This year, with huge thanks to the Wanda Chin Scholarship, which aims to help professionals, students, and emerging professionals attend the Annual Meeting and Conference, I had the privilege of making the journey from Southeast Utah to the foot of the Sierras for WMA. The drive itself across the vast desert swells of Utah, to Provo’s Trader Joe’s, to the Wendover Airfield, and finally through Nevada’s striking basin and range, was a true treat and a wonderful opportunity to visually connect such disparate land masses. But the treat of the trip lay in the many connections bolstered in my four days in Reno.
Hot off the heels of a trip down to Kanab, Utah, for the Utah Museums Association’s Annual Conference, my brain was ablaze with bigger and more cross-connecting thoughts than usual for the day-to-day of my work at the Moab Museum.
In light of our museum’s leadership transition at the beginning of this year, I was sent by the rest of my team with the express goals of learning how to manage, how to lead, and how to advocate. The WMA Conference is replete with leaders from some of the biggest cultural institutions in the Western Region of the United States and the Conference offers an opportunity to pick the brains of folks working on teams of 50-100. I was struck by the scalability of leadership lessons one can take away from some of the big dogs in our industry. At first glance, one might think an organization like ours (four full-time staff and three part-time) may not look at all similar to the Nevada Art Museum or the Natural History Museum of Utah, and in function, that’s true.
But when we dissect the Museum professional experience down to the personal level (the personnel level), the challenges, the wins, the conundrums turn into people challenges, wins, and conundrums. Great exhibitions require buy-in; not only from the communities they represent, but from each of the staff who introduce and walk guests through our exhibitions. And building buy-in takes time and attention.
This is my first year in a leadership position, and the learning curve has been steep. I’ve been learning how to navigate an exploded national grant scene under this current federal administration (the effective dissolution of the IMLS, hand-tying of the NEA and NEH, etc.), as well as how to advocate for a cultural institution to an ever-expanding list of stakeholders. I’ve been learning how to manage a team of co-leaders and how to manage my time across multiple positions with their varying requirements, i.e. building buy-in across the board.
I’m forever grateful to sit in the same room with a group of people going through quite particular and niche challenges and come to understand those challenges and experiences as ones we can all relate to in our own ways. WMA serves as a platform, a vessel in a way, for a convening of minds. It is a way to share not just how to do a task, solve a problem, or manage a broader phenomenon; WMA convenes us to work through these things better as a team. Think of WMA as a deep tissue massage where attendees can subconsciously and consciously work out and work through the roadblocks, the biases, the sticking points, the pain points we all have in our work.
Thanks to WMA and the Wanda Chin Scholarship for this experience!
Diego Velasquez
Director of Communications
Moab Museum
Moab, Utah
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