I recently had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Samuel Vasquez, Deputy Director of Advancement at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He kindly took the time to sit down with me and discuss his work in helping various art organizations evolve and adapt to these unsettled times.

TRB: Let’s start with you talking how you got to MOCA. 

SV: I ended studying political science at UCLA with a focus on international relations. It’s funny. Little did I know that studying war, which is what you ended up studying when you study international relations, you end up studying people, because wars are started by individuals for the most part. How much that knowledge and experience has been applicable to the art world has been really interesting because my job now as Deputy Director of Advancement at MOCA is about people, people that support the organization, people that work in the organization, people that have a relationship to the organization such as artists and community members. 

So my job at MOCA is to work alongside our director, Klaus Biesenbach, to ensure that the museum stays open, that we can pay our bills, that we can be successful and stable and grow. And also, to build—that’s what I like to do, to create programs, to create groups. He has a very similar mentality, and that’s how we work well together. So, for example, we just launched an environmental council. We are the first museum to launch an environmental council, and the first museum that will be carbon negative. We are not changing the mission of the organization from being a defining museum of contemporary art. We’re expanding what a museum can be and what role it should play as a civic entity. So the fact that our museum can be carbon negative while still doing everything we do is just how he and I view what we do as expanding the role of a museum, keeping it contemporary, dealing with contemporary art. Artists don’t just deal one issue. Artists both create work that is a reflection of our moment but also imagine what our world can be. A lot of times, they’re dealing with issues that are way ahead. So we have the same mentality that visual arts are not limited to beautiful objects, but that they can expand to deal with other issues. 

That’s my job. It’s fundraising, it’s community relations, it’s special projects with artists of which we’ve been doing quite a bit. I tend to be the optimist. Everything’s great, I keep saying it’s great and let’s build it. So that’s my role. I feel like I’m the cheerleader of the museum. 

The way that I got there is after UCLA a few friends and I we formed a little collective in Los Angeles and we actually opened up a performance arts space, total DIY. It was in an abandoned building, it was a shitty little building in east LA, in Echo Park right on Sunset Boulevard and Glendale. The landlord gave us a great deal. It had six rooms and a rooftop and we basically opened up a space that was dedicated to performance art, particularly because we felt that the arts in that moment were very passive. The visual arts can be very passive. You go to an opening and see a painting and you spend the rest of the time talking. You zip through a museum, and say ‘you got it.’ We wanted something that created a focus for people. This was 2006-9, we did it for about three years. There was nothing in the area like that and we managed to somehow pay the rent. We built a community of artists and that initiative, that project, that space catapulted all of us into our careers. There are four of us: one of us became a musician, two became curators, and myself. I’m the one who went into the institutional art world because the space started to partner with other organizations and started to get more attention. One of our collaborators told me that you can get paid to do this. At the time, fresh out of college and doing our thing, he introduced me to someone at MOCA. We hit it off, and she said, “Why don’t you come work here. We love what you’re doing. You can come do that here.” So she hired me for a position at the bottom of the totem pole. I was an assistant in the development department. This is around 2008. So I was the last person at the museum to get hired before the crash hit. 

We ended closing the performance space when I started working because it started to turn too much into a party space. So we would have a performance by Dawn Kasper, Ryan Heffington, etc. People would show up after to just party. And so we decided—it was beyond our control. It was like it’s own thing. So we shut down. We all started working in our respective fields and that was my first career job in the institutional world at MOCA.  But at that moment they laid off tons of people, and I went from being the assistant to the head of the department. Everyone in the middle got let go. A few years went by, Jeffrey Deitch came and became director of MOCA. I realized it was time for me to move on. 

So I was hired by the Hammer Museum. I was at the Hammer for six years. That’s really where I learned how to open up a museum. In my short but long tenure there, we went admission free so that was a big way of opening up the museum. We launched Made in LA, the biennial, that was another way to position the Hammer as a serious, focused contemporary art museum. We also did a lot of internal restructuring where we brought in a friendly, more knowledgable work force into the galleries as opposed to the security, bouncer type of person. All those changes I was part of. I reached my limited there. I was invited to join the team that was opening the Institute of Contemporary Art in downtown LA. I did that. We raised five million dollars. We opened the ICA, which was formerly the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Very successful. Great program, great curator. Elsa Longhauser was the founding director there; now they have Anne Ellegood. When they hired Anne Ellegood, she’s such a scholarly, solid, capable director, that I just felt my job there was done. 

So the through-line I’m trying to picture is that I always come, build things, and then move on. So when Anne got hired, Klaus Biesenbach had been asking me to come work with him because of this. He had only been there [MOCA] a year, and he wanted to rebuild the institution, which he is. Eventually I said yes, and I came to MOCA. That’s been my trajectory. It’s been very focused and narrow in a way, but also in depth in the LA institutional world. It’s where I feel the most comfortable. I’m a diplomate, an ambassador for organizations. 

TRB: Is it too early to say something, in this moment when many museums can’t welcome people to their spaces and as galleries and artists are move out of city centers, about a decentralization of the art world? 

