In December 2023, Headlands Center for the Arts director Mari Robles called an emergency board meeting. On the call, Robles delivered a bombshell: Headlands was on the verge of financial collapse and might have to close. Board members were stunned. 

“This came out of the blue, no warning,” recalled one board member, who spoke anonymously because the meeting was confidential. “It started this domino effect of acknowledgment that we had a leadership issue and serious issues with choices of how money was being spent.”

The board didn’t know it yet, but this moment would mark the beginning of a seismic shift for the venerable arts institution that for decades has hosted one of the world’s most prestigious — and naturally beautiful — artist residencies, nestled on the dramatic Marin coast.

Beneath the surface, unease over financial stewardship had been steadily building within Headland’s board and among employees for years — from spending on contracting for lead remediation to a precarious lease with the National Park Service to lackluster fundraising efforts, all unfolding amid a $50 million capital campaign to fully renovate the campus. Now, the cracks forming at Headlands were splitting wide open.

Over the next year and a half, Headlands would go through the most turbulent period in its 43-year history, taking drastic measures such as laying off several staff and furloughing the rest. Its coffers were drained. Artists and associates braced for the worst as the board navigated a leadership shakeup.

But just as it seemed the Headlands might not make it, the institution made a shocking turnaround. A year and a half after it first considered closing, and just as arts organizations across the Bay Area began to feel the pinch of the Trump administration’s grant cuts, Headlands has emerged stronger than ever. 

Within three days of a leadership turnover in November, the board stepped up fundraising efforts, bringing in a whopping $400,000. At its annual auction dinner in early June, the center raised over $1 million —  the biggest haul in history. 

So how did the Headlands do it?

“The last year and a half was really tough for us,” said Heather Barriatua, the organization’s finance manager since 2022. “We hit the end of [2024] in a really scary place financially. But we’ve made a lot of really strong strategic decisions to recover from that I think and the community impact has been huge. So far, we’re tracking far ahead of what we were this time last year.”

Situated on the chaparral floor of Rodeo Valley, Headlands Center for the Arts is a cluster of nine rustic former U.S. Army buildings transformed into artist studios, performance spaces, and mess halls. The decommissioned buildings were transferred to the NPS in 1972, and in 1982, were turned into an arts space by local artists and activists.

Each year, the center awards residencies to roughly 50 artists working in any medium from around the world. In addition to room and board, the center provides materials for the artists’ work and travel expenses. Each residency costs up to $30,000, with the center holding as many as 50 each year.  

“It really changes artists’ lives,” said Nathan Lynch, a performance artist, sculptor, and chair of California College of the Arts’ ceramic program, who had a residency at Headlands in 2011 where he first conceived of his signature sculpture, Doubledrink. “It’s one of the most important Bay Area institutions for artists, and if you’re talking about the arc of my career, it was critical.”

Robles had been hired to lead Headlands in November 2020. Though she’d spent time leading public programming at prestigious museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Robles did not have experience as a director. Her interview process took place over Zoom by a board in panic mode; they had been been kneecapped by the pandemic, and were anxious to find a leader after the departure of director Sharon Maidenberg, who led Headlands through 11 years of unprecedented growth, expanding the grounds, more than tripling its budget, and doubling its staff. 

But Robles was inheriting more than just big shoes to fill. Shortly after joining, she was advised by Headlands’ financiers to raise the costs of a capital campaign aimed at renovation and expanding the campus from $30 million to at least $50 million. “It bumped us into a very high category of cost,” said Louisa Gloger, who served on the board during Robles’ tenure while working as the director of the Bolinas Museum. 

The large capital campaign was part of a new lease negotiation with the National Park Service, which owns the land. While the new lease gave the center a sense of stability in rocky waters, it also turbocharged its financial uncertainty, leaving it in the hole for  $4 million over the next 30 years.

In 2022, the organization hit a high with nearly $1.5 million in cash reserves, but in 2023, it faced steep financial challenges as donations plummeted and unexpected renovation costs proliferated, shrinking cash reserves by 82%. Despite steady program spending, revenue — more than three-quarters of which comes from donations and grants — fell by 31%, as expenses continued to rise.

