Welcome back to the Wall Power Inner Circle. I’m Marion
Maneker.
Atlanta’s High Museum of Art is a model of community engagement, and its director, Randall Suffolk, has become an elder statesman among his American peers. Amid this fraught moment, as fear mounts that the current administration’s war on D.E.I. and elite institutions might open an additional front against museums, I sat down with Suffolk to talk about how he has operated through the turmoil. More on that below.
But first… |
- A realist revival at Sotheby’s?: An astute reader and market observer alerted me to this sale of a John Koch painting at Sotheby’s nearly two weeks ago. Man Putting on His Shirt was estimated at only $8,000, but attracted strong bidding that drove the selling price to $381,000. That’s the
American realist painter’s second-highest auction price, behind only the $596,000 paid for Siesta, from 1962, in a 2020 auction at Bonhams. That house also sold a painting called Manuscript I for $177,000 in 2023.
So the top four prices paid for a Koch painting at auction have now all been achieved in the past six years. That’s quite a comeback for a painter who was once so successful that he lived in a 14-room apartment in the El Dorado, on Central Park West, but whose
work has languished as realism fell out of favor.
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Guillaume’s art market forecast: Guillaume Cerutti thinks we’re overlooking the importance of some long-term secular trends in the art market. In a LinkedIn post, the Christie’s
chairman used data from Clare McAndrew to argue that “four structural changes … have been shaping the art market for more than a decade,” before going on to say that these themes have “only become more apparent in the context of a more fragile macroeconomic environment.”
The first trend, according to Cerutti, is the stagnation in total value in the art market: Art buying isn’t “keeping pace with the growth of the H.N.W.I. population or the broader luxury sector over the
past 15 years,” as he put it. Second, he cited the growing dependence on American buyers, whose market share has grown during the past 15 years from a third to 43 percent last year. Third, he noted that the shift from art to luxury has undercut total sales—since luxury items, after all, do “not carry the same financial weight as fine art.” Finally, he explained that the shift to contemporary art has introduced greater volatility into the market.
Cerutti seems relatively sanguine about
these trends. Reading between the lines, I assume he is cautioning clients and competitors to be realistic, rather than pessimistic, about the art market’s future. - Artlogic acquires ArtCloud: Yesterday, in a brief announcement, Artlogic said it would merge with ArtCloud, another gallery management software service. The press materials noted that both companies were focused on building technology that “simplifies and elevates how art is managed,
sold, and bought.” Artlogic claims more than 5,500 clients—presumably mostly galleries, since their software is the backbone of many galleries’ infrastructure. ArtCloud says it has more than 700 customers and 2,200 daily active users.
These numbers don’t sound impressive for software companies, but a combined 6,000+ customers should give the merged entity a fairly dominant position within the art world. That’s clearly been the strategy ever since Cove Hill Partners made an investment in
Artlogic in 2021. Mergers with ArtBase, exhibit-E, and galleryManager followed in 2022. As an investor with deep knowledge of the art market explained to me, the roll-up of gallery infrastructure software requires mergers for growth because the cost of switching software platforms is too great for customers. - Two seized Basquiats for sale: The U.S. Marshals Service is
auctioning four works of art recovered in the case of 1MDB, the Malaysian fund that Jho Low helped establish, before he and others were accused of illicitly using the proceeds for their personal benefit. (Low, an international fugitive, is believed to be hidden in China.) ARTnews
reported on the existence of the auction, which includes two works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Pablo Picasso still life painting from 1939, and a Diane Arbus photograph.
The Basquiat work on paper is particularly interesting, given the quality of the image and the
recent success of similarly sized Basquiat drawings at auction. The work currently has a bid of $850,000 when comparable works have sold for as much as $10 million or $15 million.
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Now, let’s get to the main event… |
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As museums have recalibrated to ride out the MAGA storm, Suffolk has
made it imperative to diversify the High Museum’s audiences and offerings—and to embrace Atlanta’s unique history and strengths. |
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Atlanta is, in many ways, the cultural capital of the South. It’s also one of the fastest-growing
metro regions in America, with a large creative community that revolves around the music and entertainment industries. In the heart of the city, there is also its temple to the fine arts: the High Museum of Art, founded in 1905, which comprises several buildings, including one designed by Richard Meier and three by Renzo Piano.
Since 2015, Randall Suffolk has been the director of the High, leading the museum’s efforts to grow and
diversify its engagement with the Atlanta community. Last year, according to museum data, some 49 percent of the visitors identified as white. Another 35 percent identified as African-American, mixed race, or “other,” and Hispanic and Asian visitors comprised 8 and 7 percent of the total, respectively. In each of the latter categories, the numbers outpaced the figures recorded for arts audiences nationally, according to a survey of hundreds of such institutions. |
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Museums have been under huge pressure in recent years to appeal to a broader demographic base. But
what’s so interesting about Suffolk is that he’s used that to strengthen his institution financially and forge greater ties to the community. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Suffolk to talk more about that. As always, the conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. |
Marion Maneker: Can you speak about how you see the
High Museum positioned right now, how you got here, and what that sets up for the future?
Randall Suffolk: When I came to the museum about a decade ago, this institution had a certain kind of credibility within the community. It had a history of achievement; it had a legacy of aspiration. The previous director, Michael Shapiro, the board, and the staff did a remarkable job of transforming the institution physically. There was a 2005 expansion by Renzo
Piano that tripled the scale of not only the museum, but also our aspirations as an organization.
