Even before I worked here, the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMA) impressed me with its warmth; it exudes an old-fashioned intimacy embodied in the idiosyncrasies of its buildings, which are full of character and unexpected beauty. Despite the grand facades of the buildings that Andrew Carnegie erected for the people of Pittsburgh in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and the architectural power of its 1972 Edward Larrabee Barnes addition, there’s an appealing lack of pretentiousness to the place that nicely reflects the spirit of the city in which it resides.

Museums like the Carnegie provide tangible benefits for their communities, enhancing the quality of life, contributing to the economy, and educating the populace in important ways, yet the notion of art-as-elitist is deeply rooted in the United States and, with the economic downturn, some in Washington D.C. see museums’ tax-exempt status as inhibiting a potential revenue stream. This is enormously dangerous for us.

Pittsburgh doesn’t like to call attention to itself but, given the economic and political climate, we at CMA need to demonstrate our centrality to the civic life of the region and the country. We need to take advantage of our excellent collections and talented staff to become more widely recognised nationally and internationally as a significant innovator in the museum-field, helping to define museum practice in the twenty-first century. With that in mind, we are developing new initiatives that touch all departments.

Similarly, CMA must ensure it demonstrates explicitly its inherent warmth, making the museum more welcoming to visitors of all ages and backgrounds. For us, that means everything, from better signage to improved cafes. In order to attract a younger generation, we need to be more nimble and interactive in our approach, as well as more technologically savvy, all of which requires funds and a major shift in culture.

The impact of positive changes in a museum like ours is more evident in a mid-sized city than in a huge metropolis. Everything we achieve at CMA ultimately benefits Pittsburgh in terms of reputation, quality of life and economics.

Sheyi Bankale (SB): Will you discuss the role of the institution in relation to the local art community and the mechanisms installed to acquire bodies of work locally and internationally?

Lynn Zelevansky (LZ): The institution was founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1895 with the idea that we bring the best contemporary artwork in the world to Pittsburgh in annual exhibitions, and acquire out of those exhibitions to build the collection; we were the first museum in the country to give such prominence to contemporary art. That relationship with the contemporary remains an important legacy for us and, of course, we continue to mount the Carnegie International which now takes place every four to five years. The first International was in 1896. The next International opens in October of 2013 and one of our questions has centred around the idea of globalisation and homogenisation; of the market dictating everything. In order to make our International distinct from all of the other shows like it we have been linking the global to the local; our history, our city, a very particular sense of place, are all essential to making it distinctive.

About two years ago, our curators rented an apartment in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh, as part of the International, and this has been the site of many informal events providing an important forum for bringing together local and global cultures.

We will keep our entire collection on show during the International for the first time in recent memory and will have prominent labelling that identifies those works that were acquired in relation to previous Internationals. Also, some works in the exhibition will be shown in several locations around town, so the city becomes an important factor in the event.

I think that, in a city like Pittsburgh, when you change a museum you have the opportunity to have an impact on the whole region. It’s a very different kind of civic role than you are likely to have in a very large city. I see museums as civic organisations in constant dialogue with their cities, and their reach into the world beyond the museum’s walls should benefit their specific location. Everything we do is informed by that idea. We are always aware that if we build our collector-base then we do it for the city as much as for the museum. I believe that, for a long time, lip service was paid to the idea of showing local artists, but without any real serious commitment to them or the idea. I think we have to engage the community in a variety of ways, and when we show work from Pittsburgh we should show it in exactly the way we would show any other work, which means that it’s in a curated show where the curator is absolutely committed to the work and believes in its quality and its importance. So, for the first time, we took part in the Pittsburgh biennale last year, and I thought that Dan Byers, our curator of contemporary art, did a great job for us. Dan chose the work of a small number of artists; some of them lived here and had made a lot of their work here, some of them are still here. It was very definitely a Pittsburgh show.

SB: Do you produce many exhibitions or do you buy in/loan exhibitions?

LZ: When I came here I hired Sarah Minnaert, with whom I had worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and her main task has been to develop a balanced exhibition programme for us. The museum has always had exhibitions but it hasn’t had a strong contemporary exhibition programme beyond the International, so we’ve been working on that. We are creating partnerships with other museums to enhance our program. One of the things that ideally – and it really is an ideal – we would like is to have a major, homemade exhibition every year in our main space; an important show that we’ve bought in, and a collection-based exhibition.

SB: In terms of audience participation, there are institutions that encounter audience pressure on what they can or cannot show. Is there a liberal sense of the arts here?

LZ: I think so. If I, or anyone, is going to show something that might be difficult for some people we create signage that makes it clear that some might be upset by it and might prefer not to go into that gallery, but that wouldn’t stop us from showing it. Rather, it would probably stop us from showing it on the first floor in the Forum gallery, where nobody could avoid it.

SB: How would you describe the audience demographic?

LZ: Well it’s really interesting, it’s mainly families. And we have a kind of split identity because, for the people of Pittsburgh, Oakland is one place, and they don’t see the difference between the art museum and the natural history museum, and close to fifty percent of them visit both when they’re here. I do think we struggle to get younger people in, definitely, but I also think we are doing better than we have done in the past. For example, in the first quarter of 2011, when we had the Paul Thek and Ragnar Kjartansson shows up, in terms of percentage of the population, we outstripped the city itself in the 19-34 year old age range.