Costs associated with new staff and contractors — which under Maidenberg and then Robles grew from 18 in 2018 to 32 in 2023 — began to balloon. Headlands brought in $754,000 from its 2024 auction but still struggled to stay afloat as public contributions fell by 40% in 2023 compared with 2019, leading to layoffs and furloughs.

According to two sources familiar with the situation, Robles was perceived as being distracted from key decision-making processes and often absent from the Headlands campus due to personal issues. Rather than finding ways to cut costs in line with expenditures, Robles was banking on a large donor gift to the tune of $500,000 to buoy the Headlands and win back the confidence of a nervous board. After it was decided that Robles would be leaving to lead YBCA, the gift was rescinded, pushing Headlands further into chaos.

“There are some feelings between Mari and some of the board leadership at the time and [the transition] was not as seamless as it would seem,” said one person who works at Headlands.

By September 2024, the Headlands board approached Gloger, a board member at the time, about taking over the helm. Robles, who has led Yerba Buena Center for the Arts since leaving her post at Headlands in November, declined through a spokesperson to comment for this story. 

Gloger officially took over as director last November. When she arrived, Headlands was a veritable ghost town. All the employees were on some degree of furlough, and there was no reserve fund, she said.

While Gloger’s move came as a surprise to the Bay Area art world, few leaders in the Bay have a closer relationship with Marin and its insular arts scene. Raised in Bolinas in a family of artists and educated at The Branson School — alongside figures like California’s First Lady, Jennifer Siebel Newsom — Gloger grew up fluent in Marin County’s two defining dialects: the insular hippie spirit of West Marin and the polished intelligentsia of Ross Valley. 

Gloger received her undergraduate degree in art history from Williams College — an institution that became so famous for producing museum directors, its alumni are often described as the “Art Mafia.”

At her previous post running the Bolinas Museum, Gloger had built up a sizeable reserve for a smaller institution, in part by being judicious when it came to costs. So when she arrived at Headlands, she was bearing a chainsaw, hacking away at superfluous costs and cutting back on the number of consultants Headlands had contracted, with the priority of rehiring all of the furloughed employees.

“We barely snuck by in that first month,” she said; the center made payroll by “just a few thousand dollars.”

“Louisa’s presence has resonated not just at Headlands, but throughout the arts community,” said Doree Friedman, co-chair of the board at Headlands. “That in and of itself allows us to grow in a way that we found we couldn’t do before. She’s extremely collaborative and has proven herself brilliant in her role.”

Headlands’ momentum under Gloger was solidified by the institute’s annual auction dinner in June. At $500 per ticket, the event was reserved for the Bay Area’s preeminent artists, gallerists, curators, and collectors. Bay Area ceramicist Reniel Del Rosario sold his hand-sized hotdog sculptures from an usherette tray; an extravagant meal was served courtesy of former Headlands chef Katie Powers; and a live auction turned into a bidding war, with a drawing by artist Lava Thomas selling for $19,000 and a mask by artist Rose B. Simpson going for $27,000.

“You’re like the Medicis of Marin, but only the good parts,” Andrew Lueck, a vice president at Christie’s, who led the auction, said to the crowd.

Finally, it was time for the auction’s crown jewel, a print by the late San Francisco artist Ruth Asawa, whose work is experiencing a resurgence thanks to her first major retrospective at SFMOMA. 

Paddles went up in rapid succession until only two donors remained — a man in the room and a woman receiving instructions via cellphone. At last, the mystery caller conceded, but only on the condition that the in-room bidder agree to a $30,000 purchase. The caller then pledged a matching  $30,000 donation.

Gloger has scaled back the capital campaign significantly, raising funds only to improve accessibility on campus, she said. The center negotiated with the park service to return to a special use permit — the costs of which have been waived for the next nine months, “to ensure [Headlands] could invest its resources in organizational stability, continued programming, and facility investment,” said Julian Espinoza, a spokesperson for the park service.

Gloger’s goal for this year, she said, is to build back the center’s reserve and bolster the institution’s relationships with its donors.

“Tonight was a much-deserved success for Headlands,” Martin Strickland, director of Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, told The Standard at the event. “The real test, as so many of us experience, will be next year to see how people continue to support and donate.”