Seattle's MoPop CEO Michele Smith

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I've got with me in person,the CEO of MoPOP, Miss Michelle Smith.
Hi, Michelle, it's great tomeet you in person. It is
really great to meet you. Finally. Yes, so here is my question.
You've been around because you were workingat the zoo. I was raising
money for that zoo. Ah,the world amazing zoo. Yeah, I
have. We have some amazing artsand culture other places. This is a

(00:24):
great city. Yeah, it is. So what you know, you're driving
around and you're like, what madeyou want to you drive past this?
Well, I mean you go,I want to work in there? Well,
I mean, who wouldn't. It'sa Frank Curry building, right,
you know, one of a kind, one hundred and forty thousand square feet.
Yeah, and so you know Ilive downtown. Oh yeah. And

(00:44):
so I've been in Seattle for sevenyears and I had the opportunity to work
at the award winning Woodland Park Zooand do a lot of great things.
And when this role came up,I was like why not. You know,
I am a lover of the artsand culture. I play piano,
play violin, sing, coror stands, all those types of things. And
you know, MoPOP not MoPOP,but pop culture has been in my DNA

(01:07):
since I was born, and sothis is the best job ever. Why
wouldn't I want to be the same, No kidding, no kidding. Well,
congratulations. So right now you've gota new exhibit and I just toured
it with Jacob. What do youthink? I love it? Cool,
It's really cool. Made me thinka lot. What did make it do?
What did you think about? Iwish we'd had more time, but

(01:29):
there were people all gathered around.It was the thing about color and barbies
and what color does for a personand how it makes you feel. Yeah,
and like what about you know,sitting in the living room and you
could go through time and see howpop culture has changed over the years,
and like where you were at thattime, how did that make you feel

(01:52):
exactly? And like even when yougo up into the older exhibits like Kurt
Cobain's, you know, the wholeNirvana exhibit that's always here. Yes,
you see his old yellow sweater andthen he is gone, and then you
just feel sad. So there's justa lot to be said about feeling when

(02:13):
it comes to popular culture. Yeah, I mean, well you also saw
the area around gone too soon withRobin Williams and how we focus on mental
health right, and how that's reallyprevalent right now, you know, and
that is in the new exhibit,Massive The Power of Popular Culture. Yeah,
I was talking with Jacob about likewe all thought we knew him,

(02:36):
Robin Williams and Kurt Cobain and everybodywho's left us who was a huge part
of our DNA. Everybody loved RobinWilliams, and when he died, everybody
freaked out because we all were closeto him. We were you know,
there are these characters are in ourlives every day and some people, you
know, as you think of thefandoms, you know, we relate our

(02:59):
own sometimes our identities to the charactersthat we're seeing. And that's what's really
powerful about the power of pop culture. It helps people think about a time
or they relate to a character ora feeling. And so that's what's so
powerful about this exhibit. There's somethingfor everyone. It's multi generational. Even
if you bring your family, youcan talk about a time where you were

(03:22):
At that time something happened pivotal inpop culture. Everybody remembers their first concert,
right or the outfit that Beyonce waswearing yes, or you know Batman
and you know the cape and things. But you know, massive the power
of pop culture not only talks aboutpop culture, but it also talks about
the work that we do here atthe museum. You know, if you

(03:43):
think about it, these artifacts,preserving them, and what is the power
of pop culture is how we carefor those art you know, for those
artifacts in our care, which isvery precise. It's a science because you've
got to take care of these thingslike Dorothy's one of from the Wizard of
Oz. You have one of Dorothy'sblue dresses, the little yes gingham right,

(04:08):
yeah, you know, and youjust can't just store that away in
a closet. There is a lotof care that we take for our collections
here to restore that. And oneof the reasons why you see Batman without
the cape is because when we receivedit, it was not really care for
as well to be putting out ondisplay. And so who is Batman without

