New director at Center for the Arts means business

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

By Richard Anderson

Now that Jackson Hole’s 89,000-square-foot Center for the Arts is built, the real work has begun.

There’s an acre of back yard that needs to be reclaimed and turned into a park. There’s talk about the need of housing for visiting artists and students. There’s the job of putting the Center and Jackson Hole on the map – regionally, nationally, even internationally – as an arts destination. And there’s a complex business model involving 20 individual resident arts and education organizations, the income generated by the facility, and the umbrella nonprofit that has vowed to serve those residents while making the Center financially viable.

In short, there’s a large business to be run – one of Teton County’s largest, when the employees, board members and volunteers of the Arts Association, Dancers’ Workshop, Off Square Theatre Company, Central Wyoming College and all the rest are tallied up – and Stephen Schultz is the businessman up for the job.

Though only 47, New Jersey-raised Schultz has more than 25 years of experience as a senior executive in public and private companies. He started a tech business in Houston and took it public, was so successful during his stint at Digital Equipment Corporation that Compaq up and bought the company, and most recently raised capital and did communications for Acusphere, a Watertown, Mass., -based pharmaceutical company that is in clinical trials for a technique that will allow real-time ultrasound imaging of blood flowing through the heart muscle.

If serving as executive director for a nonprofit arts center in western Wyoming sounds like a radical change in career paths, well, it is, but Schultz said the time was right in his life for such a change, and John Tozzi, the chairman of the board of the Center for the Arts, said Schultz was the right man for the job.

“The Center has now really become a full-time business,” said Tozzi, who since the announced resignation of the Center’s previous ED, Mark Berry, in November, has acted as de facto executive director, presiding over day-to-day operations of the Center, including a highly successful Center Theater grand opening and busy inaugural season. As someone who has been there, he said, “A necessary ingredient for the new executive director is highly professional business skills and acumen in addition to a knowledge and a passion for the arts.”

Schultz happens to fit both criteria. In addition to his high-level business experience, he’s a painter, having earned his undergraduate degree in fine art from St. Lawrence University (where he also skied on the racing team).

“I was a sculptor and printmaker,” Schultz said, bright-eyed, clean cut, and appearing to be bursting with energy. “Now I paint oils.” He’s even won awards back in Boston, and on trips to Jackson Hole (he’s been visiting for a dozen years), he carries his paint box in his pack when he goes into the parks.

“But I decided the pauper’s life was not for me,” he said, so he went into business.
Schultz was hired after an extensive search that eventually went national. All told, the Center reviewed well over 50 candidates. Schultz was one of the first, and he remained at the top of the list throughout the process.

“It was a logical time for me to leave” Acusphere, he said. Having enjoyed what he called “reasonable success” in business, he said he thought it was time for him to give something back, so he “ripped” his life up from Boston. At the moment, he’s in Jackson with his two sons, Bennett, 12 (who works at the local Dairy Queen and is getting ready for hockey camp at Snow King later this summer), and Cord, 15 (who last week attended Rock ’n’ Roll Camp, put on by one of the Center’s resident organizations, the Jackson Hole Music Experience). His wife, Heather, remains back East until his daughter, Erin, is done with her current term at the University of Massachusetts.

“I’m excited to become a part of this community,” said Schultz, who said he had been getting tired of crying on the tarmac at JH Airport as he was leaving to go back to Boston. “Finally!”

But change of career path does not mean change of pace. Just one week into his job, he already has a lengthy list of priorities, starting with meeting everyone he can, gathering information and understanding the Center for the Arts’ strengths and weaknesses.
“Stage One was getting [the Center] built,” said Schultz. “The next phase is going to be about management, growth, awareness, processes and procedures.”

Schultz said the arts are full of strong personalities. In business, he’s had to deal with plenty. He said the way the Center is currently organized, with 20 autonomous organizations with their own boards and brands, is rare if not singular. “I’ve run organizations with autonomous units that each want their own brand ID,” he said.

“One of my favorite things about business is solving problems,” he continued. “There are challenges all throughout this organization” – transitioning from an organization whose first job was building a facility to an organization whose first priority is operating the facility, proving the organization invaluable to the 20 resident arts groups in the Center, raising regional and national awareness for the Center and its programs and, at or near the top, engaging residents with programs and events tailored for them and within their price range – “I’ve got to figure out how to add value,” he said. “What’s my function? What’s the charter for this place vis-à-vis the community?”

Schultz said Jackson Hole is known all around the world as a place to ski and hike and raft and climb and enjoy the forests, the mountains, the wildlife. “But the cultural depth is exceptional, too.” The new executive director has a vision of the valley being equally known for that, too.

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he admitted, “but I’m working on it.”

Photo by Derek Diluzio
Stephen Schultz brings 25 years of high-level business experience – and a passion for painting – to his new job as executive director of the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts.

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New director at Center for the Arts means business | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

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