Curatorial or Strategic? Lessons from the Barnes Foundation Case Study
The Barnes Foundation art collection opens its new home in Center City Philadelphia this weekend. While more accessible than its former home in suburban Merion, the move to a new US$150 million building along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is not without a unique sort of drama that brings into focus the enduring question of a governing board's fidelity to institutional mission.
The Barnes mission, framed by founders Albert C. and Laura Barnes in 1921, says that it "...promotes appreciation of the arts and horticultural science, through the preservation, presentation, and interpretation of the collections of Albert C. and Laura L. Barnes." Some, including people who formerly served on the Foundation's board, infer that the mission includes the signature space in Merion where Barnes originally sited the collection (Barnes and his successors eschew the word "museum"). To them, the collection must be preserved entirely as Barnes intended, site and all. To others, the viability of the collection as a nonprofit business is paramount, and a location amid the arts institutions of Philadelphia offers opportunities that were simply unavailable six miles west.
This being America, the matter was ultimately resolved via litigation, compromise, and inclusion in the new facility of many interior design elements from Merion.
The tension between these two perspectives on what it means to be faithful to the organization's mission is neither mere semantics nor hyperbole. At the heart of the matter is the question of exactly why, besides fiduciary oversight, the board exists in the first place. From one viewpoint, the board's role is curatorial; that is, it exists to preserve the institution and its assets exactly as the founds intended. Applied to international and independent schools, the parallel perspective would be that the board preserves the school in its present form (pedagogy, location, program, etc.). The perspective that eventually won at the Barnes Foundation would say that the board is strategic; that it preserves the school as an education institution, and that things such as location, pedagogy, program and more are fungible in service of that aim.
We are talking with an increasing number of boards pondering moves, mergers with other schools, and substantive changes to pedagogy and program, all in response to adverse economic conditions. Our counsel is for governing boards to reach agreement on whether they curate or strategize, and about what aspects of mission and operations must not change at any cost, before launching, say, into debate about a merger. Positive things rarely happen when governance purpose and strategic planning become confounded.