(04:29):
his cape? O? It iswhat I say, But it's because we
don't put that on display because itwas not in the best care. And
so one of the things that wedo here very well is we take artifacts
like that to preserve it to showand tell the story and history of that
artifact and who was wearing it andwhat was going on at the time and

(04:51):
what was relevant for that article thatwe have. Wow, super cool it
is everybody I am with the newCan I still call you the new CEO?
You know what I am one yearhere and so you can call me
new right one year and one yearold exactly. Michelle Smith of MoPOP the

(05:12):
Museum of Pop Culture right here inSeattle, and the newest exhibit is massive
the power of pop culture, whichit is. It's very powerful. There's
also Lizzo's outfit and you've got whatyou talked about, Beyonce's very cool white
suit. Right. We also havean area. They let me do my
own area. I don't know ifyou saw it, but it was the

(05:34):
Prince. Oh yeah, that wasmy area. So that was nicely done.
Yes, well, I'm a bigPrince fan, so I got very
nostalgic. Well, the cloud guitar, Rain, that's what that was from
the you know, the the roughas lace shirt. Yeah, Rain,
I mean that's iconic. How doyou guys get this stuff? Well,

(05:57):
it's all part of our collection givento us by the Paul Alan Estate and
Paul and he was, you know, collecting all of these amazing things from
art, fashion, music, scifi, gaming and more. And that's
what we're all about right now.And do you still acquire? Well,
we just received an estate gift backin June of last year of four thousand

(06:21):
more items that we're adding to ourcollection and so you know, there's something
for everyone, and we will switchthings in and out, so only one
percent of our collection is on displayhere, so we have a lot to
share and a lot to switch inand out for people to come. So
there's not always going to be thesame thing here, no kidding, you
don't really need to acquire right well, it's going to take a lifetime to

(06:44):
see all of his stuff exactly.That's so great, lots of content to
share. Tell us how is membershipgoing? I know you want more members,
Yes, so we are looking formore members. We just a soft
launch of our new membership program withdifferent ing or value. We are working
now to do a lot of localand community things. We are starting an

(07:08):
apartment program, so you know,when you go to your apartments downtown and
you're signing up for a new leaseand you want to see some of the
arts and cultural in town. Well, you can get a special membership with
us and some of these new apartments. We're coming out with a press release,
you know, so I'm giving yousome skilled teas, little teas there,
little teas coming up. Well that'sexciting, but it's crowded down there.

(07:30):
I just came up and I'm reallyglad to see it's thriving the museum.
The museum is thriving, you know, and we're coming into a really
great summer season where you'll see alot of the cruise ships coming in,
so we'll have a lot of internationalor new people coming in. But we're
also hyper local and we want tomake sure that we continue to focus on
the community that we serve. Soyou don't have to just be from out

(07:53):
of town. You could be fromyou know, Bellevue and coming down or
from Everett or from Tacoma to comesee iconic you know, Frank Gary building,
but also learn about pop culture.So you know, we're here for
everyone, and we're excited that weyou know, continue to get visitors.
That helps us continue to keep ourbuilding going. It helps us really to

(08:16):
expand our operating programs because we haveclasses in camps and different you know,
public facing programs. So yes,membership is really important to us, and
come on down because there's some specialmembership things going on right now and more
to see and we're looking forward tothat. Membership benefits, so like early

(08:37):
access to when we put tickets onsales for new openings of exhibits. There
is a percentage off in our foodand beverage programs. Sometimes we have member
Morning early days, which gives youaccess to have a sneak peak of what
I have going on, or CEOtalks or different special you know people coming

(08:58):
in for different events. So itgives you that first all access pass.
That's nice. Yeah. Another thingyou used to have the sci fi part
separated when it first opened up.Paul Allen Science Fiction Museum. I love
that it's all one, that's allintegrated, which is into this concept of

(09:20):
popular culture. Yeah. Well,I mean we you know, we have
thirteen different galleries here, so somethingto see everywhere. Yeah. Right now,
we have Laika, which is ourexhibit that is on display right now
with Coraline and all that stopped.Oh yeah, tell me about that Leikaka.
So it's like the Hidden World's Coralineyou know the very popular shows that

