Museum Trustee Merges Social Justice and Art

Victoria Rogers grew up with activism and public service. She remembers sitting on her father’s shoulders at anti-gun violence rallies in Chicago when she was young. Because of her parents’ prominence — her father, John Rogers Jr., founded Ariel Investments, and her mother, Desirée Rogers, was President Obama’s White House social secretary — some of those early service experiences were out of the ordinary. Take the times she went into prisons with the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he ministered to inmates on Christmas.

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But one experience stuck with Rogers more than all the others.

In seventh grade, she volunteered at the Sue Duncan Children’s Center, which runs after-school and summer programs on Chicago’s South Side. There were plenty of University of Chicago students helping young people with reading and math. Rogers was looking for something she could contribute so she began teaching art classes. She taught painting and drawing, and, on one memorable day, she decided to try papier-mâché masks. She needed to apply a lot of Vaseline to the children’s faces to keep the masks from sticking to them, something the middle schooler hadn’t completely mastered. The project was a bit of mess.

“It was not my greatest moment,” Rogers says with a laugh. But it’s one that would help guide her to where she is today.

“That was my entry point,” she says. “I realized that they didn’t have access to art, and I tried to solve that. Through that experience, actually being able to connect with kids that were shy or maybe not good at math or needed an additional way to express themselves and their life experiences, art became this language.”

Art plays a central role in Rogers’s life. She earned both an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. An avid art collector, she was appointed as a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum when she was just 26, and at 32, she continues to serve. She was on the board of Creative Time, a New York nonprofit that commissions public art, for eight years until stepping down this month and is a supporter of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

For Rogers, art is not separate from activism or social justice or people’s everyday lives but is intimately tied to all of these things. It’s something she feels keenly as a board member at the Brooklyn Museum.

“The mission of the institution is based on social justice — bringing people together through art and experiences to inspire celebration, compassion, courage, and the will to act,” Rogers says. “The Brooklyn Museum is a place where art is a powerful force for personal transformation and social change.”

Probing Questions

Anne Pasternak first hired Rogers as an intern when she was the president of Creative Time. Rogers became a board member there in 2014. Pasternak says that even as an intern, Rogers asked direct and insightful questions about diversity and equity that forced Pasternak to think more deeply about her own biases and limitations.

When Pasternak was appointed to lead the Brooklyn Museum in 2015, she asked Rogers to join the board there, along with two other board members from Creative Time, in part because she wanted to bring young, thoughtful leaders to a board composed mostly of people over 50. “She’s a wonderful young philanthropist. She’s very creative,” Pasternak says. “She’s a great listener, and she’s a really deep thinker.”

Because Rogers is closer in age to many of the museum’s staff members, she has often acted as a bridge between staff and trustees.

“Many of them look up to us and can feel a sense of comfort that the board isn’t so out of reach because she is of their generation,” Pasternak says.

After the murder of George Floyd, Rogers was one of the board members who spoke with staff on a weekly basis to understand their concerns and needs. “It is highly unusual that you can have a board and young staff in conversation together,” says Pasternak. “She was the one to say, ‘Hey, let’s do this.’”

During the 2020 social-justice protests, Rogers also helped start the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, an organization that seeks to provide support to Black trustees. The group grew out of conversations initiated by the Ford and Mellon foundations. One of the goals, Rogers says, was to formalize informal networks among Black trustees and to help them learn from each other.

Ray McGuire, the former vice chairman of Citigroup, serves on the group’s board with Rogers. He joined the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art 30 years ago and also serves on the board of the American Museum of Natural History and other cultural institutions. He now is on the board of the alliance. McGuire has known Rogers since she was young through his relationship with her parents. He has long been impressed by the depth and breadth of her knowledge of the art world and her commitment to social justice and connecting communities to culture.

“Victoria epitomizes the future of the art world,” he says.

CHRIS WAGGONER

When he started joining the boards of elite museums, Black artists were rarely included in the collections, and board rooms were almost exclusively white. That is beginning to change as institutions and boards work to become more diverse and inclusive. But problems remain. The alliance recently published a report based on a survey of 134 institutions that found that Black trustees tend to be younger and are more likely to have Ph.D.s than their white counterparts. Another finding: While Black trustees are highly satisfied with their board experiences, they are more likely than their white counterparts to report a negative climate in the boardroom.

The alliance is important, McGuire says, because so many Black trustees have only been appointed in the past five years or so. It can provide new board members with resources to help them better advocate for Black artists and perspectives, and to give those trustees more agency in the work they are doing.

He’s not surprised that Rogers was one of the founders of the organization.

“She’s an inspiration to those of us who’ve been around for a while,” he says. “She’s so respected and admired, it gives me hope that our best days are ahead of us.”

Tool for Change

Rogers, for her part, is excited about the work of the Brooklyn Museum, which has a long history of connecting with the borough’s communities and promoting social change which is at the heart of her vision for the arts.

“I really do believe that culture has the ability to impact social change. I think it’s an important tool to get people to open up and have difficult dialogues,” she says. “Artists do an amazing job of reflecting where we are as a society right now, but also imagining different futures for us.”