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January 24, 2011

Natural leader | An architect of Portland's Arts District returns to lend Roxanne Quimby a hand

Photo/Tim Greenway Daniel O'Leary, credited with reviving the Portland Museum of Art, will lead three Quimby nonprofits

This winter, Daniel O’Leary will move to Portland for the second time when he begins a new job as CEO of Roxanne Quimby’s three influential philanthropies. But the city he will return to will be far different than the one he first encountered.

When O’Leary first came to Maine in 1993, leaving his job at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts to take over as director of the Portland Museum of Art, he was faced with a desolate downtown and rundown storefronts. People here hoped the new museum director might help revive the dingy, depressed area.

“There were lots of empty buildings and panhandlers,” O’Leary recalls. “There was an idea you couldn’t succeed in downtown Portland.”

During O’Leary’s 14-year tenure at the museum, Congress Street transformed from a strip of urban blight into the Arts District, as it’s known today. “It is beautiful how that has changed,” O’Leary says. “People are building condos, and there are vibrant cafes, restaurants, the Friday Art Walk. And the museum was one of the forces that allowed that to succeed.”

O’Leary, who is 67 and has a Ph.D. in art history as well as an MBA, brought the museum back to financial health and fortified it as the anchor to the flourishing district. “He is credited for providing the museum, which had been plagued by financial shortfalls for more than a decade, with 14 balanced annual budgets,” a press release from Quimby states. He and his staff of 50 also nearly doubled attendance, tripled membership, restored the museum’s historic buildings and raised the endowment from $3 million to $36 million, according to the release. For the last two years, O’Leary has been the president of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, N.Y.

This transformation is the type of change Quimby wants to see more of in Portland and in Maine, O’Leary says. She started her first foundation, Elliotsville Plantation, Inc. in 2003 to conserve wilderness, and later formed the Quimby Family Foundation and the Quimby Colony, an artists’ residence in Portland, to support, among other objectives, farms, fashion, visual arts, culinary arts and job creation in Maine, according to her release. In December, she announced she was uniting the three nonprofits and hiring O’Leary to manage them all.

“Roxanne believes, and I think it is a brilliant insight, that all of these things have a resonance with each other and that it is a great portion of what makes Maine so special,” O’Leary says. “And she wants to have each of these organizations work together and build a kind of unified engine of Maine quality of life.”

Quimby’s visions are big, and she is in a unique position — because of her entrepreneurial track record and her wealth — to make things happen. Co-founder of Burt’s Bees in 1984, Quimby sold 80% of the company in 2003 for $177 million to AEA Investors, which sold it four years later to the Clorox Co. for more than $900 million, according to The Associated Press. Added up, the Family Foundation and Elliotsville Plantation in 2009 had assets of roughly $144 million, according to tax documents. The Family Foundation, run with help from Quimby’s twins, gave $1.8 million in grants last year. Her wilderness foundation has bought more than 120,000 acres of land in northern Maine, and O’Leary says future plans include creating a national park. His job will be to grow and develop the three nonprofits, forming partnerships with other organizations and individual patrons.

“Roxanne’s vision is behind each of these organizations,” O’Leary says. “And I don’t feel I am asked to enrich it, but rather to understand and fulfill it.”

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