As executive director of The Branch Museum of Design, former ad agency powerhouse Kristen Cavallo plans to cultivate a spirit of truth-telling and optimism.

It’s well known that long walks can lead to epiphanies. For Kristen Cavallo, a big idea came to her while she traversed one of the longest hiking trails in the world: a route within the Camino de Santiago, a network of pilgrimages all leading to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

She had only recently retired from a 30-year career in advertising, one peppered with high-profile awards, accolades and time spent as both chief executive officer of The Martin Agency and Global CEO of MullenLowe. The lingering question was what to do next.

While the answer remained uncertain, Cavallo turned to her lifelong passion of travel; she and her two children have visited all seven continents. While on her own pilgrimage, she realized that even though she had stepped away from advertising, she wasn’t ready to leave creativity behind. Not long after returning from the Camino, Cavallo was announced as the executive director of The Branch Museum.

Formerly known as The Branch Museum of Design and Architecture, the institution will now be known as The Branch Museum of Design. The change marks both the museum’s 10th anniversary and Cavallo’s first move in her new role. She’s now in the thick of shaping a full rebrand. And while the Branch may be smaller than the global brands she’s led campaigns for in the past, her vision hasn’t narrowed.

“One of the things that we built a lot of Martin’s positioning on was the fact that the most talked-about brands grow two and a half times faster than their competitive set…we want The Branch Museum of Design to become one of the most talked about design museums in the country,” she says. “Some people might say that’s unrealistic given that we’re in Richmond or that we’re not a big museum, but the truth is all revolutions come from the sidelines.”

“It’s not going to be a dusty museum”

The building that houses the museum has a rich design history of its own. Completed in 1919, it was originally built as a home for financier John Kerr Branch. Concrete floors and masonry walls serve as its foundation, and opulent plaster ceilings, stonework, leaded glass windows, and decorative woodwork speak to the popularity of the Tudor Revival style in the early 20th century. Cavallo plans to use this historic backdrop to stage exhibitions that inject the space with a contemporary intensity, shining a light on design that provokes.

She admits that when she initially presented this approach to the museum’s board, she wasn’t certain if it would land. Her pitch included a proposal for an exhibition that would focus on “apocalyptic motorcycle design”—featuring bikes like those designed by Classified Moto’s John Ryland, who built Daryl Dixon’s motorcycle in “The Walking Dead.” She envisioned these steel bodies lining the museum’s long gallery hall like horse armor.

“I was worried that the board might be quite conservative, so I brought in that exhibit as a way of testing the boundaries,” she says. “I held my breath after I walked them through the idea. The lead board member’s response was, ‘that is just the kind of rebelliousness this museum requires.’”

Cavallo’s energy when talking about the future of the museum is one that’s easy to imagine existing inside an ad agency board room: kinetic, driven by a habit of making connections between far flung ideas, and rooted in the belief that genuine internal enthusiasm is the key to sparking that same excitement in future audiences. When she initially retired from the ad world, she hinted that she might pursue political or societal causes. While not the most traditional path, she sees her work at the Branch as a way to tap into the public’s trust in museums—consistently ranked among the most reliable sources of information—to sustain dialogue around contemporary issues at a time when the Trump administration is actively working to suppress many narratives.

“It’s our responsibility to not be neutral, but to be true,” she says. “That means we’re going to have to reflect what’s happening [culturally] with the goal of creating a more just world by being educated and informed…I wrote ‘museums are not neutral bystanders’ on a sticky note to remind myself not to shy away from the important stories. It’s not going to be a dusty museum, it’s going to be a place for real thinking and conversation.”

Programming rollout this summer

Programming guided by Cavallo will begin to roll out in June, and as with the advertising industry, she sees developing ideas for the museum as a team sport. In addition to working closely with her “small but mighty” team at the Branch, this also means leveraging her relationships with brands to create collaborative exhibitions—helping to offset potential funding losses from the possible elimination of government agencies that support the arts, including those that fund museums.

“It just means that we have to be more inventive and find a different approach… where we’re allowed to tell stories that involve brands,” she notes. Detailing an example that could be created in collaboration with an outdoor brand like Patagonia, “we might tell a story about the evolution of outdoor gear in light of the fact that [the body of] Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine was just found on Mount Everest, and we got to see the boots he wore… it would be interesting to have an exhibit that shows how outdoor gear has changed through the years, from when the first people tried to summit Everest until today.”

In the shadow of an often unstable future, Cavallo hopes the sense of curiosity and hopeful ingenuity being cultivated in these planning stages will leave a lasting impression on the public.

“I think that the creative world is a largely optimistic world,” she says. “Every time [our team] has a further conversation, we get more and more excited…[Future] exhibits will invite you to shift your perspective, and we will take risks.”