If you were to take a drive today along Ninth Street toward MacArthur Park in downtown Little Rock and look over at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, you would see a large LED countdown clock proclaiming 131 days until the museum's grand reopening. Closed since 2019 for extensive renovations and upgrades, the museum, formerly known as the Arkansas Arts Center, will open its doors to the public on April 22.
And while there is much work left to do before that date, it won't get here a moment too soon for Dr. Victoria Ramirez, the museum's executive director.
"The clock counts down the days and minutes until our grand opening," Ramirez says. "It's our way of expressing our excitement for the grand opening to the community and letting them know we are literally counting down the minutes until we open our doors."
Until that time, Ramirez and the museum staff, along with hundreds of contractors, will continue the transformation of the museum, which was founded in 1937 and is home to a 14,000-object permanent collection. The project includes a 133,000-square-foot building designed by Studio Gang, led by world-renowned architect Jeanne Gang, that will house an art school, art galleries, a lecture hall, a performing arts theater and restaurant, as well as a newly landscaped 11-acre area of MacArthur Park designed by Kate Orff, an award-winning architect of the SCAPE Landscape Architecture. To finance the project, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Capital Campaign and Building Committee set a fundraising goal of $155 million.
To reach the finish line for the project, which began six years ago, Ramirez oversees a weekly plan of to-dos for the multifaceted project with countless deadlines requiring many meetings and long days. Simply put, it is taking a lot of hard work, something Ramirez doesn't shy away from. It could be said that the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts project is one Ramirez has been preparing for since her childhood in Cleveland, where she grew up immersed in the strong work ethic of her parents.
MIDWESTERN UPBRINGING
Although Ramirez is a member of Generation X, known as latch-key kids with independent streaks, she grew up in a more traditional baby boomer fashion with a working father and a stay-at-home mother. She and her friends were adventure-seekers who would ride their bikes around their neighborhood, and sometimes points beyond.
"I thought it was just the greatest childhood," Ramirez says, adding that her love of art began at a young age.
"I was always an art kid and so I would take classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art, which happened to be across the street from the Cleveland Museum of Art," she says. "My mother and sometimes father would shuttle me down there whenever I was taking my classes. I thought I was going to be an artist when I grew up."
She took classes in painting and ceramics, but found her favorite was drawing, an interest she maintains to this day.
"I'm very visual in the way that I think about things; sketching out ideas," she says. "I always have a pad or something in front of me because I think it's important. It helps me clarify thoughts."
It even helps her husband, George Ramirez, on grocery runs.
"Sometimes if he's running to the grocery store, I'll sketch out the grocery list for him," she says. "It's really a funny thing between us."
While art was her favorite childhood activity, she also took classes to learn the flute, as well as ice skating and gymnastics. And when she wasn't in class, she was often working at the clothing manufacturing factory managed by her father.
"I would go to work with my father every Saturday," she recalls. "And it actually was a lot of fun because he ran these big factories, and I would get to essentially play in the factory. He was the kind of person that if you had a summer break or a spring break, and we were not going on vacation or didn't have anything to do, you were working with him at the factory."
He even enlisted the help of her high school friends. "We would all pile in my dad's car and we would drive to downtown Cleveland, and we would all work every summer at his factory," she says. "I think so much about how his work ethic is so much a part of who I am today."
During those summers, Ramirez's father would place her and her friends in what she says were the "more challenging departments" such as accounting and shipping and receiving, exposing them to various parts of business. "I knew what he was doing," she says, adding that such experiences would help her later in her career.
She also inherited a sense of adventure and passion for life from her parents. "He loved to cook, but it would never be just a simple meal," she says. "It would always be something elaborate."
One time on a visit to one of her father's factories in New York, they visited a jelly factory, inspiring one of many family projects. "You could buy the grapes, and my father decided we were going to make our own jelly," she says, adding that family ski trips were other regular activities. "Everything was always a big project."
FROM CLASS TO WORK
Starting in middle school and continuing through high school, Ramirez was drawn to graphic design. "I was very interested in how art graphically communicates ideas," she says.
By the time she went to college at Kent State, known for its art programs, she had decided to study art history. "I realized I wasn't as good as I would like to be [in graphic design], and so I changed my major to art history," she says. From there, she continued her studies at an art school in Paris for a year before enrolling at the University of Maryland, known for its art history department.
While at the University of Maryland, Ramirez became an intern at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Asian Art in nearby Washington. After her internship ended, she stayed on at the museum, working part time until she graduated with a bachelor's degree in art history.
In 1998, she was hired as manager of school programs for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, one of the nation's largest art museums. During her 15 years there, she was promoted to education director. "Although I had had museum experiences before, that's really where I learned how a big museum works," she says.
It's also where she learned how to better share art with others. "You learn how to talk about art to just about anybody," she says. "I worked with preschoolers, I worked with senior [citizens], I worked with educators."
Her approach to art education, she says, is that art is a part of everything.
