Stephan Jost

Stephan Jost has been director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts since only May but already he has helped plan and implement major changes at the nonprofit institution, which was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke and now encompasses a wide range of collections, programs and facilities.

Foremost has been overseeing the merger of the Academy with The Contemporary Museum, and launching a new marketing program that renames the expanded organization the Honolulu Museum of Art, come March 2012. Jost wants people to understand that the Academy is more than just a place that displays art. It also features the Doris Duke Theatre, the Robert Allerton Art Research Library, the Academy Art Center at Linekona, the Luce Pavilion Complex, two cafes and a retail shop. The Academy also organizes tours to Shangri-La, the former home of heiress Doris Duke owned by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

Jost came to the Academy from Vermont’s Shelburne Museum, where he had been the director for five years. Before that he was director of the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, Calif., and worked for other museums and art-related ventures as well.

Born in Michigan and raised there by his Swiss immigrant parents, Jost has a bachelor’s degree in art history from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass and a master’s degree in art history from  the University of Texas at Austin.

A resident of Kahala with his partner, Dr. William Scott, and their newly adopted daughter, 11-month-old Monique, Jost acknowleged that Hawaii is quite different from Vermont.

"The biggest city in Vermont is 40,000 people, and Vermont is about 98.5 percent white," he noted. "On the other hand, there’s actually some odd similarities. They both have very strong local cultures, and they’re both places where people want to be."

Is he happy to have gotten away from Vermont’s freezing winters?

"Oh, yeah," he said, laughing. "But I’m still trying to reconcile palm trees and Santa Claus. It’s not quite working yet."

QUESTION: How did you get this job as director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts? Did you respond to an ad?

ANSWER: They advertised nationally, but it was really a couple of search firms.

Q: Why were you ready to leave Vermont?

A: On the one hand I wasn’t. I was having a great time there. We were doing a campaign and we had raised 90 percent of the money, so I felt I could leave before we went public or when the project was completed. It’s a construction project, another building.

Q: When you say public, what do you mean?

A: That we had raised 90 percent of the money from board sources or close friends, but we hadn’t announced what we were doing to the broad public. When you do a campaign for a museum, you kind of quietly raise a substantial amount of money before you talk about it.

Q: How come you have to do it quietly?

A: Because many campaigns aren’t successful. (Laughter)

Q: If that’s the case, what do you do with the money you’ve already raised?

A: That’s a whole ‘nother issue.

Q: You can’t give it back? You use it for something else?

A: Yeah, that’s tricky. You could give it back, if the people who gave it to you want it back. But it was a moment — basically a three-month window — where I could go, or I needed to be there for the next several years.

And the Honolulu Academy of Arts is a really interesting position. I mean, you got the merging of two museums, which is something very few people get the chance to do. The collections are great. The location’s great. There was a lot of desire on the board to change. I think it’s tricky to be a museum director if the board is against change, and I just saw here it was a really great group of smart people who are like, OK, we have to adapt.

Q: How big is the board?

A: The board is 44 people. There’s 10 new board members from The Contemporary Museum. And it’s a full range of people. It’s really diverse. The Twigg-Smiths are involved, the Cookes and the Johnsons are involved, but then there’s just an amazing range. Jay Shidler’s on the board. Linda Ahlers, who is president of Marshall Field’s. …

Q: Have you met with them as a whole?

A: Oh yeah. Every month we meet for formal meetings. And then we have sub groups.

Q: All 44 people?

A: We do, and there’s great turnout. We have an emeritus board member in Tokyo, too. And people calling in from the Bay Area, and Seattle, as well. It’s a big board. A very good board, though.

Q: What is expected of you as the director?

A: Well, from my perspective, it’s the world’s most wonderful job. You obviously have to keep the curatorial, the exhibitions, on track, to make sure that they’re resonating with the public. But I’m also running two restaurants, a shop, technology, social events, Family Sundays, huge education programs — we’re the largest provider of children’s education for art, so arts education is a gigantic part of what we do — there’s an art school. So I love it because it’s very diverse. And of course there’s the Doris Duke Theatre.

Q: Are you managing the staff?

A: Basically, at the end of the day, I’m the guy between the board and the staff that’s serving the public. My job is to make sure there’s great people in the key positions and we’re serving our public and our mission.

Q: How big is the museum?

A: There’s about 150 staff members. Over $10 million budget. We’re two museums — one in Makiki Heights, one here (on South Beretania Street) — plus a space at First Hawaiian Center, a space at Chanel in Waikiki, plus the public programming for Shangri-La, the tours, plus an art school, plus a 280-seat theater. (Laughter) It starts to get pretty sprawling.

Q: What are its sources of funding?

A: We have an endowment, we have incredibly generous donors, and some earned revenue.

Q: What is the earned revenue?

A: The shop, the cafes.

Q: Do you take any government money?

A: We get, occasionally, grants. They’re competitive grants. But we don’t get a stipend from the state or anything like that.

Q: You said in January after you’d been hired — you didn’t start your job until May — that you would try to expand interest in the museum by listening to the community, which at the time you admitted you didn’t know that much about.

A: (Laughter) Now I know that I really didn’t know much about the community.

Q: What have you discovered since then?

A: First of all, that the number of people who love this institution is humbling. It’s amazing. And how we are part of people’s lives for their whole lives.

