Mimi Gates, the single most powerful person in art in Seattle, announced June 2 that she's retiring at the end of June 2009. By then, she will have been director of Seattle Art Museum for 15 years.
This is no surprise. Last year was the mother of all SAM years, and directors habitually depart on a high, usually after a building project. SAM had two: the opening of its brand-new sculpture park and the expansion of its downtown hub. At the same time, the museum announced what it called a billion dollars' worth of gifts of art from private collectors. And then it followed its opening exhibition—of those gifts—with two blockbuster displays, of Lorenzo Ghiberti's restored Renaissance Gates of Paradise panels, and of Roman art from the Louvre.
Gates's headlining accomplishments—buttressed by her fundraising—are plain to see. There are subtler components, too. Gates quietly inaugurated the only on-site conservation studio in the region at the museum in 2001. And while SAM has made the most of limited collections through creative installations that integrate art from around the world, Gates has worked behind the scenes to update the board of trustees from what chairman Jon Shirley says was once "a bunch of elderly white people."
Gates's regime has specialized in leverage. Under Gates, SAM has partnered with museums in China, Japan, India, and across Europe and the U.S.—and with Bill and Melinda Gates, Mimi's stepfamily, too. Before coming to SAM, Gates was director of Yale University Art Gallery; now she's on the boards of the university and its museum. Yale's vaunted American collection will visit SAM next spring.
To replace Gates, SAM's trustees will search internationally. Gates will become director emeritus, and Shirley hopes she'll stay involved in the field of Asian art, which is her passion and her background.
When I asked Gates why now, she said, "It's just a good moment; it just feels right." It does feel right. After a certain amount of time, every museum needs to press refresh.
There's one quality from the Gates years that must be preserved: Gates may be able to woo the wealthy, but she also is a serious scholar, even a nerd. No museum can afford to lose that root of substance. It helps to explain the sense of intellectual freedom you see in some of her curators' choices as well. (The first time I saw Gates speak, I gasped at her almost total lack of conventional, hucksterish charisma.)
There's also one deficit that must be eliminated: Gates doesn't get the web. During an interview a few months ago, I found myself introducing her to Wikipedia. In Seattle? (In the Gates family? OMG! WTF?)
What will Bill and Melinda give the museum in honor of Mimi's distinguished tenure? They've never given a work of art to SAM from their personal collection, and it's time to pony up—with a thoroughbred. Is, say, Michelangelo's Pieta out of the question for such a couple on such an occasion? We'd settle for a simple Vermeer, Rembrandt, or Caravaggio in a pinch. 
