Pamela Kiecker Royall (Photo by Jay Paul)
This month, Pamela Kiecker Royall becomes the first woman to serve as chair of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture’s board of trustees since the museum’s founding in 1831. She joined the board in 2015, leading its first marketing and communications committee, which helped guide the former Virginia Historical Society’s rebranding to VMHC in 2018.
Royall and her late husband, Bill, who died of complications from ALS in June 2020, are well known for their philanthropy and volunteerism. “Bill would always say we’re investors, we’re not donors,” Royall says of their active approach to philanthropy. “He thought of investing as a more long-term commitment where you’re interested in the day-to-day productivity of the organization because it’s the future that you’re most concerned about.”
We talked to Royall about what the future has in store for VMHC.
Richmond magazine: How did you feel about being VMHC’s first female board of trustees chair?
Pamela Kiecker Royall: I remember so clearly [in 2017] when my friend who was the board chair, Jack Nelson, took me down from our board room … and he showed me this plaque, and it had [the names] of all the chairs of the board since our beginning — you know, we are the oldest organization in the state of Virginia and one of the oldest in the nation. And Jack said, “Look at this list, do you notice anything?” and I said, “I sure do. There’s not a single woman on the list.” And he said, “Well, we want to change that, and we want to change that with you.”
RM: With so many distractions in today’s world, how do you battle the perception that history museums are “boring?”
Royall: You don’t want to turn off young people on the notion of learning through history, so [we emphasize] making it fun, making it engaging, making it a place to connect to other people. We’ve got these four pillars of our strategic plan, and one of them is to be a convener. We, like the [Virginia Museum of Fine Arts], want to be a place that people want to be and where people come together. And we really do want to engage new audiences.
RM: How can you accomplish that?
Royall: The way we can engage new audiences is through exhibitions like “Fresh Paint” [a 2018 exhibition that featured murals inspired by VMHC’s collections]. In just this last year, we did “Determined: The 400 Year Struggle for Black Equality” … and “Agents of Change,” about the women’s suffrage movement. We really spoke to a diversity of audiences in a deliberate and really thoughtful manner. … It’s not all about the dead white guys who founded this nation.
RM: You’re taking on this role amid the pandemic and a major construction project at VMHC. What do you think will be the greatest challenges this year?
Royall: I think about this moment in time as an opportunity. Pre-COVID … we had the best-ever year in terms of attendance and diversity of our audience. We had made such a transformative change in terms of how we were perceived and what we were able to say about what we were doing, that it is just sad to be forced to step back. … When we’re able to gather again, we will be ready. And we will be ready in such a significantly different way, physically within this building, that we are going to be able to do what we do so much better. We’re going to have so much greater impact.
RM: What do you think people want from history museums today?
Royall: They really want a place where they can learn, expand their horizons, where they can be challenged. I really think that to varying degrees, not everybody wants to have their long-held views challenged, but we do want to be engaged in discussion. … The types of programs that people sign up for here are often a forum for discussion. They want to be entertained, they want to have fun … they want it to be educational, and they want to come away enriched by it, [but] don’t want it to be boring.
