John Wetenhall, the director of the Cheekwood Museum of Art, is ready to hit the beach. Wetenhall was named Tuesday to the director’s job at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.
The news that Wetenhall is moving on creates even more uncertainty for a Nashville institution that has been struggling to meet projected revenue goals. Still, the news comes as no surprise to Cheekwood insiders.
Two years ago, Wetenhall received his MBA from Vanderbilt, adding a business component to a résumé that already sported a doctorate from Stanford—and making him an attractive candidate to museum boards looking for bottom-line expertise.
“In his career path, it’s time for him to move on,” says Raymond White, the chair of Cheekwood’s museum committee. “We hate to lose him, but we wish him all the best.”
Cheekwood president Jane Jerry calls the position at the Ringling “a significant one. We’re proud of John and grateful for the work he’s done at Cheekwood.”
The Ringling Museum—whose collections of European and American art include 17th-century baroque paintings and tapestry cartoons by Rubens and his studio—is housed in a 1920s pink Italian Renaissance villa on a 60-acre site at the edge of the Gulf. During his five-year tenure at Cheekwood, Wetenhall capitalized on a similar conjunction of manse and grounds, installing a sculpture trail that rings the old Cheek home, and staging popular exhibits such as the sculpture of Nashville outsider artist William Edmondson.
Wetenhall is understandably pleased by his appointment. “The Ringling is one of the major museum jobs in the country,” he says. “A survey of museum directors rated the collections as 12th in the United States. And the fact that it’s controlled by Florida State University provides access to a lot of academic talent and stable funding.”
But replacing Wetenhall with someone of comparable caliber—and salary level—may not be easy. Despite the renovation of the museum and gardens, courtesy of an $18 million capital campaign, Cheekwood’s income has failed to hit predicted levels since the grand reopening a year ago. “Gate receipts are up a lot,” White says, “just not as much as we’d hoped.”
In response to a disappointing fall season, Cheekwood administrators this year instituted a hiring freeze and have decided to close the site to the public on Mondays, except for federal holidays. That means some staff will receive a salary cut of up to 20 percent.
“Like all other cultural attractions in Nashville, we’re facing the challenges of the decrease in tourism,” Jerry explains. “But we’re working hard to address them. And we think that attendance will go up at all the cultural sites when the new entities [Frist Center for the Visual Arts and the Country Music Hall of Fame] open downtown.”
Jerry points out that Cheekwood’s summer exhibits—an outdoor “Big Bugs” sculpture show, as well as art of “Young America” from the Smithsonian and works of American Impressionism from the Metropolitan—should also draw larger crowds.
But such exhibits often come with big price tags. One staffer estimates the rental fee for American Impressionism at $90,000. And Cheekwood has not had an endowment to subsidize its exhibit schedule since the bequest by Anita Stallworth was liquidated in 1997—as the terms of her will mandated—for part of the recent renovations.
“No question that we need to go after special funding for the big, unusual exhibits if we want to have them,” White says. “That means going head to head with the Frist, and Nashville’s arts community is not that big.” And unlike the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Cheekwood is a collecting institution. White acknowledges that today Cheekwood has little money for new acquisitions, and that it will have to go after gifts of art—and money to buy art—if it hopes to increase its holdings. “We’re busy as beavers,” White says, “because we have a lot to do to address present and future needs.”
Frist director Chase Rynd says that fears of the Frist Center duking it out with other local visual arts institutions are “misinformed. It’s true that after our admissions and other earned income—and all these are just projections—we could have a shortfall of $4 million or so. But we are not going to go wading out into the community for such enormous dollar amounts. The Frist Foundation has pledged to cover any shortfalls for the first few years at least, and we will be working on building our endowment.”
Some Cheekwood supporters view the possibility of Wetenhall’s departure as just the latest downer in a demoralizing scenario that includes, in addition to the pay cuts and hiring freeze, leaks in the museum building and talk of a cash bar at opening receptions. Others see the current state of affairs as “not that much different from the past. Cheekwood has always been hand-to-mouth, although not many in the community may realize it,” one board member says. The ritzy location, after all, creates the perception that the institution itself is well heeled.
Business as usual is of little comfort to the staff who viewed the reworking of the gardens and the renovation of the museum as a great leap forward. “We thought we were raising the level of our game,” says one recently departed worker. “Now it feels like the same old struggle to maintain an even strain.”
Kreyling is a former curator at Cheekwood who has prepared an exhibit on the history of the Broadway post office for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
