After an eight-month search, the Seattle Art Museum has a new leader. On Tuesday, the museum announced that Scott Stulen will be its new director and CEO.
Stulen, 49, is making the move from the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla., where he’s been president and CEO since 2016. He will officially join SAM on Aug. 26, nearly a year after the departure of the museum’s previous CEO and director, Amada Cruz.
An innovator known for expanding audiences with a creative, fun and somewhat populist approach — including bringing a cat video festival and mini golf to his previous museum gigs — Stulen is hoped to expand SAM’s audience and enhance the museum’s relevance and dynamism as the field undergoes major transformation. In a news release, the museum praised Stulen’s “commitment to community engagement” and a “transformative approach to museum practice.”
“For me, the role of a museum is that it needs to matter to people. It needs to be more than just a place that stores beautiful objects,” Stulen said in a phone interview. “I don’t want to be a museum [where] people go on their fourth grade field trip and never go back. …. It really should be a place that is part of your everyday life.” That could look like coming in to see an exhibit, but also stopping by to have lunch, or bringing your family to experience a festival on the weekend, Stulen said.
Stulen’s background as a visual artist — he has a master of fine arts degree in painting and drawing, and a bachelor of fine arts in sculpture — makes him somewhat unusual among U.S. museum directors. He’s brought creativity to his museum roles as well. At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he co-created the first Internet Cat Video Film Festival with his colleague, Katie Hill, who came up with the idea. That first edition was so popular that a freeway in the city shut down because so many people were trying to get to the museum, Stulen told The Indianapolis Star in 2015.
During his tenure as the curator of audience experiences with the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where he commissioned new performances and site-specific installations, organized brunches with local chefs, an art swap and mini golf, museum event attendance more than tripled, per IMA.
At the Philbrook Museum of Art, Stulen extended opening hours, organized a Friday Burger Night, sold a centuries-old Chinese vase from the museum’s collection to establish a $15 million fund to purchase new art, made membership free for public school teachers and oversaw the planning of a new a vegetable garden on the campus that provides fresh produce to people in need.
“Scott’s commitment to community-building and his passion for innovative programming was just what Philbrook needed upon his arrival in 2016,” said Megan Whittaker Nesbit, the museum’s deputy director of external affairs, in an email. “He made great strides in elevating the daily experience of the museum, diversified our exhibiting artists and collection, and added welcome playfulness to our brand. Philbrook feels that museums are for everyone; Scott makes people believe it.”
At SAM, Stulen will oversee the museum’s three sites (the downtown Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park, and the Olympic Sculpture Park on the Seattle waterfront), a staff of nearly twice the size, and an operating budget more than three times the size, of Philbrook’s. (SAM’s staff count is about 300; its operating budget came in at just under $32 million in fiscal 2023.)
A SAM spokesperson declined to disclose Stulen’s salary. According to the most recently available tax information, former CEO and director Cruz received $449,115 in compensation in fiscal 2022.
Stulen inherits an organization in good shape: SAM has ended the year in the black for the past three years, according to audited financial statements and tax documents. It also received a few high profile art collections in recent years and had a successful fall and winter season thanks to blockbuster Calder and Hokusai exhibits.
But the museum hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic: While attendance in fiscal 2024 July 2023 through June 2024) is up slightly from 2019, that’s in part due to the fact that the Seattle Asian Art Museum was closed for renovations five years ago. The number of memberships, while increasing since a pandemic slump, is still down about 25%.
One of Stulen’s major tasks will be to bring those numbers back to pre-pandemic levels. “I’m hopeful we can do that coming into next year with the Ai Weiwei show,” Stulen said.
Plus, he noted, with the opening of the city’s renewed waterfront and the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup forthcoming, there will be opportunities to welcome more tourism to downtown — and the museum.
Stulen also plans to expand hours of operation and bring back programs that were paused during the pandemic. Plus, he wants to increase temporary exhibits at the Sculpture Park and find ways for SAM to “be more relevant and more engaged with the artists in Seattle.”
Also on the horizon for the museum: ongoing union negotiations with its security guards and the implementation of its 2024-2029 strategic plan. The plan outlines strategies to elevate the museum’s profile by courting the next generation of audiences, art collectors and donors and evaluating gallery and storage needs to grow its collection. That could potentially include an expansion of the museum into the upper floors of its downtown building (which are currently leased and in use as office space) after 2031 and a strategic deaccessioning (the process of selling objects from the collection) as part of a long-term plan to refine and build the collection, but Stulen said nothing is forthcoming.
Stulen’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for SAM and the museum sector at large, as institutions navigate a landscape that isn’t quite going back to its pre-pandemic “normal.” Attendance hasn’t rebounded, inflation is adding pressure to the balance sheets and a generational philanthropic shift is taking place. All the while, museums try to court a new generation of museum goers (and donors) while increasingly having to compete with social media, other entertainment and a new cohort of “immersive museums.”
“We’re in a different landscape right now. And you need to acknowledge it,” Stulen said. The only way to address this, he said, is to take a different approach than museums have before. “I think this is one thing [that] probably differentiates me from some of my colleagues in the field, is addressing that head-on,” he said. “If we don’t think about [ourselves] in competition with Netflix and with sports, and with other things that people can do with their time, we’re not living in reality.”
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