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ENLARGE
Among the bits of wisdom stuck on the walls of Jim Baker’s office at Anderson Ranch Arts center is this one, credited to James Rosenquist: “Sometimes you take something you don’t know. And it becomes something you know.”
The quote, one of many on the walls intended to guide Baker’s thinking, has particular prominence and not only because Rosenquist is a prominent pop artist who has visited Anderson Ranch and become an acquaintance of Baker’s. The 54-year-old Baker announced last week his resignation from the Snowmass Village visual arts institution he has worked at for two decades. Baker is moving on to the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. Both the position he is leaving, as Anderson Ranch’s executive director, and the one he will assume in the latter part of the summer, as a college president, are jobs that a younger Baker could not have imagined himself filling. Therefore, Baker has taken something he didn’t know — the administrative end of the fine-arts world — and turned it into something he knows well.
As recently as the mid-’90s, Baker wasn’t just unfamiliar with administration, he didn’t care to know about it. “When I was in the university system, I couldn’t stand administration,” said Baker, who had just earned tenure as an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas before coming to Anderson Ranch, as director of the photography program, in 1986. “I thought they were so disconnected from the faculty. I didn’t know what their interests were.” When, in the early ’90s, Baker was asked to succeed Brad Miller as director of the Ranch, “I said ‘No’ so fast, I didn’t even realize I said no.”
<b>An arts administrator is born</b>
Baker was raised in Fairfield County, Conn., where his father, also James Baker, was an elementary-school art teacher and taught in the same classroom for 30 years. The elder Baker, a ceramist, also founded The Art Barn, a workshop facility he made out of an old cattle barn.
The son didn’t get the art bug in any big way. In his teens, Baker picked up photography, but mostly as an extension of his interest in nature and hiking. His first serious ambition was to be a meteorologist, which he studied at Penn State in the ’60s. Even when he realized he didn’t have the drive to be a great research meteorologist and began focusing on his photography classes, he hardly locked himself away in the darkroom. Most of his undergraduate time was spent at the school newspaper, where he became the arts editor, as a radio announcer for the school’s progressive rock station, and booking concerts, bringing Bonnie Raitt, Doc Watson and Richie Havens to campus.
The transforming moment came when an acquaintance a grade ahead of Baker was accepted to the graduate program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Baker still seems at a loss to explain why this made such an impression, but Baker applied and was accepted at RISD, where he earned a master’s degree.
“I thought I’d just won the lottery,” he said of the surprise acceptance. “I’d gotten my one ticket to make something happen. I took it as a sign, and made the most of my graduate experience. I was on an adrenaline high for two years.”
After stints at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro State College and the University of Texas, Laura Dixon, who had come from Colorado to Texas to marry Baker, told Baker it was time to return to the mountains. Visiting Anderson Ranch, Baker had another head-turning incident. This time, it was a cardboard model of the new photography building Aspen architect Harry Teague had proposed for Anderson Ranch. The model is small enough that it sits on a shelf, still, in Baker’s small office, but it was sufficient to lure Baker to Snowmass Village.
“I could visualize myself in that building,” recalled Baker. “It had something heartfelt and intimate about it.”
Baker’s early years at Anderson Ranch were enjoyable, but he saw obstacles in the organization’s path. Under Frances Chaves, Baker’s predecessor, Baker describes the experience as “bumpy.” “Let’s just say we were not clear where we were headed,” he continued. “We were in a transition period. Maybe it was going from a mom-and-pop place, where everything was decided organically and instinctively in a conversation between two or three people. But it had grown a lot and needed to think of itself more as an organization. It had gone past startup mode.”
Most tentatively, Baker agreed to be the person to start leading Anderson Ranch to the next level. Assuming he’d return to the photography department after a few months, he insisted on the title of acting director.
The quote, one of many on the walls intended to guide Baker’s thinking, has particular prominence and not only because Rosenquist is a prominent pop artist who has visited Anderson Ranch and become an acquaintance of Baker’s. The 54-year-old Baker announced last week his resignation from the Snowmass Village visual arts institution he has worked at for two decades. Baker is moving on to the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine. Both the position he is leaving, as Anderson Ranch’s executive director, and the one he will assume in the latter part of the summer, as a college president, are jobs that a younger Baker could not have imagined himself filling. Therefore, Baker has taken something he didn’t know — the administrative end of the fine-arts world — and turned it into something he knows well.
