Contemporary art challenges us to consider ourselves and our era in different ways. So why aren’t we doing more to reconsider the settings in which we experience art? That was the question Insight Labs had in mind as we partnered with the West Collection to come up with an original way to bring their many contemporary pieces to the public.

After asking many questions of founder Paige West and director Lee Stoetzel, the gathered thinkers kept returning to the curatorial practices the pair had developed to display the collection at financial services company SEI. In particular, they were interested in the ways in which West and Stoetzel had succeeded in cultivating a sense of ownership toward contemporary art and how that quality could be exported to other settings.

After the session, Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson spoke with West about just what makes the collection at SEI so distinctive and how the West Collection could use the quality of ownership to invent new ways for people to experience art. Their conversation follows:

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: What would you say was the “big idea” that came out of this Lab?

Paige West: The entire process got me to a place of throwing out the idea of a physical museum for the West Collection altogether. Instead, through the conversations we had with Jeff Leitner and Howell Malham before the Lab, we started to ask whether an art collection can provide a creative shot in the arm for a city that may be interested in attracting creative capital. We thought that instead of just building a building and waiting for people to show up, we could put it back on the city and say, we have this great collection, how would you use it to juice creativity in your community? We thought about putting out requests for proposals around this idea, which was very intriguing to me.

ABN: Could you tell me what made you certain you did not want to build a traditional museum?

PW: The museums we currently have are very important – as someone in the Lab said, there is no reason to throw out the museum model entirely. I love museums, though I wish some of them would tweak their programming so they could be more far-reaching. But I do think is something about the model of creating a building and sticking a bunch of art in it that feels mausoleum-like and dust-gathering. We had backup for that from Lab. I feel like they said, let’s think about the art first and the best way to share it. It may not even involve a building.

We’re trying to reach new audiences. I would venture that the people who go to museums already have an interest and desire to see art. It’s kind of preaching to the choir. We want to get to people who have not necessarily been touched by art, who wouldn’t think about experiencing these kids of pieces.

What can be done to get these kind of people to visit a space? Well, maybe you throw space out. Maybe you bring the art to them. Where are they hanging out? Lee and I have said that for a long time that whatever type of space we would create would have to have a tapas bar or a cafe, some place where people would come to gather anyway. But we came to the point where building a building is not necessarily needed.

ABN: So how do you think the ideas generated by the Lab addressed the questions you had coming in?

PW: My expectation was that we were going to talk about the big picture and industry models, asking how we can create a totally unique vision for a contemporary art museum. But what I found in the Lab was that the focus was more on the West Collection, SEI, and what we had spent the last 15 years doing. It made us realize we had to do an even better job of answering questions like “Who do you hope to reach?” and “What do you want your audience to experience?”

ABN: I think many people have the experience you describe in a Lab. The kind of intelligence that emerges is more analytical or strategic than people sometimes expect. Jeff says one of the things the Lab is really good at is shifting a group’s perspective five degrees to the right or left, but in a way that makes a huge difference for everything else. It may be even more pronounced, though, since we were talking about a kind of institution that doesn’t exist yet.

Another thing, though, is that I think you guys have some really exceptional assets already that the Lab participants didn’t fully understand until they heard you describe them. I think they were more impressed with what you had come up with -  and how you might leverage that -  than whatever zany ideas they might have.

PW: It was a very flattering, juicing, energetic, good feeling. It was nice to see people get excited about what we had done. But I also wonder if it would have been better to introduce everything we do first and then said, “Now how do we push the boundaries?” But there was something absolutely thrilling to see that group get excited about who we are. They could have said, “This is a joke” and I did not get that feeling at all.

ABN: This is the “legitimation” effect of the Lab. I think that simply by explaining who you are and what’s important about you to this group of highly intelligent strangers, you develop a sense of your greatest value that you can then instantly access when assessing your mission or talking to new people.

