Todd Smith ’88 doesn’t need a map.
On a recent trip to Japan, Smith did what he prefers: He arrived with barely an itinerary, not speaking the language, and just allowed the “travel gods” to take him where they would. He craves the new – especially if it takes him out of his comfort zone.
“I did a bunch of work in China over the years. There are some scary moments when you’re in the back of a taxi in Shanghai and you’re not sure you’re going in the right direction. You go under the river and you’re like, ‘That’s the wrong way,’” Smith says, smiling at the memory. “That’s exactly where I need to be.”
If seeing new places and being open to what they can teach him is Smith’s passion, it has been core to his career as well. For decades, he has run art museums all over the United States, from both coasts to the interior. He’s learned to listen to the public and meet them where they are, from early roles designing exhibits to massive projects creating new homes for museums. And now, as the executive director of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, Smith is right at home in a young and flexible arts scene.
“If you have a great idea, you can make it happen still in Charlotte,” he says.
Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, Smith was more interested in architecture and history. Then, at Duke, an art history course changed his trajectory. He kept the political science major he’d started, but added another in art history. After graduation he started a curator job at the Hickory Museum of Art in western North Carolina.
One of Smith’s classmates is still impressed that he landed the role fresh out of school.
“It’s a classic Todd scenario, where he just walked into and appropriately handled and was successful at this thing that most of us wouldn’t have shot for at the time,” says Kirstin Ringelberg ’88, an art historian at Elon University and an old friend of Smith’s. Ringelberg had an internship at the North Carolina Museum of Art at the time.
“An intern was where I was at,” Ringelberg recalled. “And Todd – Todd became a curator.”
At the Hickory Museum of Art, Smith kept up a respectable pace. Working for a public-facing institution with a small staff, he could bring projects to life relatively quickly while still studying art history. From there, he moved from curator roles, including at Charlotte’s Mint Museum, to leadership roles in Tampa, Florida; Knoxville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; and Fargo, North Dakota. Most recently he led the Orange County Museum of Art in California.
When he took the Bechtler directorship in 2020 and left the West Coast, he was coming home. His family had moved from Virginia to Charlotte, and Smith knew the city well from his time at the Mint. While he was away, Charlotte had grown.
“Richmond gave me a great background of knowing what a midsized city can do, and the richness of its culture,” Smith says. “Charlotte didn’t have that, so it’s created it in the last 25 years.”
Smith arrived in Charlotte during the height of COVID-19, but the disconnection and isolation of that era stubbornly remained even as the pandemic receded. The Bechtler isn’t just an art collection, he feels, but a part of the community – and the community had a major mental health crisis. Smith decided to push back against disconnection within Charlotte with a literal “social prescription.”
“The premise is simple,” Smith says. “You are prescribed by your health care provider with art as a way to connect you to other people.”
The Bechtler is in the second half of its pilot year of a partnership with Novant Health. There are 50 people in the program so far, whose ages range from their 20s to their 70s. On doctor’s orders, they regularly visit the Bechtler and a handful of peer institutions in Charlotte.
“People are saying, ‘Look, this got me out of the house,’” Smith says. ‘This has got me connected to people.’” Smith, decades into his art museum administration career, is using his institution to meet the people of Charlotte where they are.