Tania Talks Museums with Zinnia Willits
Executive Director, Southeastern Museums Conference, Part 1 of 2
Zinnia Willits is the former Director of Collections and Operations at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, where she worked for seventeen years. Before the Gibbes she worked as an archivist at the College of Charleston, registrar at the Augusta Museum of History in Augusta, Georgia, and assistant registrar at the Micheal C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta. She became the Executive Director of the Southeastern Museums Conference (SEMC) in 2020. Zinnia also teaches museum studies courses at the College of Charleston and George Washington University. Before employment at SEMC Zinnia served as the organization’s board president and program chair. Zinnia holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology and history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Arts degree in public history from the University of South Carolina. I met Zinnia in the late 1990s when I served as registrar at Telfair Museums in Savannah. I have enjoyed knowing and learning from and with Zinnia since then. We talked via Zoom in January. Here’s some of our conversation.
Tania Sammons
How did you find your way into the museum industry? Was there a particular museum that drew you in?
Zinnia Willits
I didn't grow up going to museums, but I remember being in sixth grade, and going on a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I remember feeling like I wanted to know everything in the exhibit, and having an interest in how things were displayed. In college, I thought I would go into advertising and communication, but I wasn't in tune with the classes. I took an anthropology class my first semester of college, and it resonated with me, so I took a few more anthropology classes. I was really interested in cultures. I also became very interested in material culture. I ended up switching my major to anthropology. I was going to be an archaeologist, but spent a summer doing an archeological dig in central Illinois and realized I didn’t know if I could commit my whole life to it. But, I was really interested in the findings, and how to share them.
I had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't have a lot of guidance. I was in a kind of existential crisis, like so many of us who pursue this work. I had friends in business and other majors who were suddenly getting job offers, and I'm like “what am I going to do?” I remember being in the anthropology department and seeing an advertisement on the bulletin board for internships at the Smithsonian and thinking that would be interesting. I applied and was accepted. I wanted to work in the National Museum of Natural History, but was placed at the National Museum of American History. I was very fortunate, because there are a lot of barriers in this profession. In my case my family financed me to live in Washington, D.C. for the summer because the internship was unpaid. I lived in the dorms at George Washington University, and worked with a collections manager processing a collection of objects from the 1939 New York World's Fair. We were at an offsite storage facility in Maryland half the time. It was sort of like a bunker. I just laughed at it, and said to myself: “this is what I’m going to do.” I liked the organization. There’s a certain satisfaction in processing collections. That was the moment that sent me in the museum direction. I decided to pursue a master's degree in museum studies.
Tania Sammons
How did you end up at the University of South Carolina?
Zinnia Willits
Neither my husband nor I are originally from the South. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and he grew up in Indiana. Graduate school brought us down here. I always say go to graduate school somewhere you think you might want to live because that's where you start to make professional connections. When I was coming out of college there weren't many programs out there. I ended up at the University of South Carolina, in their public history program. That appealed to me because I could concentrate on museum studies, and also learn about historic preservation and get a foundation in archival work as well. But what was really foundational about that experience was a graduate assistantship working with the collections manager at the campus museum at the University of South Carolina, the McKissick Museum. That’s where I learned all of my on-the-job training. It confirmed that this is actually what I wanted to do.
Tania Sammons
After graduate school, where did you go?
Zinnia Willits
My first job was assistant registrar at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory. I went from there to the Augusta Museum of History in Augusta, Georgia. I needed to take a step back, and life started to dictate some of my decisions. I was the first professional registrar they had. I handled a 30,000-object collection, which was a lot of responsibility for an emerging museum professional. I look back at some of the things I did, oh, man! But it was such a great learning experience. I was in Augusta for a few years. I got married, and we moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where my husband got a teaching job. The museum community in Charleston is smaller than Atlanta, but I started making connections and figuring my way in. I worked on an NEH grant-funded project in the Special Collections Department at the College of Charleston for about a year and a half. We processed archival material in the Jewish heritage collection, which dated back to colonial days in Charleston. I was not a true archivist, but I worked with real archivists and learned a lot.
I really wanted to be back in a museum. I made some connections at the Gibbes Museum of Art when they needed some extra hands with a huge installation. I got to know their staff, and when their registrar left I applied for the position and got it. I stayed there for 17 years, working in collections and exhibitions. I had maybe four titles over the time I was there, but my final title was Director of Collections and Operations. If you stay somewhere long enough your roles change. In my case a lot of that had to do with the museum going through a major renovation. They needed a senior staff member to be in charge of the building, and it made sense with my collections responsibilities as well.
