In her previous museum job, Katie Anderson’s collection included the piano John Lennon played while composing “Imagine.”
Now Anderson will get to imagine ways to explore local history as executive director of the Clark County Historical Museum. She has been hired to replace Susan Tissot, who headed the museum for 10½ years before leaving in May for a job in California.
Anderson will start July 28. Her most recent post was at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, where Anderson was the head of collections for five years.
“When a new director came in, the position was eliminated,” she said.
Prior to that, Anderson was executive director of The Bead Museum in Glendale, Ariz.
The two Arizona museums had specific niches, but Anderson also has a background for her new job.
“This is not my first historical museum,” said Anderson, who was executive director of the Rome (Georgia) Area History Museum from 2002 to 2006.
While Anderson is coming to Clark County from a world-class museum, she shouldn’t be out of place here, said Bob Stepsis. He is president of the Clark County Historical Society, which operates the museum at 1511 Main St.
“She had worked in a high-level museum, but her personality struck us as someone who will be a good fit for our community,” Stepsis said. In addition to academic credentials and job experience, “We were trying find somebody who would respect this community.”
At the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Anderson was part of a $250 million start-up founded by former Target CEO Robert Ulrich. She was on the job for more than a year before the place opened.
“She was there when everything had to be figured out,” said Manuel Jordán, the Musical Instrument Museum’s deputy director and chief curator. “It was an immense task. We had to process thousands of objects, store them, develop the record-keeping. It all went across her desk.”
That collection of 15,000 instruments and related objects now includes the first Steinway piano (built in 1836 in Henrich Steinweg’s kitchen) and the guitar Elvis Presley played in his last public performance.
But those milestones of musical artistry weren’t the topic of Anderson’s job interview in Vancouver. Anderson, one of three finalists, based her pitch on an earlier job and a different art form.
“She brought different beads and passed them around and talked about the history of the beads,” Stepsis said. “She taught us things I had never thought about before,” how beads are “one of the most ancient forms of human interaction and craftsmanship: no utilitarian purpose, just art and decoration.
“That she was able to use the session to teach us things we found fascinating was a large part of the attraction,” he said.
Anderson’s hiring was the result of a two-phase search by the Historical Society. The directors picked three finalists this spring, then identified the No. 1 choice and tried unsuccessfully to reach an agreement.
Anderson came into the picture late, she said in an interview last week during a quick trip here to find housing. About a week after Anderson’s job in Phoenix was eliminated, she was in Seattle for the May meeting of the American Alliance of Museums. She met a friend who runs a museum in Maine; the friend knows Tissot and told Anderson about the Vancouver job.
“It worked out well for me,” she said.
Jordán agrees. In Phoenix, Anderson was part of a big team — she supervised 27 people in the museum’s year of preparation work — in a very large museum
“It was obvious that this was her next step: manage a whole institution,” Jordán said. “To me, it made a lot of sense.”
Anderson thought about going into museum work when she was a seventh-grader and a tour featuring the treasures of King Tutankhamun came to the United States. It sparked her interest in earlier cultures and what they left behind: “Artifacts that hadn’t been seen in thousands of years,” she said of the Tut exhibit.
But she was interested in more than tomb treasures: It was the relationship between earlier cultures and the people who curate and interpret those stories and artifacts today, she said.
The historical society hasn’t given Anderson any sort of to-do list, Stepsis said.
“We hope this is a long-term commitment and she can assess what she thinks needs to be done,” Stepsis said. “Susan left us in a very strong position, but everything can be taken to a new level.”
Tissot now is executive director of the Humboldt Botanical Garden Foundation in Eureka, Calif.. The new job gave her the chance to rejoin her husband, Brian Tissot, who left the faculty of Washington State University Vancouver to become director of Humboldt State University’s marine laboratory.
