Bishop Museum hires new leader from New York

The Bishop Museum is hiring a top museum planning consultant with close ties to Hawaii as its next president and chief executive officer.

The museum is expected to announce today that Melanie Y. Ide, a principal at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the world’s largest museum exhibition design firm, will take the leadership role following a unanimous vote of the board of directors.

Ide, whose parents and grandparents were born and raised in Hawaii, will take over Jan. 8 from Linda Lee Kuuleilani “Cissy” Farm, who served on an interim basis since April 2016 following the resignation of Blair Collis, who left under a cloud of suspicion in connection with credit card spending tied to an improper loan he received from the museum.

While Ide has never led a museum before, she does have more than 27 years’ experience in museum planning, design and program development with the prominent worldwide consulting firm.

Among her lengthy client list: Bishop Museum.

From 2005 to 2014 Ide led a team that helped to restore the museum’s Hawaiian Hall and Pacific Hall galleries during a $24.5 million capital campaign. She also led the first-phase development of a 2016 interpretive master plan that aimed to both streamline and invigorate the museum in the face of falling revenues.

Pauahi Bishop Museum is Hawaii’s largest museum and home to the world’s largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts and natural-history specimens.

In a phone interview, Ide said she is honored to lead a museum she knows well. She said Bishop Museum, with its history and rich heritage, has great potential.

“The resource has been underappreciated for a long time,” she said, “and it’s ripe for transformation.”

Transformation is something Ide knows about. She frequently works with institutions during major fundraising campaigns and periods of significant change, including museums seeking to reinvent themselves or evolve, she said.

Extensive clientele

Ide’s client list has included the Clinton Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the International African American Museum, the Japanese American National Museum, the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Natural History.

Signature projects have included the Fossil Halls, Hall of Biodiversity and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark.; the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in Washington; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

More recently, Ide has been leading the interpretive planning and exhibition design for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Ide, who spoke on the phone from Chicago, where she was attending an Obama Foundation event, said she will continue to be involved in the Obama project’s development.

Asked whether it would detract from her work in Hawaii, she said it will not. In fact, she said, the two projects will have “strong synergy and will be fueled by each other,” with both seeking to inspire people to fully understand their natural and cultural environment and with no shortage of issues to focus on.

Hawaii ties

Ide said that while her parents and grandparents were born and raised on Oahu and Hawaii island, she was born in California and raised in the Bay Area, earning a degree in architecture from UC Berkeley. Ide said her mother was a teacher, and she would spend three months out of every year in Hawaii in her youth.

Ide currently lives in Manhattan near the New York offices of Ralph Appelbaum Associates.

Bishop Museum Board President Anton Krucky said he’s excited to land a leader with Ide’s credentials. He described her as creative, engaging and a nice person. Her connections in the museum community will benefit Bishop Museum greatly, he said, as will her experience away from the islands.

“We share Melanie’s vision for a thriving and relevant Bishop Museum for Hawaii’s next generation and look forward to great things with her leadership,” Krucky said.

Krucky praised Farm for helping to improve the museum’s financial health, strengthening partnerships and restoring community confidence.

Loss of funding

The museum slumped following the 2008 economic downturn and under diminishing federal funding. The end of federal earmark spending, tied largely to the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, reportedly resulted in the loss of a third of the museum’s income, about $3 million a year.

Financial struggles prompted the creation of a strategic plan that aimed to cut costs while seeking to raise the museum’s profile. But Krucky said the plan was scaled down following the instability that resulted after Collis’ April 2016 resignation.

Even so, he said, things are looking up: Membership is on the rise, the planetarium has been updated and there’s a new gift shop. The 2017 fiscal year ended with a $700,000 surplus.

Ide said her vision includes nurturing the museum’s vast pool of knowledge, including its research, collections and scientific and cultural expertise.

“Everything in the museum grows out of that knowledge,” she said.

There’s lots of work to be done, she said, including more care and upkeep of the collections, research, buildings, archives and the entire campus.

Ide said the museum’s reputation shines brighter outside of Hawaii than in.

“It’s not a luxury, but a necessity to have such a specialized institution in the Pacific,” she said.