(09:41):
you see on Netflix for Leika inthe studios and really that's the stop film
animation, and so that's one exhibitthat's here. You have sci Fi downstairs,
you have Horror now, you haveMassive coming up, you have Jimmy
Hendricks and Nirvana. So there's always, you know, something to see.
And we're switching out exhibits. Wehave coming up in August, not August,

(10:05):
but actually October a new exhibit KeithHering. That's going to be exciting.
That is so you know, we'rereally planning our exhibits three years out
so that there's something different and somethingnew to bring in because we know that
people like to come here and lingerand see, and so we want to
be able to continue to be relevantand provide what's going on in the global

(10:28):
pop culture environment. Yeah, thatwas my next question. It's like a
meeting place because there's all these differentempty rooms in the sky. What was
this that Well, we're you knowright now we're in the Blue Lounge,
but the sky Church where you canjust sit and look at the videos.
But you also have the sound labsound lab where you can record, you

(10:48):
know, playing guitar or all thosedifferent things. It's really hard to get
the kids out of there. Youknow, they're playing the drums, they're
recording, they're listening to tracks.So that's a fun interactive area that parents
always seem to have their kids inthere for a very long time. I
love it. But then you cango, you know, sit and buy
some retail or go downstairs and enjoysome local sustainable food with our food provider

(11:13):
that does an amazing job, so, or you can go into the Sound
and Vision where we have movie screeningsand different things like that. Really nice.
I met MoPOP with CEO Michelle Smith. Is there anything else you want
to let people know about the wholegestalt of popular culture and what you represent
here at this museum. I thinkwhat I'd like people to know is that

(11:37):
pop culture is a global language.Right. We saw what happened in the
pandemic when we couldn't go anywhere,and everyone's online on Netflix looking at different
things, and I think that youknow when you come to the Museum of
Pop Culture, pop culture is alive, right. It is a global language.
It helps us learn in different waysabout where we were in certain times.

(11:58):
But we're really focused on how museumscan help bridge the gap with schools
with cultural literacy, right, youknow, everybody learns differently, And one
of the biggest things here is thatwe have a teacher advisory program and we're
working with school groups and different things. And how do we you know,
bridge the gap between math and Englishand humanities and really make pop culture relevant.

(12:22):
You know, one of the thingsthat I was just talking about today
with one of another podcaster was climatechange. You know, how do we
talk about climate change and make itrelevant and fun? Well, focusing on
the movie Wally that has a lotof learnings and lessons about climate change.
And you know, some of theteachers I've told us that they've had a
hard time, you know, makingclimate change relevant at the level for kids

(12:45):
and youth. And so pop culturecould really bridge the gap for you know,
American history learnings about what's going onin time, Like we've said,
we're going all the way back toyou know, Hendrix and what was going
on with thes and the race,riots and things and woodstock. So a
lot of history can be learned bypop culture. And I think that you

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know, we're not giving you ourpoint of view. We want you to
just come in and learn. There'sa lot of learning and unlearning to talk
about pop culture and where we aretoday and for an environment. Oh I
want you to talk about unlearning,can you? Well? I mean it's
you know, as we talk aboutde EI a right, you know,

(13:28):
no one has gotten that right yet, right. And so as I talk
to my team is like we're goingto be on a because we all need
to be speaking the same language.And there's you know, for myself,
you know, a lot of learningand unlearning. And so I think that
that's a focus of what every companyis trying to do with their DEI.

(13:50):
A strategy or belonging is not providea point of view, but provide the
opportunity for a safe space for differentperspectivest that's what we're doing here at MoPOP.
I love it. Thank you somuch for your time. CEO MoPOP,
Michelle Smith. I appreciate you great, great talking to you. Thank

(14:11):
you so much. We are sograteful for you. Thank you for the
time. Bet