In September, Olivia Miller returned to Eugene to start her new position as the executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. She earned a master’s degree in art history from UO in 2009 and most recently served as the director of the University of Arizona’s Museum of Art in Tucson.
Miller curated two exhibits at UA’s art museum that featured works selected from Schnitzer’s vast art collection, including "The Art of Food," which traveled to Portland State University in 2022 and other locations around the nation.
Miller joins us to share her experience so far leading the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at UO, as well as her priorities and future plans for it, which may include offering a class on art theft. It’s a subject Miller has some experience with after successfully leading the return and restoration of a painting by abstract artist Willem de Kooning that was stolen from University of Arizona’s art museum four decades ago.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Olivia Miller received a master’s degree in Art History at the University of Oregon in 2009. She interned at the university’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art while she was in grad school. Now she is back as the executive director of the museum. She joins me now. Congratulations, and welcome to Think Out Loud.
Olivia Miller: Thank you so much for having me.
D. Miller: So when you were a collections intern at the museum 17 or so years ago, did you ever imagine you’d come back and run the place?
O. Miller: No, not at all. I feel very lucky. That experience was definitely one that helped direct my career goals. At the time when I was pursuing a master’s, I thought I would go on to earn a PhD, hopefully become an art history professor. I really enjoyed teaching. But once I worked at the museum, that was actually the moment where I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in museums. So although I saw myself in a museum role, I don’t think I ever could have imagined I would be back at that same museum in the executive director position.
D. Miller: What was it about that internship, that time you spent at the museum, that made you realize you actually want to have a career – it’s still in an academic environment because you, you’ve made a career in museums attached to universities: the University of Arizona for a while and now back at U of O – but different from sort of pure academia? What did you like about museums?
O. Miller: It’s the objects, it’s the tangibility of art, even though you’re there and you’re not really supposed to touch the art. Obviously, when I was in collections, it does involve some gloved handling of artworks. But growing up, I had an interest in archaeology. I was always collecting things. I did go on archaeological digs during undergrad. So I think it was that element of discovery and being around real objects that really interested me.
D. Miller: What does a collections intern do?
O. Miller: Various things. It’s all behind the scenes, at least my experience was. A lot of it was spent actually in the vault helping to catalog new collections. So when a collection of artwork comes in it gets assigned a number. There’s measurements, photography and various elements of information that have to be gathered. And then it’s definitely a lot of computer database entering as well.
D. Miller: Why did you want this job? You ran the museum at the University of Arizona for a while and then this job opened up. Why did you put your hat in the ring?
O. Miller: That’s a great question, because I actually was not actively looking for a job. I had heard that John Weber was going to retire and it piqued my interest. I thought that would be an interesting job change if I were to have one. But we were very much rooted in Tucson, I have a lot of family there. At the same time, I had been at the University of Arizona Museum of Art for 13 years and I was feeling like I had kind of reached my potential. And just personally, I was at a place in my life where I felt like I might be willing to move on.
But it was actually my former academic advisor Andy Schulz … He was my advisor at the University of Oregon [and] ended up becoming my boss at the University of Arizona – small world – but he encouraged me to apply. He said, “I really think you should just go for it.” And I’m glad he pushed me over the line to do it.
D. Miller: What are the first … is it three months now?
O. Miller: Four months.
D. Miller: Four months, sorry to cheat you out of one month. What have they been like?
O. Miller: Oh, they’ve been a whirlwind, but really, really wonderful. I’ve spent these few months really meeting a lot of people, trying to observe as many programs as I can. I’ve been meeting one on one with all of the staff and just really trying to collect information.
D. Miller: In Tucson and now in Eugene, you’re at a museum attached to a university. How do you think about the balance between serving the community of students and scholars, who are the heart of the university, and then the general public?
