Diane Evans, head of Museums of Sonoma County, to depart after nine years

Diane Evans, who guided the Museums of Sonoma County through a period of growth and financial gain, announced this week she is stepping down from her job as executive director for nearly nine years.

Evans, 53, said it was entirely her decision to leave the high-profile job of running the nonprofit Santa Rosa museum organization that dates back to 1985.

“It was time,” she said. “I had done as much as I felt like I could do.”

Foremost among Evans’ achievements was developing the Art Museum of Sonoma County, which opened last year in the renovated back half of the former Conklin Brothers flooring company warehouse at Seventh and B streets, steps away from the historic post office building that houses the History Museum of Sonoma County.

The two facilities were renamed the Museums of Sonoma County, run by a 17-member board of directors on a budget of more than $800,000 a year.

The new 4,300-square-foot art gallery, combined with the 2,500 square feet of exhibition space in the old building, enables the organization to serve the combined mission of exhibiting art and history, said Liz Uribe, the board’s vice chairwoman.

“Before there was always this competition,” she said, describing a “conflict over space” to serve both goals. “Now we have room for both.”

Evans, who was hired in May 2008, said the museum at that time had “alienated much of the art community,” and the organization under her direction “worked really hard to expand our art audience.”

Another art-related addition was the outdoor sculpture garden west of the museum, opened in 2011, and the payoff has been measured in money and footsteps.

About 25,000 people, including 3,000 children in school tours, visited the museum in the past year, Uribe said, compared with about 11,000 a year when Evans came aboard.

Evans has also secured a $1.1 million endowment for museum collections, Uribe said. Confined to the old post office building, erected in 1910 and moved to its current site in 1979, the museum was so small visitors “could see everything very quickly,” Evans said.

With two sites and more than double the gallery area, the museums became “more of a destination space,” she said. It is the only collecting art museum in the North Bay area.

The organization’s next goal is to tear down the front portion of the Conklin building, now used for museum storage, and replace it with a two-story structure that provides more gallery space, plus an auditorium and workshop area, Uribe said.

“The future looks bright,” she said.

The museum’s past expansion efforts, however, were fraught with setbacks.

An ambitious plan to build a blocklong facility on Seventh Street, wrapped around the post office building and replacing the carpet warehouse, was dropped before Evans arrived in 2008.

In 2010, developer Hugh Futrell and his partners offered to include the museum and a restaurant on the first floor of the former AT&T building on Third Street, but the post-recession lending environment and the demise of Santa Rosa’s redevelopment agency caused numerous delays, and the museum pulled out of the project in 2013.

Evans, who came to the museum at the start of the recession, said she had “grown tired of the daily grind of keeping an institution alive and viable.”

Operating a nonprofit, including the pressure of private fundraising, is “stressful,” she said.

Evans seized a new opportunity, she said, in buying The Competitor, a tennis and racquet store in Montgomery Village.

“Right now I’m having a lot of fun with tennis,” she said.

Evans started playing at 40 but quit the game after three years, when she moved to Santa Rosa, and remained off the court for seven years.

Evans is an active United States Tennis Association league team captain in Sonoma and Marin counties and a member of La Cantera Tennis & Racquet Club in Santa Rosa. She said she plans to work with school tennis programs, including the Sonoma State University women’s team and with players throughout the region. Evans will remain at her $100,670-a-year museum post through December.

The museum executive board met Tuesday night and named Eric Stanley, the history curator, as interim executive director.

The board will conduct a wide-ranging search for a new leader and hopes to form a panel of community members to review the applicants, Uribe said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.? On Twitter @guykovner.