There He Goes

“There’s no big secret,” says Derrick Cartwright. He’s sitting at a round glass table in a sparsely furnished office at Second and University. This has been his office for less than two years.

“There have been numerous moments when I’ve wished… well…” He trails off, then starts again, editing himself. It’s an awkward situation. His two bosses are across the table. “I feel a deep connection to culture and its place in our lives. Sitting in this office is not where I feel that connection.”

And there it is: Cartwright is leaving his post as director of Seattle Art Museum because there isn’t enough art in the job.

He came to the realization gradually, he says, in the accumulation of moments like hearing the band Hey Marseilles for the first time at a recent art event and loving them. “I realized I had been, sort of, cut off from that,” he says. “I just really want to have that deep emotional connection to what got me into this work in the first place.”

Cartwright was doing a great job—by quantifiable measures and by more in-the-air readings. “It’s weird,” says longtime Seattle artist and curator Greg Bell when I run into him in the street. “He was a good guy. I thought he was doing a good job. I thought everything was going well.”

If he didn’t do something wrong, did SAM? As SAM enters another search process—it took 10 months for the machinery of the board and its consultants to hire Cartwright, after Mimi Gates had been in the job 15 years—the question becomes: What kind of director can thrive here?

The museum has grown tremendously in the last few years, adding a sculpture park and doubling its downtown home base, while its staff has stayed the same size. Is there too much to do and too few people to do it? Did SAM wake up one morning an ocean liner with a skeleton crew? Can SAM accommodate a hands-on, approachable, fine-grained director like Cartwright?

Or were there other unseen factors at play? Does Cartwright want to get out of the business of museum directing altogether? It’s a job that, across the board, has become more about administration and less about art as museums have grown. (Studies show American museum-going is at an all-time high and rising.)

Cartwright says he’s not sure what his next move will be. Board chairman Charlie Wright does not come across as secretive, but he doesn’t give much away about what has happened or what it indicates for the future—in part, he says, because the museum has some soul-searching to do, too.

“Every museum director I know doesn’t let a week go by without thinking, ‘This was a bait and switch,'” Wright says, sitting in Cartwright’s soon-to-be-vacated office. “There’s the thing you’re most motivated by, and then there’s the financial and administrative stuff. It’s a balance that is never quite perfect. I understand Derrick’s decision.”

Wright says something many people in museums do: “We’re still trying to figure out—what should museums be in this century?”

“Picasso,” the winter exhibition from Musée National Picasso Paris, he continues, “introduced us to a new drug here, which is bodies. Myself, I still don’t know quite what to make of it. But it did have a druglike effect.” The show brought more than 405,000 visitors. So what aspect of “bodies” did SAM get high on, and how did it affect Cartwright’s decision?

Ironically, it is partly Cartwright’s more open and welcoming approach—along with the influence of lead staffers like education head Sandra Jackson-Dumont—that has drawn the crowds that seem to retrospectively justify the museum’s jump in scale. On May 5, during First Thursday, 9,000 people went through the museum. It was a record. Though some of Cartwright’s success has been due to exhibitions that were programmed long before he arrived, including Picasso, his tenure has been one record after another.

The fact that June 30 is his last day is no coincidence. It’s the end of the fiscal year, which brings yet another record. SAM will have the largest surplus—seven figures was all Wright and board president Maggie Walker would say—in the history of the museum.

Steering the museum back into the black must have been a deeply unpleasant task after the crash, and certainly it left Cartwright depleted. He inherited the expanded SAM that Gates wrought, its financial structure resting on its relationship with Washington Mutual, which—unthinkably—collapsed just months before Cartwright arrived from his directorship at the San Diego Museum of Art. His hiring was a bright spot in an unusually dark spring—2009—when it was just becoming clear that SAM was left holding the bag on millions of dollars of WaMu’s rent for offices above the museum. SAM was a landlord in a market with no commercial renters. Less than a year into his tenure, Cartwright had to lay off 15 staff members and announce that the museum would close for the first two weeks of 2011, the first furlough in the museum’s history—another record.

Through all this, Cartwright was a pro. He was a good boss. Staffers reported seeing him in the audience at their lectures, and he’d stay all the way to the end, listening with respect to his employees as peers. During the layoffs, he cut his own pay significantly. His public face was the same: gracious and intelligent without ever seeming aloof. He delivered scholarly lectures on different subjects, each one researched carefully, but you could just as easily find him at 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night leading an all-ages tour during SAM’s quarterly Remix party. And he impressed the most difficult group of them all: artists. In January, when a small group showed up to watch the first screening in Seattle of a work of video art that had been censored at the National Portrait Gallery—on a Friday lunch hour at Seattle University—Cartwright was there. He eventually decided to show the censored work at SAM in solidarity with other museums supporting freedom of expression. Unlike his predecessor, Cartwright resisted burying his head in the sand, even when it was inconvenient.

“Stunned,” is the reaction of Jenifer Ward, Cornish College of the Arts associate provost, to the news of Cartwright’s departure.

“Yeah, I really liked him,” says artist Gretchen Bennett. “I feel like even though he has to straddle the space between administrative duties and regional and national artists, he was really involved with the creative process. I’m sad. It feels like a blow.”

“He’s been doing a great job at SAM and the whole time maintaining a great relationship with artists, donors, and the public,” artist and University of Washington School of Art lecturer Timea Tihanyi wrote on Facebook. “He has been most kind, accessible, and professional. He gave at least four scholarly lectures in four completely different topics in the past two years. Each of those were excellently researched and flawlessly delivered.”

His tenure will be remembered as an unqualified success—except that it had to end so soon.