"Art is not just for the art classroom, but art is for all subjects," she says. "And, so, we would talk about how you could take a work of art and use it to teach math, science and social studies."
In 2013, she was contacted by the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin about its director position. She was interested in the job because it would allow her to oversee all aspects of a museum. "It's a huge and pretty complex organization with multiple theaters and restaurant and a store, an admissions department or a ticketing office, and a parking garage," she says.
"I really learned the business of running a museum," she says. As director of the museum, she was involved in everything, even including the removal of a snake from the building's elevator.
"When you are the director, everybody calls you," she says. "And everybody knew there was nothing I could do to get the snake out, but I was there." Experts were called in and the snake was safely removed, she adds.
A MUSEUM NEEDS ITS COMMUNITY
In 2017, another opportunity came knocking, this time at the El Paso Museum of Art. Located next to the state's border with Mexico, she welcomed the opportunity to again work with art as director of this city-owned museum.
"I started to understand interpretation through a cultural lens," she says. "I started to better understand how a museum needs to be synchronized with the community. It can be more of a fabric of the community when they are thinking about the community and visitors first when they make decisions."
While there, she says she oversaw some changes with exhibitions, as well as membership and marketing.
"It almost felt like instantaneously we were even further embraced by the community, and the people started to really see themselves in the museum," she says.
She wants to encourage that same level of community involvement in her current position as executive director of the fine arts museum, a position she began in late 2019. At the time, even though the museum's building and campus were closed for the renovation project, programs, classes and even the retail store, were open at a temporary location in the Riverdale area of Little Rock. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, the museum had to close completely.
"The community doesn't have its museum and the museum doesn't have its community," she says. "We're like utterly rudderless right now."
To help keep the connection to the community, the museum's Theater Department started to do "pop-up programs" outside at MacArthur Park during the pandemic. The staff returned from those programs with "eyes sparkling," she says. "I could not get over how good it felt to have that connection with the community."
Although the pandemic presented many challenges, it also helped the staff focus entirely on the renovation project without the tasks of the day-to-day operations of a museum.
"The majority of my time is focused on what the museum will look and feel like at the grand opening, and who we will be moving forward and everything that needs to happen leading up to that," she says.
Ramirez's job is huge, says Stan Hastings, president of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Board of Trustees.
"The diversity of the project, which she has managed, and having it all come together is monumental," Hastings says. "She wasn't here when we had the Arkansas Arts Center, so she wasn't a part of all of that. She had to learn what that was, what the vision was."
Warren Stephens, co-chair of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Capital Campaign and Building Committee, says Ramirez's extensive museum experience is vital.
"Her strength has been to talk with us about the building and the most efficient and effective use of space," he says. "She has brought expertise to the project that no one else had."
For Ramirez, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is a great fit. "My wheelhouse is directing a museum this size," she says, adding that the support of museum's leadership and of the community helped her decide to take the position.
For now, she is continuing to follow the grand reopening plan, and working to build community excitement for the day that the doors open once again. That includes promoting an Art Garden project, described by museum as "a community-built art installation celebrating AMFA's grand opening." The project will include thousands of origami lotus, which will be installed on the museum grounds "to transform the surrounding landscape into a dynamic composition of color, shape and movement," the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts website says.
Meanwhile, the countdown to the "initial wow" that Ramirez says she expects when the doors finally open continues.
"We are so excited to share the museum [with the public]," she says. "We are so excited for them to see it. This for them."
SELF PORTRAIT
Victoria Ramirez
• EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree in art history, University of Maryland; master of arts degree in museum education and art history, George Washington University; and doctor of education degree in curriculum and instruction, University of Houston.
• MY FAVORITE ARTISTS ARE: Too many to name, but any artist with whom I am currently working tends to be top of mind. For now, it's Natasha Bowdoin, Elias Sime and Oliver Lee Jackson. Johannes Vermeer and John Singer Sargent are also favorites.
• THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICE I'VE RECEIVED: I've always liked the Eleanor Roosevelt quote, "Do something that scares you every day."
• A FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY: Taking art classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
• THE BEST TIME OF DAY FOR ME: I am a morning person.
• IF I WASN'T A MUSEUM DIRECTOR, I WOULD BE: I can't imagine doing anything else. Maybe an architect.
• MY PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT IS: The grand opening of the AMFA (Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) will undoubtedly be my proudest professional achievement.
• ONE DAY I WOULD LOVE TO VISIT: Sweden. I love the Scandinavian design aesthetic.
• ONE WAY I DEAL WITH STRESS: I like to make craft cocktails at home.
• MY FAVORITE PART ABOUT MY JOB: Working with the public, and during the last three years, being able to think deeply with everybody involved about what this museum needs to be for this community.
“I’m very visual in the way that I think about things; sketching out ideas. I always have a pad or something in front of me because I think it’s important. It helps me clarify thoughts.” -Victoria Ramirez (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)