20 January 2022 – How to make a difference as a leader?
While cultural institutions are trying to adapt to new times, their inner structures are often last to change, if at all. We may see a gradual diversification of the people at the top, but their roles remain unaffected: one person is the organisation’s face, its mastermind and holder of the final say in everything.
About this event
With great power comes great responsibility and for the next edition of Night Shift, we will consider the position of (cultural) leaders and get to the bottom of how they can truly make a difference. A difference for the well-being of their team, as the precarity of cultural workers remains an issue in the field, or by sparking a revolution within the organisation. Should our leaders exude a strong vision or care, or should we refrain from the traditional image of the solitary director altogether, and is the best way to make a difference as director to discontinue its own role?
For the next Night Shift we will be hosting a conversation with and between leaders from the sector. People who have truly made a difference in their institutions or reflected on their own leadership qualities or that of others. Please join the conversation, which will be in English and online, on Thursday January 20th, 20:00 hours Central European Time (that would be 19:00 hours British Standard Time, 11:00 Pacific Daylight Time, 14:00 Eastern Daylight Time, you get the gist).
When: 20 January, 20:00 hours
Where: Online
Please note: this event was previously scheduled on November 18th. The new date for this event is January 20th, 2022.
Speakers
Saskia Scheltjens studied Literature & Linguistics, and Information & Library Science at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). She is an experienced information manager who has worked in the university and museum world in Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2016 she moved to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to set up a new department called Research Services in which the Rijksmuseum Research Library, the Collection Information department, the Rijksmuseum Archive, Collection IT and Public Information Services work closely together. The department is working on tools and services for researchers on top of very hybrid, rich and open collection data. She is fascinated by the interdisciplinary possibilities of cultural AI, digital humanities research and a strong advocate for open data and – systems within the digital heritage world.
Dr. Amy Gilman joined the Chazen in September, 2017. As director of the Chazen, Dr. Gilman oversees all administrative, financial, and curatorial duties for the museum, and has spent her first few years focusing on capacity-building and access. Since Dr. Gilman’s arrival at the Chazen, the staff has grown by 30 percent, unpaid internships have been replaced with paid positions for students, and the museum has revamped its visitor services model and lobby space to be more welcoming to visitors. Dr. Gilman is a progressive leader in the field, and an advocate for the role of the university art museum on campus and in the community. She was recently featured in the online publication Hyperallergic with her opinion piece titled “The Era of the Visionary Museum Director Is Over … or It Should Be.”
Amy Whitaker researches the frictions between art and markets. She is the author of three books Museum Legs, Art Thinking, and the recently published Economics of Visual Art: Market Practice and Market Resistance (Cambridge). She began her career working in art museums including education at the Guggenheim Museum, marketing at the Museum of Modern Art, and Business Strategy at Tate. As a member of the faculty in Visual Arts Administration at New York University, she conducts research on a wide variety of topics that are connected by a search for novel financial models to create economic sustainability, equity, and justice across artistic practice and the management of arts organizations. Her work proposing fractional equity in art using blockchain has been published in the leading journal Management Science and received the 2021 Edith Penrose Award for pioneering research that challenges orthodoxies in one’s field and has impact. Her research and teaching have been covered in Time Magazine, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Art Newspaper, and Het Financieele Dagblad, among others. She holds an MBA, an MFA in painting, and a PhD in political economy.
Practical note
If you really want to come, but you really can’t afford a ticket, please contact the Night Shift team by emailing hallo[at]nightshift010.nl.