SV: It feels like it’s in process, but the outcome is not fully known. There’s different aspects of the art world where that is happening more clearly than in others. If you think of the art fairs, for example, who knows what next year will entail, but this year so far Basel, Miami, Frieze, Chicago, all these fairs have gone online. From what I hear, and I’m not that involved with the commercial side, it has actually opened them up to such a broader audience and more people are now buying from the virtual fairs who have never gone to them to have bought before. People who couldn’t go to Basel Switzerland are now buying from that fair. I do think in a way, it has broken down these silos of who can go these fairs and who can’t. Now everyone can. 

From an institutional world, it is really hard to say right now because each region is feeling the impact so differently. New York museums have reopened. I think takes a little bit of the pressure off of having to rethink themselves. Now that they can open their doors and regain some of that momentum of having a physical space is very different from organizations in Los Angeles that haven’t been able to open. The county and the state haven’t said when we can open. We are still in a waiting pattern. So every day that goes by, we have to adapt. We have to rethink and reposition ourselves to stay relevant, to keep our members, to keep people interested in us, to keep a sense of value in people’s minds about our organization. Which, by the way, that’s why engaging a group of founders and a group of people who have been historically involved with an organization is so important, because those are the individuals who remain invested in you through the ups and downs. That’s really important to us. 

From an institutional standpoint, every organization is different. Some museums are much more dependent on attendance than others. We at MOCA are fortunate in the sense that we launched Virtual MOCA immediately and down it’s Digital MOCA. So many of our programs and initiatives are able to migrate online. I do think that moving forward we will have a hybrid model, where analogue and digital will coexist. We were just talking about this the other day, asking, ‘what will programs look like next year?’ I said, ‘well you’re going to have to have a safe Covid friendly life program where people can come and sit six feet apart and also people online. So it will be a hybrid model, that we probably should have been doing forever. 

TRB: I’ve been bombarded with so many virtual museum opportunities. How have yours been attended? How much eyeball traffic do yours get and are they staying with it? 

SV: At first, the numbers were incredibly high. It was new. It started to taper as more and more offerings came on line. Now we have found our steady core audience. Our programs are well attended. What we are trying to now is refine them. Because the competition for good online programs—like if your program is not sleek, captivating—no one is going to sit in front of their computer for two hours after having sat at their computer all day. We’re repositioning our programing to be more targeted and quality versus when we launched, we were doing something every single day. There is a fatigue. People want to be out. People are craving interaction. If you do a program, people will want to socialize. That’s why people go to programs. I’m interested in starting to figure out how we can introduce a social factor into everything we do. Now, you log on to something, and no one sees you, you don’t see anyone. You just see someone talk for an hour and a half. It doesn’t give any social satisfaction.  These are all the tweaks we are trying to do to improve our offerings. 

TRB: The numbers started off high. Are they maintaining a level that merits these efforts? 

SV: One of the things that we are realizing along with every other institution is that we didn’t start off with the expertise to understand digital content. We are a visually based organization. We know how to mount incredible exhibitions. We didn’t have someone on staff that was a digital expert, who was analyzing data the way that tech companies have perfected. Museums are now starting to hire those positions. A lot of our LA partners are drafting job descriptions for digital strategists. CTOs. All these tech people are now entering the visual arts world. There’s a lot of potential there. We also haven’t figured out how to capitalize on the international potential of programs, because now anyone can tune in from around the world. And also how to monetize. I’m starting to see more and more that you have to pay to participate in programming whereas at first it was all free. But as things get better, as online experiences get refined, I think you are going to see people starting to charge, if they haven’t already. 

TRB: Are you looking at Virtual Realty, Xtreme Reality immersive experiences? 

SV: In a limited way. We know that that’s not our expertise. We would hate to jump into it and have it be a clunky, outdated version by the time we come out with it. But we are thinking about how to translate the museum environment into that. 

TRB: As the art world, whether fairs or museums or galleries, migrates to digital platforms, do you think that an art community living and working in close physical proximity is still necessary for creative vitality? 

SV: A place like Los Angeles historically has been a place of great artistic production for a few reason, one being the number of art schools there. They aren’t going anywhere. You have Cal Arts, Otis, Art Center, UCLA, others. There’s always an influx of creativity and new artists. For a long time rent and space has been fairly accessible, along with light. But it’s regional. What I hear about New York is that is starting to disperse much more than somewhere like Los Angeles is. That probably has to do with density, how dense it was there versus Los Angeles. But it’s happening. I am definitely hearing more and more about artists retreating to other places. Whether that is temporary or permanently, I don’t know. I do think there’s places like Los Angeles that will always have that creative production, but I can’t speak to a place like New York, although from an art market perspective, that will always be there. But maybe the creative activity is starting to spread out more and more. It’s a little too early to say if these changes will be everlasting.

I was talking to a group of artists just a few weeks ago, and they were expressing a fear that we will lose all of those gathering places where artists tend to go for nightlife. Those places will be gone, even while there will be a need for those types of waterholes, creative hotspots where you can hang and talk to people. That’s a big concern. That kind of socializing is absolutely needed, while at the same time understanding that people will find other ways to do that. People are still a little traumatized, but once people start to emerge, there will be new forms of socializing. The more we can encourage the DIY. 

