SLO LIFE Oct/Nov 2020

| Q&A
OPEN MIND
Newly installed as the Executive Director of the San Luis Obispo
Museum of Art, LEANN STANDISH checked in recently for a
wide-ranging conversation. Here is some of what she had to say…
Tell us, Leann, where are you from? Okay, sure. I’m
from the Midwest. I was born in Indianapolis and
grew up in that region. Most of my family still lives
back there. My folks are in Michigan and I visit there
several times a year. My father worked for Volkswagen
of America and Audi, so we moved around that area
a lot. I was a real troublemaker. My first car was a
Volkswagen Beetle, stick shift. I was the first of my
friends to get my license. So we’d pile into my Bug, way
too many of us, much more than was appropriate. It
was kind of like a clown car. We’d drive around in the
winter. If I lost control and slid over the ice, we’d all pile
out, pick it up, and put it back on the road.
What were you like as a kid? It was a very innocent
childhood. I was mostly always getting myself in trouble
for talking. And I was always up for something different
or a new experience. So I don’t know. I wasn’t really
a troublemaker. When I reflect on it, I realize, “Oh, I
wasn’t really in any kind of trouble.” But at the time I
was very disruptive. I was the oldest of four kids and I
required a lot of attention. I was terrible at sports. I was
on a softball team for a minute, and I remember sitting
on the bench and painting my teammates’ fingernails. I
was active in choir and in theater, I was an exceptional
shower and car singer, and occasionally I joined actual
singing groups.
What came next? I went to South Bend to Notre
Dame. I was a terrible student, so I ran away to
California before I finished. I had never traveled
anywhere ever and was sure that I was going to live
on the beach. I had no idea what Fresno was. Didn’t
realize there was no surfing there. I got a job in a lab
analyzing soil and stuff. I hated it, hated it, hated it,
and was miserable. And just on a whim, I took a job
as an assistant in a museum. It was the most perfect
career for me. It was a tiny, little museum. Everything
just clicked and I fell in love with it. I found my calling.
From there, I went to the Minneapolis Institute of
Art, then I moved to Portland to work at the Oregon
Museum of Science & History. But I was really missing
my family, so I took a job at Fredrick Meyer Gardens
and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which
is a pretty extraordinary place. It’s remarkable and
noteworthy because it’s a small community that has a
huge arts support system. Then, it was full circle, back to
the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
And then you made a stop in Miami, correct? Yes, that’s
right. It was a freezing cold day in February when I got a
call from Florida asking if I’d like to work at the
Miami Art Museum. I was like, “Yes! Get me
out of here! It’s so cold!” Anyway, as it turns
out, a small group of us built a brand-new
museum there. Still, to this day, it’s the
thing I’m very most proud of. And, while
I was there, I had this dream, a vision,
of advertising on all the taxi tops—this
was before Uber, gosh it sounds like I’m
so old, this was not that long ago—so
everyone coming out of the airport
would know about the new museum.
So, around this same time, I met this
guy at one of our fundraising events,
and I noticed he was liking everything
I’d post on social media. They call that
“deep liking,” by the way. So, one day,
he sent me a message and said, “Are you
interested in advertising on taxi tops?”
And I was like, “Yes, I love you! And, by
the way, who are you? And why are you on
my page?” [laughter] It was cute. Turns out,
he was in advertising, and he was from Fresno
originally, and he made the taxicab thing
actually happen. He had the goods. We’ve
been together ever since. He’s my person.
Okay, but why museums? I think that
museums have opened my mind. And I’ve
watched other people experience that same
sort of thing. A work of art can change you,
or speak to you deeply, or challenge you, or
make you angry, but it makes you feel. And it
makes your world bigger. So, when we moved
here, right away I thought to myself, “One day
I will run SLOMA. I really want to.” I did.
I think back now to when I was a young
person in the field. One of my mentors
talked about how museums so often
feel like a stuffy, formal existence. He
compared it to when your grandmother
had that living room furniture you weren’t actually
allowed to sit on. And you had to take your shoes
off to go into the formal living room and all of
that. He said he wanted his museum to be like the
rec room where you eat popcorn and crawled all
over the couches and stayed there for hours and
hours and were able to be yourself. I have always
dreamed of each museum that I worked with as
being the place where you just really relaxed into
yourself and discovered a bigger world. SLO LIFE
32 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | OCT/NOV 2020