Photograph by Daniel Quat
Frances Levine
Just over six years ago, I sat down for a conversation with Dr. Frances Levine, who had settled into her role as the director of the Missouri History Museum the year before. She was the first woman to lead a Zoo Museum District institution (Min Jung Kim at the Saint Louis Art Museum is the second) in its over-100-year history, and the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson had changed the St. Louis region forever.
Now, with Levine’s retirement announced for next year and the search for her replacement begun in earnest, I spoke with her again. This time, it was not in person but via Zoom, a technology no one had thought much about back in 2014, due to a pandemic we had never dreamed of.
I reminded Levine that when I interviewed her in the summer of 2016, she had moved to St. Louis from the Southwest desert, and her first impression was how green St. Louis was. Levine laughs. “I actually have a full vocabulary of shades of green," she says. "Before it was just sage green and Christmas green. I can tell you all about green now.”
“I’m staying in St. Louis," she continues. "I’ve really made a wonderful community connection for myself here. It just feels like home for me now. I have really good friends here. The cultural amenities are quite amazing. I’m kicking myself for not going to the Rolling Stones concert today.”
When Levine arrived at her new home, things were not so settled as they are now. The death of Brown occurred only a few short months after she became director.
“I started on April 15, 2014," Levine says. "I remember several of the staff coming to me and saying, ‘Please don’t leave.’ And I said, ‘Why would I leave?’ This is the kind of work we need to do in museums. We need to connect with the community.”
I asked her more specifically what role a history museum plays in current events, and what it can do to preserve the present before it's lost.
“I think everybody knew we had to collect now to tell the stories in the future," Levine says. "When you collect in the moment, you collect from the participants. If you wait 10, 15, 50 years, you lose the provenance the person has to that object.”
Right on the heels of Ferguson, the history museum began the leviathan task of renovating and reinterpreting the Soldiers Memorial, which had languished for decades. (I wrote about its opening back in November 2018.) The history museum was in the early stages of taking over the management of the Soldiers Memorial when Levine arrived. It started with the cataloging of the memorial's substantial collections, which had been neglected for years. The result has been a dramatic revitalization of a former forgotten corner of downtown.
“It really helped us broaden our institution’s reach. It helped to build a bridge to an audience we hadn’t had before,” Levine explains. “It really rescued and put military and veteran history front and center—it put it in a building that is really magnificent.”
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The renovated Soldiers Memorial, 2018
A few short years after the opening of the Soldiers Memorial, the coronavirus pandemic closed the history museum—and just about every other cultural institution in St. Louis. For Levine, though the pandemic was certainly a difficult time for the museum, it would have been worse without the Zoo Museum District. Taxes from the city and county helped protect employees’ wages and museum programs.
“The ZMD is one of the true lights of the region," Levine says. "We saw that coming through COVID. We saw that core of funding and commitment to the arts. I think it’s a real civic commitment. I feel honored to be a part of it.”
Levine wants the region to work toward more cooperation, after seeing how successful regionalism has been with the ZMD. Our conversation then turned to some of the special exhibits that have occurred over the past seven years, and I asked Levine if her perspective as a director had changed since our last interview.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The "St. Louis Sound" exhibit
“[The exhibitions team] know the stories way more than I do," she says. "I challenge them [in] the way we’re doing things. I mother hen a little bit, but I try not to micromanage. I think the team has gotten better at collaborating with other organizations around town. I think our programming has gotten way better.”
The history museum also offers free admission to all special exhibits now, which was not the case in the past. Another aspect of some special exhibits has been the ability to reuse portions of the content for display elsewhere after the original run. Five of the top-attended exhibits, such as "Route 66" and "#1 in Civil Rights," have been during Levine’s tenure as director.
I asked Levine what she planned on doing with her remaining time at the history museum. Like all museum directors, fundraising is always at the forefront. But even with the loosening of pandemic restrictions and opening of museums, the rebuilding of audiences will be critical in the coming years as people cautiously return to public spaces. The museum’s expansive collections also need rehousing, and reimagining exhibits are in the planning stages.
I also asked Levine what she saw as the future for St. Louis and the business of history now that the direction of our city has been irrevocably changed over the past decade.
“Right now, how we tell history is changing," she says. "We’re not looking for what I call received wisdom. History doesn’t have one voice. History has many voices and many perspectives. How you’ve been raised and where you’ve been schooled all play into how we tell history. We live in the presence of the past.”
Levine continues, “What I love about St. Louis is how proud people are of their history. But they have to be proud of what we are now, too. And they’ve got to be engaged in what we’re building, and I think that’s one of the things that we’re doing at the history museum, giving people moments to be proud of and raising questions of who we are and where we’re going.”
