For the MSU Broad Art Museum, the 10th year is the charm  

Additional reporting: Click here to read more about the Kresge art collection at the Broad Museum.

The stainless steel gills of MSU’s Broad Museum gulped golden gobs of sunshine into the galleries Sunday afternoon. Two students, Megan Fazio and Hannah Etheridge, took in a towering wall of paintings by Hamtramck, Michigan-based artist Beverly Fishman. 

“It’s so big it tricks your brain,” Fazio said. 

“It’s like we’re inside of it,” Etheridge nodded. 

The playful angles and electric hues of Fishman’s huge canvases, commissioned for the Broad’s 10th birthday year, toyed brazenly with the late Zaha Hadid’s swooping architectural design and easily put the sunshine in the shade.  

A more somber mood ruled in the adjoining gallery, where a knot of rapt scholars scrutinized original drawings by the 20th century’s most recognizable artist, Frida Kahlo, and lingered to read letters written in her own hand. 

Upstairs, visitors lost themselves in a packed labyrinth of art from the Broad’s “museum collection,” including long-buried works from the former Kresge Art Gallery, ranging from ancient Greek kylixes (vessels designed to maximize your Scrabble score) to medieval portraits to abstract modernism. The walls were festooned, salon-style, with three layers of portraits and landscapes from a dozen centuries and cultures. Tucked into the visual splendor were, oh, by the way, a Rembrandt etching and a mobile by Alexander Calder. 

At dead center of the gallery, Erica Holtz stared at a breathtaking, 8-foot-wide figure of the martyred St. Cecilia, in the form of a young Black man, painted by Kehinde Wiley, the New York artist who painted the famous official portrait of Barack Obama. 

For much of the Broad’s 10-year history, if you asked someone whether he or she planned to visit the new museum in town, you would either get a terse “no” or a terser “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” 

Not this spring. 

“I’d absolutely come back again,” Holtz said. 

After a rocky pre-adolescence marked by bad luck with its top leadership, unmet expectations, a persistent undertow of bafflement and hostility from the community, and a pandemic for a cherry on top, the Broad Museum is cooking on all burners this spring. Three major exhibits, each one completely different from the others, and a student exhibit bursting with imagination, are sending a strong message from the Broad’s third director, Mónica Ramírez-Montagut: This is the year it all comes together. 

“When I was hired a year and a half ago, I proposed a vision that you would walk into the Broad and there would be something for everyone,” she said. “I think this roster of exhibitions delivers that vision.” 

She ticked off the boxes: traditional historical art; cutting edge contemporary art “with a ton of visual impact;” imaginative student art; the star power of Frida Kahlo. Check, check, check, check. 

“That kind of rich mix of perspectives and textures is something we’ve been aiming for awhile,” she said. “And folks are responding very well to this combination. We want to walk into the museum, not through the lens of an art expert, but a person who is walking into the museum for the first time. As long as we do that, we will continue to see positive results.”  

Eye-popping dance 

Jordan Sutton, a member of the Broad’s advisory board, frequently takes her four daughters, aged 3 to 8, to the museum. She kept on coming even during the pandemic, when strict protocols were in place. 

“You walk in there and you can tell the difference,” Sutton said. “There’s something that’s so ‘wow’ about it that’s hard to put your finger on.” 

Then she put her finger on it. 

“Mónica’s energy is absolutely contagious,” Sutton said. “That’s what you’re seeing, and what all of us feel when we walk into the museum. That’s terrific for us as a community, but also for the staff, because they’re doing their best work as a result of her leadership.” 

Alan Ross, chairman of the Broad’s advisory board, is over the moon with her. 

“She’s very knowledgeable,” Ross said. “She’s very approachable. We’re just so pleased to have her leading the Broad. The board supports her 100 percent.” 

Sutton was impressed by recent exhibits like “Interstates of Mind,” about car culture and the effects of the interstate highway system on the urban landscape, and a series of exhibits on mass incarceration, including art by incarcerated people in Michigan. Both exhibits involved dozens of local community organizations, from the Historical Society of Greater Lansing to prison reform advocates to local residents who remembered the Black neighborhoods wiped out by I-496. 

“Her vision is global, like we’ve always had,” Sutton said. “But it also speaks to the heart of where we are, locally and regionally. You can see that in the choices for exhibits and the relationships with local groups that are being presented.” 

