Coming home: New director of Morris Museum needs no map as he maps its future

Tom Loughman, April 2023. Photo by Kevin Coughlin
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When Tom Loughman accepted his new gig, he says his extended family in Morris County posed a burning question in a group chat:

Is there a sleepover experience at the Morris Museum?

“Everything is possible,” he says with a big smile.

For the 51-year-old Loughman, who started this month as executive director of the Morris Museum in Morris Township, this is a homecoming of sorts.

The Morris Museum. Photo courtesy of the Morris County Commissioners.

He grew up within bicycling distance of the place, and remembers a mounted snakeskin (still in the collection) that seemed “27 feet long” when he was a 2nd grader.

The former CEO of Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Art Museum, America’s oldest continuously operating museum, has taken the reins of a 110-year-old organization best known for its Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata.

While Loughman was away, the Morris Museum also became New Jersey’s only museum affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.

There has been some churn at the top. Loughman is the seventh director or interim since 2016; his predecessor returned to Florida after little more than a year at the helm. The board, assisted in its latest search by the consulting firm Museum Leadership Placement, is hoping Loughman sticks around for awhile.

He signed a five-year contract after “snooping around a little” one Saturday morning in February, queuing with visitors awaiting the museum’s opening. Loughman counted 17 of them, ranging from seniors to parents with small kids in tow.

Making sure they all have plenty of reasons to keep coming back is central to his charge.

Tom Loughman. Photo courtesy of the Morris Museum.

“Our role is to find common ground and to be ecumenical and welcoming. That’s really served me well as my North Star in my career, and I know it’s served the Morris Museum very well, too.”

Loughman says he wants to extend the museum’s community outreach, and explore creative uses for its eight-acre campus. Earlier in his career, he helped the Clark Art Institute expand in Williamstown, Mass.

The Morris Museum ventured outdoors during the pandemic, launching a popular series of jazz and classical concerts atop the parking deck when COVID shuttered its Bickford Theatre. That series kicks off its fourth season on June 22, 2023, with the Antoinette Montague Experience.

Loughman also envisions creating programs around a slate roof replacement at the museum. He thinks it could offer opportunities to share the history of the former Twin Oaks mansion, once the country home of the Frelinghuysens, one of New Jersey’s leading political families.

And look for the museum to enthrall schoolchildren, just as it captivated him on a field trip with Mrs. Wilkerson’s class from the Hillcrest School all those years ago.

INCITING CURIOSITY, CELEBRATING WONDERMENT

“The museum’s played an outsized role in the life of every schoolkid of my vintage from Morris County, and I know that has continued. Having that kind of traction with youth can shape a lifetime of experiences,” says Loughman, who grew up on Morristown’s Hillcrest Avenue and Indian Head Road in Morris Township, near his high school alma mater, the Delbarton School.

He remembers museum field trips and birthday parties and a Bickford production of Peter Pan. Back then, the museum also loaned kits to classrooms — boxes with dioramas and National Geographic clippings and other items, so “you could handle real stuff and learn about the world,” Loughman says.

Spark!Lab now provides hands-on learning to young guests.

The Antoinette Montague Experience is returning to Jazz on the Back Deck. Photo by Jack Grassa

Citing Loughman’s curatorial prowess, board Chairman Edward von der Linde said in a statement that trustees are eager to see him “bring his ambitious plans for exhibition programming to the Museum.”

In recent years, the museum has partnered with Art in the Atrium Inc. to showcase top African American artists. A pair of leading rock and roll photographers have been featured in separate exhibitions. Automata, kinetic art and virtual reality displays have figured prominently, too.

While Loughman isn’t tipping his hand just yet, he says he firmly believes access to art yields more engaged citizens, and a richer inner life.

‘Merge With Me,’ a 2022 multimedia presentation by the Safarani sisters, at the Morris Museum’s Bickford Theatre. Photo by Kevin Coughlin

“It’s our job to catalyze those experiences, it’s my mission to incite curiosity and celebrate wonderment. That’s the job,” says Loughman, whose specialty is European art.

One of his challenges is figuring how best to utilize the 312-seat Bickford. He says he is striving for a holistic view, one that looks beyond physical attributes to regard the museum as a community, “an ecosystem of teaching and learning (and) exceptional experiences.”

“What I’d like to see is us grow in our impact and expand to those people who feel that this place is their own, and the place that makes them happy, and that challenges them to think about the world differently,” says Loughman, who co-chairs the board of the United States National Committee of the International Council of Museums.

PORTALS TO HUMANITY

After graduating in 1989 from Delbarton–where he played football, was a thrower on the track team, and ran a creative arts festival–he studied international affairs at Georgetown University.

He added a second major, art history, after a friend convinced him to take a course in Italian medieval architecture, taught by C. Douglass Lewis of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Loughman recalls asking his Georgetown adviser: “If I tried really hard could I make a difference in service to the field?”

A week later, he recounts, he had a lunch date with Carter Brown, then director of the National Gallery of Art.

Loughman says art history gave him new insights into the history he was learning in foreign affairs classes. “So what did these people look like? What did they think about? What brought them joy?  What were they curious about?

“What museums did for me was actually give me portals that cut through time and space and culture and gave me an immediate and authentic and truly inspiring view on humanity.”

Loughman earned a master’s degree in art history from Williams College, and a doctorate from Rutgers University. His resume includes seven years at the Clark Art Institute, where he was associate director of program and planning.

Before that, he was curator of European art and an assistant to the director for exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum. He got his start with a curatorial fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, working in its department of prints, drawing and photographs.

The Philadelphia Museum also is where Loughman met his wife, Sara.  They have two daughters, now in high school in outside of Hartford.

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Photo by Daderot at the English-language Wikipedia

Loughman led the fortress-like Wadsworth from 2016 to 2021. It houses 60,000 square feet of art in 40 galleries, and has an annual budget of about $13 million. Things are tighter at the Morris Museum, where the budget is closer to $2.6 million, according to the staff.

One of Loughman’s initiatives, the “Wadsworth Welcome,” gave free admission to Hartford residents in an attempt to bridge wealth disparities between the city and its affluent suburbs.

The Wadsworth board praised him as a highly respected curator who made significant acquisitions for the museum and strengthened its exhibitions. Loughman left amidst a museum drive to shed a stodgy image and offer more programs for Hartford’s growing minority population.

Loughman feels he accomplished most of his objectives there, bringing more professionalism, upgrading marketing for the first time in decades, increasing the Wadsworth’s digital presence, and forging more connections with the community–while making some acquisitions and growing the endowment.

“So a lot of that work was done. So I was satisfied with being there a little over five years. I got my team through the first year of the pandemic, got us reopened, got us in pretty good financial shape, and the board was seeking a different future agenda for the place that was not my strength,” he says.

Loughman acknowledges that the role of museums is shifting.

“We need to be resonating emotionally with all kinds of audiences. Because museums in the end are not a cerebral exercise. They are marvelously immersive, experiential places. They are places where we are no longer the authoritative voice. We are increasingly inviting outside voices, and participatory discovery and learning.”

Loughman’s local ties run deep.

His dad was a real estate attorney in Morristown and a longtime trustee of the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey. His mother worked for Allied Signal and Honeywell, and studied at what is now Saint Elizabeth University in Morris Township. His uncle, Mike Loughman, is a former Township police chief.

And Tom Loughman counts 23 cousins in the Morris County vicinity.

Fortunately, the Morris Museum staff reports 75,524 square feet of space–ample for any future Night at the Museum sleepovers.

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