Growing up in Wisconsin, Paul Baker Prindle, the new director of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) didn’t think about the arts much. “I was going to be an attorney,” says Baker Prindle, in the office he’s occupied at the museum since early May. “My family has some politics and law enforcement in their background and I thought I would do that.”
But he found himself at Edgewood College in a modern art class taught by Ellen Meyer. Her love of art history rubbed off on him. Baker Prindle thought he could do something in the arts, too. And he did, earning a master of fine arts degree in printmaking at UW-Madison and moving to museum work, directing the gallery at Edgewood College, the Lilley Museum of Art at University of Nevada-Reno, and the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University-Long Beach.
Baker Prindle replaced Christina Brungardt, who stepped down in 2023 amid controversy surrounding the vandalism of artwork and other racial issues at the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial. (She is now director of institutional giving at Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas.)
Baker Prindle is eager to showcase the museum and the contemporary artists that call Wisconsin home. He’s lived in Paris and New York, Italy and China. But he was attracted to come back to Madison, he says, “because I care about this museum very much.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Isthmus: Before you left Madison to pursue your career, you worked at MMoCA. That was some 25 years ago. What about the museum has spoken to you throughout that time?
Paul Baker Prindle: I have known generations of people who have worked here. The role it plays in bringing contemporary art to Wisconsin is probably not fully understood; how important its watershed is. It is our pipeline for contemporary art in this state. And, with Madison, we’re the center of government. We’re the center of learning. It’s a rich place to engage with contemporary art.
Has that engagement with the arts in Madison changed in the years you’ve been away?
It’s amazing to see how transformative the tech sector has been. It’s added more texture to what has long been a fairly global city, an intellectual city. The tech sector has brought different modes of thinking and tackling issues that makes for a more interesting dynamic.
With the troubling controversies of the 2022 Triennial, with artists pulling out, requests for your predecessor Christina Brungardt to resign, and issues surrounding the support, or lack thereof, for artists, notably Lilada Gee, do you have any concrete plans (or general thoughts) to help rectify those issues and/or plans to celebrate the diversity of local artists?
Over the past three months, I’ve had conversations with a lot of people sharing a wide variety of perspectives. I have felt a great deal of support and welcome from our community — I plan to pay that kindness forward. I acknowledge with my full heart that valued members of this community have been hurt by our past mistakes. As a newcomer, I believe I can have a role in refining and clarifying our work as a reflection of our care for that hurt. We have to make the museum as welcoming as possible, while working to balance the unique and diverse needs of our visitors. This means learning from our missteps, addressing complex issues with humility, and creating a space where everyone feels valued. My real hope is to inspire participation in a shared journey in grace, especially during this pivotal time in our country. I believe we share more than we might readily admit and because of this we need to come together more to work through what divides us. Working at a contemporary art museum now is both a responsibility and an honor that I take seriously.
How do you make this museum more diverse and dynamic?
One way, reach out to students. I was an educator for a long time and one of the things I love about young people is they’re so often very curious and absorb anything you throw at them. So, as the director of a contemporary art museum, there’s a real opportunity in a town of 50,000 students to throw some water on that sponge.
What ways do you envision bringing in people to the museum who wouldn’t otherwise go?
Our stakeholders, and our community, are asking for change. In what ways do we want people to feel welcomed and included in our museums? People often think of museums as stuffy, closed off, exclusive places. A lot of people feel disenfranchised from museums. They want to see things that make them think, but they often feel put off by the environment.
There are big changes people are asking museums to do. How we work with artists. How we work with visitors. How we pay artists. How we pay staff. What the building looks like. There’s almost no furniture in the galleries. This drives me crazy. If you want people to come, give them somewhere to sit. It’s a little thing, but it’s actually a huge thing.
What successes are you hoping to have in the near future?
I think of this museum as a sort of cultural agora on State Street, out to provide a forum for Madison. I want to let the community decide where the conversation about the museum goes. The more people you have involved in that conversation, the better the outcomes will be. I want to hear in our museum what the corn farmer in Waunakee, who’s now surrounded by suburban sprawl, thinks, while having a conversation with a biochem faculty member in his 80s, to a Black American woman who’s come in with her kids. That, to me, is the most exciting opportunity for this museum and what I’m trying to cultivate. That is how I envision this place to be: a museum full of people talking to each other.
What upcoming shows cultivate those conversations?
The Triennial will be back next summer, May through September. It’ll be a survey of contemporary art of the state and it takes a look at the breadth and depth and scope of what contemporary artists are doing in Wisconsin.
This month we will have a show of Richard Hunt, “Line to Form: Richard Hunt’s Prints and Sculpture” (Sept. 5-Jan. 5). Hunt is an important Black sculptor, who also made prints and drawings on paper that very few people know. We’ll be showing two of his sculptures alongside a number of works on paper. Hunt is having a moment. His archives are on their way to the Getty over the next few years and we’ll start seeing a lot more scholars engaging with his work.
There will be a Richard Moss show in November. He’s an Irish photographer of some renown, who uses scientific photographic tools to document sites of conflict, particularly where conflict affects the environment. The work will focus on changes in the Amazon basin. It’s very visually striking and very moving and very complex in that it tells the story from multiple perspectives.
And, right now Shilpa Gupta’s show “I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt” is up in three different spaces in the museum, through Jan. 14. It’s an excellent show, visually striking. It’s a very quiet show about censorship and how we as people function, or don’t function, when we come into conflict.
