On a sunny Central Coast morning at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Executive Director Leann Standish is accompanied by her energetic sidekick — a small black puppy named Sophie.
The pair led me to Standish’s subterranean office within the museum. Sophie was excited to have a visitor and wanted to be on my lap, which I didn’t mind — even when she started kissing my face.
“I better take her,” Standish said. “She was going to go to sleep, but she loves you.”
Standish excused herself to get Sophie some treats and told her to lie down. Either Sophie behaved, Standish told her, or she’d be banned from the room. There was a sweetness and tolerance coming from Standish, but also an expectation of good manners, which made sense given her Midwestern upbringing. Standish herself seems to have been raised with both love and propriety.
“I was very fortunate and grew up in a most adorable place with the most adorable family,” she said.
When she was in college, she had no idea that she would end up with a long career in the arts.
“It was fully accidental. A museum profession wasn't even on my radar when I was a student. I studied marketing. I sort of had a terrible job that I hated in Fresno, California.”
But she found a better job at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum as an administrative assistant.
“I think I made $22,000 a year. I always tell the story of cleaning porta-potties and ball gowns. It was the most valuable education of my life. The woman who hired me, Kaywin Feldman, hired me again at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts," Standish said.
"And today, she's the first woman ever to run the National Gallery in DC. So, I could never have planned for the career that I have. It's accidental in all the ways,” she said.
Standish has been lucky, she said, to have the flexibility to follow her career — and follow it she has. It’s taken her to Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and South Bend, Indiana; to Fresno, California, where she spent eight years; to Portland, Oregon; to Grand Rapids, Michigan; to Minneapolis, Minnesota; and then to Miami, Florida.
“Certainly, you know, there's nothing more powerful than being recruited to Miami in the midst of February in Minnesota. It was a very compelling case,” she said.
But her decision to come to San Luis Obispo wasn’t based on her career as much as it was simply wanting to live here.
“San Luis Obispo, I tell people all the time, was the first time in my whole life that I chose a place to live and said I would figure out what to do for work after,” she said.
She said the characteristics of Midwesterners —neighborly and sincere — were shared by people she met here in SLO.
"A few people can make your life a success or not, especially in a small community."Leann Standish
“A lot of the sort of powerful things about Midwestern people I feel here. I feel really welcome. I feel really lifted up by the community in a way that maybe you wouldn't get in some of the bigger metro markets,” she said.
When Standish first came to town, she worked for the Foundation for the Performing Arts Center where people, women in particular, helped her make other connections.
“And you know, a few people can make your life a success or not, especially in a small community. I think that people generally think that if you're coming from a big community to a small community, that it's easier. It's not–it’s harder. I have felt very lifted up by the professional women in the area,” she said.
Standish said managing her professional and personal life was a delicate balance.
“Well, you know, I would say that I'm not always the best at balancing personal and professional life. I used to work for a fellow called Max Anderson, who was the director of the Whitney at a very young age–and he ended up through strange circumstances being my boss at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He lived in the museum home and entertained every single night."
"I remember saying to him, ‘You must be exhausted.’ And he said to me, ‘Leann, I do what I love. So it never feels like work to me,’” Standish said.
This was an 'a-ha' moment for Standish, one she said she has reflected on often.
“This work is very social, you give so much of yourself to it. Because it's joyful, right? It's all the artists, the patrons, and all the people you get to encounter, but you do sort of find that you don't necessarily have a different personal life–it’s all one thing,” she said.
I told Standish that when I popped into the museum the evening before, I found a skateboarder quietly making a detailed sketch of a painting. Then in the next 20 minutes before the museum closed, all sorts of people came though: a group of young adults, a couple, a father and his two daughters, a family of four — people from a wide range of ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities.
Standish said that’s a common sight here.
“I'm unbelievably proud of the diversity of our audience. We're so fortunate at our location, being right in the center of downtown. "
"Museums when I was a kid were sort of cathedrals of solitude and reverence, and there's a place for that. But today a museum is alive, and part of the joy of the art is seeing how people respond to it. I'm very proud of how we're meaningful and relevant to a lot of different people,” she said.
Standish said this meaning and relevance informs her vision for the museum.
“My vision is that it is the center of this community in all the ways that means. I always tell people: Take three minutes when you're downtown and just walk through–don’t spend any time; don't worry about it. People think that when they go to a museum, it's an event and they have to dress up or put aside hours of time. And what we want is to be a place where you just pop in,” she said.
