"The Dutch people pay 52% of their income for taxes, and they have a sense of 'I paid for this place.'" The truth is, government support for the arts, including the Stedelijk's subsidy, is shrinking, and Goldstein and her trustees will have to seek more private money, as task she says she's eager to undertake even though the concept of arts philanthropy is new to the Netherlands. "There's a sense of collective ownership of the museum that is different from the U.S.," she says. Goldstein knows she must navigate the difference, and says it's not just political. I think she's well-suited for it, but the other challenge-a very significant change between a privately run, museum here that was a startup versus a government-run institution with a profound history-that's harder." "But as much as she knows museums from the inside out, it's different when you are a director from when you are a curator. MOCA, who left the embattled museum in June. "She is very dedicated, very thorough, very rigorous," says her friend Paul Schimmel, the longtime chief curator of L.A. In the second column, she has zero experience as a director or even a department chair. "This is a museum with a huge history and huge collection without hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal," he says, "and we wanted someone with the nose and the acumen for contemporary art to give artists their first chance, and to make sense of what's out in the art world, and to deal with the new environment for museums to get people to visit."įorthright and strong-willed, Goldstein comes to the job with assets as well as liabilities.In the first column is her well-respected scholarship she is known for organizing large-scale, deeply researched exhibitions like "A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1988" [(2004) and "1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art" (1995-96). Recalling the trip he and another trustee made to Cologne, Germany, where Goldstein and her husband-artist Christopher Williams, who teaches in Düsseldorf-have a home, he said they courted her based on her reputation at L.A. "We were looking for someone who could get this museum back on its feet," says Alexander Ribbink, chairman of the museum's board. The Dutch public, angry that their tax-funded museum was taking so long to reopen, was losing patience. Its 1895 building has long badly needed modernizing, yet as the Stedelijk's renovation and expansion stretched beyond all expectations-the original reopening was set for 2007-the museum's stature didn't so much fall as disappear. Long known for showcasing and acquiring international avant-garde art, the Stedelijk was founded in 1895 as a municipal museum and has employed a number of strong directors, like Willem Sandberg, who avidly collected the art of their time, from Kandinsky and Malevich to de Kooning and Nauman. One day last spring, on a visit to New York, Goldstein framed her agenda with "four A's": "I want the Stedelijk to be alive, active, artist-centered and anticipated." Later, she added "ambitious." That's just one of the many objectives of this American in Amsterdam, who spent 26 years as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles before being tapped as the first foreigner and first woman to lead the Stedelijk, which reopens on Sept. So when she returned in January, 2010-this time as the museum's director-she had a goal in mind: "I don't want that to happen to people. "I had a fight with a guard about the size of my purse," she says.
Ann Goldstein vividly remembers her first visit to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 1989.