There were several reasons why Monica Ramirez-Montagut left the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, where she'd been director for two years, to take the helm of the Parrish Art Museum in June 2022.
"I wanted to come back to the New York area of influence, because it does have a lot of visibility and therefore a lot of impact in the art world," she said during a conversation in her office.
Ms. Ramirez-Montagut holds degrees in architecture and architectural theory from universities in Mexico City and Barcelona, which is another factor: "I love that [the Parrish] is an architecturally relevant building." Not only did she work early in her career as an assistant curator at Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum; she designed an exhibition there of the work of Zaha Hadid, the architect of the Broad.
She especially likes the scale of the Parrish, which, she said, is "big enough to have an impact, but also small enough so you can be very responsive. You can have the personal rapport with your staff and can course-correct or adapt with more ease than in larger institutions."
But the move was not without its complications. Her predecessor at the Parrish had resigned after less than a year, and several longtime staff members had moved on to other jobs. "The challenge here," she said, "was not only that I came to a museum that had its own individual crises at the board level, at the senior staff level, at the director level, but on top of that the crisis that was going on globally in cultural organizations during Covid."
Twenty percent of museums worldwide did not survive the pandemic; those that that did lost 20 precent of their income.
One of the new director's first initiatives was to reach out to artists with deep roots on the East End, "to build back our relevance and credibility." The result is the three-part exhibition "Artists Choose Parrish," in which established artists are invited to select works from the museum's collection to pair with their own. The series, whose third iteration will open on Sunday, has another goal as well, equally important: to draw attention to the collection itself. "People did not know we have a robust collection."
A year and a half into the job, Ms. Ramirez-Montagut now has a reinvigorated board, new senior leadership positions in the museum, and "exhibitions that while furthering the field of art can also be accessible and relevant to not just the art experts but to a lot of different communities with different interests."
One such was "Kahlo: An Expanded Body," which she organized last November with Cristina Kahlo-Alcala, Frida Kahlo's grandniece. "The idea was to acknowledge that about 22 percent of our population in Suffolk County is Hispanic-Latinx, that four of the five school districts we work with have more than 50 percent of the students who are Hispanic-Latinx. I think the Kahlo exhibition was one that signals we need to start serving our Hispanic-Latinx audiences in a purposeful manner, with conviction, and with rigor and consistency."
Nor was the Kahlo show a one-off. "I have heard concerns that just doing a Day of the Dead community event is not really serving that audience. Serving that audience is making sure that every year they see their own culture acknowledged on the museum walls, not just as a community outreach event." Starting next year, the Parrish will mount a Hispanic-Latinx exhibition every spring to coincide with its annual student art show.
During the summers, the museum will continue to show work by highly recognized artists of the region. In the past, Ms. Ramirez-Montagut said, the museum has focused primarily on artists from the South Fork; the intention now is to extend its area of recognition to the North Fork.
Next summer will feature solo shows by Eddie Martinez and Sam Moyer, who live on the North Fork, and KAWS and Julia Chiang, who vacation on the South Fork. The two pairs happen to be married to each other, "but you wouldn't know that because they both have prominent careers independent of each other."
Ms. Ramirez-Montagut has known all four artists for 20 years. She might organize the KAWS exhibition herself, although she remarked that "many times it's not helpful when a director is curating." That project, though, sounds dear to her heart: "I gave him his first museum exhibition 14 years ago at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and we also did his first museum publication."
Every fall, she said, the Parrish will develop themed exhibitions. "We're going to be talking about food, we're going to be talking about climate change, affordable housing. There are themes that are part of our everyday discussions that can benefit from interdisciplinary approaches."
Museum-goers can also expect that architecture and design will become a prominent part of the museum's exhibition program. "People want to know about architecture and design, and we are fortunate that in this region we have highly educated and well-versed audiences for those two subjects."
The Parrish has just updated its mission statement and strategic plan. While it is similar to its predecessor, and to that of many other museums, "We want to honor our legacy through a contemporary lens, and one that’s socially conscious. We added a sentence that says the architectural creativity, the artistic community, the access to nature, the access to the creative process, make a visit to the Parrish unique."
Her first 15 months on the job, she said, have been "very busy. The biggest surprise for me was, the mystical place that is 'the Hamptons in the summer' really doesn’t do it justice. It is extraordinary. You can envision many things, but being here through a whole summer -- I think I went to 46 events."
"There’s a lot going on, and we have a lot of colleagues doing tremendous work, so you want to be there to support them. But you also want to come to all the events in your own venue. It’s a good problem to have. It's a testament to the vibrancy of this region."
Another surprise was the summer traffic, which she now understands can dissuade people from visiting the museum during the high season. But that's a small disappointment compared to the "tremendous, amicable community of creative people, architects, designers, artists, writers, photographers. I was not expecting that. Artists are still moving to this region in search of other artists or a creative community. I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere in this country. And I’ve lived in six or seven different cities."
When she first moved here, Ms. Ramirez-Montagut rented an apartment in Bridgehampton. "One of my retired colleagues called me and said she heard I wanted to live in Sag Harbor." That colleague was Alicia Longwell, the museum's longtime chief curator, whose tenure at the museum overlapped with the new director's.
"She was very kind to sell me her house. It's a house with a provenance, so I'd better make good by that house." Apparently she has, because when Ms. Longwell came to Sag Harbor recently, she stayed with Ms. Ramirez-Montagut.
"Sag Harbor is incredible. There is a year-round community, and there’s The Church and the cinema and all the restaurants. I’m participating in the life of Sag Harbor, which is really exciting. I couldn’t ask for anything better."