I've spent the last few years preparing for this year: the unsettling inertia of a privately-held public museum grafting into a major university system. Our arrival as the Crow Museum of Asian Art now OF the University of Texas at Dallas was comet-quick: we "closed" just over three months after the real negotiations began. True to form it was "Trammell Crow Time". Sometimes the hardest decisions need to be the quickest; I think shrewd real estate gurus know this. I am learning this.
In the one-hundred days since we became "UTD" I've had the opportunity to see the future: a welcome and necessary balm to the things we've said goodbye to: our sky-lined office, colleagues, the Pearl Art Studio and the way we were.
The familiar is always nearby. I've been dropped off at college before: twenty-five years and seven months ago my parents left me on the third floor of Scottish Rite Dormitory at UT Austin in a dorm room with a blue and white striped comforter that matched my sweet roommate's decor from Mount Pleasant, Texas. I cried in the bathroom stall hoping no one would hear me. I went outside to see if my parents really left. It was a quick goodbye: they were gone along with the way things were: the wood paneled Buick Century Station Wagon (The Party Wagon), Joe, Stu, Jonathan and the rest of the Six Pack. They became my past.
But at the University of Texas at Austin I saw the future: on the first day I met Brian, Ian and Hillary: new friends for the ages. I saw myself as an art educator. I fell in love with my museum studies class and the works of Helen Frankenthaler and Jim Dine with Sue Mayer. I studied in the Best Place on Earth to Study: The Architecture Library. I ate lunch in the Law Building looking for a husband (no future there--he was somewhere else!). My context had changed, and while it took a few more than a hundred days I became that future: curious, challenged and called.
I am that college freshman again: wandering the buildings at the University of Texas at Dallas: imagining what the founders of the Harry Ransom Center were thinking before it was built: before the Huntington Art Gallery and the Blanton Museum of Art. I am beyond the past of the Crow as it was and before the future of the Crow Museum of Asian Art as it will be. I have so much to learn.
Last week I tried to run out to the metaphorical front of the dorm to see if my parents were still there. They weren't. But even if they were, we are different now: the context has changed: 29,000 students are waiting for us to write the future and we have work to do. Through these moments of change and uncertainty I am using the tools I've practiced: mindfulness meditation, creative writing, breathing and yoga. It is as if I knew I was going to need new and serious, disciplined practices to take with me into this future: I am prepared and ready. It's all in where I've been that gives me the fearless heart to walk into where we are going: curious, challenged and called.
And so the work begins to dream up the next chapter. I see myself as a university art museum leader and educator both continuing to create unparalleled experiences in the Dallas Arts District location (which is not going anywhere!) and creating the new second location at UT Dallas. I see myself mentoring university freshmen who might be crying in the dorm room bathroom. And I've fallen in love with what the Crow can mean to this new world: this campus and the community: intercultural, inclusive experiences with works of art. We get to lead as a complex of museum collections: a museum that will respond with relevance and belonging to others who arrive on their first day on campus: curious, challenged and called.
In the one-hundred days since we became "UTD" I've had the opportunity to see the future: a welcome and necessary balm to the things we've said goodbye to: our sky-lined office, colleagues, the Pearl Art Studio and the way we were.
The familiar is always nearby. I've been dropped off at college before: twenty-five years and seven months ago my parents left me on the third floor of Scottish Rite Dormitory at UT Austin in a dorm room with a blue and white striped comforter that matched my sweet roommate's decor from Mount Pleasant, Texas. I cried in the bathroom stall hoping no one would hear me. I went outside to see if my parents really left. It was a quick goodbye: they were gone along with the way things were: the wood paneled Buick Century Station Wagon (The Party Wagon), Joe, Stu, Jonathan and the rest of the Six Pack. They became my past.
But at the University of Texas at Austin I saw the future: on the first day I met Brian, Ian and Hillary: new friends for the ages. I saw myself as an art educator. I fell in love with my museum studies class and the works of Helen Frankenthaler and Jim Dine with Sue Mayer. I studied in the Best Place on Earth to Study: The Architecture Library. I ate lunch in the Law Building looking for a husband (no future there--he was somewhere else!). My context had changed, and while it took a few more than a hundred days I became that future: curious, challenged and called.
I am that college freshman again: wandering the buildings at the University of Texas at Dallas: imagining what the founders of the Harry Ransom Center were thinking before it was built: before the Huntington Art Gallery and the Blanton Museum of Art. I am beyond the past of the Crow as it was and before the future of the Crow Museum of Asian Art as it will be. I have so much to learn.
Last week I tried to run out to the metaphorical front of the dorm to see if my parents were still there. They weren't. But even if they were, we are different now: the context has changed: 29,000 students are waiting for us to write the future and we have work to do. Through these moments of change and uncertainty I am using the tools I've practiced: mindfulness meditation, creative writing, breathing and yoga. It is as if I knew I was going to need new and serious, disciplined practices to take with me into this future: I am prepared and ready. It's all in where I've been that gives me the fearless heart to walk into where we are going: curious, challenged and called.
And so the work begins to dream up the next chapter. I see myself as a university art museum leader and educator both continuing to create unparalleled experiences in the Dallas Arts District location (which is not going anywhere!) and creating the new second location at UT Dallas. I see myself mentoring university freshmen who might be crying in the dorm room bathroom. And I've fallen in love with what the Crow can mean to this new world: this campus and the community: intercultural, inclusive experiences with works of art. We get to lead as a complex of museum collections: a museum that will respond with relevance and belonging to others who arrive on their first day on campus: curious, challenged and called.
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