By Joelle Seligson

“Always say yes.” An unlikely mantra for the typically under-resourced, overworked museum employee—but Ron Potvin, assistant director and curator at the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University, Providence, R.I., maintains it’s the best way to get ahead. “If you’re hoping to advance in this field, I think you need to be as useful as possible in as many ways as possible,” he says. “If colleagues ask you for something that’s within your power to do . . . I think you should say yes.”

A nearly 20-year museum veteran, Potvin’s affirmative responses have taken him a long way since he was a “history major without a clue”—eventually leading to his present position. A few years ago, he (unenthusiastically) agreed to assist a colleague with a workshop on genealogical research. “It was on a Saturday morning; there was no stipend, no honorarium,” he recalls, “but I said yes because of that philosophy that you should say yes. It turned out that person later hired me for my current position.

“You never know when a person may be helpful down the road,” he continues. “Certainly saying yes to someone is more likely to be helpful than saying no.”

Playing two major roles on a staff of four can make this philosophy difficult to follow. Potvin has his fingers in so many pies he needs another set of hands. He creates and administers the Brown Center’s budget. He researches, catalogues and manages its collection—approximately 750 objects once owned by the Brown family, mostly decorative and fine arts from the 18th to 20th centuries. He monitors preservation and conservation, negotiates donor relations and long-term loan agreements and coordinates the largely student-curated exhibition program.

Image courtesy of the John Nicholas Brown Center

Though the latter sometimes overwhelms a large fraction of his workweek—the center has held about 15 student exhibitions in the last two years alone—working with students is the part Potvin likes best. “I enjoy the role of mentor probably more than anything else,” he says.

The number-one rule Potvin passes on: A curator’s first responsibility is the care and interpretation of the object. He likes to share an anecdote from his time as a handler, responsible for framing, matting prints and handling paintings. During one of his first weeks on the job, Potvin was with a curator in the storage vault and pulled out a piece that he particularly liked. Upon his saying so, the curator informed him that in his hands was an original drawing by Pablo Picasso.

“I became really uncomfortable touching it, handling it,” Potvin remembers. But the curator told him not to worry. “He said, ‘In a museum we treat everything the same . . . from Picassos to a five-year-old’s art project. If it’s an object in your collection, simply treat it with the highest amount of care. In other words, all things are equal.’”

But collection care is only one piece of the curatorial puzzle. As his track record suggests, one of Potvin’s mottos is that museum novices have to be nimble, prepared to take on many different tasks. His first stint in the field was an internship at a 17th-century house in Newport, R.I., a position that proved much broader—and thus more beneficial—than simply guiding summer visitors through the historic home. “I was giving tours, doing research, helping with marketing and promotion, answering phones,” he recalls. “I stress to students that when they do internships they shouldn’t confine themselves . . . to their main task, but also try to branch out and learn as much as they can about the totality of the way the organization operates.”

The ability to don many assorted hats is becoming increasingly important to curators, Potvin says, as well as to museums as a whole. He has conducted research on how the roles of curators have changed over the past two decades, and believes that the field has become overly specialized, to the detriment of some museums. He says the pendulum is swinging the other way, increasing the demand for even the most specialized staff members to have many different skill sets. Accordingly, it’s important for students not to enter careers with predefined notions of what a director, curator or any other position is “supposed” to be, but instead prepare to be flexible in response to a changing environment.

Potvin says aspiring museum professionals should expect to learn the way he has: through experience, attending conferences and workshops, reading, listening to others, being open to ideas and making mistakes. Admitting that his personal foray into the museum world was largely unplanned, Potvin insists that this kind of inadvertent route is not that unusual. “Working in museums, I think, is more of a calling than most professions,” he explains. “Museum careers are often more accidental than planned, and I think you respond to opportunities in different ways as a museum person, as opposed to someone in business or finance.

“I think it’s a process of weighing fulfillment versus financial security,” he adds. “I think people who go into the museum field are more interested in the fulfillment side of things.”

Ron can be contacted at Ronald_Potvin@brown.edu.