After nearly nine years at the San José Museum of Art, Executive Director Sayre Batton has announced she will step down at the end of May. The museum will conduct a national search for her replacement.
Batton joined the SJMA in 2015 as the deputy director for curatorial affairs. Two years later, after serving as interim executive director, Batton assumed the top role permanently.
“I was really brought in as a change agent to help build the curatorial team,” Batton says, noting that her very first hire was Lauren Schell Dickens, now the museum’s senior curator. Under her leadership, the SJMA has presented over 50 exhibitions, including the 2017 show Diana Al-Hadid: Liquid City, featuring one of the artist’s delicate yet monumental sculptures, which Batton says set the stage for the type of ambitious programming she wanted to bring to the museum.
“I was told that a lot of people won’t come down to San José to see exhibitions,” Batton says. “And when we brought Diana, we got fantastic attendance from people locally, but also people in the art world, in the wider Bay Area, and California and beyond.”
While the museum established itself as a venue for world-class exhibitions, it never neglected its closer-to-home audiences and community members. The SJMA maintains partnerships with South Bay institutions like San Jose Jazz, MACLA and Mosaic America, as well as with the city of San José itself.
Tuesday’s announcement acknowledges Batton’s role in “refocusing” the museum’s commitment to acquisitions. “We wrote it into the collection plan that we would always try to acquire something in from a major exhibition project wherever we could,” Batton explains.
On March 7, the results of that plan will go on public display. The SJMA will open Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection in its renovated main galleries, marking the first time the 55-year-old institution has created a dedicated space to showcase these works.
The show will include pieces that have been in the collection for some time, including Hung Liu’s Resident Alien and Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral, alongside more recent acquisitions — artworks by Tishan Hsu, Yolanda López and Sarah Sze.
Making the museum’s collection more publicly accessible is seemingly more exciting to Batton than even her own next professional chapter. “That’s what I’ve been hoping that the real story is about,” she says.
“With this inaugural exhibition, many of the aspirations I’ve held with the curatorial team for the museum have come to fruition,” she states in today’s press release. “While the decision to step away was not easy, I am proud to be leaving on a high note, with great pride in what we have accomplished together.”
The next executive director will face the same hurdles Batton says all museums are facing right now: finding the financial support for arts and culture. “It’s a nationwide challenge,” she notes.
Prior to the SJMA, Batton worked at both Dia: Beacon and for the Dia Art Foundation, and served as the project director for “Modern Views,” which invited artists, architects and designers to respond to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Batton leaves the SJMA without a fixed institutional destination, but will instead “manage independent projects,” according to today’s announcement.
“I have a number of things that I’ve wanted to carve out the time for,” she says. Among them is a book project about art pilgrimages.