From the first five minutes of our tour of the Academy Art Museum with Erik Neil, we can see he just loves his work. He’s been the Museum’s Executive Director for slightly over a year, and there’s a light in his eyes as he shows us around the facilities.
As the main exhibition galleries had been closed for the installation of the upcoming exhibit “Modernist Inclinations: The Art of Jan Matulka,” on view through October 16, we move directly to the permanent collection gallery. Neil is genial and soft-spoken as he shows us the current exhibit arranged on the walls of two quiet rooms.
Chatting with him about the collection, we feel almost as though we’ve been welcomed into someone’s home. Indeed, this part of the museum was a house before it was purchased by the Museum and connected to the main building (itself a former school built in 1820). These two rooms are now home to a rotating exhibit of art drawn from the more than 1,000 works in the Museum’s permanent collection.
Neil leads us to the library where, amidst the book-lined walls, we get a hint of his scholarly background that includes a BA in History from Princeton University and an MA and PhD from Harvard in 
the History of Art and Architecture. (We learn later that he’s finishing work on a book about Tomaso Maria Napoli, an 18th-century architect of Sicilian villas.)
As we scan the impressive array of art books, I spot a volume on Mark Rothko, one of my favorites. I’m delighted when Neil tells us the Museum is organizing an exhibit of Rothko’s work from the National Gallery of Art’s collection for this coming winter.
After stepping into the Museum’s largest room where concerts, lectures, and ballroom dance classes are held, we continue upstairs to peek in on a class of preschoolers. As the father of four daughters, ages nine to twenty, Neil is especially interested in education, and we see him smile as we watch the kids work, heads bent over their colorful projects, taking no notice of us. Next door, beyond a color wheel pinned to an easel, teenagers likewise are concentrating on their paintings.
We have a look at the main painting studio cluttered with canvases and easels, which Neil plans to upgrade with more efficient storage, then the ceramics studio, its tables crowded with the products of a class called “Critters from Clay,” and on to the very popular dance studio, where classes are held in partnership with the Ballet Theatre of Maryland.
Neil came to the Academy Art Museum from his position as Executive Director of the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York. Previously, he served as Director of the Newcomb Art Gallery of Tulane University where he also taught Art History.
Settling into comfortable chairs in Neil’s office along a quiet hallway, we ask him if a museum professional accustomed to the big cities of New York and New Orleans can be happy at a small museum in quiet little Easton.
He smiles and shakes off the question saying, “It’s a vibrant institution. It’s well regarded and well loved. For a town and county of this size, the interest is phenomenal. That’s very gratifying.”
Noting Easton’s close proximity to Washington, Baltimore and New York, he continued, “You don’t feel cut off from everything. We were going to make a move out of New York and wanted to come closer to our family, and this matched a lot of my interests.”
It turns out Neil is not so far from his roots. He grew up in Arlington and often visited the Eastern Shore on the way to his family’s beach house in Rehoboth. His wife, sculptor Luisa Adelfio, also has family in the Baltimore-Washington area.
One of the things Neil likes best about the Academy Art Museum is its high level of community involvement, including outreach programs with a variety of organizations from schools to senior centers. He tells us about how he enjoys coming into the Museum every morning.
“When you have the Young Explorers preschoolers at work on their projects, volunteers preparing for a concert, families enjoying the current exhibits, it’s a great feeling,” he said. “Part of what we do is show artists from the region, part is to bring in things you wouldn’t see locally. We offer something to the community that nobody else offers.
“I think Maryland is a good place to be for the arts,” he mused. “They’ve kept funding levels for the arts stable. I think arts funding is some of the most effective spending. It supports learning, economic development, any number of areas. You notice how successful people also have art in their homes or they’re very interested in music. These things we think of as extras are very important to them.”
Neil plans to build on this potential. He told us, “One thing on the horizon is expanding education, especially K through 12. We want to supplement what’s available through the schools.”
Recalling his early years living across the Potomac from Washington, he said, “I took a lot of advantage of the museums as a boy, especially Natural History, that used to be called the National Museum, and the Smithsonian Castle. I went to the inauguration of the Air and Space Museum. I’ve been interested in museums for a long time.
“I remember a field trip in sixth grade to the National Gallery of Art. I wrote a paper from that trip on ‘St. George and the Dragon’ by Raphael. You just don’t know how important those early memories of a museum can be.”
