Scott Metelko, Arts Executive

Amarillo, Texas · 2022 to now

Santa Fe Historical Railway Museum

The depot as planned. Concept art by Melody Matheny.

I'm laying the groundwork for a new railroad museum to open in Amarillo's historic Santa Fe Depot.

Before a museum opens, how it's run is all its backers have to go on. To raise the money to get this one off the ground, we have to show the community we'll be a trustworthy steward of our assets, and that depends on good governance.

When I arrived, the board had been operating for about twenty years, and its governing documents all needed updating. I rewrote the bylaws, and the board adopted accounting procedures I wrote. We've started recording years of donated objects, and before every board meeting, I build the agenda and prepare the board.

I'm writing the strategic plan and the financial model for opening the museum and running it. Our impact study projects 100,000 visitors a year, and with them 137 jobs and $225,000 a year in hotel tax.

The county is already a working partner. It provides the museum with office space and collection storage, and its chief elected official approves every board appointment.

The historic Santa Fe Depot, where the museum is planned to open.

The depot as planned. Concept art by Melody Matheny.

A planned exhibit space. Concept art by Melody Matheny.

Santa Fe 5000, the Madam Queen, the first locomotive of her class.

Duncan, Oklahoma · 2020 to 2022

Chisholm Trail Heritage Center

In twenty-four months, the Center's endowment grew from $3.5 million to more than $6 million, and its yearly guest count doubled to 15,000.

The board hired me to reverse several years of financial decline. I started in February 2020, and COVID closed the doors at the end of March. I spent my time in city offices, service clubs, and classrooms before I asked anyone for money, and I gave people reasons to come to the Center. The money followed. I raised nearly $1.6 million in those two years, and almost none of it came from a campaign.

The Garis Gallery was a series of rooms laid out in a meandering way, and it was the least used part of the building. I used its natural breaks to divide it into a series of gallery spaces, and I rebuilt them around what the paintings showed, like cowboys, buffalo, and open country. Then I moved the Guest Artist Gallery, where visiting artists sell their work, into the center of those spaces. Sales of the guest artists' work rose tenfold in the first year.

With the doors closed, I asked an educator on our staff to host a weekly live show from the galleries, and I ran the camera. Within a year, she was co-producing two shows a week, and the virtual field trips that grew out of it were reaching classrooms across the country.

I brought the Chickasaw, Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa nations into the Center's events and programs. We shared our schedules with them and asked for their input, and they sent dance troupes, singers, interpreters, and historic reenactors. Through them, I met some of the guest artists we booked.

Timothy Tate Nevaquaya's exhibition in the Garis Gallery.

The Guest Artist Gallery, at the center of the Garis Gallery.

Liberal, Kansas · 2017 to 2018

Mid-America Air Museum

The museum's guest count doubled in one year, and its earned revenue followed, rising 65 percent.

The Mid-America Air Museum, with 109 aircraft in 88,000 square feet, is a department of the city of Liberal, and I ran it as a department head. When I arrived, the board held a welcome event, and 2,500 people came, about eleven percent of the county.

Before I changed anything, I held five community meetings to ask what the town needed from its museum, and seventy-five people came to each one. The new programs came from what they told me. The mall had closed, so we opened the hangar every morning to people who walked for exercise, and some of them became volunteers. High school and college art classes came to draw the aircraft. Most of it ran on space the museum already had and on my own time.

Aircraft on the museum's ramp at sunrise.

The parking lot at the welcome event the board held when I arrived.

A Liberal man with the plane he designed, built, and gave to the museum.

Naples, Florida

Naples Depot Museum

The Naples Depot Museum and all of its exhibits opened on the same night, on budget, after an eighteen-month construction delay.

My company designed, built, and installed every exhibit, along with the furniture and finishes. The museum is a restored 1927 railroad station, and we worked alongside the restoration contractor for years.

In the Station Master's office, we installed eight screens in a false wall just inside his four bay windows. The wall kept daylight off his uniforms and papers, and every so often the Orange Blossom Special pulled in on the screens. On opening night, the museum's volunteers stationed one of their own at the door to alert other guests to the train's arrival.

For that room, I first priced a proven video wall, but its cost was out of scale with the rest of the exhibits. I put a number in our proposal that matched the rest of the work, before I knew for sure how we would build the room for it. During the construction delay, we found a new kind of screen that gave us the effect within that budget.

The Station Master's office. The windows are screens.

The Station Master's office on opening night, with his uniform in the case on the right.

A 1955 Chevy and the Trails End Motel sign, inside the 1927 station.

West Lafayette, Indiana

Purdue Christmas Show

For ten years, I produced Purdue's Christmas show at Elliott Hall of Music, with a new design every year.

Producing it took the whole year. The first production meeting was in January, and every November I moved my company's office work to West Lafayette for the install, the rehearsals, and the run. Each December, the show opened with a full orchestra and a cast of more than three hundred.

The stage opening is a hundred feet wide, and the hall seats six thousand. Each year, 35,000 people saw the show live, and millions more watched it on PBS.

Scenery built to fill a stage opening a hundred feet wide.

A completely different design every season, for ten years.

Elliott Hall of Music seats six thousand.

A town built across the full width of the stage.

The scenery and the production, for 35,000 people a year.

South Florida · 2007 to 2010

BET Spring Bling

My company engineered and built the stages for BET's Spring Bling, filmed on a South Florida beach in sea turtle nesting season.

BET brought us in a few weeks before filming in 2007 and kept us for every show through 2010. In 2011, the network decided not to hold the event again. BET's own designer designed the layout and visuals, and my team made sure it worked. We did all the technical design and engineering, built and installed the stages, and provided part of the crew for the run.

In the technical design, we had to meet the designer's intent and conservation rules at the same time. The stages had to work for the network's cameras and the crowd on the beach and still leave a way through for sea turtles coming ashore at night to nest. After talking with conservation groups, we built the stages on legs nine and a half feet apart and took the side panels off every night.

We built protective platforms at our studio in Orlando and kept them on site in case a turtle nested where the crowds would be. When one did, we were ready with a platform to protect the nest, so filming could continue.

The 2009 stage, on legs spaced so turtles could pass underneath.

Marco Island, Florida

Marco Island Historical Museum

My company designed and built the main hall of the Marco Island Historical Museum, a full-scale diorama of Calusa daily life that visitors walk through.

The exhibit is broken into several distinct islands that guests find their way through, and each island depicts a different part of daily life. Guests pass chickee huts, lifelike figures, and a shell mound of real oyster shells.

Every part had to meet the codes for a public building. The palm fronds on the chickee huts had to be fire retardant, and a log bridge across an inlet had to meet accessibility code. It took scenic painters, sculptors, and carpenters from my own staff, along with two artisans we brought in who make historically accurate baskets.

A Calusa fisherman about to cast his net.

The AST crew on the shell mound they built.

Scott Metelko

Museums I've led

What I built while leading AST Exhibits

Career

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