The pandemic proved something to William Keyse Rudolph. It showed him that art matters. Granted, he kind of already knew that. You don’t get to be the deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum without knowing that art is important. Still, the pandemic drove it home.
When 2020 began, Rudolph was co-interim director at the San Antonio Museum of Art. That February, he agreed to a new job in KC. Just a few weeks later, the world shut down. He started working remotely. “I was in the same living room for months,” he says.
Weren’t we all.
The explosion of online, pandemic-era creativity showed him how much people care about creative endeavors. “People need art,” Rudolph says. “The culture industry is something that people want and turn to for entertainment, for inspiration, for solace, for helping them get through the day. And that just underlined it indelibly for me.”
The son of an academic, Rudolph spent his first few years in Blacksburg, Virginia. Just before he started grade school, his family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, when his father was named dean of libraries at the university. He tells me this in his Nelson-Atkins office. One wall is covered in bookshelves, a window overlooking the Walter De Maria reflecting pool installation on the north side of the museum. His dark hair is cut short, features sculpted.
Growing up in Lincoln, Rudolph’s first experiences of Kansas City were going to Worlds of Fun and seeing the Plaza Lights. As an adult, he’s found so much more to love about the city. He sees a willingness to dream big and embrace the future in our town, whether it’s a new airport, the World Cup or the KC Streetcar.
“What is palpable to someone like me, coming from outside and living here now, is that the city does have an energy,” he says. “Change is afoot.”
That energy, of course, is fueled by the arts. Rudolph is thrilled by the city’s generosity and the “amazing benefactors for the Nelson and other institutions.” He glories in the “robust artistic infrastructure”—not only museums and galleries but also local arts organizations, artist groups and the Kansas City Art Institute, which he calls “one of the country’s great art schools.”
“I’m one of the very few lucky people in the world who gets to say, at the end of the day, I was doing something that I believed in and that gives me pleasure personally.”