"I feel very very lucky to be a part of this. Art does matter."Leann Standish
She said she took inspiration for this vision from Michael Govan, the director of LACMA–the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“I remember years ago reading an article about Michael Govan, the director of LACMA, talking about how museums, again, historically had been sort of like your grandmother's living room where you couldn't go in with your shoes on, and you sat on the plastic on the furniture; they were something you couldn't engage in."
"His vision for LACMA was like your rec room, where you know, you flopped out on a sofa, your friends ate popcorn, you just engaged in it in such a fun and comfortable way. And that's my vision for this museum,” Standish said.
It might seem obvious for the director of a museum, but for Standish, art matters to a community for so many reasons. For some, it provides a place of solace, especially after Covid.
“I love talking about how much art matters. Shortly after we reopened, we participated in a national survey of museum goers, and why they valued museums. And people said that it really was good for their mental health, that it was meditative for them."
But museums don’t just offer mental health benefits, she said.
“What I think, though, mostly, is that art allows us to connect with humanity in this moment, in this time, in a way that nothing else can–simply said, nothing else can."
"I value so much when third grade or fifth grade students are here in the museum and you watch them connect to a piece of art or the practice of making art, and you see that a-ha moment for them. I feel very very lucky to be a part of this. Art does matter,” she said.
And since art matters, the museum provides ways for everyone to get involved. The museum partners with YMCA to offer art classes and also hosts a variety of other art-centric events.
“The second Saturday of every single month from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the museum’s lawn, we do art activities that are free–these entire kits. The first Friday of every month, we participate in the SLO County Arts Council ‘Art After Dark’ program, so we're open from 5-8 p.m. every first Friday. We have a DJ; we have hosted wine. It's a good crowd. You want to talk about a diverse crowd? That's really a wonderful thing to see,” she said.
Standish and I said hello to the museum’s curators, who offered to take care of the puppy while we toured the galleries. It takes a village, as they say.
“We had an opening on Friday for the new exhibition and it was so much fun,” Standish said.
About 300 people were present, she said. The museum always does an opening for members on the Friday before the exhibition opens to the public. She said members are incredibly important to the museum.
“We are 100 percent supported by members and donors. We are all charitable revenue,” she said.
I told her guiltily that I’d let my membership expire. She laughed and said, “Obviously, we’ll fix that.”
We talked about the text that accompanies the art pieces–how the texts can take over and how people can spend too much time reading and not enough time seeing.
“Early on in my career, when I was in Indianapolis, we had an NEA grant and did a study where we asked visitors to wear a pair of glasses that would monitor how much time they spent reading the text versus looking at the art. It was really fascinating. It makes me not love extended text. Because people do that,” she said.
Her concern with too much text is that people will rely on it to tell them what an artwork means, whereas Standish would like to see people decide for themselves what it means for them.
“How does it move you? Why does it move you? And what is that rooted in?” she asked.
Outside the museum, Standish showed off the colorful mural on SLOMA’s walls.
“This was a really important project. I'm super proud of it. We intentionally wanted this mural program to be a look at diversity in the arts. We wanted it to be a welcoming beacon,” she said.
The first mural was made in 2021 by Juan Alberto Negroni.
“I really wanted a Spanish-speaking artist. If you spend time downtown, you realize that so many of our community members are speaking Spanish consistently. I wasn’t really aware of that,” she said.
The current mural, “Calafia Was Here,” was the creation of Erin LeAnn Mitchell, an artist whose work focuses on Black futures.
“We really wanted a woman of color on this second mural. We were intentional about who we wanted or what we wanted to represent. And then Emma just did a fine job in connecting with Erin LeAnn Mitchell who did this exquisite piece,” she said, referring to Emma Saperstein, the museum’s chief curator and director of education.
We walked over to the lawn, which holds installations funded by the City of San Luis Obispo’s public art program. The current installation was made by Camille Hoffman, who also had a prior exhibition inside the museum earlier this year.
“This piece, and this show–the Camille Hoffman piece here–were really motivated by her Filipino ancestry, and then her sort of pointing out to us this narrative that we didn't know necessarily–all of us in this community–that the first ever Filipino landing in what is now the continental United States happened through Morro Rock in Morro Bay,” she said.
Standish comes across as playful and wise. She’s also not afraid to admit when she doesn’t know something, whether about the fact that many people speak Spanish here or about that first Filipino landing. It’s refreshing and rare, that intellectual humility, and so important–because she’s willing to learn. And if the knowledge comes through art, even better.
Admission to the museum is free. Information about membership, exhibitions, and events can be found here.
The KCBX Arts Beat is made possible by a grant from the Community Foundation of San Luis Obispo County.
