Steven Maklansky, director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art,
stands with a touchable sculpture called Big Crocodile. Previously,
Maklansky was executive director at the Brevard Art Museum in Melbourne.
Photo by Kurtis Boggs
By Mary Jane Fine
Steven Maklansky has a question, simple and practical. “Do you mind if I have a coffee?” he asks, lifting a cardboard take-out cup from his desktop, uncapping it, taking a sip. “When you have a 1-year-old and a 5-year-old, a friend told me, coffee is your friend.”
He sips again, smiles, says, “I have two titles beginning with a ‘d’ — director and daddy.”
In his role as director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art — a position he assumed on July 1 of last year, following the departure of former director George Bolge — both titles, it would seem, will carry near-equal weight.
And you’d be safe betting your favorite stuffed bunny, there’ll be some changes made.
Some are already under way. January saw the launch of the museum’s new last-Tuesday-of-the-month “stroller tours,” an opportunity for moms to have a museum outing with young ones in tow. “This,” Maklansky says, “came from my wife who knows that there are a lot of women thinking, ‘Tuesday morning, now what am I going to do?’ ”
Maklansky recalls what he often wanted to do during his growing-up years in New York City — when, as he says, he considered museums to be magical places.
“It’s very important to me,” he says, seated on a black-and-chrome chair in his corner office, “that the Boca Raton Museum of Art is perceived as a magical place … to children of all ages. It’s important to me that we always have family-friendly experiences. You have to make sure that a museum is not perceived as a place full of old paintings for old people.”
Helping to make that point is Teddy 2011, an 18-inch-high teddy-bear sculpture by Canadian artist Ross Bonfanti — “Touchable art — cast concrete and toy parts” — that greets visitors just inside the museum’s double front doors.
“There’s no second chance to make a first impression,” Maklansky quotes.
Second, third and beyond impressions are in the works, too.
Maklansky’s vision, he says, must include positioning and marketing, ways of making Boca stand out, since museum-goers have so many options: to the south, the Museum of Art/Fort Lauderdale; to the north, the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach; to the west, the Young at Art Children’s Museum in Davie.
He talks about technology and interactive exhibits, about accessibility and integrating playful with thoughtful. “The way of the world now,” he says. “The way young people are learning.”
A primary example is “Big Art: miniature golf,” an interactive exhibition scheduled to run from July 18 to Oct. 7. The museum has issued an invitation to artists to submit a design proposal for an individual golf hole, the judging to be based on creativity, playability, safety, durability and feasibility of implementation.
One of the artists invited to do so is Bogota-born Federico Uribe, whose recent Boca Raton Museum exhibit — a fantastical jungle of animals he created from sneaker-soles and shoelaces — preceded Maklansky’s arrival.
The man who planned Uribe’s exhibit was former museum director George Bolge, now CEO of the Museum of Florida Art in DeLand, who said via email, “Leaving a museum you have developed from the ground up is akin to a captain leaving the ship which has been his home for many years. You don’t talk about your many adventures and travails together or the places you have visited. It is part of your past, and as such, has no significance to anyone but you. What is meaningful are the plans of the new captain and how he intends to distinguish his command.”
Maklansky’s command includes plans for, as he says, “a complete paradigm shift” in our website and increased awareness of the museum’s art school, which will include online enrollment, children’s birthday parties, and greater interplay between the school and the museum.
Most of all, he indicates, he hopes to alter the way museums often are viewed by the public as omniscient and authoritarian. He lowers his voice into the basso register and intones, “The museum in its great wisdom has decided that this is for you,” then returns to normal-speak. “We want to sort of get away from that.”
To do all he wants to do, Maklansky knows, will cost big bucks, so part of his role — the director, not the daddy, part — means persuading potential donors to think Boca.
He spends as much time as possible, he says, out in the community, getting to know as many people as he can, looking ahead to the museum’s forging more connections and to doing more for the community.
“Boca has meaning,” he says. “Now, what are those meanings? Boca is retirement. Boca is wealth. Boca is snowbirds. Thirty-five percent of them spend half their time in other cities — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, cultures defined by their museums.
“Instead of giving your money there, where it gets lost in the sauce,” he says, voicing a potential pitch to potential donors, “or giving another Picasso to MOMA, where it gets stored in the basement …”
With all the increased attention to outreach and family-friendly exhibits and altered perceptions of a museum’s role, does the museum, then, plan to shy away from controversy, from possibly disturbing exhibits?
“Would the museum hesitate to do ‘violent’ or ‘licentious’ because it would offend the family? I think the answer is ‘yes,’ but there’s enough challenging art that doesn’t feature guns or phalluses,” he says. “There’s not going to be a penis show, but, no, we’re not going to be a children’s museum.”
The Boca Raton Museum of Art’s Visionaries Ball
Where: The Boca Raton Resort and Club, 501 E. Camino Real, Boca Raton
When: 6:30-11 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 18
Tickets: $350
For more information: Email kdelarosa@bocamuseum.org or call 392-2500, Ext. 208.
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