New Director Sarah Ganz Blythe on Reenvisioning Harvard Art Museums

For new Director of Harvard Art Museums Sarah Ganz Blythe, museums have always been a place that gave her “a way to understand the world.”

Blythe, who before assuming her current position in August was Deputy Director of Exhibitions, Education, and Programs at the Rhode Island School of Design, began her career in conservation as a teenager when she interned at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“What made a big impression on me was not just the work that we were doing, or the research that we were doing, but the way in which I was among grown ups who were passionate about their work. They had full lives outside of their work, and they were asking complex questions and figuring things out together,” she said in an interview with The Crimson.

Her first exposure to Harvard Art Museums was as a student intern while she attended nearby Wellesley College.

“There are ways for me to directly connect, for example, to 1500s Italy or to actually look at this visual evidence and be able to deduce meaning from it,” she said, in regards to how works of art, as primary sources, offer students touchpoints with history.

The educational experience Harvard Art Museums offers its students has, for nearly the past two years since the museum instituted free admission, become more accessible to the broader public. Ganz said the museums’ attendance has nearly tripled in that time.

“From what I understand and from what I remember from coming here beforehand, the tempo, the volume, the pace of the place has transformed significantly, which is wonderful,” she said.

However, the influx of new visitors does not come without its challenges.

“How do we lean into that particular space of being an academic museum which we are so good at, and — at the same time — connect people who might be new to art, new to this place, new to Cambridge, and to really use works of art as a point of connection across many different perspectives?” she said.

The difficulty lies in being “accessible” without “losing that depth and rigor,” Blythe said.

At RISD, Blythe led the museum in increasing its acquisitions from underrepresented artists and says she intends to do the same at Harvard.

“Part of it is for us to first understand, you know, what is missing? Where’s our collection sitting, in terms of geographies, time periods, ways of making and perspectives? And then start to develop some intentionality towards where we want to build the collection,” she said.

As Blythe seeks to expand the diversity within the museums’ collections, she and her team will also continue reckoning with whether and how to display artifacts that contain racist or other offensive subtext. In 2019, the museums began an initiative to relabel those artworks to better explain their context. For example, the label for “The Black Countess” by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was updated to acknowledge the identity of the the Haitain aristocrat depicted in it, and mentions of the Boylston family’s involvement in the slave trade were added to their portraits’ labels.

For Blythe, the relabeling effort is only a “first step.”

“We have the opportunity to reflect the last 10 years of learning and research and even the shift in our publics, to reinstall our galleries, so that is going to be our work that we’re going to start to get underway,” she said. “I think it's a wonderful opportunity to build new relationships, to conduct new research and really interrogate the histories.”

Six months into the job, Blythe’s work is just beginning.

“The first six months, the biggest goal was simply to begin to understand the history of this place, to understand its responsibilities and its obligations, and then to start thinking about its opportunities,” she said.

Blythe in her team are still in the early stages of revisioning the museum’s galleries. In the meantime, “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,” an exhibition on the Norwegian experimentalist‘s work, is on view at the Harvard Art Museums through July 27.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.