TRB: Any notion of what those forms will be? 

SV: Not yet. Artists are trying to figure that out. 

TRB: Let me take us to a different topic. As I look at arts news coverage, it seems like museums are often the target of a gotcha politics in this highly politicized moment of artistic consciousness. What’s your experience at MOCA?  

SV: Museums have a lot reckoning to do. Every museum is at a different place, with a different capacity to deal with it, and a different pressure to deal with it. My experience has been that there was a lot of necessary work that had to be done and now is getting done. I’m a very cautious person in the sense that I’m always trying to institutionalize things, integrate things as opposed to doing something to do it. That’s one of the things you’ve seen a lot backlash against organizations that say something, promote something, but then there’s no real change. We as an organization have been doing a lot of work around that. My personal role is to ensure that what we are doing is for the best of the institution structurally. If you don’t change things structurally, then nothing will change. That’s my experience from working within organizations to change their inner workings, so I’m always hesitant to post something online or send out a letter. I’m always trying to slow down the process even when there is pressure to expedite the process. 

There’s a tension that every organization is trying to deal with: how do you stay current and respond and engage in the moment, but also think about your organization three to five to ten years out and where you will be will all of this. It’s not enough to bring in an outside expert to tell you how to behave and then they’re gone and you think you’re a better person and the organization is okay.  No. It’s also not enough to just hire people of color and call it a day. It’s how you embed all that into your mission, into your organization. I don’t think you have change your mission, I think you have to adjust your values a little bit. And refine your values. 

There’s a beautiful uprising happening from a grassroots place and a lot of what museums—this is why a lot of museums are having a hard time with this: it’s grassroots, it’s coming from the people who have been the most impacted, the most shut out of systems of power. How do institutions deal with people in that capacity? Institutions are normally built to present content to people, not to be challenged, or broken down by people in that way. You have education departments, you have visitor services departments that are the funnels to deal with people but now institutions from top down are forced to deal with people that are facing these problems. People want change, people want change now, people want fast change. There is validity for that because people have suffered for so long and institutions have been complacent for so long. But how does an institution that has been around for twenty, thirty, sixty, hundred years change in one year? It’s just not possible. You can make changes in that amount of time, but honest structural change takes time, continued pressure and dialogue. That’s a challenge that a lot of organizations have, how do both parties have a dialogue. Neither side is figuring that out. Some do it better than others. It’s incredible to watch, both it’s fearful because you see how fragile institutions can be. Look at some of the organizations, I’m sure you’ve read about them, that are having a much harder time than others. Board member, curators, directors having to resign. 

TRB: And if you look deep enough, there’s no such thing as clean money. 

SV: Yes, that’s a whole other side of it. The financial component of organization. It’s one of the roots of how we got to where we are, that by necessity organizations are funded by a few individuals. And so people have preferences, biases, views of the world that may not be aligned with the museum, with the institution with the director. Do organization need to change? Absolutely. How? That’s to be seen. There’s no one formula for every organization. 

TRB: There’s always an opportunity for organizations to make themselves objects of conversation.  

SV: Sometimes it feels like it’s too tender. Maybe in five years a museum can have panel discussions about the issues that are very raw right now. But you’re right. Contemporary museums and institutions in general should be having conversations about the moment. History is about the present. That doesn’t happen enough. We’re still young as a country. We’re still young in grappling with our history. We’re still dealing with it everyday, and we’re still very tender. 

TRB: Are we too tender? Should we be more discursively combative? 

SV: Yeah. We are losing that skill, that exchange. 

TRB: Is that one way you see in opening up museums? 

SV:  Absolutely. There’s so many ways you can open an organization. Through this idea, through admissions, through programming, through expanding your donor base. Through marketing. It just has to be a philosophy that the institution as a whole understands. 

TRB: Do you design programs that model the kind of conversation you’d like to see? 

SV: I wouldn’t say I model programs, well, in a way…For example, in the Institute of Contemporary Art we always said that the ICA is a reflection of the city we live in. Exhibitions, programs and donors. We had a curator that created a stellar exhibition program that was truly reflective of the diversity of Los Angeles. They have a director of learning and engagement who programs also did that, in terms of topics, speakers. From the donor side, that’s where I was able to influence how we expanded the institution.We created a membership program that was $40. That’s it. There was no other level. It was called 1717 Collective. The goal—I left before we got there, but it was getting there—was to raise our budget every year through people giving $40. The budget was 2.5 million. How many millions of people are in Los Angeles? They can give $40.  It was for me such an important gesture for how you can open up a museum and feel invested in it, for only $40. We got hundreds of people to participate because it was a new organization, it was contemporary, it was great, it was downtown. And you got invited to every event, whereas only the bigger donors would usually be invited. 

TRB: That’s countering the David Geffen effect. 

SV: You need that kind of person to build a new building. I’m noticing where I work now is that a lot of big big supporters started with a $40 membership. That to me, when you ask if you create programing, that’s what I’m interested in. I ask what is my job, and what are my values, and how do I bring them together. Those are the types of programs I create…

TRB: Democratization. 

SV: Yes, democratizing participation.