O. Miller: Yeah, it’s always a balance. I think museums already run the risk of wanting to be everything to everybody. Museum employees tend to feel very strongly about the mission, they want to share as much as possible with as many people as possible. But in reality, you can only do what you can do with the resources you have. So we know first and foremost that our core audience is the university, and we’re there to support the mission of the university, which in turn supports the faculty and students. At the same time, we’re the largest museum in the region in Southern Oregon. So I do feel a responsibility to serve the larger community. And thankfully, I think there’s enough variety in what we do where we can be a lot of things and we can serve as that sort of bridge to the university from the community.
D. Miller: What do you think all Oregonians should know about the collection itself, the Jordan Schnitzer collection?
O. Miller: I want everyone to know this is a world-class museum, this is a world-class collection. It’s a large collection; it’s about 18,000 works of art. It started as an Asian art museum, so we have a very strong collection of Japanese, Chinese and Korean art. At the same time, we have a constant rotation of these incredible works on loan that are mostly modern and contemporary artworks. So there’s always something new to see. But we also have a wonderful collection of metalwork and decorative arts, and really there’s something for everybody.
D. Miller: What percentage of the total collection is on public display at any given time?
O. Miller: It’s a very small amount. I would say with a collection of this size, probably somewhere between 2% and 4%.
D. Miller: Is that pretty standard for a medium-sized museum?
O. Miller: It is, in part, because a lot of our collection includes textiles and works on paper, and those are incredibly fragile works where you actually can’t have them on permanent display, or even a long-term display. So we’re constantly rotating through the collection. A lot of the works that aren’t on view also come out regularly for class visits, so we’re always pulling artworks out of the vault every week for class visits. The collection gets used a lot, even if you’re not seeing it on view all the time.
D. Miller: It’s a different way for me to think about a museum. As a member of the public, I’m just seeing the tip of the iceberg about of what the museum collection encompasses.
O. Miller: Yes, but you can go to our website and most of the collection is online, so you can definitely get an idea of what’s there.
D. Miller: You worked at the University of Arizona Museum of Art for one of the more dramatic episodes in the museum’s history. It has to do with a stolen painting. Can you first tell us about the painting that was stolen?
O. Miller: Yes, the painting was by Willem de Kooning, called “Woman-Ochre.” He finished the painting in 1955. It had been donated to the museum in 1958. It was part of a larger collection of artwork that was given as a memorial to the donor’s only child, who had passed away. So it had been in the collection since 1958 and it was stolen from the museum in 1985. And for almost 32 years, it was unknown. And then it was recovered in 2017.
D. Miller: How was it recovered?
O. Miller: So in 2015, we held a 30th anniversary commemorative event to try to publicize the theft and get it out there on people’s radar, to let people know that this painting had been stolen and we still wanted it back.
D. Miller: Had it been pretty quiet before then?
O. Miller: It had. When it was first stolen, there was definitely a lot of local press. But it happened in 1985, so it was sort of pre-internet. I had done my undergrad at the University of Arizona and I had no idea that this had happened. So we knew that we needed to get more information out there. We held an event about art crime and we invited an agent from the FBI art crime team to come out and talk about the art crime team. And then we retold the story of the theft, we hung up the empty frame on the wall, and we invited press to come and cover it. And thankfully, they did, and that directly led to the recovery.
D. Miller: In what way?
O. Miller: Well, in 2017, these men who owned a shop in Silver City, New Mexico went to an estate to buy the estate and they ended up finding the painting hanging in the bedroom of this couple’s home. And when they brought it back to their store, all of these customers kept coming in and saying, “I think that’s a real De Kooning, you really need to look that up.” So they did, and that’s how they kind of tracked down that it had been stolen.
D. Miller: Was the FBI able to piece together anything about the crime, or is it still officially unsolved?
O. Miller: Well, I don’t know if they officially closed the case. They do their jobs and they don’t tell us anything. All of the circumstantial evidence points to it, and actually even just this last year, it’s been confirmed that there were two more stolen works of art in that couple’s home that had been stolen from the Harwood Art Museum in Taos.
