On a recent afternoon, Anne Breckenridge Barrett walked the Tucson Museum of Art campus with the same mix of affection and analytical energy she brought to her first day on the job as the TMA’s new CEO six months earlier.
The museum had just celebrated its centennial, the main building had turned 50, and Barrett said the milestone moment made her ask a simple question with a complicated answer: “What should a second-century TMA look like?”
Barrett doesn’t come to that question lightly. Her life has been braided with the arts since her teens, when she attended Interlochen, the arts-focused boarding school in northern Michigan. She studied photography, landed in New York after college, then spent her 20s working in museums around the world.
“I’ve been fortunate to be at so many incredible places,” she said. “I realized my calling was working with creatives, not necessarily being one.”
Her early career included helping open the first Faberge exhibition post-perestroika at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. She was young, in a foreign country, surrounded by mentors who pushed her hard and trusted her anyway. “It was an incredible experience,” she said.
A law degree came later, but it wasn’t a detour. She earned her J.D. at Vermont Law School to pair legal skills with museum work. At the time, she said, many people in the field were adding MBAs to art history credentials. She took a slightly different route.
“Law is so relevant in museums,” she said. “We handle gift agreements, acquisition agreements, titles to artwork, contracts with other institutions. The legal skillset helps with high-level decision making.” In 2009, she was named one of the Top 50 Arizona Pro Bono Attorneys by State Bar of Arizona — a distinction it’s likely no other art museum CEO shares. “I hope it gives me an edge,” she said, with a laugh.
The road to Tucson
Barrett’s arrival in Tucson was what she pins “the fault of my husband.” She met him in law school, a second-generation Tucsonan studying environmental law in Vermont. After graduation, they planned to start careers in the desert then move on to the Pacific Northwest. Instead, Tucson stuck.
“Tucson hit me hard when I got here,” she said. “It’s an intersection of so many cultures and professions. Through my husband’s family I came to love this place.”
They raised their two children here – one now in college up the road in Tempe, one a high school senior. Barrett said both kids grew up attending museum openings in Tucson and later Chicago, where she took a prestigious job as director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013, dragging her family from the desert to the Windy City.
But her brood was happy to return with her to Tucson, first to work at the University of Arizona, including a four-year stint as director of the Center for Creative Photography (her husband still works at the UofA law school), and now at TMA.
“I brought my daughter to TMA before I took the job and walked her through,” she said. “She said, ‘Oh God, Mom, you have to do it!’”
Her family still grounds her. “When I go home I’m just Mom,” she said. “We hike a lot. We cook. We try restaurants all over Tucson. This city is the smallest mid-size big town I’ve ever lived in. And so it’s really special to us to spend time with our friends and family.”
Connecting art to life
Barrett stepped into the director’s role during a moment of transition. The museum’s centennial brought celebratory projects, but it also raised expectations for what comes next. For Barrett, the mission statement became her guidebook.
“The mission — connecting art to life through experiences that inspire discovery and creativity and cultural understanding — that’s the compass,” she said. “The strategic plan is the map.”
Although her career has taken her to some pretty iconic places in the museum world — New York, D.C., Chicago — she insists she’s now here to stay.
“I’m not using this as a launchpad to go anywhere else,” she said. “You know, I’ve been other places. This is my home. It’s deeply important to me.”
The museum already had momentum. TMA received the American Alliance of Museums’ Impact Award for Community Practice and was featured in Museum Magazine for its community-focused programming. Barrett said she wanted to deepen that work by amplifying what she called “convergence” across departments.
“We work across collections, education and engagement to make the museum experience less static and more inclusive,” she said. “Internally that means collaboration. Externally it means approaching everything through a hyperlocal lens.”
Her first major hire — the inaugural Chief of Curatorial and Convergent Practice, Meg Jackson Fox — set the tone. During a team conversation, Jackson Fox said something that stuck with Barrett. “She said TMA shouldn’t be the place you visit when you happen to be in Tucson. It should be the reason you come to Tucson,” Barrett said. “I loved that. That’s our North Star.”
A museum of place
If Barrett has a central thesis for TMA’s next chapter, it’s that museums in cities like Tucson should reflect their regions with nuance and ambition. Tucson, she said, has an unusually rich convergence of Indigenous history, Latin American culture, desert science and borderlands identity.
“What makes our region distinctive is also what makes it globally relevant,” she said. “Borderlands, water, arid climates, cosmopolitanism – artists here and around the world are wrestling with the same issues.”
Barrett said TMA is leaning into that identity by elevating Southern Arizona artists and placing their work in conversation with the museum’s Latin American and American West collections. “We’re also inviting Indigenous tribal members and community collaborators to be community curators,” she added. “We’re asking questions like, who are our primary audiences? How does the community inform our work? We have to be that intersection.”
She pointed to Tucson’s UNESCO gastronomy designation as another element of place-making the museum can tap. “There’s so much happening here,” she said. “The culinary scene, the healthcare sector, the university, the artistic pulse. I really want us to be that connector.”
The campus question
Barrett’s most ambitious internal goal may be her push to create a holistic master plan for the museum’s downtown campus. The museum (its full name is the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block, after all) occupies a full block of historic adobe houses, courtyards and newer gallery spaces — a charming but complicated patchwork that has grown through decades of expansions.
“We can’t piecemeal it,” she said. “We need a holistic master plan that looks at the entire block — how we educate, how we engage, how we become that nucleus in the center of town.”
She said the board supports the idea and sees it as essential groundwork for what she called a “second-century campaign.” Before launching any major fundraising effort, Barrett said the institution needs clear data, community input and operational alignment.
“My first-year focus is financial discipline and operational excellence,” she said. “If we build strong teams and strong systems, we can push the important work forward.”
She speaks about the museum’s donors with genuine warmth. “We have very dedicated, longstanding donors,” she said. “Growing the endowment is important, but we have to be informed before we kick off the next big campaign.”
Looking ahead
Barrett describes her leadership style as “servant leadership,” a phrase not always associated with the museum world but one she uses freely.
“Leadership can come from any corner of the room,” she said. “I surround myself with people much smarter than me in their areas of expertise. Building great teams is the first step.”
Although she no longer practices photography professionally, she still experiences creativity viscerally. “I’m a sponge,” she said. “Walking through a gallery gives me peace and wonder. Artists are the barometer for society. They’re always one step ahead in interpretation.”
Six months in, Barrett still speaks about the museum’s possibilities with palpable excitement. Her curiosity, she said, keeps circling back to interdisciplinarity.
“There’s so much more that can be done at the intersections of arts and sciences,” she said. “Museums can be that third space where people come together.”
That vision — a museum that is rooted in Tucson yet connected to global conversations, a campus that is both historic and forward-looking, a place that is as much a civic commons as a cultural showcase — seems to animate every piece of her strategy.
“Tucson has so much going on,” she said. “I’m blown away by the activity and the creativity. I want us to be a connector, a convener. And I want people to feel TMA isn’t just a place you visit — it’s a place that calls you here.”