If museum director Gary Vikan had any inkling of the surprise in store for him at this year's annual dinner for the Walters Art Museum board of trustees, he certainly didn't show it.
The festive event, held recently in the marbled sculpture gallery of the Walters' elegant 1904 building, seemed to be drawing to a close when Vikan approached the podium to deliver a few remarks and introduce board president Bill Paternotte after desert was served.
"This year we've decided to add a little twist," Paternotte began.
Turning to a startled Vikan, Paternotte said, "Gary, all of us honor you on your 10th anniversary as director," he said. "And tonight we've gathered a small group of people who know you to help us. What we have in mind is not a roast, it's more of a toast."
His comment was apt: For Vikan and the Walters, the last 10 years have been a fast-paced ride of change and growth, both personal and institutional.
When Vikan was hired at the Walters by then-director Robert Bergman in 1985, he was a conscientious but somewhat shy scholar-curator who spent much of his time tending the precious objects in the museum's medieval collection and virtually none dealing with the public.
Today, Vikan is the museum's most recognizable public face and an increasingly visible presence on the national scene as a spokesman for arts policy. And the museum he heads has gone from one with a reputation for almost hermetic indifference to the world to one widely recognized as among the art world's most forward-looking institutions.
"When I first lived in downtown Baltimore in the mid-1960s, the Walters was a very sleepy place that nobody visited and nobody was encouraged to visit," Paternotte recalled.
"Gary has created a vast range of programs and an environment in which lots of people feel welcome and attracted to the Walters. That's a major accomplishment."
'Realizing our best'
The institutional changes are visible everywhere -- in the $37 million renovation of the museum's Centre Street building, with its gleaming new lobby and beautifully reinstalled collections of ancient, medieval and 19th-century art, in important new collections of Ethiopian, Asian and ancient American art that Vikan has championed, and in the continuing renovation of the Renaissance and Baroque galleries, scheduled to reopen in 2005.