D. Miller: That’s maybe two too many stolen paintings for it to be a coincidence. [Laughter]
What was it like to get that call? You were at the museum, right? You were working there when the call came in: “Hey, I have your painting.”
O. Miller: Yes, and that’s kind of how it happened. I feel very lucky, I was just in the right place at the right time. But I was sitting in my office talking to my coworker and I could hear the security guards talking on the radios. They were saying, “Oh, we have someone on the line who says he has our stolen painting.” And Jim, who was our security guard, said, “Oh, forward the call to Olivia.” So I just sat there waiting for this call to come through. And it was David Van Auker. He said, “This is gonna sound crazy, but I have your stolen painting.”
D. Miller: And then a major restoration effort followed, because it had been cut, damaged and varnished, or whatever else.
O. Miller: Exactly.
D. Miller: You’ve said that you’re interested in teaching a course about art theft. Why?
O. Miller: Well, obviously I’m personally affected by it. That’s just an experience that I’m never going to fully get over, and thankfully ours had a really happy ending. I think it’s interesting. As sad as it is, we found a lot of new audience because of this theft. People are entranced by art crime. And even if they don’t have an affinity for museums, people can still get lured in by something like that. So on the one hand, it’s a way to connect with people and to introduce museums to them. On the other hand, I’m not sure if people understand just how vast, varied and complex the world of art crime actually is, when we start to think about the effects of war and archaeological looting, copyright issues. There’s so much, it’s such a rich topic.
D. Miller: What are some of the exhibitions that are either already planned or that are still in the works that you’re excited about right now?
O. Miller: Yes, we have a great show that just opened up, it’s called “Love, Desire and Sorrow” from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation. So this is a show that features contemporary artists, and focuses on the concept of home and what it means to feel at home, whether that’s with people, a place or objects. And it just includes some really incredible works. We have the artist vanessa german, who’s featured in the show. She’ll be coming out to give a talk on the 31st.
The other big exhibition we have coming up is called “Gateway to Himalayan Art” and that’s a major exhibition organized by the Rubin Museum in New York. So that will be traveling to our museum. That’s gonna be a major exhibition and introduce people to not just the iconography or the symbols of Himalayan art, but also the actual technical process of making some of these artworks. So, I’m excited.
D. Miller: When you go to a museum anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, what are you looking at in addition to the art?
O. Miller: Honestly, a lot of what I look at is the things that probably nobody else sees. So I do pay attention to lighting. I’m interested in how other museums do their labels and interpretation. I think a lot about visitor experience and how we can learn from other museums. So in some ways, working in a museum has kind of ruined it for me, because I’m constantly thinking about my own museum, what we can do and how we can learn from other museums. And sometimes I’m less focused on the art. [Laughs]
D. Miller: How do you feel about labels? I’ve heard two competing philosophies about this. On the one hand, they provide important context for those of us who don’t really know much about the artist, or the art, or the time period, or when it was made. On the other hand, I’ve heard people say if there were no label, people can just take that piece of art in their own way, in a more pure way. How do you think about this?
O. Miller: I also have mixed feelings about it. When I was a curator, I took different approaches to each exhibition. So there were some exhibitions where I left the labels off the wall and they were in a handbook where people, if they wanted to learn more information, had the choice to do that. There’s been other exhibitions I’ve done that have been very text-heavy because of the nature of the show. So I think it’s a balance.
I think for the most part though, I want our visitors to have the tools to be able to pose the questions that they want to ask, especially when we’re thinking about a college campus and college freshmen. This might be the first museum they’ve ever been in. We have to give them the tools to understand how to move through a museum and think about art. And I think oftentimes that does involve a label.
D. Miller: Olivia Miller, thanks very much.
O. Miller: Thank you.
D. Miller: Olivia Miller is the new executive director of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon.
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