SB: Is the admission fee a contributing factor?

LZ: Well, to some extent it may be but we have agreements with most of the universities, so students get in free. We also have this amazing access card programme that I am particularity proud of. Access cards are for people on public assistance. If you have a card you can visit the museums for a dollar and bring up to three people with you. The implications of this are huge, and the programme has been so successful; we have created something of a model, I think, for others.

SB: This is encouraging, being a parent of two children I can relate to the importance of quality family time, and to find stimuli for your child is a challenge.

LZ: I’m very excited about it because I also think that by encouraging people to bring their children to museums we are seeing to our future audiences too.

SB: There is a high percentage of African-Americans living in Pittsburgh but this is not reflected in the gallery space. How can the majority of African-Americans be enticed into the gallery?

LZ: Have you seen the Teenie Harris show? The show is addressing a whole new demographic because I don’t think, previously, African-Americans in the city have thought of the Carnegie museum as being ‘their’ museum. It’s a challenge for us to figure out how we widen the audience. Will the people who’ve visited come back for other shows? I don’t know. We will continue to look for exhibitions that relate to African-American culture, and we always have African-American art up in the contemporary galleries, but people don’t always realise that and many of the artists wouldn’t want us to call that out. On one hand, we have to work on broadening our demographic, on the other, there is the visitor experience – the whole place just needs to be spruced up, to be ‘hipper’. The store needs to be better, the restaurant needs to be better.

SB: The central issue is, how do we perceive the museum in the twenty-first century, given the importance of social spaces.

LZ: I agree completely – we have not yet fully addressed the need for social space. That is the great advantage that museums have over other arts, especially performative art forms; museums are, by definition, a social space so we really have to work on that. Because we are four museums under one umbrella, we work within a corporate entity – Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (CMP). Likewise, change can take longer to implement or achieve as there is a lot of bureaucracy to work through, but it’s the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about since I got here and we’ll move forward.

SB: Looking back at your previous comments about bringing different demographics and ideas into the museums – which are the museums in question, and is there a relationship between them?

LZ: The four museums are the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Science Center and the Carnegie Museum of Art. There is a history of territorial turf-wars among the museums – but that’s really over. We try to work together and, as we now have four relatively new directors at each of the museums, there are no bad feelings so it’s easier. For example, Eric Shiner, director at The Warhol, wanted to organize an Ai Weiwei show and asked if we would take Ai’s ‘zodiac piece’ for when he produced the show. We were really happy to oblige.

SB: So there is dialogue?

LZ: Completely! We even hang out and are friends, so that’s nice. I like them all, and – needless to say – there is always stuff to talk about.

There is a kind of mandate from the board of CMP for the museums to try to work together more, and so we’ve spent the last year – since our new president has come in – talking about the differences in our cultures, which is something that I think we never fully understood before.

For example, it was difficult for us to work with The Warhol on an exhibition basis because they tended to do things with a much shorter lead-in time than we did, that’s changing now. The science museums, everything they do – their entire face to the public – is generated by their education departments whereas, for the two art museums, our education departments work in sync with the curatorial departments. We are proud of our education departments. They do very creative things and they’re deep thinkers but, when they’re working on exhibitions, their material comes out of the ideas with which the curators are working, so it’s very different.

SB: Several American institutions which I’ve had the pleasure to visit have a gallery or wing dedicated to photography, but that’s not currently in place at the Carnegie – is this a consideration?

LZ: It’s really interesting that you should ask. My background is in photography; I was a photographer for ten years and I have a BFA undergraduate in photography from the Pratt Institute, so photography is dear to my heart. As you well know, there is a photography world that is separate from the contemporary art world. At the Carnegie, we’re relatively new to photography and, if I can help it, I don’t want to have those kinds of divisions here. It’s difficult because while certain people, Catherine Opie for example, are really photographers, they get marketed as ‘contemporary artists’ and that’s the world they occupy. Others don’t have that advantage. It’s possible that traditional black-and-white photographs – printed relatively small – don’t have enough ‘flash’ for today’s art world, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t have a broader base of support at another time.

SB: The main question aggregating in Europe is what is photography ‘now’? In the past ten years, there has been a major shift, especially with the internet extending previous photographic parameters. Also, many people have a camera tool applied to a phone, whereas before a camera was a specialised tool. But, now, subconsciously the camera is just there; one simple act and the pictures exist in a digital file. So everyone now has a new relationship with photography.

LZ: There are interesting things taking place in a lot of different facets of our culture, which includes de-professionalisation; the field of photography is a prime example of that. As you noted, there are eight billion images on Flickr. We’re in the process of developing what we’re calling a ‘Photography Initiative’ and our activities centre around the question of the future of the medium. We are creating a very fluid and nimble structure that is also collaborative and will produce a project a year. That project could manifest in a gallery, online, in a performance, a residency, a publication, etc. The only thing required is that it engages the public in some way. We’re especially interested in technological advances that will impact artists and photographers.

We already have a project with Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) CREATE lab, where they invented the ‘Gigapanarama’. We’re giving that camera to a group of artists/ photographers to see what they make of it. Interfacing with centres at CMU, and other institutions that are totally technological, is of interest to us. They have a facility for ‘computational’ photography, for example, where you can take a picture of anything and then decide where the depth of field is, where you want to focus, etc. There are people working with robotics in ways that may be relevant for us.