The most dramatic evidence of that is the current “History Told Slant” exhibit of art from the museum’s own collection, including the former Kresge collection. (The title of the exhibit refers both to the angled walls of the Broad and a verse by Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”) 

It’s a loving, lavish tribute, not only to the 7,500 pieces gathered by the Kresge Art Museum in its 80 years, but also to the people who created and collected it. 

For visitors who never went to Kresge, there are discoveries everywhere, from ancient and medieval art to abstracts and modernism, along with generous samplings of Asian, African and Latin American art. 

In a poignant tableau, splashy abstract paintings by Alma Goetsch and richly textured prints by Kathrine Winckler, two leading MSU art professors in the 1960s, do an eye-popping dance at right angles to each other. Goetsch and Winckler lived together for decades in a little house in Okemos they commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright, where they held workshops, classes and salons, part of a golden age of art education and creativity at MSU. To complete the ensemble, a Wright chair from the house is nestled in the nook between, as if waiting for one of the two women to take a seat and comment on the art. 

In a nearby video, former Kresge Art Museum director Susan Bandes details the Kresge collection’s rich history.  

Ramírez-Montagut said that bringing back the rich collection that began at Kresge, from ancient to modern, is “instrumental” to making people “feel they belong here and that it also their museum.” 

“History Told Slant” is not a one-off, either. It’s a foretaste of a major change at the Broad, an expanded space in the lower level where up to 5,000 pieces from the collection will go on view permanently (see related story). 

“A lot of people miss seeing those artworks, and it behooves us to make an effort to have these artworks that folks would come every month to visit — to have them be available again,” Ramírez-Montagut said. “The lower level refurbishment is going to earn us that credibility with the community. Go to the Broad because there will be something you will like.” 

Finding an identity 

It was frustrating for the public, not to mention the museum board, when the Broad Museum did not live up to its potential from the get-go. Steven Bridges, the Broad’s senior curator, took a longer view. Bridges came on board in 2016.  

“These 10 years have been a process of finding an identity and building the personality and character of the institution,” Bridges said. “Ten years is just a blip in the history of most museums.” 

When the Broad opened in 2012, Michael Rush, the museum’s founding director, was like the cool teacher who grabbed you by the lapels and said, “You’ve got to see this,” even if you weren’t sure you wanted to. Rush’s energy and gregarious nature gave the Broad a fighting chance to overcome its already growing reputation as an ivory tower full of recondite, academic art, but it was not to be. 

“We had a great director in Michael Rush, and there was all this excitement, but he became ill,” board member Hari Kern recalled. Despite his cancer, Rush soldiered on, but he was away for treatment much of the time and died in March 2015. Rush’s successor, Marc-Olivier Wahler, made a splash with his magic-themed “Transformed Man” exhibit (the one with the dangling elephant and the musical tent full of fireflies) and established the Broad Art Lab, a hub for workshops and community outreach across Grand River Avenue. But the soft-spoken Swiss intellectual never fulfilled the board’s, or the public’s, expectations. 

“There was something about his background, and his European roots, and his wish for international recognition that did not resonate with people in this community that well,” Kern said. “I thought he was sincere, but it was not a good fit for this community.” 

Ross put it more bluntly in a 2018 interview: “Maybe we should have interviewed more.” The issue was mooted when Wahler left the museum in 2018 to take care of his wife, who was battling cancer. 

The time was ripe to make a clean break with the Broad’s old leadership model. Philanthropist and arts supporter Jack Davis, who died in May 2020, was also on the Broad’s board of directors. In a 2019 interview, Davis cited the Broad’s tendency to hire directors “who want to display their creations, in terms of exhibits.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Davis said. “But the next person should also have management skills and an idea of how to appeal to the public.”  

The board was impressed with Ramírez-Montagut’s people skills, her expertise as a trained architect and museum curator, and her outreach work at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Museum. 

“She can relate to people on all levels,” Kern said. “There’s no pretention. She is what she is. She’s so enthusiastic and wants people to learn about contemporary art, to learn about our building.” 

“One of her main assets at Tulane was engaging local groups, and she’s continued that here,” Ross said. 

Under Ramírez-Montagut, the Broad Museum began to read less like a Jean-Luc Godard film with unhelpful subtitles and more like a multilingual menu for a restaurant specializing in home cooking. 