But this room was particularly interested in some of the curatorial practices you had developed to display the West Collection at SEI. Could you tell me about a few of them you think were most relevant to the Lab? How about “Hot Hall,” for example?

PW: Yeah, it was around the discussion of Hot Hall that I think I got the greatest education about how to do something unique outside of the community of SEI.

So when you think about the story of our organization, we had a top guy who decided all of a sudden that we are going to have art at this company, and in the art goes. There wasn’t a vote. There wasn’t a committee.

When we started this, lots of employees weren’t too happy with it. It wasn’t art they had chosen and there were no outlets for them to voice their opinion about it, but it was going to be hung in areas where they work and sit all day. So they started physically voicing their opinions by removing some pieces from the walls.

Lee Stoetzel and I realized that people were trying to voice their opinion in the only way they could. In response, we tried things like leaving notes telling people to e-mail us with their thoughts, but we were still having art removed. Lee and I said, “We’ve got to create an opportunity for these people to voice an opinion” – just to protect the art! I didn’t want it damaged.

So we created this space called Hot Hall. It’s an area of SEI that most people have to visit during the day – the mail room is down there, the gym is down there. It’s a long hallway. We took the works that had removed from the walls to get it started. We explained to the company that this would be an area where you could use a computer to leave anonymous comments about the art at the company. We also let them know that if there was art in their area they did not like, they could send us an e-mail telling us where they were and what team they were on, and if two or three people had a problem with the work, it would be removed to the Hot Hall.

In the Hot Hall, rather than just labeling things as controversial works, we allowed for everyone else to see what the problem was. We posted the comments we had received by e-mail, comments like, “My child could do this,” or “I’m insulted by this,” or “This makes me want to throw up,” or “I don’t think it’s appropriate for a financial services company to have large photos of crying children on the wall.” Next to their comments was our defense, as curators, of the art and why it was in our collection. We tried to give some historical perspective on the art as well as the artist’s personal statement.

We worried that works would get stuck in Hot Hall forever and ever. So we created an adoption program where teams could decide to take a piece out of Hot Hall for their area. And as a thank you, they got to take for their area another piece of art from anywhere else in the company. Some groups took on a certain persona of being the controversial, hip, young crowd. They would adopt many works from Hot Hall. We also saw competition – in order to take back your favorite art work from another team, you might have to take something from Hot Hall. It became a fun game.

The key component of this, which was pointed out during the Lab, was that it created an opportunity for teams and individuals to actually feel ownership of the art and their space. In an organization like SEI, which has an open floor plan where every desk is the same, it became an important vehicle for teams to build camaraderie, personality, and culture. It was a vehicle for them to really take ownership, which was nice.

There were some other ways that we got the teams to take ownership with the art and feel connected to it. Clients who visited SEI started saying to employees “Holy cow, I can’t believe you work here with all this amazing art.” And the employees were like, “Really? You like this stuff?” Prospects and clients started remembering SEI. It made them unique. So employees – especially sales teams – realized that this art was helping them make money. It was memorable and unique and dynamic.

So the art has become much more accepted, and teams have started to take ownership of it. Now the question is how you might transfer that feeling of ownership outside of SEI, so another community could take ownership and feel that connection.

During the Lab, someone kept making a mistake and calling “Hot Hall” “Hot House.” But I wrote that down, because I started thinking how we could actually build “Hot Houses” that would present creative, unique works in a dynamic way that would allow the public to do everything from give comments to vote for which work they wanted to keep in their neighborhood.

ABN: Seth Godin says that companies can stand out by being “purple cows.” It seems to me that that would be the effect of the art at SEI. Regardless of whatever value it might or might not add to what the company is selling, everyone remembers it.

So what other curatorial practices do you feel contribute to these positive effects among employees?

PW: SEI had already started on a road of being unique – the space alone is a purple cow. Normally when you think of the space of a financial services company, you think of a giant skyscraper or lots of wood-paneled rooms. The art was just a very smart icing on the cake. There are lots of companies with contemporary art collections, but the Hot Hall and other aspects of the way we have done it here – that’s what’s purple cow-ish.

