ABOUT
What is Remuseum?
Remuseum is an independent project seeking to promote innovation among art museums across the United States. Remuseum does this work through research, convenings, and catalytic support for innovators among museum leaders (directors, educators, curators, and trustees). With a focus on relevance, governance, and financial sustainability, Remuseum supports new ways for museums to sustain and fulfill their missions, almost all of which are now centered on the public.
Inspired and funded by entrepreneur and arts patron David Booth (with additional support from the Ford Foundation), and powered by the disruptive spirit of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (and the Art Bridges Foundation), Remuseum is led by entrepreneur and innovative museum director Stephen Reily.
About Stephen Reily – Founding Director, Remuseum
Stephen Reily is the Founding Director of Remuseum, an independent research project housed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which seeks to promote innovation among art museums across the United States. Stephen is an attorney and entrepreneur who served as Director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky from 2017 to 2021. At the Speed, Reily invigorated a newly renovated museum with a mission of public service and dramatically increased both contributed revenue and accessibility. Under his leadership, the Speed introduced a new “Speed for All” free family membership for anyone for whom cost is a barrier to entry; initiated its first paid internships; issued its first annual Racial Equity Report, specifying the museum’s standing and commitments on staffing, acquisitions and exhibitions, programming, and more; presented over 20 exhibits, expanding the museum’s commitment to presenting both the work of artists historically underrepresented in museums and all of the arts of Kentucky; increased contributed revenue by nearly 50%; offered an “After Hours” event welcoming on average over 1,000 visitors monthly; and created “The Art of Bourbon,” the premier national nonprofit bourbon auction.
During his tenure, the Speed worked with Guest Curator Allison Glenn and Community Engagement Strategist Toya Northington to present the exhibition “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” cited as a model of relevance and innovation as the museum responded in real time to the killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests in Louisville. In 2022, Reily, Glenn, and Northington co-wrote a book documenting the exhibition and that work.
A longtime supporter of museums and the arts, Reily currently serves on the Boards of the Creative Capital Foundation and the American Federation of Arts.
A graduate of Yale College and Stanford Law School, Stephen Reily clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens before beginning his career as an entrepreneur, co-founding IMC Licensing, a global leader in brand licensing that has generated over $6 billion in consumer product sales for the Fortune 500 brands it represents. As a social entrepreneur, Reily was longtime Chair of the Greater Louisville Project, which for 20 years used data to catalyze civic progress in Louisville, and partnered with the Louisville Urban League to create the Reily Reentry Program to support expungement programs for citizens of Kentucky.
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Task Force
Remuseum’s research is advised by a Task Force of museum and non-profit leaders. Members are:
Rehema Barber
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
Carol Colletta
Memphis River Parks Partnership
Juli Goss
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Colleen Jennings-Roggensack
ASU/Gammage
Stacey Shelnut-Hendrick
Chrysler Museum
Vivan Zavataro
Ulrich Museum of Art
Rod Bigelow
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Miki Garcia
ASU Museum
Daniel Hemel
NYU School of Law
Adam Levine
Toledo Museum of Art
Winans Slaughter
Independent Curator/Museum Trustee
Jim Bildner
DRK Foundation
Sam Gill
Doris Duke Foundation
Diane Jean-Mary
Black Trustee Alliance
Kimerly Rorschach
Former Director, Seattle Art Museum
Scott Stulen
Philbrook Museum of Art
Frequently Asked Question
What is Remuseum’s relationship to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art?
Remuseum’s primary funder, David Booth, was inspired by the spirit of innovation he found in Bentonville and in the way that staff and board leaders there continue to serve the field in innovative ways; in the development of Crystal Bridges and the Momentary as museums in service to a growing region; in the creation of Art Bridges Foundation, an independent organization that expands access to American art across the country; and in grantmaking that is helping diversify leadership in the museum field. Like the latter ventures, Remuseum is focused on and seeks to benefit the museum field overall, with the freedom to make and share independent and unbiased findings about all museums, including Crystal Bridges.
How does Remuseum relate to other initiatives promoting change in American museums?
There are already many groups and there have been many research projects calling museums to be more diverse, inclusive, and accessible; to better engage “next-gen” donors; to compensate and empower their workers more equitably; to adapt faster to climate change; and to reconsider their attachment to new buildings and to unsustainable growth of their permanent collections. And most of those groups and projects feel that museums are not changing fast enough. Remuseum will not replicate their work but will shine a light on it – and will hope to accelerate both innovation and change – by addressing core issues of financial sustainability, relevance, and governance in the belief that if museum boards and leaders focus on fulfilling their own public-facing missions, they will matter to more people and find more support for their work.
Why are financial sustainability, relevance, and governance, Remuseum’s three areas of focus?
Remuseum is addressing three topics that all museum leaders recognize as both essential and in need of new solutions, but that few other projects have made central to their work:
- Financial Sustainability: Over 40 years ago, MIT Professor Peter Temin wrote that museums “are in a continual state of financial crisis. The operations so in need of funds today seem to have had financing problems since the start of American art museums.” In 2023, those challenges have been heightened by rising staff and utility costs, depreciation, and deferred maintenance costs from a never-ending boom in building, storage, and care for perpetually growing collections, higher inflation, and the end of COVID-driven grantmaking by the federal government. More than ever, museums need new financial solutions to fulfil missions, goals and expectation that are broader (and more expensive) than ever. Museums cannot thrive, much less accommodate the pace of change sought by museum critics and supporters alike, without new sources of revenue.
- Relevance: At a time when visual culture is a bigger part of everyday life than ever, most Americans do not visit (or even consider visiting) American art museums. At the same time, museums themselves now define their missions and goals in terms of serving and engaging the public. Museums need to find new ways to matter to more people.
- Governance: Remuseum is focused on board governance for two reasons:
- Change in nonprofit management requires changing the conversations that boards have with the leaders they employ. Remuseum will use data to provoke conversations within museum boards about whether their budgets and everyday work are fully aligned with the missions they have adopted.
- Daniel Weiss, outgoing President and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently wrote: “To function most effectively, the board should be representative of the full community it is intended to serve.” At a time when most museum boards have approved audience-centered strategies and community-serving missions, Remuseum hopes that boards will ask themselves whether success at their own stated missions would be easier if they themselves fully represented the community they seek to serve.
How will Remuseum define success?
Given that most American art museums have adopted missions that center their audience above their collections, Remuseum thinks a fair measure of success will come when museums spend at least as much money on the public as they spend on objects.
In addition, Remuseum seeks to support the development of reliable, consistent, and publicly available metrics about American art museums that can help museums, innovators, and the public evaluate and identify new ways for museums to serve their missions and thrive.
Is Remuseum a supporter or a critic of museums?
Yes. Remuseum seeks to be passionate, honest, and provocative about a field we love but one that sometimes uses rules of its own creation to inhibit the creative spirit that gave it birth – a spirit that it can always choose to embrace. Remuseum is optimistic about the capacity of museums to matter to more people and thrive.
Who advises Remuseum?
In 2023, Remuseum formed a Task Force of museum and non-profit leaders to advise our ongoing research efforts, including the latest report, Museum Missions and Transparency.
Who is funding Remuseum?
Remuseum is inspired and supported by entrepreneur and arts patron David Booth, with additional support from the Ford Foundation.