From left: Betsy Millard, Paul Ha, and Lisa Melandri
This year marks 15 years of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in its current form. While 15 years is still relatively green in the museum world, CAM has done a lot in those years and become a crucial part of the city’s fabric. It may not yet have a 100-year legacy, but the city’s art scene seems like it could hardly exist without it.
CAM is celebrating this landmark with a private event for longtime friends of the institution, and all three of the institution’s directors—past and present—will be on hand for the event. St. Louis Magazine caught up with them all by phone for a look back and a look forward.
Betsy Millard was the director of the Forum for Contemporary Art. She was at the helm for the evolution of the Forum into its current iteration as CAM, including commissioning the now-iconic building by then-up-and-coming architect Brad Cloepfil, who had never designed a museum before and has gone on to design the 2002 expansion to the Seattle Art Museum and New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, among many other cultural spaces. Millard currently serves as the director of Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum in Washington State.
Paul Ha was the first director of CAM in its current form, holding that position from 2002 to 2011. Prior to that, he was deputy director of programs and external affairs at Yale University Art Gallery and director of White Columns gallery in New York. He shepherded the building’s construction, and worked on projects to raise CAM’s profile locally, nationally, and internationally. He created the first endowment for the institution. Ha is currently the director of the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lisa Melandri is currently the museum’s director, a position she took in 2012 after serving as deputy director at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. She has initiated programs like Street Views, large-scale exterior façade exhibition space, as well as the Project Wall, a 60-foot-long space that artists customize during exhibitions. Melandri has brought in recent blockbuster shows like "Basquiat Before Basquiat" and "Amy Sherald," the first major solo show of the Baltimore artist, arranged just ahead of Sherald’s commission of Michelle Obama’s official portrait.
The pre-CAM years
Before it was CAM, the institution—founded in 1980—worked under names such as First Street Forum and the Forum for Contemporary Art. Those bodies provided space and connected contemporary artists with audiences in the city.
It wasn’t an easy task, Millard recalls. The Forum had spaces, but they weren’t ideal. Artists came in spite of the storefronts. The Forum, she says, was the scrappy underdog in a city full of prestigious organizations—but in some ways that worked in its favor.
“So many artists wanted to come to St. Louis, they wanted to make their work there,” Millard says. “They felt like, particularly a lot of the European artists, felt like it was the real America.”
Community outreach was an important part of the Forum’s mission as well, Millard says. The New Art in the Neighborhood program arose in collaboration with Washington University and its efforts to diversify its population of art students, and the idea of working in the neighborhood took off.
“We just kind of started talking to the neighbors,” Millard says—mostly community centers, after-school programming, and contacts in nearby housing projects. “We said, ‘Do you have kids that don't fit into the sports programs, that are sitting there during the homework hour doodling in the back of the class?’ and they're like, ‘Oh yeah, we have some of those kids.’”
The kids had great exposure to art and artists. Millard particularly remembers Kara Walker’s visit.
“These girls and boys were just mesmerized,” she says.
Building on
By the early 2000s, the hunt was on for an architect to build on the space next to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. As a non-collecting institution, the museum had to be incredibly nimble, crafting a reputation purely on the success of past exhibitions. The task was to build a home for artwork that, by its very nature as contemporary, is constantly evolving and requiring settings and infrastructure that hadn’t even been dreamed up yet.
“We didn’t know what was going to be needed, but the building seems to work for everybody who comes into it in some way or another,” Millard says. “How do you make a space that’s flexible enough, given the mission of the organization, and lasting enough? It’s exciting, because it seems like it’s doing it!”
It was Millard’s and the Forum’s success, as well as the chance to build a permanent museum from the ground up, that drew Paul Ha to St. Louis, he says.
“As a small organization, they showed tremendous ambition and reach,” says Ha. “In their small space, they had an internationally renowned program.”
The devotion of the board and founders sealed the deal for him.
“When I interviewed, I wasn’t thinking about moving,” he says. But the board sent him a plane ticket anyway, and he arrived to see mounds of dirt and blueprints—clues that something very exciting was beginning.
Just out of curiosity, Ha asked the board what they were expecting out of the institution and its director.
“They said, ‘You know, we’re just going to trust our choice and we’ll let the director do whatever they want,’” he says. “I thought, ‘My goodness! You don’t get offers like that.’”
The board was as good as its word, allowing him the freedom to create programming and exhibitions specific to his vision for a contemporary art museum in a city that hadn’t previously had one.
“What was really important to me was to be part of a larger international dialogue,” says Ha. “By the time I left, we showed something like 230 artists from all over the world. After they have an exhibition with us, they become the ambassador.” The word spread fast: if you're a contemporary artist, St. Louis should be a destination.
An innovation of his is the Front Room, a space that can move and respond fast.
“Some shows were up for an hour, some shows were up for a week,” Ha says. “We just want to have this sort of fast-moving vehicle where we can show debuting artists in St. Louis that had never shown before.” Museums are programmed years out, and the Front Room gave CAM the ability to hang a show in a week.
CAM, in the now
In her half-dozen years as director, Lisa Melandri has seen the Grand Center neighborhood change dramatically. It’s always had the “extraordinary bookends” of Powell Hall and the Fox, but more and more organizations keep arriving—visual arts as well as performing arts organizations. The Pulitzer, of course, is an excellent neighbor.
“We’ve talked so much about this idea of a two-fer,” Melandri says of the proximity to the Pulitzer. But as the neighborhood evolves—she says it’s been in “hyperdrive” in her time at CAM—it’s become much more than a two-fer. Visitors seamlessly integrate the museum into a day before seeing jazz or the orchestra or visiting some of the other dynamic performance spaces. The neighbors, and First Fridays, create a natural environment for collaborative programming.
Educational institutions like Cardinal Ritter College Preparatory High School, the Montessori Lab School at Grand Center and the Grand Center Arts Academy provide natural points of intersection, Melandri says, as well as the Public Media Commons.
“It is ever more full and ever more vibrant, and it’s a really interesting cross-section,” she says. Audience and programmatic intersections, she says, pop up in a lot of unexpected and healthy ways.
Baked into the DNA of CAM, Melandri says, is the idea of being artist-centric. But that doesn’t mean artists parachuting in, putting on a show, and leaving. It’s about how St. Louisans can have access—to art and to artists.
Being a museum without a permanent collection, Melandri says, is a real asset when it comes to maintaining relevance.
“A really wonderful thing about a non-collecting institution, and one of contemporary art, is that it is inherently something that has salience,” she says. “Rather than thinking about what this show or this artwork will look like to posterity, we're really thinking about now all the time and of course now changes. It’s our job and our role and very much our mission to continue to evolve to the now, whatever that looks like.”
Here’s to a long future of now.