Another thing we have done to push the boundaries is to get artists involved. We have artists talks once a month. We have in the collection a motorcycle made from a cow, which was done by Billie Grace Lynn. That’s kind of a crazy unique thing sitting on our floor that most people notice. There was also a team from India working at SEI, and they obviously had very specific feelings about cows for religious reasons. They had issues with the motorcycle. But we were able to bring the artist to the company to speak directly and specifically to that group about that work of art.

These artist talks have grown more and more popular. Artists have started coming to us asking if they can create something together with the employees. It’s been extremely dynamic – people with MBAs, who had no interest in or training in art, sit down with a living, breathing, contemporary artist and make something new themselves. Talk about getting out of the box – you’re moving from a room full of computers and numbers to this room full of pipe cleaners where you’re creating a ten-foot sculpture with this artist.

ABN: You also mentioned in the Lab that you have an educational component, where kids are coming to SEI to meet artists and learn about their work. Would you say that has also had an effect on employees?

PW: Most definitely. Kids get it. Most children embrace the unknown. They say, “A giant shoe made out of licorice? That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen!” We take thousands of school kids through the collection, and the employees get to experience the kids experiencing the work. It’s one big melting pot.

We hear two things about this. One is that just seeing the kids’ faces light up inspires people. The other comes from the fact that early on, many of the kids came from the schools of employees’ children. When those kids came home, the parents were learning new things about the art from their children after having sat with it for years. They had a whole new perspective when they came back to work the next day because their kids had explained the works and were jazzed about them.

Most education programs get to the people who already want to be educated. How do you get to the people who don’t want to be educated, who say, “I don’t care about art” or “I don’t need to know anything about art”? We were dealing with many people who thought art was a waste of time. We transferred a group of people who thought of art as a detriment to doing their job well to thinking of it as enhancing their ability to do their job well.

ABN: It seems to me that that’s something you’re doing better than most contemporary art museums. I think that if you went to your average curator of a big institution and said, “Tell me your ten best stories of people who were resistant to art who you changed through your efforts,” they wouldn’t be able to answer you.

PW: That’s true, but we can’t really pat ourselves on the back. It was in order to survive. In order to keep the artwork there, we had to figure out how to transform thinking. Museums don’t have that fire under their butt. We had to figure it out.

ABN: Ha, it’s like that which doesn’t kill art makes it stronger.

So could you further characterize the overall effect you think having the West Collection at SEI has had on employees and company culture?

PW: SEI has fallen on business magazines’ lists of best places to work for several years in a row. I think the art has been one tool in the toolbox to create a unique work environment where people take ownership, encourage others, get friends hired. The art screams from the moment you walk in the door that this is a unique place to work.

Contemporary art is also about having a message. Employees here are surrounded by different thoughts and different opinions. Some of them are obvious and some of them are not. But when you are sitting next to a cow motorcycle, you think, “Why would someone do this? What were they thinking?” So the art helps incubate innovation and thinking differently.

ABN: What do you think is the best way of describing this effect to someone who can’t experience it directly?

PW: Well, that was one of the main things that Lee and I took from the Lab – we do need to start quantifying whatever effect we have. We have stories and things that people have told us, but we need to start figuring out how to put some numbers on this. It makes sense, especially given that we are housed at an investment services firm.

One of the ideas that came up in the Lab was actually bringing this art to other corporations. We were able to do it with financial services – is there a medical insurance company that could now use a spark of creative thinking? If we were to do that, we would need statistics to be able to sell that idea to somebody else.

ABN: I think there is great appeal in statistics, but I tend to be naturally contrarian about quantitative reasoning, so I wonder about something like assigning an ethnographer or sociologist to the collection. You say that you have stories, sure, but you don’t necessarily have documentation of the employees’ stories, the kids’ stories, the artists’ stories, the sales teams’ stories, etc.

