Stefano Catalani taking over at MoNA

The Museum of Northwest Art has a new executive director, Stefano Catalani, starting in January 2022, a museum press release announced Nov. 10. It is hard to know who is more excited, Catalani, C.J. Ebert, chair of MoNA’s board of directors or Joanna Sikes, who will transition to director of development after over 30 months as executive director, first stepping in as interim director in April 2018.

Catalani was energetic in a phone interview Monday. MoNA has energized, refreshed and transported him since he was asked to jury the art for the 2019 annual art auction he says. He shared how impressed he was at “how engaged and supportive the community was and the museum was the epicenter of this experience; those who recognize the (transforming) value of art; that was the moment I took notice,” he said.

Sikes will become the museum’s director of development, an area she is already managing. The transition means “it is going down from four jobs to one,” she said in a phone call Sunday. “It is nothing new for me except I will have one job.” Sikes became interim director “amid an extremely difficult chapter in MoNA’s history,” the museum wrote in its press release. Well over half the board had resigned, six en masse in December, and Executive Director Christopher Shainin the day after a tumultuous town hall meeting attended by some 60 people in February 2018.

Ebert said the museum is “very lucky to have Joanna continue on. We have been on the hunt for a development director for quite some time. To have Joanna assume the director of the development opened the opportunity for a new executive director.”

Ebert, Catalani and Sikes were circumspect on Catalani’s recruitment and selection. Ebert said “It all came together at once.” Catalani said he was flattered and honored to be asked last summer to become MoNA’s director. “I think that Joanna did an amazing job so I was surprised in the sense that she was ready to pass the baton,” he said.

He called his five years as executive director at the Gage Academy, a fine art school in Seattle, founded in 1990, a “good run,” noting growth in funding and staffing and successfully moving their educational programs online after the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down in the spring of 2020.

“It was a good time to leave,” he said. “The opportunity in La Conner and to northwest art was too beautiful to pass on. So many things I want to do up there and put it on the map; it is already on the map with its incredible collection.”

Ebert echoed that the museum’s collection was an attraction. “Our collection of northwest art is nearly 2,500 pieces. Stefano has an interest in presenting that collection to the community through the museum,” he said.

Catalani is philosophical. He believes “art has a language and has the power to bring together people and engage them in an experience; they become an experience in something that binds them or divides them but engages them in a conversation: why we are here, what are we expressing, looking at the future by looking at the past.”

He is also looking forward to living in the Skagit Valley; that was part of the attraction of the position. He grew up in a rural area outside of Rome and waxes romantically about the Skagit. “It is a perfect place it is so beautiful; I always exit at Conway and go through the Skagit and emerge at SR 20. I never go through Mount Vernon. I want to go through the Skagit Valley every time. It speaks to me. I am really excited,” he said, and he sounded so.

Catalani, who loves to cook, will combine this “amazing art work and the freshness of food. The Skagit Valley offers me the same two things: art and the seasons related to the landscape.

After Thanksgiving he flies to Italy to see his parents for a month. Returning, he will find the right place to rent, a space that supports cooking and entertaining. He owns a townhouse in Seattle and will keep that. He has a cabin on Decatur Island and will continue to use that, too.