Tania Sammons
Museum professional development has always been a passion for you. Will you talk about that? How has your involvement in state and regional museum associations impacted your career?
Zinnia Willits
I worked in museums for a very long time, and then I had children and was working and juggling and trying to be everywhere. I was literally just trying to do my job, and deal with my kids. At a certain point my kids got a little bit older, and we had more of a routine, and managing that aspect of my life became easier. All of a sudden I started to feel a little stuck. I looked at the organizational chart at the Gibbes Museum of Art, a medium-sized art museum, and realized there wasn't a lot of upward trajectories. We didn't want to leave Charleston, but I've always been very professionally driven. That's a huge part of my life, and who I am. It fulfills me as much as my family does.
I called a friend of mine involved with the South Carolina Federation of Museums and asked how I could get involved. I went to their annual meeting, and presented a session. Once you make a presentation at a conference people come up to you afterwards. They appreciate what you said and connect with it. I liked the way that felt, and it gave me more confidence. I went to other sessions and learned and would go ask questions. Those peer to peer relationships were important from the beginning. I felt like I was part of a network, whereas if you stay within your museum bubble with the same staff you don't feel that. It's nice to step out and become part of something larger.
I was very fortunate that I worked in an organization with an excellent executive director that supported me in doing this. I also think that she, and this is a leadership thing, saw something in me and she knew I was a little bit frustrated. She knew that I wanted to do more, and there wasn't necessarily that opportunity at that point within the organization. In order to keep good people, sometimes you have to let them fly a little bit. I always give Angela Mack credit. That's really important to establish, because there's a lot of organizations that don't support that kind of growth. I continued to get more involved. The more involved you get, the more name recognition you have. When I went to the state conference, I was in a totally different professional mode, while also representing my organization and bringing the good work that they were doing to a wider network.
Doors started to open in ways I could not have anticipated. I ended up the program chair for SCFM, and I organized the annual meeting. I was growing new skills. I had to ask people for money, and I enjoyed that. I did the same work with SEMC. I remember calling Susan Perry and she put me on a committee. Whenever people reach out to me in my role now, and ask me to do that directly, I have to take that very seriously because I feel it. I know that they understand what this is all about. I've always been very committed to trying to put people in the right committees or open doors as others have done for me.
Tania Sammons
How did your work with museum associations lead you to leap from collections work to SEMC leadership?
Zinnia Willits
I plugged into professional networks early on. I started with state museum associations, and learned very quickly that if you offer to help them you'll soon be running a conference or chairing a committee. That was a real benefit because I gained skills outside of my work. SEMC has always been very near and dear to my heart. I started presenting at conferences and attending the annual meetings, and then I got involved with the program committee, and had a say in how the organization presented sessions regionally to museum professionals across the twelve Southeastern states. I was on the board, and became the board president.
Longtime SEMC Executive Director Susan Perry became a mentor to me in a different way than someone inside the museum. She had been the director for ten years, and announced her retirement in December 2019. I had always wondered what it would be like to have Susan’s job, to be the executive director of this organization. I knew SEMC was an important resource and association in the Southeast, and felt somewhat called to do it. Association leadership is a strange animal. You need the skills to manage it, but you also need to really love and believe in the organization, and what it is they're trying to accomplish. I was the president of the board, but I decided to throw my name in the hat. I went through the same process as everyone else who applied, and ended up with the job offer the first week of March 2020. I was excited and accepted it. I went back to the Gibbes Museum of Art, and told the director. She was disappointed, but she understood. She said we’d wait until the full staff meeting the next week to make the announcement, but there was no next week. The pandemic hit and everything went sideways. That was a bummer because after working there for so long I was never able to be with that full staff again in person. Susan retired at the end of April that year, and I took over officially on May 1, 2020. I felt the weight of it right away.
Tania Talks Museums with is a free monthly post that features interviews with museum professionals and enthusiasts. Come back to Tania Talks Museums on April 30, 2024, for Tania Talks Museums with Zinnia Willits, Part 2 of 2 to find out what Zinnia says about the rewards and challenges of her job, current museum trends, her favorite museums, and her advice for museum professionals.
Thank you for sharing Zinnia's story! It's empowering to hear about the path others have taken and especially women who mostly have had to punch through glass ceilings to be successful. Zinnia did impressively well because she was prepared to walk through those doors when they opened up.
I enjoyed reading Zinnia's story. It was interesting learning about her journey to the work she now does. Thanks for sharing!