PW: I’m with you on that. Another idea was to set up a video camera focusing on what particular art work or area to capture how people interact with it. Do people stop when they go by? Are there more conversations happening around this piece?

Another idea would be to find a question that could be easily answered and set up booths where everyone might get a minute to answer it. Then we would have even more stories about people’s opinions of art and how it affects them.

ABN: You sound as if you feel a little guilty about not having done this kind of documentation of people’s reactions to art. But I don’t know that anyone is doing it. Has anyone formally studied how people react to contemporary art?

PW: I’d bet there are studies out there, but it is certainly not something that museums and curators seem to consider. Lee and I once asked a curator after a show what kind of reaction they were getting from visitors, and the curator looked at us as if it were not part of their job description, or like it didn’t affect them. There is a case to be made for that, that curators should put up pieces solely for art-historical purposes and not consider what the public thinks. But someone should be interested in that. We would learn a lot more about showing art. It’s time to consider it.

ABN: So it seems to me that before very long, everyone in the Lab coalesced around the question of how we scale the curatorial practices that have been developed to display the West Collection at SEI. We talked about a number of ways of doing that. But I’d say there was also a point where a consensus seemed formed around duplicating your practices in other entrepreneurial or corporate settings. How do you feel about that?

PW: There was definitely a lot of discussion around that option. We talked a lot about finding an audience – who is an audience you want to spark? Most people think about schoolchildren or economically challenged areas within cities – let’s take the art to them. But there was interesting moment when people in the Lab pointed out that there are also a lot of middle-class businesspeople out there who are not being challenged to broaden their cultural horizons. So why not do it in other workplaces?

I don’t think there is going to be just one thing we take away from this Lab. It may be multiple things that run together in certain programs. We could have an arm where we are taking unique experiences to corporate America, but we can also take it to bus stops or to other spaces in a community there people feel ownership. And maybe we could still have a 10,000-square foot tapas bar museum.

So we will not solely be trying to re-create what we did at SEI in other places. In fact, at SEI we’re not just one thing – there are a lot of different programs going on at any different time.

ABN: Well, it seems to me that the unifying thing at SEI is this culture you’ve created. The culture doesn’t live in one building or one program or one folder or one word. But you can have symbols of it like the Hot Hall.

PW: Exactly – you have one thing called “the West Collection” but there are many smaller components that make up that brand or feeling. As we go forward, we will be looking at ways to scale that feeling with many components.

ABN: You could imagine how that feeling would be created by combining experiences inside and outside the corporate setting. So let’s say you went to Atlanta and started with Coca-Cola. You might implement something like you’ve done with SEI first, but then when you expand outside the corporation into the city, all of the well-heeled executives will already know what a “Hot Hall” is and can explain what is going on at the bus stop or the airport.

PW: You could look at the entire petri dish of Coca-Cola and Atlanta. No one would get a break from art.

Someone said that what we’re hoping to build is not a museum so much as a lab. I do look at West Collection as a lab where we are constantly trying to come up with  new things to get people engaged. It’s a constant, growing, changing thing.

ABN: There’s one other aspect of the corporate idea that I’d like to explore. In the Lab, Joe Shields from Johnson & Johnson drew a bell curve on the whiteboard, and he pointed to the middle of it – representing the  middle class or corporate America – as a sort of swing vote or tipping point for  contemporary art.

Right now, you go to a museum and you see a big banner that says “Ford Motor Company” or “Bank of America” or whoever, and the relationship between the corporation and the art is rather distant or aloof. This would be something really different. Over time, you could coherently make statements like “Ford employees like abstract art, Coke employees like figurative art.” You would learn things about the companies and the art over time.

PW: They would be expanding their brands and creating personality through art and their employees, rather than some committee deciding that they are going to support a certain show at the Museum of Modern Art. This would be a whole company getting involved, rather than just the corporation spending some money – though it is also great that corporations support museum shows.