By the time I got here, I think there was a notion that the next director’s role should be focusing on filling the museum with extraordinary works of art, compelling programming and exhibitions, and, ultimately, with the city of Atlanta—or at least with an audience, and a set of visitors, that reflected our community writ large. So if you think about the work we’ve been doing over the past
decade, it’s been about how we transform this thing that people understood as being exceptional, and turn it into something essential—a vital, necessary community resource. In a nutshell, the goal for us is to ultimately be the museum that Atlanta deserves, however we can define that.
Many of the big museums, especially in New York and other cities around the world, have a constituency and audience driven by their fame and location. But in a place like Atlanta,
that’s a very different situation.
One of the things that distinguishes Atlanta from many other communities, certainly of our scale, is that it’s never really had an industrial golden age. As a consequence, we weren’t a community where massive fortunes were being built. Additionally, in 1962, there was a group of more than 100 members of Atlanta’s cultural elite, for lack of a better phrase, who all decided to go to Paris and see the sights. And on the way back, their plane
crashed on takeoff, and tragically killed every single one of them. So in one swoop, our community lost, easily, two generations of cultural leadership. The ramifications of that are still felt today. So if you take those two pieces, we’re an institution that wasn’t starting with a core collection.
We never set out to be an encyclopedic museum; we want to be a general fine arts institution. So we have collections across seven different areas. During my tenure, we’ve leaned into the
fact that we’re proud to be a Southern institution. While that’s not our exclusive focus, there is some degree of a throughline across our collecting.
When you talk about the self-taught collection and folk material, we probably have one of the top five collections anywhere on the face of the planet. But no one will touch us when it comes to Southern material. We probably have what many people would regard as a top 10 program in photography. Again, no one can touch us when it
comes to Southern photography, or documentary photography around the Civil Rights Movement. Many people would say that our historic decorative arts collection is a CliffsNotes version of either the Met, or the MFA Boston—but again, we believe no one can touch us when it comes to Southern historic decorative arts. We’ve tried hard to embrace opportunities like that, which we believe lean into not only our geography, but also our constituency. |
There’s an idea that populism will move its focus from elite universities to museums.
You’ve said you’re already ahead of that curve, and that you’ve done a lot of work to transform your board and membership base during the last several years.
Inclusivity has already been a part of how we’ve approached our work. You could put a gun to my head, and I probably could not name a single D.E.I. program we have at the museum. Having said that, we could provide examples of success when it comes to the expectations that most D.E.I. programs would aspire to. We’ve
dramatically changed our exhibition program—if you go back over the last eight years, nearly three-quarters of the exhibitions we’ve put on display either highlight, or focus on important work by, LGBTQ+ artists, women artists, and artists of color. If you look at the acquisitions we’ve made, we’ve really leaned into ensuring that we’re building a diverse collection. We’ve challenged our learning and civic engagement team to embrace the fact that they have an equal responsibility in developing
the intellectual capital of the museum, on par with our curatorial staff. And as we’ve tried to transform ourselves into what I hope is a profoundly different magnet in the community, the good news for us is that Atlanta has responded. |
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We’ve averaged more than 50 percent BIPOC participation or visitation for the last eight years.
About 76 percent of people coming to the museum are under the age of 55, and 63 percent are under the age of 35. About 40 percent come from households making less than $70,000 a year, and about 50 percent come from households making over $100,000 a year.
For the first seven years that I was here, we were in the attraction phase, working hard to become this magnet within our community. Over the past two and a half years, we’ve seen a transition to what I would identify as the
affiliation phase. It’s not just that our community is coming to the museum—now they’re saying, Hey, swipe my card. I want to write a check. I want to be a member of the organization. I want to be part of the family in a deeper way.
This past year, we broached 46,000 member households, and now we have a 60-plus percent retention rate across all levels of membership. The challenge and the opportunity for us now is: How do we very intentionally and strategically move into
what I hope will be an accumulation phase? The goal is that we hold on to the members that we have, and over time, grow that base of support significantly, to help us not only develop more fuel for our mission, but ultimately drive greater impact within our community.
What do you think has been the secret to this success?
It’s been a number of things. The kind of acquisitions we’ve made, the kind of exhibitions we’ve put on display—the programming has been
fantastic. We’ve doubled down on engaging the next three generations of users, and we created programming that we thought would resonate. Hopefully, we’ve done a much better job in terms of our marketing and communications. At every step of the way, we’ve tried to send the message that there is a consistent, sincere, authentic invitation for people to come and experience their museum. There’s a real commitment to Southern hospitality and speaking to people in a way that lets them know that
everything we do is for them.
Looking ahead to your next 10 years, what are you looking toward next?
I don’t know if I can have a crystal ball that directs us for the next decade. But over the course of the next three years, we think there’s an important distinction to be made—which is moving us away from audience-building to community-building. There may be greater emphasis for us now on trying to, say, get $1 from every household, as opposed to
focusing on the angels who can write the larger checks.
Corporate philanthropy is changing before our very eyes. You’ve got a lot of wealthy people who fear chaos, and the world right now is pretty chaotic. And with government funding being diminished across the board, there are a lot of very valid, very necessary, but competing needs when it comes to people’s charitable contributions. So as an organization, if we can continue to be relevant and exciting and compelling for more and more
people from our community, that’s going to hopefully continue to sustain us, so we can do what we need to do moving forward. |
That’s a wrap for today. See you again on Friday.
M |
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