In late July, Chicago History Museum Board Chair Warren Chapman announced that Michael J. Anderson has been chosen as the venue’s new Edgar D. and Deborah R. Jannotta President and Chief Executive Officer. Anderson—previously the museum’s vice president of external affairs and development—was named interim president after his predecessor, Donald Lassere, resigned in January.
Anderson, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, now leads what has been called Chicago’s oldest cultural institution as it navigates tricky situations involving decreasing revenue and connecting with unionized workers; however, despite those problems, he already has made inroads.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Windy City Times: Congratulations on the new position. How does it feel to be officially president?
Michael Anderson: It’s great! I’m excited about this opportunity, for sure. Since I was in that interim role for six months, I knew what I was getting into; I don’t have to have a year of getting to know everybody and figuring out what’s going on.
You probably know my background, but I was a dancer and I’ve been in the performing arts pretty much my whole life. And I was telling somebody the other day that it was like the longest audition I’ve ever had. [Smiles] But instead of doing it in a new institution where I have to figure it all out, it’s with an institution that I know and love.
WCT: And you’re from Utah? I’m asking because I’m trying to figure out how you ended up in Chicago.
MA: Yes and no. That’s always a complicated question for me because I was born in Salt Lake City but [my family] moved to Alaska right after I was born. So my childhood was in Alaska. And then I went to high school and college in southern Utah, which is where my parents went to college. And then I did my graduate work in Detroit at Wayne State, mainly because I wanted to be my own person.
After I graduated from Wayne State, I went to New York City to dance, and I had a scholarship at the Joffrey Ballet School for that summer. And I went to New York and the Joffrey Ballet School because it had a second company at the time, called Joffrey 2. I spent the summer there and, in the fall, I got into Joffrey 2, spent the next year kind of in this training program and then got into the main company. And the Joffrey moved to Chicago in 1995. That’s what brought me [here].
WCT: So let’s talk about the museum itself. And I have a basic question because the museum has had some really intriguing exhibitions: How do you all go about deciding what the next exhibitions will be?
MA: It varies and it’s never always a straight line, right? It depends on the curators that we have and their interests. Also, we have a process where people in the community can submit different exhibition ideas. So it’s a combination of talking to partners and the community as well as things that our curators have expertise in—and it’s always something that ties to our collection so that we can use it to tell those stories.
We have a large costume collection—more than 50,000 garments. So we always try to put a costume show about every two years that connects to the curators.
WCT: Without being too specific, has anything ever been excluded because it seemed too controversial?
MA: So we do like to do things that are sometimes maybe not as mainstream. We [exhibited] the main religions in Chicago, so we did Shalom Chicago, which was about the Jewish faith; Catholic Chicago; and Muslim Chicago. It’s always kind of a balancing act. But sometimes things will present themselves that are really timely, and we try to jump on those really quickly.
At times, it can be almost a five-year process. Aquí en Chicago [which traces the lives of Latino/a/e communities in Chicago] is up right now, and that started in 2019. Of course, COVID slowed things down a little bit, but Aquí en Chicago was really important. And it actually started as a project in which we were talking with the community about what they would like to see.
WCT: So it’s not on purpose thatAquí en Chicagocoincides with Hispanic Heritage Month, which is Sept. 15-Oct. 15.
MA: Correct, although one of the reasons why we’re leaving it up into November was so that it could be there for that period of time. But it’s up because students came in and did not see things in the museum that really represented their community. They felt like the museum needed to do a better job at telling their stories. So we assigned a curator, Elena Gonzales.
WCT: The museum has gone through a few bumps in the road. But from what I’ve gathered, you’ve made some inroads regarding the unionized workers, for example. [Note:Media outlets, including WBEZ, reported that Lassere’s tenure included staff reductions following unionization efforts at the museum.] I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.
MA: I came here and the union really finally understood that there was somebody at the top who was really listening; this was important to them. I was at every negotiation while the former president never went to negotiations. When I was a dancer, I was part of the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), which represents dancers.
I’m not a working AGMA union member now but I understand how it works. And we have to work in an environment where we’re all one. It should never feel like “them against us” and be adversarial. The union will make us be more disciplined in what we need to do to make the work environment better for everyone.
WCT: The museum has had to deal with declining revenue. I saw where you describe yourself on LinkedIn as basically a fundraiser extraordinaire. How do you plan to turn things around?
MA: That’s a good question—and a complicated one.I’m working right now with the CFO; he and I have been working since January, looking at how we can increase revenue and decrease expenses. That’s really the bottom line.
[Among other things,] we haven’t increased our admission prices since 2018. So we’ve worked with the park district to increase our admissions by a couple of dollars. We’re still the least expensive museum, compared to our peers.
There’s a lot of board involvement as well, Andrew; it’s not me just waving a wand. It’s really looking at the data and things that we can do to tighten the financial business. We have to run the museum like a business.
WCT: And the museum has free days but they’re not every Tuesday, like other museums have.
MA: Correct. Yeah, we try to connect our free days with commemorative days that we have, like Martin Luther King Day, President’s Day, Juneteenth, the Fourth of July and Indigenous Peoples Day. We want people to be able to come and participate in the programming and not have to pay to get in the museum.
But we use free days for other reasons as well. For example, we had some extra free days and we used them when it was really hot recently. People could get out of the heat and have a safe place to hang out.
WCT: Is the LGBTQ+ seriesOut at CHMcoming back?
MA: It never really went away, but it kind of changed. That was a decision from the former president.
We’re already talking to Center on Halsted and Gerber/Hart about some joint programming that we can do. Over the last five years, the programming did go away as it used to. We used to have three programs a year, and they were always based on a theme. We had a community group that would kind of put those programs together, but it just became harder and harder to keep the group engaged.
We are thinking about how we can continue the brand. The programming we do now is just part of our regular programming in the education department during Pride Month and History Month. I would agree, there has not been enough promotion around that, and I think that that’s what we need to ramp up. We haven’t had a marketing director for about a year.
WCT: Regarding the museum and its future, I’ve also seen where you’ve talked about AI and incorporating that. I was wondering if you could expand on that.
MA: I see my young nephews and nieces that they are so connected with a screen. So I think, so there’s that visual aspect of it. But I also think AI is going to help a lot in collections with cataloging and searching—to find things and to find digital images that we have, for example.
We’re actually doing something in the museum right now. It’s called our digital futures program, and we’re looking at how we’re going to digitize and activate that digitized collection for different things. I’d like the Chicago History Museum and its collections to be accessible not to just Chicagoans, people in the Midwest or in the United States, but globally.
WCT: And asking you something I’ve asked others—and working in a space where this matters a lot—what does representation mean to you?
MA: It means that I’m being seen and it means that others are being seen. Growing up, seeing others like me made me more confident, more proud, Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of representation for other than just a specific type of person or people.
But Detroit was a big growth period for me because I saw other people like me. Then, of course, when I went to New York, I remember the first time holding somebody, another guy’s hand in the street—it was just so liberating that I could truly be accepted and recognized for who I was. For me, [representation is] very, very important. At all levels and races, sexual orientation—whatever it might be—we all need to celebrate our unique differences.
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