As recently as the mid-’90s, Baker wasn’t just unfamiliar with administration, he didn’t care to know about it. “When I was in the university system, I couldn’t stand administration,” said Baker, who had just earned tenure as an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas before coming to Anderson Ranch, as director of the photography program, in 1986. “I thought they were so disconnected from the faculty. I didn’t know what their interests were.” When, in the early ’90s, Baker was asked to succeed Brad Miller as director of the Ranch, “I said ‘No’ so fast, I didn’t even realize I said no.”
<b>An arts administrator is born</b>
Baker was raised in Fairfield County, Conn., where his father, also James Baker, was an elementary-school art teacher and taught in the same classroom for 30 years. The elder Baker, a ceramist, also founded The Art Barn, a workshop facility he made out of an old cattle barn.
The son didn’t get the art bug in any big way. In his teens, Baker picked up photography, but mostly as an extension of his interest in nature and hiking. His first serious ambition was to be a meteorologist, which he studied at Penn State in the ’60s. Even when he realized he didn’t have the drive to be a great research meteorologist and began focusing on his photography classes, he hardly locked himself away in the darkroom. Most of his undergraduate time was spent at the school newspaper, where he became the arts editor, as a radio announcer for the school’s progressive rock station, and booking concerts, bringing Bonnie Raitt, Doc Watson and Richie Havens to campus.
The transforming moment came when an acquaintance a grade ahead of Baker was accepted to the graduate program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Baker still seems at a loss to explain why this made such an impression, but Baker applied and was accepted at RISD, where he earned a master’s degree.
“I thought I’d just won the lottery,” he said of the surprise acceptance. “I’d gotten my one ticket to make something happen. I took it as a sign, and made the most of my graduate experience. I was on an adrenaline high for two years.”
After stints at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro State College and the University of Texas, Laura Dixon, who had come from Colorado to Texas to marry Baker, told Baker it was time to return to the mountains. Visiting Anderson Ranch, Baker had another head-turning incident. This time, it was a cardboard model of the new photography building Aspen architect Harry Teague had proposed for Anderson Ranch. The model is small enough that it sits on a shelf, still, in Baker’s small office, but it was sufficient to lure Baker to Snowmass Village.
“I could visualize myself in that building,” recalled Baker. “It had something heartfelt and intimate about it.”
Baker’s early years at Anderson Ranch were enjoyable, but he saw obstacles in the organization’s path. Under Frances Chaves, Baker’s predecessor, Baker describes the experience as “bumpy.” “Let’s just say we were not clear where we were headed,” he continued. “We were in a transition period. Maybe it was going from a mom-and-pop place, where everything was decided organically and instinctively in a conversation between two or three people. But it had grown a lot and needed to think of itself more as an organization. It had gone past startup mode.”
Most tentatively, Baker agreed to be the person to start leading Anderson Ranch to the next level. Assuming he’d return to the photography department after a few months, he insisted on the title of acting director.
<b>Going in new directions</b>
After three months, Baker dropped the position of acting director and became simply the executive director. He had come to find the administrative position meaningful, challenging, a great learning experience and, surprisingly, well-suited to his latent talents.
“You know how you love what you hate?” said Baker, explaining his fast change of heart. “There must have been an attraction early on. My attention was on a weak part of the university system, and maybe in retrospect I was already working on that in my heart and mind.”
Baker, who now describes himself as “an organizing-type person,” took aim first at how the Ranch was structured. His instincts might have told him that having all the program heads reporting directly to him was a good idea, but he quickly recognized that the reality of having 16 people looking to him for direction was not workable.
“If you’re anti-bureaucratic and anti-hierarchical in your approach — which I am — how do you handle 16 staff members reporting directly to you?” asked Baker, whose office shelves are stocked with as many books on leadership (“The Wisdom of Teams,” “Servant Leadership”) as on art (“Shock of the New,” ”Woodworker,” by Sam Maloof, a key figure in the Ranch’s 40-year history). “I spent the whole day trying to handle 16 people — which is impossible. I hate hierarchy, but I needed to create a structure.”
