Someone give them a glass of chardonnay. By the 1980s, when this photo was taken at the MIA in the Charleston Drawing Room, the ‘Tute, as people called it then, was grappling with how to dismantle crusty notions of art as an upper-class activity, the museum as sacrosanct, even as its leaders often held exclusive pedigrees.
On the right, with the dapper collar pin: Samuel Sachs II, who led the MIA as its director from 1973 to 1985. His father had founded Newsweek. His great-grandfather had co-founded Goldman Sachs. Yet in Minnesota he proved a down-to-earth and fun-loving administrator, originating a cheeky and popular MIA exhibition on art fakes and even serving as a juror for the Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Show.
On the left: Michael Conforti, who grew up near Phillips Andover Academy, the archetypal prep school, in Massachusetts, attended Trinity College in Connecticut and then Harvard. He was the head curator at the MIA from 1980 to 1994, specializing in decorative arts and sculpture, and oversaw the restoration of the Purcell-Cutts House after it was willed to the MIA in 1985.
A few years ago, in the midst of a 20-year tenure as director of the Clark Institute, the museum at Williams College (he left this year), Conforti became the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. When he left, in 2010, the position went to Kaywin Feldman, the MIA’s current director, who has continued to grow the MIA’s influence while dispensing with charges of elitism.
Today, at 11:30 a.m., Conforti will join Feldman and former MIA curators and administrators (Christopher Monkhouse, Lotus Stack, Greg Hedberg, Bill Griswold) in a panel discussion on the museum’s past and present, moderated by current head curator Matthew Welch.