The board at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in western New York has decided that two is better than one. In an unconventional move, the trustees of the venerable 164-year-old institution have chosen to promote its deputy director, Jillian Jones, and its chief curator, Cathleen Chaffee, as co-equal leaders to take the helm after Janne Sirén, the director for the last 13 years, steps down at the end of October. Jones, to assume the title of executive director, and Chaffee, to become artistic director, will begin their new roles as of 1 November and report directly to the board.
“Cathleen and Jillian are both passionate, driven, creative and I frankly couldn’t think of any better profiles to fill the roles than what we have right in front of us,” says Alice Jacobs, the board’s president for the last nine years, who spearheaded the new leadership structure with the trustees’ executive committee.
Chaffee joined the Buffalo AKG as curator in 2014 and Jones as director of advancement in 2015, rising together through the ranks in parallel. “We’ve seen these two people work collaboratively for almost 12 years and they have the benefit of years of experience with this museum,” Jacobs says. She hopes the new structure will be “better for us operationally and allow us to hit the ground running for the next period of growth we aspire to”.
Given the complexity of museums today from artistic, operational, financial, educational and community perspectives, “what this co-leadership model offers is a look at the same mission or whatever the question of the day is through our different lenses”, Jones says, “to arrive at a stronger and more integrated solution than either one of us would develop alone”.
Born in Buffalo, Jones received her masters in museum studies at George Washington University and worked in fundraising at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts before returning to her hometown to start at the Buffalo AKG. With Sirén and the board, Jones completed a $230m capital campaign supporting the museum's campus transformation, designed by Shohei Shigematsu of the architectural firm OMA, which opened in 2023.
An aerial view of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum's campus Photo by Jason O'Rear
Chaffee, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, says she and Jones have “always been really each other’s first meeting and had the opportunity to agree, disagree and work through really complicated projects, especially in relationship to the expansion process”. She earned her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and has held curatorial positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Yale University Art Gallery. At the Buffalo AKG, she has given numerous artists including Stanley Whitney, Joe Bradley and Erin Shirreff their first large US museum survey exhibitions and oversees stewardship of the Marisol estate—more than 700 works bequeathed by the Pop artist on her death in 2016 and the basis for Marisol's recent touring retrospective organised by Chaffee.
The museum, with 185 employees, a $16.5m annual operating budget and an endowment of $183m, has a modern and contemporary collection of international renown. Its annual attendance hovered around 125,000 visitors before the recent renovation and expansion, spiked to 308,000 the year of the reopening and settled at around 220,000 this past fiscal year—43% higher than the most optimistic projection in an audience study commissioned as part of the expansion project.
“We’re delivering on the promise to make this museum more accessible and approachable,” says Jones, noting that around 30% of recent visitors came either for free programmes or to the wing of the museum designated admission-free as part of the renovation.
As co-leaders, Jones and Chaffee will launch the museum's new five-year strategic plan this autumn. “Coming out of this very ambitious capital campaign and multi-year expansion process,” Chaffee says, “we’ve had a beat to analyse how the museum is functioning, how it can grow and what the future is going to look like.”
Jacobs hopes that other museums will consider “creating a leadership structure where the artistic and the operational are at an equal level and have a better opportunity to be integrated”, she says. “Leadership can be a lonely place. Having somebody to share the burdens can be really healthy and productive.”