The Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art was established in 1945 by Jacques Marchais to foster an interest in Tibetan and Himalayan art. Centered on one of the highest points of the Eastern Seaboard the entire museum was designed to reflect a small Tibetan mountain monastery, with extensive terraced gardens and grounds, and a fish and lotus pond. The museum has also been lauded for having one of the most extensive collections of Himalayan artifacts in the United States.

            Managing the museum’s day-to-day operations is Meg Ventrudo, director of the museum since July of 2004. She started working in museums and historic houses while she was in Loyola University getting her degree in American History. Prior to working at the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art she was the Assistant Director at the Museum of American Finance. Since working here she has been a part of the institute of not-for-profit management at Columbia University and received a SI Economic Development Corporation “20 under 40” award in 2010.

So, what exactly made you decide you wanted to work in a museum? And has the reality of the job changed your view of the arts field in any way?

I’ve always loved museums as a child. My grandmother always took me to museums so I felt that it would be very interesting to eventually work in one. I think that when you visit museums as a child or as a tourist you see them as tourist attractions or you go to learn something or to see something you would never see somewhere else and I think that all museums, whether they’re large or small, contain really fantastic treasures. But I think since working in a museum for as long as I have been now, and this is something that I think came from 9/11, is that museums serve as places of support in the community and that when there are bad things or upheavals people do look to the museums to have some sense of continuity and stability and also as a base in their community.

That’s a very interesting perspective on museums.

Well, shortly after 9/11 the Museum of American Finance brought together a group of professionals that worked in the financial industry and basically created a forum for them to discuss how Wall Street responds to terror and to war and how Wall Street reacted and why the continuity of the financial system was so important to people’s everyday continuity. And when I came to work here in 2004 after 9/11 I found that people come to the Tibetan museum to look for peace or meditation. This is a place where people come when they experience some kind of loss, such as a death in their family, and they come here to step back and have that retreat function. So the role of a museum in the community is really much more important than just the preserving of artifacts.

So, what exactly does the Tibetan museum do as an outreach to the community in reference to the artifacts and the culture?

Well, Tibetan culture is really threatened in its homeland and there are exile communities throughout the world for Tibetan monks and the museum is really a repository for Tibetan art, artifacts, and culture. In addition, the pieces are not just beautifully crafted, they are also significant to world history not just to Tibetan Buddhism. One of our two-part plan that the museum has been implementing for the past couple of years, is the presentation of the objects in the collection. We have objects not just from Tibet but also China, Nepal, Mongolia but all of the objects have relationships to Tibetan Buddhism. Another one of our goals, something we’ve been working on is outreach to the Tibetan and Himalayan communities in New York City and there’s about 30,000 Tibetan, Nepali and Bhutanese people in the New York, New Jersey area so to involve the community and preservation of their history and we’ve been doing that through social media and meetings with people in the Tibetan community.

Is there any event or moment that stand out to you in your 9 years here?

We had a monk visit us who had been a political prisoner of the Chinese for 30 years and he was able to forgive his Chinese captors. He presence was completely radiant when he was here and he was talking about forgiveness and I feel like if I ever have a bad day, like if I’m driving, and you know, somebody cuts me off and just stupid things that should never annoy you, I just think back on meeting him and saying “If he can let this go, if he can let his life go [laughs], you don’t have it so bad”. And in 2010 a group of us from the museum had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama in person and that was really, a real fantastic experience. It was in New York City but we were able to meet the Dalai Lama and that was a really moving experience because he’s so, he’s just a remarkable person and a remarkable presence and has the skill to say what he really means but also put his audience at ease when they’re around him which anybody gets really nervous when they meet the Dalai Lama and we had given everybody instructions on what they should wear and how they should say hello [laughs] and I said “Nobody shakes hands with the Dalai Lama” and of course there’s a picture of me in the newspaper shaking hands with the Dalai Lama. So I think those were two really fantastic experiences that I’ve had since I’ve been here.

And financial-wise, given the recession, what’s your take on the challenges facing museums nowadays and are you optimistic about the future of museums?

I’m not optimistic but, I’m not totally pessimistic. Funding is very cyclical for museums in general and this museum is trying to put in a lot of initiatives to stabilize and expand our fundraising because one of the things museums always need is operating money; you need money to pay your staff, you need money to pay Con Edison [laughs] you need money to pay Verizon. When people give a donation to a museum they want to give you a donation so that a class of school kids can come in for free. They don’t want to give you a donation to pay your gas bill and it’s kind of hard to say that’s what we need and sometimes with grants they say that only 10 percent can go to operating costs. Well, 10 percent doesn’t really do much. It’s the people that work here that make the place run and they need to get paid. I also think that relationships between donors and museums is changing too, people who were giving the museum $100 a year, started giving the museum $50 a year. At the same time, where schools used to have money to come to museums for external programs, that’s really changed since the recession because the schools don’t really have the funds and then sometimes, if there are schools from low-income neighborhoods the parents don’t have the funds to send their kids to the museum. I don’t think we break the bank on school tours here but if you have two or three kids and if you have to pay for this school trip or that school trip I’m sure it adds up for families so its probably a different story.

And to wrap up, do you have any advice for those who want to enter into the arts administration field?

When I started in this field twenty years ago, you get in as a programmatic person so you get in implementing programs, or designing exhibitions, or giving tours or doing research and then after a certain point you become a museum director or a museum assistant director and the business side is the skills you don’t have. You have plenty of research skills because you come out of a liberal arts education but when it comes down to it well, how do you budget? How do you plan? Those are a lot of skills that you have a lot of on-the-job learning for and its very hard for people in the program side. When program people become directors or fundraisers, as program people we know the stuff so we can communicate our love for it to a donor but to write it in a grant and to do a budget, that is something that you don’t always know. And I think that now there are more educational programs for people who are interested in arts management or the museum that twenty years ago didn’t exist. In addition, getting an internship or doing some volunteer work at a museum, you can be kind of hands on and see what you like or what you don’t like in the field and that’s great.