So, the number of 85-year-olds who are saying, "You know, when I was 15, I was there." You’re like, "Wow," right? And then you see the number of kids who are going through Linekona, the art school, now.

So we’re relevant to people at a whole bunch of stages in their lives.Which is really kind of amazing.

And, what I also love is that we are many things to many different people. So there are people, like, "Oh, you have the best Japanese art collection," and others will say, "Oh, you have the best Hawaiian art collection." Everybody sees it based on their interests and their experience.

Q: Has that given you a fix yet on how you’re going to market the product?

A: Yeah. I think that the marketing question, which links to that branding question of the name change, is key. What I felt and saw when I came here is essentially a rather large organization that had a whole bunch of different brands going on. The Contemporary Museum, it’s called The Contemporary Museum, it’s called Spalding House, its called Makiki Heights, it’s called TCM, right? Linekona, the art center and the art school are all in the same place. The Doris Duke Theatre, the Academy Theater — all the same place. And so we have a lot of different brands that don’t indicate that we’re one organization. And, the names don’t actually tell you what we are.

When I took the job, everybody in Vermont was going, like, "Why you taking over an art school?" Everybody here on Oahu knows what the Academy is. The problem is, visitors have no idea, no clue.

Q: OK, so you decided to change it to …

A: Honolulu Museum of Art. That was the original name. (Laughter)

Q: But it is an academy of arts. I mean, hasn’t it been teaching art classes for decades?

A: Sure, it is also an art school. But, again, the marketing, here on Oahu in particular, is about reaching out to the visitor to the island. Hotels aren’t selling rooms to local people. They’re selling it to visitors. And what we need to do is make sure that we engage the visitors to Oahu. And there’s clear evidence that more and more tourism is not just on a beach, but it’s also culture. You know, Miami Beach and Miami are building huge new museums. Our collection is much bigger, much better, much higher quality. But they’re like, "Miami Museum of Art, great, let’s do it," you know? Because they realize that people are not just hanging out at the beach having mai tais.

Q: Calling it a museum doesn’t sound a bit stuffy to you?

A: It all depends on your experience with museums. There’s a lot of evidence that essentially the under-45 crowd has very positive associations with museums.

But if you think about the stuffy question, have you been to "Art After Dark" here? There’s nothing stuffy about it.

Q: (Laughter) Yeah, but is it called a museum? I haven’t been to one of those "Art After Dark" things, no, but I love the Academy. It’s great, and it’s got all this variety.

A: We do great work. And one of the things is people do not associate all the things we do with us.

Q: You’re trying to pull it all together, then.

A: We constantly present ourselves as a smaller institution than we actually are. Of course, I know that every local person will always call this the Academy, right? That’s OK. I mean, they still call Macy’s Liberty House. (Laughter).

Q: How is the merger with The Contemporary Museum coming along?

A: Actually really positive. The good news was the merger was negotiated when there was no director here, and that means that the board really owns, and is very invested, in the success of the merger.

Q: What facilities and art collections came with that merger?

A: It’s roughly 3,000 works of art, all post-1945, mostly contemporary; a gorgeous facility in Makiki Heights; a very capable staff; a fantastic assistant director now, who used to be the director there, Allison Wong.

Q: Has the merger affected the staffing level?

A: No, not yet. We have done some changes. One guy took another job, so that allowed there to be an opening, and basically what I’m doing is taking administrative positions and filling them with educators, because, you know, the education program I want to make sure is really ramped up.

Q: Looking at the short-term, what can we expect?

A: There will be some superficial changes, like, you know, the signage will change, like that. That’s relatively straight-forward.

What you’ll also start to see is a series of exhibitions that I hope are going to be pretty darn relevant.

This summer, for example, we’ll have an exhibition called "Tattoo Honolulu" … because when I came here I saw these men and women who are tattoo artists doing really world-class work. So, hey, let’s show their work.

Simultaneously we’ll do a Hiroshige show, which is a Japanese print show. It’ll be our kind of show. We’ve got one of the largest collections of Japanese woodblock prints in the world.

Q: In these tough times, how is the fundraising going?

A: Our fundraising is pretty good. We still run a deficit, but I think people invest in organizations that are mission-focused. As long as we are reaching out to the public — and reaching out to new publics — and as long as we’re doing our educational mission great, and doing exhibitions people want to see, we’ll be OK.

Q: How do you continue, though, in the short run when you’re running a deficit?

A: Well, I’m pretty fiscally conservative, so we need to make sure that we’re most efficient as possible.

Q: But how do you cover the shortfall?

A: We have endowments.

Q: So you draw on your endowments?

A: Greater than we want to, which isn’t good. But my plan is to have a structurally balanced budget in three years. We’re going to chip it down. We’re going to get there, and be very realistic and pretty upfront about it. I mean, we’ve already posted our finances online. Let’s just tell everybody where we’re at. We’re a nonprofit. It’s all legally available information, so you may as well tell people now.

Correction: An earlier version of this story implied that Shangri La is owned by the Honolulu Academy of Arts. It is owned and operated by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. The museum manages the tour program for Shangri La. Also, Jost earned his bachelor’s degree at Hampshire College and got his master’s degree in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. The earlier version of the story had the institutions reversed.