After an unusually long tenure of nearly 30 years as president of the American Museum of Natural History, Ellen V. Futter informed the board on Wednesday that she would step down in March, following the planned opening of the new Richard Gilder Center for Science. institution, Education and innovation.
“It’s been an incredible run and I feel so proud and grateful for my time,” Futter, 72, said in a phone interview. “The opening of the Gilder Center marks the completion of my work and a good time for the museum to take on new leadership.”
The board immediately starts looking for Futter’s replacement. “They’re huge shoes to fill, there’s no doubt about it,” Scott Bok, the museum’s president, said in an interview. “But she leaves us in a position to find someone great.”
As to whether the board would appoint anyone of color, Bok said, given the current emphasis on diversity in the museum world, an outside executive search firm — yet to be hired — “will be tasked with providing us with a diverse slate. of candidates.”
Given the museum’s size — it has an operating budget of about $178 million and more than 1,000 full-time and part-time staffers — and its public role as a state-owned institution, the position requires an experienced steward of stature, Bok added. †
“We want someone who is a great leader, who is collegial and who is an effective collaborative partner with key constituencies, including New York City,” he said. “We want someone who is a strong fundraiser because we can’t do everything we want to do with just the entrance fees and the support we get from the city. It’s a big job.”
Over the past three decades, Futter has led a museum that seems both frozen in time and propelled by change. On the one hand, the dioramas – some of which depict native tribes – with which the museum is closely associated, have been weathered, reliable for repeat visitors while at the same time a symbol of the institution’s slowness to evolve, especially in a world that is once again prone to cultural stereotypes and inaccuracies. (The scenes were eventually adapted in 2019.) Last month, the Northwest Coast Hall reopened with a new emphasis on the lives of Indigenous people.
At the same time, the museum has gone through some major new developments, namely the opening of the new Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000 and the Gilder Center.
In realizing these projects, Futter had to navigate the often thorny city politics. With its glass dome rising between the antebellum buildings of the Upper West Side, the Rose Center for Earth and Space was initially considered sacrilege by some residents. But in the end, it was widely celebrated by critics and welcomed by the community.
“Here is that rare instance where a time, a place, a function, an architect and a client (the heroic Ellen V. Futter, president of the museum) have aligned perfectly to produce an intelligent design that is also will appeal widely. public taste,” architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in 2000 in DailyExpertNews. “It’s like finding another world.”
When the museum announced plans to build the Gilder Center in 2015, a neighborhood contingent opposed the project’s foray into adjacent city-owned Theodore Roosevelt Park. In response to these concerns, the museum decided to demolish three of its existing buildings to make way for the six-story addition, rather than extending further into the tree-lined space along Columbus Avenue. And the curvilinear addition of stone and glass – designed by the architect Jeanne Gang – is nearing completion.
Adrian Benepe, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, said that during his years as the city’s park commissioner, he was impressed by Futter’s ability to balance such tensions in urban clothing without being ambitious. “She was always very clear: ‘This park isn’t ours, it’s New York City,'” he said, adding that her board meetings, which he attended as an ex officio, “were a masterclass in how to cultural institution in New York City.”
In 2020, the museum announced that its bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback and flanked by a Native American man and an African man — which had presided over the entrance since 1940 and had come to symbolize a painful legacy of colonial expansion and racial discrimination — would come down . After years of protests from activists, the decision, proposed by the museum and approved by the city, came amid the racial reckoning over the murder of George Floyd.
Futter also had to navigate traumatic world events that took a financial toll on cultural institutions across the country, such as the September 11 attacks, the 2008 economic downturn and the coronavirus pandemic.
And Futter has delved into the museum’s potentially important role as an educator during a period of mounting concern about climate change. Since 2008, through the Richard Gilder Graduate School, the museum has offered a Ph.D. in comparative biology, and in 2011, the museum established a separate master’s program in teaching science.
Currently, in New York City, half of the public school teachers hired each year with primary certification in earth sciences are graduates of the master’s program, the museum said.
The integrity of the museum’s position on science as paramount was challenged by protests in 2017 against one of its board members, Rebekah Mercer. Mercer had used her family’s millions to fund organizations that questioned climate change, a cornerstone of the conservative agenda she put forth as an influential member of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team.
After being pressured by scientists and other academics, Mercer quietly resigned in 2019.
Futter came to the museum after 13 years as president of Barnard College, where at age 29 she became the youngest person to assume the presidency of a major American university. When she was named president of the museum in 1993, she was the first woman to lead a major museum in New York City.
With a no-nonsense manner, Futter has been a solid, deliberate steward, managing the institution without fireworks or showmanship. She’s also largely avoided controversy, for example surviving the 2010 revelations that she was living rent-free in a $5 million East Side apartment that the museum bought when she started (she’ll move out when she leaves the museum).
Some will inevitably criticize Futter for doing too little too slowly. But in the end, others say, she moved a legendary museum as fast as she could.
“How many millions of kids have gone on a school trip and stared at a giant buffalo or that herd of elephants?” said Benep. “Probably today museums wouldn’t have stuffed animals as their main attraction, but she understood that this was an essential part of the history of this museum and they enjoyed coming to see it. Ellen understood the need to keep certain things fully connected to the museum in people’s minds, but also the need to modernize and address societal issues.”
Futter, for her part, said she was well aware that she had to strike a balance between preserving the past, responding to the present, and preparing for the future. “When I first came here, people told me it was their favorite place, but nothing ever changes,” she said. “I’m proud they still say it’s their favorite place, but things have changed. Not the essential mission of science and education, which forms the basis for us, but how we deliver it.”