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