We considered the idea of pursuing this was a for-profit piece that supports a non-profit piece. So we could go to a Coca-Cola who would pay for environments like Hot Hall, but while they’re doing that they would also be getting Hot Houses into warehouses throughout the lowest socio-economic areas of Atlanta. The corporation would be taking the same environment they are using to spark creativity in their offices and using it to spark creativity throughout a city.

ABN: You could even imagine art traveling back and forth between the two locations. It would be fascinating to walk along at Coca-Cola and find out that one of the works had previously been in the Hot House from a bad part of town. And to see people’s comments about it – most of the time corporate executives would not even have a reason to interact with people from those neighborhoods, much less solicit their opinions about art.

PW: The people in those neighborhoods could also be looking at the art at Coca-Cola and saying, “You know, we would really like to see that piece here.” They could call the shots about what they would see in their community. They would probably see Coca-Cola in a different light, and then be able to share in a unique art experience. This may be naive, but I think it would be fun to see if you could spark that between a community and a company, getting them to share art and disagree about art and fight over it.

ABN: So let’s say that corporations do turn out to be key to the plan. Let’s say duplicating the West Collection at SEI in another company is the first goal. You’ve established that the first thing you need to do is to thoroughly document what you already have. What’s the next step?

PW: Find a very good salesperson. I think that if we can document what we have done, it’s just going to be finding the right first partner, a company that gets it and that would be willing to replicate it to get a better bottom line and a happier workplace. Most to all of corporate collections out there started with someone at the top who was passionate about art – usually someone at the tippy-top. This would take the same thing. It would take a leader who is willing to take a risk and a challenge like Al [West] did at SEI. He’s no dummy – I know that when he came and said we need art at SEI, he was thinking big-picture. He wanted to push the envelope. But I think not just the first company, but the fifteenth company would have to have a unique environment. It’s not for everybody.

ABN: Sure, and you can also imagine practical requirements. Presumably these forward-looking companies have already figured out that you don’t want a completely stifling office environment full of cubicles and narrow halls and no open spaces. But if they did have that, the art might not work there.

PW: We definitely have gone through a period where companies tore out walls and opened environments. Most companies have come to a more democratic idea about the use of space. But you’re right, the space might be just as important as the leadership.

ABN: Let’s say that 20 years from now, you haven’t just found that fifteenth company, but the 1500th. Let’s say this becomes a standard part of the art world as well as corporate America. What does the world look like when it’s a completely normal thing to ask your friend what kind of art you can find in their company’s Hot Hall?

PW: Well, the world would have a lot more artists in it. We would be able to support many more artists if this is the way corporate America, or the corporate world, for that matter, goes. I like a world that has more artists in it.

I have been able to see firsthand the change that art has made in a number of employees’ days, whether it’s bringing in new smiles, new perspectives but also new contentions, new angers – being able to actually elicit some kind of response that is not expected in a workplace. That is going to make the world a more human place, I would like to think. You would be able to think about things that we are not expected or encouraged to think about at work right now. Ideally, we’ll end up with happier employees, better products, and a more forward-thinking environment that embraces conversation among more people. That would all be thanks to artists.

ABN: You know, it’s interesting. My wife was an art teacher in a public school. And you can see firsthand in that environment the low legitimacy society gives to both public school teachers and artists. People talk about “job creators,” and they understand in a very abstract way that you need those educators to make those jobs possible. But their actions don’t reflect that sense of value. Artists, in a way, have it even worse from that political economy point of view, because most people don’t even notice them in the first place.

PW: Right, people recognize that they should care about teachers or that teachers should be better. No one says “we should care more about artists.”

ABN: But if you can say in 20 years that what really differentiates the American economy is art – that’s pretty cool.

PW: Yes. Bravo. Please yes. If not me, somebody. That would be my world – more artists, happier people, better products, all thanks to the fact that more art is being appreciated and engaged with.

