration featuring lion and dragon dances in the museum and along Salem's Essex pedestrian way. Until next time, thanks so much for joining us, and be well.

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To come full circle on the Year of the Snake, be sure to join us on Saturday, February 15th for our beloved Lunar New Year celebration featuring lion and dragon dances in the museum and along Salem’s Essex Pedestrian Way.