 Twisting the aluminum  

It was almost a blessing that by the time Ramírez-Montagut was named Broad Museum director in May 2020, early euphoria over the capacity of the Broad to transform the economic landscape and draw 150,000 visitors a year was a distant memory. 

The Broad drew an impressive 98,000 visitors in 2013, its first calendar year, but since then, it has drawn roughly 60,000 to 70,000 visitors a year. Attendance for the pandemic year of 2021 was 48,500, but that number is hard to interpret as a failure, a success or just hanging in there. A bright spot is that last year, 4,000 people came to the Broad’s family programs, from guided hands-on activities like Family Day and Make and Take Saturdays, and 2,000 K-12 art students participated in educational programs.  

“The number floated when the museum was conceived, thinking it was single-handedly going to reinvigorate the economic development of downtown — not feasible, to be honest,” Ramírez-Montagut said. 

Even the Guggenheim Bilbao, often cited as the catalyst for that city’s economic transformation, was part of a multi-billion-dollar downtown civic investment. 

Nevertheless, Ramírez-Montagut is confident that with the right mix of exhibits and relentless outreach to MSU departments and the surrounding community, the Broad can draw a lot more people, and the coming, sort-of-post-pandemic year will be the first real test. 

“I think we can get to 100,000 with this kind of a roster of exhibitions, where people walk in and they feel welcome and they see something that is for them, and we welcome families,” she said. “But we’re still building our credibility and our reach.” 

The pandemic has hampered Ramírez-Montagut from fully applying another skill: her ability to pull together big events encompassing film, dance, music and art like the 2004 bilingual MexicoNow festival, a grand showcase of Mexican contemporary art, music and dance with more than 150 events in 36 venues. 

“We had to scale down, but these kinds of things will come back,” she said. Planning is hard in the COVID era, but a series of concerts involving musicians from the MSU College of Music is among several events waiting in the wings. 

Art-wise, there will definitely be a grand finale to the Broad’s 10th birthday celebration: an exhibit that features a panoply of objects designed by the museum’s visionary architect, Zaha Hadid, beginning Sept. 10. 

Hadid was fascinated by the objects that define human life. 

“Tables, chairs, perfumes, sportswear — you name it, she designed it,” Ramírez-Montagut said. “The objects, like our building, are going to be so different — a sofa that looks nothing like a sofa.” (The Zephyr Sofa is inspired by natural rock formations shaped by the “subtractive process” of erosion, according to Zaha Hadid Architects, which assures us they are also comfy.) 

The Hadid show is a fitting way to bring the Broad Museum full circle after 10 years, from the community’s unhealthy obsession with the building and relative indifference to the contents to complete mutual harmony. 

The Broad team is already in the midst of negotiating elaborate standards for the placement and treatment of each object set by Hadid’s exacting design firm. Ramírez-Montagut is positively eager to explain the outré forms, principles and materials behind Hadid’s objects to curious, baffled or downright hostile visitors. 

“You’re looking at a sofa; it’s made by twisting aluminum like rubber,” she said matter-of-factly, rehearsing the tour a few months ahead of time. 

For the Broad, showcasing Hadid’s designs in a building she designed is nothing less than a dream show, but that’s not enough for Ramírez-Montagut. Her mind is already firing on all circuits, looking for outreach opportunities. She seized on the idea that — no surprise— the omnivorous brain of Zaha Hadid also designed the packaging of her products. 

“The experience of unpacking the object you bought is part of our culture,” Ramírez-Montagut said. “We see videos of people unboxing products.” 

MSU also happens to be home to the leading packaging school in the nation. Boom — another connection made. 

“We could highlight the contributions of that school, in dialogue with some of Zaha Hadid’s packaging,” Ramírez-Montagut said.  

Last year, the Broad built a multi-faceted exhibit around the 2021 plantings in MSU’s epic Beal seed experiment, the longest running scientific experiment in the world at 80 years and counting. A lot of people didn’t know about the experiment, despite the national press coverage, until they saw the show. 

Looking at the campus buildings along the Grand River, the Broad Museum resembles a missile embedded in a brick wall, but to Ramírez-Montagut, it’s a door. 

“We can be a showcase for some of the tremendous contributions — the expertise on campus, and make them available to the public in a way that’s accessible to them, in a place that’s free and open to everyone,” she said. “That’s a formula for success.”