ABN: I think this idea of people being able to express their opinions at work is another really interesting aspect of this. Most of the time people in the corporate world don’t talk about the controversial aspects of religion or diversity or emotions until something goes wrong. Art is almost like a workout for that stuff.

PW: Right, the cow motorcycle and the Indian employees at SEI is a great example of that. Not only did the Indian employees come to us and mention that they had a problem in a respectful way, but the artist was actually able to come back and explain that the cow had died in a natural way, for instance. And once word got out that we had done this, people started to think about the fact that their team members and co-workers were from India and had a different set of beliefs. It was a whole new perspective. They are thinking about the challenges they face being away from their countries and their families because of the challenge that art brought to the company. We invited the entire community to learn.

ABN: Imagine if that had happened for “Piss Christ.”

PW: Exactly. There was a Robert Mapplethorpe show in Ohio a few years ago that the NEA had funded that many people got upset about. Even though they were complaining about the art, what was really coming out was how they felt about gay people and all this dark, dirty, sex stuff no one likes to talk about. It took art to bring out those conversations and topics.

ABN: So it sounds like something really new and radical could come out of this Lab. But you also have many peers out there in the art world who aren’t in a position to completely transform their institutions. What do you think are some ideas from this Lab that they might be able to apply in those settings?

PW: Well, to go back to our earlier example, it’s not necessarily the curator’s fault when they don’t know anything about how people react to their art. That may be the nature of their job. So it depends. I have lots to say about how we could change the gallery world and generate new collectors and things like that.

But it’s funny, I thought we were going to the Lab and figure out how to shake up this other industry, the museum industry. In the end, though, the message I took away was for us to look at ourselves, what we’ve done in our own small way, and figure out how to replicate it. I want to go and do and show now.

ABN: I wonder if in the long run you would create something that does not directly compete with museums, that doesn’t have anything to say to them directly, but provides a really interesting world for them to play in if you succeed.

PW: Historically, the only thing to do for families that collected was to turn it over to a museum. Ten or twenty years ago, families started saying, “I don’t have a museum I particularly trust” or maybe “I want my name to be on the museum.” They got tired of building wings and started to build their own museums. So maybe this is the next phase, which is to create a new kind of space for a collection.

I know the collection is unique. I know the programing is unique. I know the outreach is unique. And I kind of want to continue to play in this field that I’m having so much fun in at SEI. I want to keep exploring and sparking people to see how they feel about art. Turning it over to somebody else doesn’t allow me to do that.

We have museums that shouldn’t go anywhere – they are important institutions. We have collectors who are putting together really unique collections and dynamic programming. That needs to continue. Now maybe there is another category over here that we can create and nurture and find success in.

ABN: At the Labs we work with all kinds of institutions, large and small. A lot of times we have executive directors and senior staff in the room. But this organization is you – it has your name on it. Your whole heart and soul is in this. So I’m wondering – how do you feel?

PW: After this experience, I feel great. I felt great from the first time I had a conversation with Jeff and Howell. Now I feel completely energized and overwhelmed at the same time. I love the thinking this has brought on. I love where this has taken me. I love that it completely shattered my world as to what I can do with the collection.

But it’s an overwhelming challenge to think about how to put it in action. We know that the first thing we need to do is to record everything that we’ve done. But since I don’t do anything in a linear fashion, while we’re recording I know we’ll also be developing what comes next. So I’m completely energized and overwhelmed, and I think that’s a good place to be.

ABN: Do you have anything else you would like to add?

PW: To the people in the room, I just want to say thank you. These people didn’t know anything about us, and came in and really gave it to us. For that I’m extremely grateful.

The one other thing is that while we’ve talked about going into companies like SEI and creatively juicing them up, I think it would also be very important to do the same thing for cities. It may not be something I am able to accomplish. But if somebody could get their head around how art could make a community healthier, like I have seen it make SEI healthier – if you could do that for cites, that’s huge, and I think it’s something somebody will be able to accomplish.