Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio’s newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.

The Witte Museum’s new CEO, Michelle Cuellar Everidge, began her new job on Feb. 1.

TPR’s arts and culture reporter, Jack Morgan, recently spoke with her. She explained that the new role comes with some old memories.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Cuellar Everidge: I don’t know if I remember my first [visit] but I came with my grandmother, who was a teacher, English teacher, here in San Antonio, and she would take us to all the cultural institutions. She took us to all the museums. We went to the symphony. She sang with the Master Singers, so we got to hear her sing. And she really introduced us — me and my two younger brothers — to the arts in San Antonio.

And so in addition to a field trip, which I know I took in elementary school, I remember coming more frequently with my grandmother and visiting, especially the Texas Wild Gallery. I remember bisons in the center of the room, and so that’s my sort of most common memory of the Witte is standing in front of the bison in the center of the room.

Jack Morgan: A lot of kids are raised without this objective, but they end up feeling like the symphony and museums and the library—it’s not really for them. But you were obviously raised to think, “yeah, this this is for me too.”

Everidge: Absolutely. I was raised to think that these are places for children and places that children could really enjoy. I think today there are the same drives for families. I bring my children to the Witte and to the other arts institutions in San Antonio. We have a third of our visitors that are children that come through the Witte and so we really try to make it relevant and fun and interesting for people of all ages to feel like this is their space and they can enjoy it too.”

Morgan: Now, your education is a pretty amazing combination of several universities. Do you want to give us a brief overview of that?

Everidge: Sure, I grew up here in San Antonio and wanted to further my education and go away and experience something different. So I got into Princeton University, and I went to New Jersey and studied art history there, and really enjoyed my time at Princeton. Studied quite a lot, and we all had to write a senior thesis at the end of our senior year at Princeton.

My senior thesis led me to this idea that art could be more than just beautiful and more than just something to look at, but rather something that people used. So in thinking about art that people used, I decided to go to a master’s program at Parsons School of Design, and that was held in the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

And then when I came to the Witte, I started as a grant writer in 2009, and [I] was telling these wonderful stories of this museum as a part of writing grants. So one day I would write about the circus collection, and one day I would write about dinosaurs, and then we would be back to Fiesta gowns. And so that exploration of all of these elements of San Antonio history and Texas history really prompted my desire to have further study.

So I planned to go to graduate school again, and I went to the University of Delaware, and their focus really is in their history department is in material culture studies, which is what we now call the type of history that deals with objects and artifacts as historical evidence. I was at the University of Delaware for about five years, and my dissertation was nearing completion. I had a young child at that time and decided to come home and move back to San Antonio, and so I’ve been back at the Witte ever since.

Morgan: You mentioned your grandmother having gotten you on this path. Did she live to see you go far along on it?

Everidge: She did. My grandmother lived to be 96, and she saw me receive my Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. She actually did an edit of my dissertation in pencil, and she was very proud of it. So it was wonderful to get to share that with her. She knew that I was here back at the Witte, and so she was excited to have me back home here in San Antonio.

Morgan: The Witte faces Broadway on the east side, the San Antonio River and Brackenridge Park on the west. Its setting amidst towering trees is one of the nicest in the city. A $100 million capital expansion project eight years ago under previous CEO, Marise McDermott, tore down much of the old museum and replaced it with an impressive limestone and glass one.

Everidge: It’s a beautiful museum and a really large space right here on the San Antonio River. So we have 10 acres here, a place to really showcase the collections and the work of the Witte. And as part of that expansion, we really expanded our reach as well. So we went from really thinking about San Antonio and South Texas, to thinking about all of Texas.

And that was really the intention of Mrs. Quillin when she founded the museum in 1926. … [W]e’ll be 100 in a year, in 2026, and so we’re really returning to her goal of being a museum for Texas, and now we cover all of Texas from millions of years ago to the present. So it’s a vast undertaking that requires a vast space to do it in.

Morgan: Of special pride is how many children visit there.

Everidge: About a third of our visitors are children. We see about 350,000 visitors a year. So we offer scholarship support to Title One and under-resourced schools. And we see about 20,000 students a year in that way. We’d like to increase that.

And so we want to make sure that every child who would like to be here at the Witte could be able to come. And so we are actively raising money, and will continue to raise money to support those scholarships.

Morgan: Have you looked at kids piling off of a bus and thought, “Maybe that’s the future CEO of this place?”

Everidge: Absolutely. We have kids piling off the bus and walking straight into a giant Quetzalcoatlus [the giant dinosaurs that once flew through the canyons west of San Antonio], and they all look up. They all say, ‘whoa!” when they come in.

And it is one of the most inspiring places to sit in the H-E-B Lantern [museum’s huge glass entrance] and watch these children come into the Witte, and I just know that there are civic leaders among them, and there are the next CEOs among them. There are the children that will fall in love with museums that come into the doors every day.