Hasta La Ideas

It seems like just over a year and a half ago that the Smithsonian was announcing that Wayne Clough was taking over as the head of the organization. And that’s because it was just over a year and a half ago that that happened. Clough had come in right in the middle of a tough time for the Smithsonian, with the past few years of big financial hurdles and scandals perpetrated by people like W. Richard West Jr. and Lawrence Small and his cadre of big spenders. All of that, of course, was followed the museum-punishing economic plummet, which hasn’t been nice to any cultural institution. Fortunately, Clough seems to have been weathering the storm fairly well thus far and that’s the subject of this interesting AP piece, looking back at his first year at the Smithsonian and what he’s done to keep things moving forward and afloat, despite all those things attempting to weigh the institution down. It’s a uniformly positive piece, not choosing to talk to people who have less-sunshiny opinions about what he’s done in his first year (there are always some, surely), but it serves as a nice recap and a look at where the Smithsonian is currently headed.

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