Beyond Walls

A Conversation with Lacey Schütz | Beyond Walls

What does it really take to lead an institution that lives up to its own values? In this episode, we sit down with Lacey Schütz — a cultural leader with over fifteen years of experience at institutions including the Museum of the City of New York and Shaker Museum — now based in Saudi Arabia, where she's been observing a cultural ecosystem being built from the ground up.

Lacey speaks candidly about the hidden costs of scarcity culture in mission-driven organizations, why burnout is a systems failure rather than a personal one, and what humane leadership actually looks like in practice. She reflects on the tension between institutional values and institutional behavior, the quiet power of micro-interactions, and what museums need to let go of to become genuine parts of their communities.

From a little girl in the Bronx declaring her love of art to drone shows drawing millions of Saudi families into public space, Lacey reminds us that access to culture changes lives — at every scale. This is a conversation about leadership, institutional change, and what it means to do meaningful work in an uncertain world.