Through a series of retreats with staff and board, Baker began fixing the structure. In the process, he also found that the problem was not only the organization of the staff, but the staffers themselves. Baker saw that the Ranch had plenty of crisis managers — “firemen,” he calls them — but a shortage of planners.
“We’re not a firehouse,” he said. “We have to look beyond the next crisis. We had to figure out how to be planful, consider where we’re going. That required a significant change in who was on the staff.”
There was a big turnover in staff, but Baker stayed in the director’s seat. To Doug Casebeer, who has been director of the ceramics and sculpture program throughout Baker’s tenure, Baker not only identified the correct problems to address, but also has gone a long way in solving them.
“When he took over, we had no vision or leadership. We were all questioning why we were here, what are we up to?” said Casebeer, the senior program director at the Ranch. Baker “had an incredible ability to build consensus. He was able to do that in a positive and constructive way.
“We’ve moved out of being good to being great and on the road to excellence. He established that momentum to move forward.”
The evidence of that progress is all over the Ranch. The campus has been almost entirely renovated during Baker’s 11-year tenure. The ceramics building was literally caving in, according to Baker. Thanks to a pair of capital campaigns that Baker spearheaded in 1995, raising $5 million, the facilities have also gotten major upgrades. The visiting artists using those facilities also reflect a higher level of quality; James Rosenquist, photographer Sally Mann, painter Eric Fischl and writer Calvin Tompkins have all come to Snowmass to develop their skills in digital imaging, a Ranch specialty, since 1995. Also visiting the Ranch have been Doug and Mike Starn, whose work is currently showing at the Baldwin Gallery. The Annual Art Auction, a major fundraiser and community event each summer at the Ranch, has gone from tallying some $60,000 in the mid-’80s to earning between $600,000 and $800,000 the last few years.
Baker has had to sacrifice his own creativity to achieve this bigger success. He has been accepting of that consequence, though, thanks largely to the Ranch’s digital-imaging facilities.
“The great thing about digital media is the save button,” he said. “You push a button, and you save your work instead of going back to the beginning. So I could segment the world and do it in the evenings or on the weekend.”
James Baker: A Photographic Retrospective, an exhibit of Baker’s color landscape work planned before Baker announced his resignation, shows through April 7 in the Ranch’s Patton-Malott Galleries.
<b>The next step</b>
Baker spent his childhood summers in Old Orchard Beach, some 10 miles south of Portland and the Maine College of Art. Over the last 15 years, Baker has casually kept an eye on the college for no special reason other than that he admired its small scale, knew the area and liked the emphasis on the arts.
A year ago, Baker told Roger Mandle, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and a friend of Baker’s from their time on the Alliance of Artist Communities, that he was planning for his personal future. Baker asked Mandle what he suggested and was surprised by the answer: Mandle said he would make a good college president. When the opening came up in Maine, Mandle recommended Baker for the job; two weeks ago, Baker accepted the college’s offer. This time, he goes into the administrative offices knowing something — but hardly everything — about the job of leading an arts institution.
“Part of what I’m looking forward to is, can I take what I’ve learned here and apply it to a college?” said Baker, noting that the 500-student school is the biggest institution he would be comfortable leading. “I’m not trying to be a missionary. It’s, is there some value I can lend to the Maine College of Art that I’ve learned here?”
Among the lessons he has discovered while heading Anderson Ranch is his role in enabling people tap into their creativity.
“Our value is, we believe in the creative potential of human beings,” said Baker, referring to arts educators generally. “A human wants to be creative, and we think the arts are an incredible vehicle for people to achieve their creative potential.
“That’s what I want to do in life.”
<i> Stewart Oksenhorn’s e-mail address is stewart@aspentimes.com</i>
After three months, Baker dropped the position of acting director and became simply the executive director. He had come to find the administrative position meaningful, challenging, a great learning experience and, surprisingly, well-suited to his latent talents.
“You know how you love what you hate?” said Baker, explaining his fast change of heart. “There must have been an attraction early on. My attention was on a weak part of the university system, and maybe in retrospect I was already working on that in my heart and mind.”
Baker, who now describes himself as “an organizing-type person,” took aim first at how the Ranch was structured. His instincts might have told him that having all the program heads reporting directly to him was a good idea, but he quickly recognized that the reality of having 16 people looking to him for direction was not workable.
