After more than 17 years heading up Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, director Vivian Zoe is retiring.

Zoe, who will turn 70 in June, said she was initially wondering if she really could retire, since her work has been such a strong element of her identity.

“But then I realized it’s time. It’s time to transfer the mantle to the next generation and do the things that I just don’t have the time to do now. I hope some of what I like to do — like traveling again — will be possible, maybe not this summer but soon enough,” she said.

She is also a working artist and plans to spend a lot of time in her studio.

Zoe’s official employment will end June 30, but her goal is to be on vacation by May 27 and use her accumulated vacation time.

The Slater, which is located on the campus of Norwich Free Academy, is operated by NFA and is open to the public (although it was closed for a little over seven months during the pandemic, reopening in September).

Zoe said she hopes that whoever her successor is will start soon enough that there will be some overlap between the two of them. The reason: “It is a complex organization — any museum that’s 130 years old is complex. We have more than 10,000 objects. Not that in a month a new director can understand the collection, but at least (they can) get a handle on the breadth of it,” Zoe said. “It’s a complex institution, NFA is complex. We always say, those of us who are old-timers, that it takes about two years to really understand the institution and all the layers to it.”

She wants to help that process along and considers how smooth the transition goes to be a measure of her performance.

NFA Head of School Brian M. Kelly said, "While I haven’t had a lot of time working with Vivian since I began my position last summer, I have seen her work to find ways to bring the collection of Slater Memorial Museum to its members and the public during the shutdown caused by the coronavirus. Vivian and her team developed numerous video segments to allow guests to experience Slater virtually. Now, we are pleased that visitors can return to the Museum following safety protocols. That has been a welcome addition to our campus.

"Throughout all of this, Vivian and her team helped our faculty and staff continuously utilize the Museum and its collections for our students — and that is incredibly important. Having this resource on our campus helps set NFA apart from others, and we are committed to finding a new director who will both maintain its importance on our campus and increase its visibility in the community and beyond."

Starting with 'Grand Tour'

Asked about her favorite memories or the accomplishments she is most proud of, Zoe mentions a range of subjects.

From the beginning, she completely reinstalled and reinterpreted the museum's permanent exhibitions, starting with what is now called “Grand Tour,” which tells the story of William and Ellen Slater’s round-the-world trip on their private yacht. (William Slater, who grew up in Norwich and attended NFA, established the Slater Memorial Museum in honor of his father.)

Shortly after “Grand Tour” opened, NFA made a decision to build a new atrium for universal accessibility, which was wonderful, she noted, but the construction meant the museum had to close.

“The interesting thing about that was, it seemed devastating, but it gave us 18 months — which, believe me, is not a lot of time — to once again really reimagine the museum. We worked on cleaning — in particular cleaning the casts," Zoe said, referencing the museum's renowned collection of plaster reproductions of some of the world's great sculptures. "We refinished the floors in the cast gallery; there had been this hideous 1970s sculpted harvest-gold broadloom carpet in the cast gallery, and under it was these beautiful wood floors. So we refinished the floors and cleaned the casts, worked on reinterpretation of all of the casts to make them all accessible and to link them to stories in history and stories in mythology.

“Then we literally reinstalled every single gallery in the museum."

That involved a delicate balancing act of making it more contemporary and meeting industry standards while taking into consideration the fact that some long-time Slater fans didn’t necessarily want things changed. In the end, everyone seemed happy with the results.

Meyer, Pratt and Ruley

Zoe mentioned a few significant highlights in her career in terms of temporary exhibits at the Slater. The exhibit in 2015 focusing on John Meyer, a Norwich clothing designer who had a huge fan base across the U.S. in the 1960s, was a blockbuster for the museum, she recalled.

The Bela Lyon Pratt exhibition in 2017 was another highlight, focusing on the Norwich native who became a renowned sculptor of monuments. That exhibition was gratifying in particular because he was sort of a forgotten figure, she said; “He’s the most famous artist you don’t know. There are so many of his works around the state and really around New England that are public monuments … that everybody sees and walks by and doesn't know who created them.”

She appreciated, too, that when Slater had to ask for loans from individual Pratt descendants, collectors and other institutions, it managed to get permission from those sources, with objects coming in from all over the country.

The museum’s 2018 exhibition of work by Ellis Ruley, the Black folk artist who lived in Norwich and who didn't become famous until long after his death in 1959, “really warmed my heart because it served a community that I’m afraid it’s too easy not to serve. It’s the kind of stretching I think the museum has to do long after I’ve retired,” she said.

From Noah Webster to Slater

When she began work at Slater in October 2003, Zoe already had 23 years of museum experience. She had been executive director of the Noah Webster House in Hartford from 1999 until she came to the Slater.

Before that, she was executive director of the Lutz Children’s Museum in Manchester from 1993 to 1995 and was development director for the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society from 1995 to 1999.

She has a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Connecticut in Storrs and master’s degrees in arts administration and theater and design from Ohio State University in Columbus.

Zoe was hired as a consultant in 1999 to complete an evaluation of the Slater Museum, and NFA asked her to apply for the director’s job after the previous person to hold that post, Sheila K. Tabakoff, left.

Zoe thinks she’s leaving the museum in good shape but acknowledges there are plenty of things she’d still like to see happen, including having the roof restored and getting the entire museum climate controlled.

She said when it comes to members of the public who come to Slater for the first time, “One of best things I hear — both best and worst — is after a visit, visitors will say, ‘We knew nothing about this (museum). We didn’t know how much time to plan, and we didn’t plan enough time. This is a fabulous place.’”