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Keeping Up with SAM Director Mimi Gardner Gates
by Eileen Nicol

What has rare art, lots of public space, a cutting-edge restaurant, and full-sized cars suspended from the ceiling? Why, the newly re-opened downtown Seattle Art Museum, of course. But didn’t SAM just open the Sculpture Park in January of this year? And doesn’t it also run a world-class Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill? The answer is yes to both of those questions, and if life at SAM is beginning to sound like a three-ring circus, you might be surprised at the urbane, petite woman taming the lions.

Meet Seattle Art Museum Director Mimi Gardner Gates. Her enthusiasm for what she terms SAM’s “transformation” is infectious. “I see the Seattle Art Museum very much as a community resource,” she says, seated at her desk in an office tucked away in the downtown SAM. “It’s not just about the aesthetics of art, it’s how can we be meaningful in people’s lives.” With entrances on three streets, and expanded public space on the ground floor, SAM has realized the vision Ms. Gates shares with the board and staff of “opening up” the downtown museum. It’s a vision she brought to Seattle in 1994. “I did feel passionately about taking art out into the community and giving the community ownership of the museum.”

Wearing a charcoal gray crepe jacket over a salmon-colored blouse set off by a necklace of carved beads, Mimi Gardner Gates exudes a friendly, down-to-earth confidence. For relaxation she fly fishes, and it’s easy to imagine her in jeans and hip boots, casting a line into a swift flowing river. “You have to clear your head and just concentrate on that furry little thing on the end of the line.” It’s a far cry from the demands of her director position, which she likens to conducting a symphony. “I was amongst the people who had to be convinced that we could really do it all,” she says, speaking of the major capital projects of keeping Volunteer Park open, creating Olympic Sculpture Park, and renovating the downtown museum all at the same time. These things required what she calls a Herculean effort, and while she is quick to give credit to others, she nonetheless takes credit for assembling and inspiring the team.

Mimi Gardner grew up in Dayton, Ohio, but when her father merged his paperboard business with Diamond International, the family moved to the East Coast and enrolled Mimi in a private girl’s school. “I liked my public high school in Dayton better,” she remarks. She set her sights on Stanford, and became intrigued by Asian culture after a student exchange trip to Japan. She also began to study Chinese, despite a certain professor’s doubt that “a little girl like you” could learn it. “I was really mad,” she says, “and the first month I wanted so badly to quit, but I wasn’t going to have him sign my form, so I stuck it out. I think that certainly was one instance that taught me the value of perseverance.”

Stanford also provided her first museum experience: cataloguing Leland Stanford’s toy collection. After earning her B.A. in Chinese Art History, she moved with her new husband around the world, completing additional academic degrees in Paris and at the University of Iowa. “Then it was my turn to pick where we were going to live, and I wanted to come to the West Coast, but he had books being published on the East Coast, so we ended up at Yale,” she explains. There Mimi completed her Ph.D. and hired on at the Yale Art Museum, first as a curator of Asian Art, and ultimately as director. She remembers the dean of the graduate school pulling her aside, concerned that the demands of school and work would cause a nervous breakdown. “What she didn’t know was that I was pregnant!” laughs Mimi. Her son is now a Portland-based punk/rock/folk musician, and his undergraduate years at Evergreen in Olympia solidified Mimi’s growing esteem for the Northwest.

In the early 1990s Mimi heard about the opening for a new director at SAM. She was single again, and ready for a new adventure. “I just had a feeling in my gut that this was the right move for me. And I’ve never regretted it.” This feeling was confirmed when, shortly after she arrived, she met Bill Gates Sr., who had lost his first wife to cancer. “We just hit it off,” says Mimi. “For me it was totally unexpected.” They lived together a year before getting married. “He told his children he was getting back at them because they’d done that to him!” she says, illustrating the sense of humor she treasures in her husband of 11 years.

If your idea of museums is that they are stuffy and subdued, Mimi wants SAM to broaden that image. “I do believe that if you don’t try things, and if you’re not adventuresome, then you lose a lot of fun that’s in life,” she says. She envisions programs that engage children and teens as well as adults, and wants parents of young children to feel welcome in a place where “they’re not going to have to spend the entire time saying ‘don’t do this and don’t do that and be quiet.’” She’s particularly excited about the cars: nine of them, skewered with flashing light tubes, suspended from the ceiling in the new space between Union and University streets. “This is a new SAM,” she says with a smile. “This is a different SAM. Come to any one of our three venues and you’ll be surprised.”

Eileen Nicol is a freelance writer and lives on Bainbridge Island.

©2007 Caliope Publishing Company