Margaret O’Reilly has known since she was a little girl, fresh from Dublin, Ireland, one unassailable fact: Museums are cool.
Now, 28 years into her career, all of which have been spent working at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, the Lawrenceville resident is still that same little girl when it comes to museums.
She loves them. When she goes on vacations, she fills up her days visiting them. When she sees the lights go on for the kids and parents and groups who visit the State Museum, it reminds her of finding her one true love, back when she and her newly immigrated parents roamed the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
And to think, the woman who was in April named executive director of the State Museum never gave museums a thought when it came to her career path.
Originally, O’Reilly wanted to be a lawyer. “Various reasons” changed her mind, and she thought teaching would be a good gig. Why not, right? She loves education, loves learning. Seemed like a natural fit.
But as it turned out, O’Reilly had a knack for painting, and one of her teachers told her she should follow that path instead of education. Enthralled with art but intensely practical, it didn’t take long for O’Reilly to reason that she probably wouldn’t make much of a living as a painter.
“I went into graphic design,” she says. She had earned her bachelor’s degree in art at Kean University and started at the State Museum doing graphic designs for brochures and announcements and such, and was perfectly happy to stay there.
But, as it turned out, O’Reilly had a knack for museuming, and one of her coworkers mentored her about what being a curator was like. “All that time he was teaching me, and I didn’t realize it,” she says.
By 1997, O’Reilly was running the museum’s art department when she was offered a promotion as an assistant curator of fine arts and exhibitions. She’d already completed her master’s in art (also from Kean) and had plans to leave the museum for a job as a graphic designer in New York City. Her wise mentor told to consider keeping her job in Trenton until she found that New York deal, and O’Reilly kept her mind open.
Sone 19 years later, after serving as the curator of fine art and twice, in 2006 and 2008, serving as interim executive director, O’Reilly is glad she listened and more glad that she stayed.
Now that she’s officially in charge, she is contemplating whether the museum will be heading in any new directions. But don’t expect big changes. “We’re pretty well set in our mission,” she says. “We know who we are.”
The museum’s mission is fairly straightforward. It bills itself as “a center of cultural, educational, and scientific engagement [that] inspires innovation and lifelong learning through collections, research, exhibitions, and programs in science, history, and art.”
O’Reilly sees no reason to monkey with that. What she does like about being the boss is that now the staff knows who’s fully in charge. She took over for Anthony Gardner, who left after four years to head the Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum in March and assumed the interim role as the State Museum’s executive director for the third time, clearly not guaranteed to land the position full-time.
But now that she’s in charge, she says, the feeling around the museum is a pretty good vibe. She already knows everyone and is obviously not keen on leaving. She’s worked in a key department and knows the museum upside down and backwards.
Even the state house agrees. “I have the greatest confidence in Margaret’s ability to lead the organization and its quality team of dedicated employees,” says Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno. “Margaret’s exemplary record and experience make her the perfect choice to take on this important leadership role.”
But leadership of one of the state’s most important cultural centers is more than just being a good figurehead for staff. There’s that old issue of funding that nonprofit cultural institutions need to contend with. On the plus side, as the executive director, she’s not considered a state employee anymore, which means she can raise funds.
But that, of course, is not simply a matter of calling people and begging for cash. It’s about building relationships with members and corporate partners, and showing them exactly what the value of the museum is.
For the record, its main value as O’Reilly sees it is education and enlightenment; a vehicle by which to open people to new ideas and experiences, and through which to connect with the community it serves. That’s an admittedly tall task, considering the State Museum sees New Jersey and not just Trenton as its community. Exhibits must feature some connection to New Jersey, whether it’s an archaic farming tool used or developed here, a significant historical figure who was born here, or a dinosaur that called New Jersey home a few years or so before people first dipped their tootsies in the Delaware River.
But reaching people does take money. Luckily, O’Reilly says, there have been some incredible corporate sponsorships that have opened many an eye and ear. The PNC Foundation in particular, she says, has been very generous over its longstanding partnership with the museum.
PNC Bank, in fact, gave the museum $11 million last October to launch the “Trenton Makes Words” project, a two-year program for pre-kindergarten children and their families in the city to build vocabulary and enrich word usage.
Not-so-fun fact: children who don’t have good educational opportunities and who live in poorer urban districts like Trenton, O’Reilly says, will on average know 30 million fewer words than kids who attend schools in districts like Lawrence or West Windsor.
“Now, you’d think reading is not a museum project,” she says, “but it is. “We happen to be an educational institution, first and foremost. We’re introducing kids to words they wouldn’t hear otherwise.”
And if you think these kid are missing out on just the big, $10 words, think again.
“It’s general vocabulary building,” O’Reilly says. For instance, May’s theme “was animals, science and nature, so words might include things like ‘habitat,’ ‘camouflage,’ and ‘metamorphosis.’”
The museum’s competition—for money, for the attention of the community and for visitors—is, unsurprisingly, daunting.
“We’re competing against everything else that wants money,” she says. That means other museums—though she says the field is startlingly generous and not cutthroat at all—as well as the movies, amusement parks, libraries, baseball games, you name it.
But the ace O’Reilly’s holds is that the State Museum is closely tied to the City of Trenton as a cultural landmark. And as such, it is often the first cultural outlet many residents ever see.
“It’s wonderful to see the new faces come in, who maybe though the museum was not for them,” she says. “It’s pretty life-affirming.”
Despite her occasional cynicism about life, O’Reilly still gets a charge out of seeing kids and adults running up to exhibits and reading the plaques and listening to the voiceovers. And here’s what’s especially gratifying: this is all happening in the age of smartphone addiction.
Curiously, though, one of the museum’s most stalwart competitors is the internet, which has had the opposite effect on how visitors experience the museum than was expected. When the internet first took off, she says, there was a general belief that everyone would just look at pictures on the computer and never feel the need to go to the museum itself.
“Quite the opposite happened,” she says. The internet, it turns out, is most people’s first look into the museum. It gets them interested, and it lures them in because of one very compelling reason: “There’s nothing like coming in and seeing the real thing. You get to see a real dinosaur. You get to see the actual paintings and see the brushstrokes up close.”
But, she adds, “if they’re only visiting us online, that’s OK. We’re still reaching them.”
Educational institution first and foremost, remember? It’s all about getting into people’s heads.
And something else to help you feel better about the future—the kids who saw the museum’s recent exhibit on farming in New Jersey were just as enthralled as they were to see the collection of simple farming tools throughout the years as they were see the dinosaur bones.
“We didn’t overcomplicate it,” O’Reilly says of the exhibit. “We just kept it straightforward. It was a simple exhibit that was thoughtful, engaging, and it was fun.”
If you caught it, the important word in what O’Reilly just said is “overcomplicate.” There is a tendency these days, she says, to want to pander to what we as adults think kids think like. In other words, we want to dress everything up in fancy bells and whistles because we don’t think kids will be interested in anything unless it makes noise or goes 1,000 miles an hour.
Not true, she says. Kids are curious and interested and a metric ton more insightful and thoughtful that we (as adults) want to think they are. Kids took to the farming exhibit the same way they took to one in which they learned about portraits and then were asked to draw their own, asking themselves, how would they represent different aspects of themselves through a visual message.
It’s a fittingly rich tapestry for an art major who after all these years in the field still loves seeing people give into their inner fascinated child. And she still loves learning new things for herself, the same way she did when she first saw the big whale hanging from the ceiling in New York when she was a girl.
“We’re kids,” she says of herself and her fellow museumfolk. “We just want to know about stuff.”
,
