Since the departure of founding director Rebecca Hoffberger in 2022, the American Visionary Art Museum—a congressionally designated national museum dedicated to showcasing intuitive, self-taught artistry—has been searching for its footing. Hoffberger’s successor, Jenenne Whitfield, departed just one year into her tenure, sparking concerns in the local art world. Internal co-interim directors, temporarily including Hoffberger, have been filling the gap since.
But now, enter new executive director Ellen Owens, who took the helm in June of this year. The Pennsylvania native has worked at a range of institutions, from Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens—a visionary-art museum where she grew the operating budget from $160,000 to nearly $1 million as its first full-time director—to her most recent post, the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, near Buffalo, New York, where she doubled membership in just three years.
And though she has clearly earned her administrative chops, her background as both an arts educator and an artist may be her secret sauce. With degrees in fine art, arts education, and museum education, as well as her own fiber and painting practice, Owens is deeply tuned in to the experience of museumgoers and makers alike.
She says the focus of her career has always been on making museums as accessible as possible, aligning with AVAM’s core commitment to inclusivity. At a moment when federal challenges to diversity initiatives are mounting, her come-one-come-all approach may be just what this beloved Baltimore institution needs.
Welcome to Baltimore! Coming from Philly and, more recently Buffalo, what has the transition been like?
They’re all old industrial cities, so there are some threads between them. There’s a lot of really cool, quirky, creative intelligence here—a lot of non-standard ways of people doing things that are really exciting. Baltimore is very creative city, and I feel very at home.
There has been a lot of recent discussion in arts circles about the role of museums. What’s your take on that?
Historically, museums caretake objects, but the objects are useless unless people can see and appreciate them. So I think that a museum’s role is to give access to the objects in its care to the widest group of people possible, and to help them appreciate the stories around those objects.
When you get down to it, a lot of what museums are doing, or should be doing, is telling stories about people. The art world traditionally has been a place for elite people and, often, elite ideas. AVAM isn’t about elite ideas. AVAM is a place you can go to laugh, to be in your own thoughts, to be your own quirky self, and to respect the gifts of others.
Your experience starts when you come to the building, seeing how incredible it looks when the outside, being welcome from the moment you walk in the door by our front desk staff, by our guard, and being able to drift or take in as much or as little information as need to be able to have some response to the work.
You have continued to work as a maker throughout your museum career. How does your background as an artist impact your perspective as a museum director?
Being an artist, you have some understanding about the difficulties that artists circle through. One of those difficulties, especially for living artists, can be that the conversation around the work becomes the curator’s voice, and maybe not yours as much. Especially with marginalized [artists], people feel the need to speak for them, which isn’t fair. One of the things that I’ve actively been trying to do, and that I think we’ve done so nicely at AVAM with our current Mary Proctor exhibition [The Strength to Be Joyful], is to make sure the artist’s voice is really shining through. We layer in some interpretation, but the artists can really express themselves.
Beyond the galleries, how do you see AVAM contributing to Baltimore’s cultural scene?
There’s a whole [state] plan for how Baltimore can attract more tourists, and we want to be embedded in that and understood to be a national gem. But we also want to continue enhancing our service to Baltimore’s citizens, especially public-school kids. We have a lot of students that come for reduced-cost experience here. We want to think about how we can expand that service and what would be most impactful for schools.
Connecting to that, we are also thinking about how we can get outside of our doors, the way we do with the Kinetic Sculpture Race. How can we allow people in their neighborhoods to feel creative? How can they express their creativity, and how are we unlocking that for them? How can we come to them? These are my big questions. … [Ultimately,] we want be a place that Baltimore is proud of, a place that someone across the country can say, ‘I want to go to this place, because there is literally not another one like it anywhere.”
Social justice is a cornerstone of AVAM’s stated mission. How do you interpret that mandate?
Museums have historically not been welcoming to many different kinds of people, and I hope we’re the antidote to that. We stand by people of all kinds of differences—ability, mental capacity, gender, all the different ways that humans are received in the world. We normalize being weird as cool, and I think what we’re trying to show is the beauty and multiplicity of voices. That means telling the real histories of some people that are oppressed.
And yet, you’re taking the reins at a moment that diversity, particularly at museums and educational institutions, is under scrutiny from the federal government. How does that impact your approach at AVAM?
Some of the messages that are coming out of our federal government right now are devaluing what cultural institutions provide, and that’s a really scary thing to me. We’re seeing the Smithsonian institutions be challenged about what they’re able to show, and it’s extremely scary to think about how historical truths might be challenged and not expressed. Having access to our history and our cultural creations is as important as food and water. So I think it gives AVAM even more of a remit to make sure that the stories of these artworks and artists are shining through.