A parting letter from Jessica May
This September, Deputy Director and Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic Chief Curator Jessica May leaves the PMA after eight remarkable years. In this letter, Jessica reflects on her tenure and bids a fond “until we meet again” to the museum community.
Dear Friend, what you won’t know when you read this (because editors are kind to authors who submit belated manuscripts) is that the editor of our magazine has been waiting patiently for me to send this letter for almost two weeks past deadline. The reason I’ve tried my colleague’s patience is that ever since I got this assignment, I’ve been avoiding my computer as though my life depends on it. Why tarry? Because it’s such a hard letter to write. While it’s easy in the abstract to focus on the as-yet-unknown adventures that are out there waiting for me, it’s much more complicated to say goodbye to the museum and our membership community. This has been my professional home for the past eight years. That said, I’m going to put it out there now: this is less of a goodbye letter than—as they say in the movies—an “until we meet again.” I am eager to follow the extraordinary success of the PMA from the vantage point of a proud alumna, and I am hopeful that in the coming years, my PMA colleagues and I will find new ways to work together on projects that tell all manner of stories about art, including the ways in which photographers face climate change; the history of Black American painters, and particularly the extraordinary legacy of David Driskell— along with who knows what else.
I came to the PMA for an interview, from Texas, in the beginning of February. I remember thinking to myself: these folks must really be testing my resolve. I couldn’t have predicted at the time how much I would come to love the quietest moments of winter, the time of year when all things feel incipient, possible. The days grow lighter, and the hush of falling snow seems to slow time for a few hours. When we drove across the country to start my new job, it was late May, and we arrived to experience the full glory of our first Maine summer. That summer, the museum prepared to open the Winslow Homer Studio to the public, the culmination of a decade of focused work by museum staff and community members, and the realization of a long-held dream to open this very special place in American art to the public.
As we prepared to publicly open the studio, we also began to prepare for the years beyond, which we knew had to be just as riveting, appealing not just to fans of Winslow Homer and historic American art, but to fans of global contemporary art, of European modernism, of Maine’s unique art history, and of African art. We began preparing to overhaul the PMA visitor experience with the Your Museum, Reimagined project, which debuted five years later, in 2017. For that project, we reinstalled each of the museum’s galleries, opened a new changing-exhibition space (where the fantastic exhibition, Stories of Maine: An Incomplete History, currently hangs). We put the PMA collection online, opened an art study room where classes and members of the public could look at works of art pulled from storage; we published a handsome collection catalogue; and overhauled our in-gallery interpretive materials. All of this revitalization gave the museum a fresh look, but it also put a spring in my step. (On more than one occasion, I remember seeing a curator dancing a little in the galleries when an installation clicked into place, the registrars and preparators having achieved—yet again—a bit of magic.)
I think we all fell a little in love with the collection anew. I relished walking through the building at the opening and closing of each day because I could feel the pride of my colleagues practically reverberating off the walls.
Just as had been the case with opening the Winslow Homer Studio, wrapping up Your Museum, Reimagined was the occasion for welcoming a whole new slate of ideas and challenges; the opportunity to push forward and embrace the new. As that project began to wrap, we continued to build out what I believe is an astonishing exhibition program, with exhibitions like A New American Sculpture 1914-1945: Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman, and Zorach (2017), In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969 (2019), and Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times (2020) taking center stage and garnering national acclaim. A great deal of the joy of my job, in these past years, has been watching our staff exceed their own expectations, and then experience (often vicariously) the approval of audiences and critics. But other pleasures were more subtle: over the past five years we have given our beloved Charles Shipman Payson Building much needed attention, working to secure a masterpiece of modern architecture into the future. We opened the David E. Shaw and Family Sculpture Park, bringing in a series of extraordinary sculptures and creating a free public garden space at the center of our amazing city of Portland. And, not least, we began to put the pieces in place for an exciting new future for our community and our campus with the launch of the Susie Konkel Pass, which makes the museum free to all visitors 21 and under, and with Art for All, which provides funding support for exhibitions and programs that help promote diversity and inclusivity. These two programs, as much as anything we have or will do at the PMA for a generation, will pay forward the promise of an art museum that genuinely serves its community—its whole community. As they say on the billboards: “watch this space.” The future—although confusing in this moment of pandemic haze and cultural upheaval—looks bright.
As for me, my future looks bright, too. The museum will grow and change in the coming years, I’m going to do the same. I look forward to keeping in touch with this community and this beautiful, wonderful museum.
