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. 
