Meet the MFA’s new director Anne-Marie Russell

Anne-Marie Russell hit the ground running when the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg named her Interim Executive Director last September. A woman with a lengthy history of bringing inspiration and innovation to art institutions, Russell arrived with a portfolio full of ideas and began to share them, and chew them over, with other members of the MFA staff and board.

In March, the MFA hired Russell as Executive Director and CEO, full-time, and she’s watching those ideas sprout like the early green buds of a new spring.

“To me, art represents the highest aspirations of humankind,” explains the Chicago native. “That’s pretty lofty, and I feel incredibly grateful every day that I get to be with art, and be around and think about art. And we want to bring that pleasure and joy to the widest possible audience.”

The March/April programming arc has included themed series of talks by art historians, writers and critics, curators and gallerists – as well as artists themselves.

Russell describes the ongoing series called the Museum Studies Institute as the MFA’s “internal think tank. Art museums are fascinating, because we’re simultaneously charged with preserving objects in perpetuity for future generations. Like, forever.

“So we have to protect these objects. And guess what? The paradox, the juxtaposition. At the very same time, we are charged with making these objects available to the widest possible audience. Those two things are frankly completely in opposition to each other. And that beautiful paradox that exists at the core of the art museum project is magnificent.

“That’s what we are all about. That is what the Museum Studies Institute is all about. It encompasses all of our creative and educational activities, it brings the entire community into the conversation about art, and what art means.”

The By Design series, which ended March 26, circled around the eternal question “What is art?”

“Some people think of art as some big fancy painting that’s hanging on a wall, in a museum or a wealthy person’s home,” Russell explains. “But art is all around us, at all times.

“Now art museums like the MFA are obviously designed to find the best of those objects, to present them and to celebrate their greatness for being the highest quality of this art form.

“But it’s all art. I’m not interested in making definitions of what’s art or non-art, I’m more interested in issues of quality, and how do we make decisions about quality? How do curators decide that this is quote-unquote museum quality?”

Russell, who has BA in cultural anthropology from the University of Colorado and a Master’s in art history from the University of Arizona, is an educator, writer and development strategist. She came to St. Pete from Sarasota, where she was the inaugural Executive Director of the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College.

She gave up that position to help found the design, advocacy and exhibition group Architecture Sarasota.

“Architecture is interesting,” she says, “because it’s the most public art form. And we all have it. We all live in architecture. Even if you live in a tree – that’s like a primitive form of architecture. I say that because I happen to love climbing trees, and sleeping in trees. They were our early homes.

“When people look around them, if what they’re seeing wasn’t shaped by nature, it was shaped by human beings. And that is art. I would argue that art is all around us, at all times. It’s our architecture. It’s the clothing we wear.”

She missed the art world during her time at the helm of Architecture Sarasota, Russell says, and so when the Museum of Fine Arts announced the search for a new director, she threw her proverbial hat into the ring.

“I’d visited for the first time within a couple weeks of moving to Sarasota: ‘OK, where am I? Let me explore the area.’ And I just fell in love.

“And while I was building the Sarasota Museum of Art I did 45 ‘back of house’ tours at museums around the country. And this was one of them. I visited numerous times, just as a civilian, because of the wonderful exhibitions. The Navajo rug exhibit was one of my favorites. And the permanent collection is really special. It’s just such a gem of an institution.”

Everyone at the MFA is abuzz this week because Gio Swaby: Fresh Up, the textile art exhibition put together in May 2022 by curator Katherine Pill, is opening Saturday at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Pill has just been named the MFA’s Senior Curator (she is an “amazing curator, a total superstar,” according to Russell) and will be in Chicago for the opening, with is being presented in conjunction with the Chicago Art Expo.

The Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg was one of three 2023 recipients of the Northern Trust Purchase Prize, which will allow them to select works from the fair’s Exposure sector, to bring back to their cities.

Russell is over the moon at this turn of events. “The fact that this incredible exhibition at our small to midsize, regional, quasi-encyclopedic museum is going to one of the most important encyclopedic museums on the planet is astonishingly exciting,” she gushes.

“And that it’s happening simultaneously with the Northern Trust Purchase Prize with Expo, one of the most important art fairs …. The Art Institute is where Katherine got her Master’s degree … the intersection of all these events is just beyond exciting.”

Of course, there are still visiting exhibits to coordinate, community and collaborative programs to be dreamed up, as well as the ongoing series of new exhibitions of material from the MFA’s extensive permanent collection. Only a certain percentage has been seen by the public thus far.

Case in point: Best in Show: Dogs in Art at the MFA opened April 1 and will continue through the summer. It’s what’s known as a “small focus” show, highlighting the ways dogs have been represented throughout the history of art.

“I don’t want to offend any cat people in the community, but I’m hoping that the dog lovers will be excited,” Russell exclaims.

“I’m so madly in love with our little dog show, and I’m hoping the community will be too.”

Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg website.

Harold Edgerton, Dog, 1933, Gelatin silver print, Gift of Lee Arnold and Robert Drapkin.