Megan Johnston's can-do spirit has made Portadown, of all places, the only European stop for a Frank Gehry showcase. She talks to Gemma Tipton.
Portadown is rarely spoken of as a cultural destination. But Megan Johnston, head of Millennium Court Arts Centre, has ambitions for the Co Armagh town. In fact, coming from the US, she has the kind of ambitions that speak more of New York than they do of what some people see, Orangemen aside, as little more than a stop on the railway line between Dublin and Belfast. "There's a struggle to remind people to make the effort to come here, to get off the train," she says. "It doesn't matter where on the island someone is; special things can happen anywhere. It depends on the people."
Johnston developed her taste for surmounting obstacles as a student in the Minnesota town of Duluth. She found it so boring, she says, that she thought she'd go mad. So she wangled press credentials - the only way you could get a visa - and went to Cuba. When she got back, and feeding her passion for art, she got an internship at Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis. "The Walker was cutting-edge - it showed Fluxus and Robert Ryman and Yoko Ono before anyone else in the US, and it's where I got a lot of my ideas about contemporary art and its relationship with the public. They had an incredible education programme, and as a result their audience came from across the communities. Art wasn't just a middle-class-white thing at the Walker."
Then the University of Minnesota announced that it was looking for tour guides for its new gallery, the Frederick R Weisman Art Museum. "They were having some guy called Frank Gehry in to do the new building. So I went along for an interview in this old place, up all sorts of dusty back stairs, and got the job. It was exciting. Frank Gehry wasn't that well known then; it was before Bilbao. It was at the beginning of all the changes, the alternative notions of what a gallery could be."
The new Weisman, all twisting stainless steel, did not win the instant acclaim that Gehry's later Guggenheim Bilbao did. "Initially we had a hard time convincing people that this exploding UFO, this silver artichoke of a building, would work. But it was wonderful. I've always said that it doesn't matter what you think about art so long as you're reacting in some way."
Johnston met Gehry during the project. "He's really passionate, and who could envy anyone that? But it's very American, and that's something I've come to realise since I've been in Ireland. I think I'm very much the same, which does ruffle a few feathers," says Johnston, alluding to the clash between US and Irish ways of getting things done. "I'm American in my approach, in that I'm assertive, but it's couched in enthusiasm."
Then Johnston moved to New York, to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - the city's most popular attraction, with more than four million visitors a year. She also began working with the Irish Arts Center, developing an interest in Irish art. "I got on to Amazon and bought $700 worth of Irish art books, and I read [ the Irish art magazine] Circa religiously. The exciting thing was the way it reflected the society, what was going on, including the Troubles. The interesting thing about a great deal of Irish art is that, as an outsider, you can see a lot of Irish identity in it. Many Irish artists try to turn their backs on that, to embrace internationalism, but in the US you use your cultural roots. You do it because you play every card you can, whether it's being a woman or being Irish, and I don't see a problem with that."
Johnston's association with Irish art led to her advising on art for Mary Robinson's New York office - and to her coming to Ireland. "It was in 2000. I came to do studio visits all over the country, looking to see who was doing what, what was interesting." One night, in a bar in Belfast, Johnston - whose surname was then Arney - met her husband-to-be, Gary. It was an eyes-across-a-crowded-room thing.
The two have been together ever since. "He came down to Dublin with me, and then, after a year of travelling back and forth across the Atlantic, he came to New York for three months. But he's not a big-city person, so he said let's try it here."
The couple now live in west Belfast with their new baby, Aodhán. "Living there and working in Portadown gives me a social, political and professional bipolar thing. I like to think it gives me an unbiased approach, makes me genuinely open to people from different backgrounds. And of course it stops people putting me in a box."
The job at Millennium Court came up soon after she arrived in Belfast. "I came with the idea of altering perceptions, which comes from how I see art and from exploring people's approaches to art. Everything I do here is a product of where I've come from. The importance we place on publications comes from the Met; the outreach and alternative strategies come from the Walker; ideas of space and creative experience come from the Weisman. All of these institutions trained me to work at the highest museum level, and that's all wrapped up in what I do at MCAC."
Something else that has come, indirectly, from the Weisman is Frank Gehry, Architect: Designs for Museums, which runs for most of the next two months. Millennium Court is the only European venue for the show, which is already being spoken of as one of the most important architecture exhibitions to be seen in Ireland in the past decade. "Part of getting Gehry is that I want people to think: Portadown? I want people to think of it as more than a 'tension city'. That's why we're having billboards in Cork, in Dublin: it's 50 per cent getting people to the show and 50 per cent getting people to rethink Portadown."
Frank Gehry, Architect: Designs for Museums probably won't quite achieve what the designer did for Bilbao, but Megan Johnston is nonetheless making quite a difference.
Frank Gehry, Architect: Designs for Museums is at Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, until May 27. Call 048-38394415 or visit www.millenniumcourt.org