“If you’re anti-bureaucratic and anti-hierarchical in your approach — which I am — how do you handle 16 staff members reporting directly to you?” asked Baker, whose office shelves are stocked with as many books on leadership (“The Wisdom of Teams,” “Servant Leadership”) as on art (“Shock of the New,” ”Woodworker,” by Sam Maloof, a key figure in the Ranch’s 40-year history). “I spent the whole day trying to handle 16 people — which is impossible. I hate hierarchy, but I needed to create a structure.”
Through a series of retreats with staff and board, Baker began fixing the structure. In the process, he also found that the problem was not only the organization of the staff, but the staffers themselves. Baker saw that the Ranch had plenty of crisis managers — “firemen,” he calls them — but a shortage of planners.
“We’re not a firehouse,” he said. “We have to look beyond the next crisis. We had to figure out how to be planful, consider where we’re going. That required a significant change in who was on the staff.”
There was a big turnover in staff, but Baker stayed in the director’s seat. To Doug Casebeer, who has been director of the ceramics and sculpture program throughout Baker’s tenure, Baker not only identified the correct problems to address, but also has gone a long way in solving them.
“When he took over, we had no vision or leadership. We were all questioning why we were here, what are we up to?” said Casebeer, the senior program director at the Ranch. Baker “had an incredible ability to build consensus. He was able to do that in a positive and constructive way.
“We’ve moved out of being good to being great and on the road to excellence. He established that momentum to move forward.”
The evidence of that progress is all over the Ranch. The campus has been almost entirely renovated during Baker’s 11-year tenure. The ceramics building was literally caving in, according to Baker. Thanks to a pair of capital campaigns that Baker spearheaded in 1995, raising $5 million, the facilities have also gotten major upgrades. The visiting artists using those facilities also reflect a higher level of quality; James Rosenquist, photographer Sally Mann, painter Eric Fischl and writer Calvin Tompkins have all come to Snowmass to develop their skills in digital imaging, a Ranch specialty, since 1995. Also visiting the Ranch have been Doug and Mike Starn, whose work is currently showing at the Baldwin Gallery. The Annual Art Auction, a major fundraiser and community event each summer at the Ranch, has gone from tallying some $60,000 in the mid-’80s to earning between $600,000 and $800,000 the last few years.
Baker has had to sacrifice his own creativity to achieve this bigger success. He has been accepting of that consequence, though, thanks largely to the Ranch’s digital-imaging facilities.
“The great thing about digital media is the save button,” he said. “You push a button, and you save your work instead of going back to the beginning. So I could segment the world and do it in the evenings or on the weekend.”
James Baker: A Photographic Retrospective, an exhibit of Baker’s color landscape work planned before Baker announced his resignation, shows through April 7 in the Ranch’s Patton-Malott Galleries.
<b>The next step</b>
Baker spent his childhood summers in Old Orchard Beach, some 10 miles south of Portland and the Maine College of Art. Over the last 15 years, Baker has casually kept an eye on the college for no special reason other than that he admired its small scale, knew the area and liked the emphasis on the arts.
A year ago, Baker told Roger Mandle, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and a friend of Baker’s from their time on the Alliance of Artist Communities, that he was planning for his personal future. Baker asked Mandle what he suggested and was surprised by the answer: Mandle said he would make a good college president. When the opening came up in Maine, Mandle recommended Baker for the job; two weeks ago, Baker accepted the college’s offer. This time, he goes into the administrative offices knowing something — but hardly everything — about the job of leading an arts institution.
“Part of what I’m looking forward to is, can I take what I’ve learned here and apply it to a college?” said Baker, noting that the 500-student school is the biggest institution he would be comfortable leading. “I’m not trying to be a missionary. It’s, is there some value I can lend to the Maine College of Art that I’ve learned here?”
Among the lessons he has discovered while heading Anderson Ranch is his role in enabling people tap into their creativity.
“Our value is, we believe in the creative potential of human beings,” said Baker, referring to arts educators generally. “A human wants to be creative, and we think the arts are an incredible vehicle for people to achieve their creative potential.
“That’s what I want to do in life.”
<i> Stewart Oksenhorn’s e-mail address is stewart@aspentimes.com</i>
