Reflecting on Joanna Sikes retirement from MoNA

Joanna Sikes, the Museum of Northwest Art's development director from 2021-22 and executive director, 2018-2021, said goodbye to her leadership roles at MoNA in November. 

Sikes has had a long and storied career in the arts, one which she found quite actually by accident. It began in the 1960s in her early days at the University of California at Davis, where she had planned to become a veterinarian. Davis, located in California's Central Valley, a largely a rural farming country, was the perfect place to fulfill her desire to be a large-animal veterinarian. On the day she was informed that her arms were not long enough to reach into a pregnant cow giving birth to her calf, Sikes knew she needed to adjust her focus. But to what?

Meanwhile something was about to change at UC Davis. In an extraordinary coalition of alliances, political shifts and timing, the university had managed to attract a faculty that would forever change Sike's life. Esteemed Bay Area artists Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud, with Elmer Bishoff, had decamped from the San Francisco Art Institute to teach at UC Davis. And so it was that she simply "walked into an art department that was loaded with the best''.

Sikes as both student and assistant would make herself indispensable to these artists whose work, individually and collectively, would change the face of California art. They took Sikes under their wing, so much so, that one evening they brought her to see fellow painter Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park." "It blew me away – I just didn't know what to do with it." Sikes continued to take art courses at UC Davis, but in the end feeling that she was not an artist, decided the only way she could function in the art world was to become a curator. 

Upon graduation, one opportunity led to another for Sikes and while preparing to curate a solo show for a then little known glass artist named Dale Chihuly, fate would take another wonderful turn and she would continue to help build Chihuly's career for the next 30 years. Later Sikes would move within the glass art community to work as director of external affairs at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and then on to MoNA in La Conner. 

"In 2019 MoNA was in a bit of a mess both in terms of personnel and finances" recalls Susan Parke, MoNA's curator emeritus and a former executive director. "Then came Joanna Sikes to the rescue. With Sikes at the helm, MoNA ended almost in the black for the first time in many years. She was willing to take advice and we talked a lot about what was happening and what had happened. She was able to use some of my experiences and thoughts to essentially turn things around. She had a great staff who knew what they were doing and were happy to go ahead and just do it."

Stefano Catalani, MoNA's new director, agrees. "Joanna inherited an institution which had lost its way forward, stricken as it was by financial losses and board divisions. She was instrumental in healing the institution by stabilizing the finances, inspiring the staff and offering the board a road map out of the tunnel."

He notes her contributions: "I see her impact every time I walk into the Museum and meet the staff. The staff truly loves her and she not only supports them but offers them an invaluable emotional stability so critical to not only go about the day-to-day workload but also embrace with vision the long-term challenges of working in an art non-profit organization." 

I ask Sikes what her plans are now – and she smiles.

Holgate, a fine artist, has a studio in La Conner and has exhibited at MoNA.