Sarah Jesse, Director of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery, joins Jaclyn to talk about her mission to make world-class art accessible to everyone — and what it really means to lead a museum in the spirit of a community rather than an institution.
About This Episode
Who does a museum belong to? The answer might seem obvious — it belongs to whoever can afford to walk through the door, pay the admission, and spend a few hours in the presence of work that someone, somewhere, decided was worth preserving. But Sarah Jesse, the Director of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery, has spent her career building a different answer: a museum belongs to its community, full stop, and the job of a museum leader is to make sure that claim is real rather than aspirational.
Jesse came to the MAG with more than two decades of experience at major art institutions, including time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — one of the most visited museums in the country. LACMA is a place with global reach, international collections, and the kind of resources that most regional museums can only imagine. The lesson Jesse took from that experience, counterintuitively, was about specificity: the most powerful thing a museum can do is know its city and serve it honestly. At the MAG, that means Rochester — a city with a complicated history, genuine creative depth, and a community that has not always seen itself reflected in its cultural institutions.
One of the central initiatives Jesse has championed is making the Memorial Art Gallery free for all Rochester residents. The conversation with Jaclyn gets into what that decision means in practice — not just the logistics but the philosophy. The ticket price at a museum is never just about money. It's a signal about who is expected to show up, whose presence is presumed, and whose is tolerated. Eliminating that barrier is a statement of identity: this is a public institution, and public means everyone.
Jesse is thoughtful about the complexity here. Making a museum free doesn't automatically make it welcoming. There are deeper questions about whose stories are told on the walls, whose aesthetic traditions are treated as canonical, and how staff and programming signal who the institution is for. This conversation touches on all of those questions — not with easy answers but with the kind of honest engagement that comes from someone who has thought seriously about them for a long time.
The episode also speaks to something Jaclyn returns to throughout the season: the way that Rochester's cultural institutions anchor the city's identity. The MAG has been part of Rochester for over a century. What it does with that history — how it updates its relationship with the public without abandoning what makes it distinctive — is a model for how institutions in a changing city can evolve with integrity. Sarah Jesse is making that case one open door at a time.
About the Host
Jaclyn Richard is the host of I've Got a Little Brooklyn in Me, a Rochester, NY podcast celebrating the entrepreneurs, civic leaders, artists, and changemakers shaping the city's future. New episodes drop biweekly on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.