New Director Appointed at Museum of Natural History

By Alvin Powell

Contributing Writer

Joshua Basseches, the Harvard Museum of Natural History's new executive director, is hoping to take the institution to new public prominence over the next few years.

While research, collecting, and curating will continue as they always have in the museum complex, Basseches hopes to use his extensive background in museum management to help revamp the public face of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which presents the collections and research of the Botanical Museum, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum.

The work will include rethinking and updating exhibits and working to bring more visitors to the venerable institution. Basseches, who has a master in business administration degree from the Business School, said he doesn't think it's unreasonable to expect attendance to double in the coming years from the current 120,000 annual visitors.

"What I do see is the opportunity to take the institution, which has an extraordinary wealth and variety of collections, and present it in a way that the public has never seen," Basseches said.

Basseches has considerable experience to guide him in the process. For the past three years, he has worked as a management consultant to various museums and institutions, including Plimoth Plantation, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Lincoln Filene Center at Tufts University. In addition, Basseches was manager of exhibition projects at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and assistant curator of the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Mass.

Basseches was originally brought on last November to serve as acting executive director while a search for a permanent executive director was conducted. Basseches fit so well into the role, however, he was given the job, according to James McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography in the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a member of the group that selected Basseches.

"It was in the course of working with him as acting director in late autumn and early spring that we realized there were extraordinary opportunities here for both us and Joshua," McCarthy said. "He brings a fresh and broadly based perspective from elsewhere in the museum world."

McCarthy said Basseches sees the links between the museum's academic position and its public position as being a strong asset and something to capitalize on.

"He sees an opportunity to convey a message that few other museums and few other university museums have the opportunity to convey," McCarthy said. "We've all been very pleased with Joshua and all he's done."

Whaling and Art

Basseches developed a love for museums as a child growing up near Washington, D.C. His father is a maritime lawyer and his mother a psychoanalyst. The family would often visit the region's museums, particularly the Smithsonian. He said he developed a love for and curiosity about museums.

"I grew up in a museum-going family," Basseches said. "I guess I was just born curious."

That love of museums was augmented and flavored with a love of nature and the outdoors. Basseches developed an infatuation with the sea as a teenager, when he spent his summers on the coast of North Carolina. He combined those interests later, at Amherst College, writing his senior honors thesis on the art of 19th-century scrimshaw carving.

After graduating from Amherst in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts and English, Basseches won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and spent more than a year doing oral history research on traditional whaling communities in the Azores and in the West Indies.

The work took him to two of the very few open-boat whaling communities left in the world, but he found very different things. In the Azores, he said, he found a way of life coming to an end in the modern era, as young people with wider options chose easier work. In the West Indies, the industry played a much smaller role in the cultural life of the community but was also struggling to survive.

Unparalleled Resources

Basseches' enthusiasm for the challenge ahead is apparent when talking of possibilities for the future. He sees potential in the unique assets at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

"We have pheasants here, but they're not just pheasants; they were owned by George Washington. We have a turtle collected and written about by Thoreau, and the type, or first specimen of Triceratops ever described. The breadth of our mineral collections is virtually unrivaled, and the glass flowers collection is, of course, unique,Ó Basseches said. "Those are extraordinary kinds of things."

The Museum of Natural History is the only natural history museum in the Boston area, Basseches said, and it has the distinction of being at Harvard, where knowledge is not just stored, but where much of the original research that led to that knowledge was conducted.

"There aren't many situations where I've seen a museum so deeply embedded in a research institution," Basseches said. "If we can succeed in making transparent the walls between the public museum and the work going on behind those walls, we'll be offering something the public can get nowhere else."

He said future exhibits will better blend botany, zoology, and geology because that is the way those elements are found in nature. The focus of the new exhibits will be to teach and tell a story, not just to provide an object and a label.

Putting up better signs to guide the public to the museum and promoting it better will also help.

"We have the extraordinary resources here of the museum and the thinkers," Basseches said. "If one were to see the museum now and come back in five years, one would see an entirely different institution."