A photograph snapped in 1947 shows a small blond boy in a Cub Scout uniform looking squarely into the camera. Liberal amounts of Wildroot gel have been applied to his hair, which goes up over his forehead in a pompadour — just like his idol, Elvis Presley.
The young Gary Vikan is standing directly in front of a framed reproduction of Warner Sallman's iconic 1941 painting, "Head of Christ," and Jesus appears to be whispering something into the 10-year-old's right ear.
The photo is very nearly a time capsule, or a message in a bottle. It is a marvelously succinct prediction of the man the boy would become.
"The point," says Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum, "is that I was simultaneously attuned to Jesus, Elvis and the power of images painted on canvas to move viewers."
Vikan indulges all three passions in his soon-to-be-completed book, "St. Elvis: From the Holy Land to Graceland."
The manuscript demonstrates Vikan's happy knack for sprinkling esoteric topics with the fairy dust of popular culture, with the people and events on the minds of ordinary folk, right now.
And that's why under Vikan's leadership, the Walters has been competing outside its class. A $14 million budget qualifies the Walters as a middleweight institution, but you'd never know it given the museum's growing prominence in the nation and world.
But Vikan's most enduring accomplishment may be that he is rethinking the largely passive role museums have traditionally played. Under his watch, the Walters has ventured into such foreign terrain as science and international relations. Instead of functioning merely as a repository of great works, Vikan is positioning the Walters as a tool that can help solve real-world problems.
"Gary is one of a dozen or so thought leaders in the museum field in the United States," says Philip Nowlen, director of the Getty Leadership Institute, a California-based professional development group for visual arts administrators.
"Because of the strange chemistry of his mind, he is not constrained by the usual ways in which museums confront their environments. He is more interested in finding out what the right questions are than in coming up with niftier, easier ways to do the same old things on Monday morning."
Indeed, the 62-year-old Vikan seems to here, there and everywhere: lecturing on the Shroud of Turin (he'll bet money that it was made during the Middle Ages) or on Nazi art theft during World War II (on which he is a world authority) — or writing a book about Elvis.
The manuscript is a scholarly yet tongue-in-cheek look at the human desire to attribute supernatural powers to charismatic people. Such well-known tabloid fodder as Princess Di, Michael Jackson and John F. Kennedy share page space with Simeon the Stylite, a holy man in the fifth century A.D. who spent 37 years sitting on top of a 50-foot pillar with his head, literally and figuratively, in the clouds.
Since he was in graduate school at Princeton University, Vikan has focused his research on the art made by early Christian pilgrims. In 1987, he was reading a newspaper article about Elvis Week at Graceland, and something about the frenzied devotion seemed familiar.
"This was a world I understood," he says.
Instead of fans, Vikan saw worshippers. In place of tacky souvenirs, he saw relics. The bizarre rumors swirling about Elvis — including that the singer had faked his own death — were no stranger than the miracles attributed to saints.
In "St. Elvis," Vikan takes his theory one step farther. He thinks he can predict which current celebrities will exert a lasting hold on the public based on the presence of certain key indicators. (Hint: The cult of the King of Pop may be short-lived.)
"If the model is valid, it will be predictive," Vikan says. "Without Neverland as a focus, it's hard to imagine that Michael will become a secular saint on the order of Elvis. There are no holy relics, and there is no place where mourners can gather to commune with Michael's spirit. People can go to Graceland, but they can't visit Neverland."
Despite all of this intellectual gadding about, Vikan carefully tends his home turf. Since he took over the reins in 1994, the Walter's endowment has grown from $38 million to $75 million, the annual budget has more than doubled and attendance has held steady at 200,000 visitors a year. Vikan also secured major collections of artwork from India, Southeast Asia and the Americas.
It's impressive that the Walters emerged from the recent recession debt-free — though at a cost that includes laying off seven staff members and canceling a planned exhibit. Vikan himself gave up a month's pay.
"Gary managed the museum with great discipline through an extremely trying period when other institutions have struggled and some did not survive," says Peter Bain, the president of the Walters' board of directors. "Now, we have no debt and we're putting on world-class exhibitions."
Museum professionals have long been wowed by the Walters. Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, declared in 1999: "In my opinion, the Walters Art Gallery is, piece-for-piece, the best art museum in the entire United States."
But for long periods of its history, the Walters was a hidden gem that seemed to go out of its way to discourage visits from nonscholars. Both Vikan and his immediate predecessor, Robert P. Bergman, believed this attitude was wrong and were passionately committed to opening up their museum to the community.
For instance, Vikan was instrumental in securing funding in 2006 that allowed Baltimore's two largest art museums to drop their $10 adult entrance fee — a decision that bucked the national trend of rising admission costs.
"I don't think it's possible to state the importance of that event," Bain says, noting that in the six months after the change, attendance surged 40 percent at the Walters.
The Walters also has assembled the largest grouping of Ethiopian cultural treasures outside of that country, because Vikan thought it important to obtain artwork reflecting the heritage of Baltimore's African-American community.
"Gary has taken this world-class collection and made it accessible to people on so many levels," says Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "There have been a mosaic of gestures over the past decade that have made the Walters a more open and embracing place."
But Vikan's most game-changing initiatives might paradoxically be the ones with the smallest local impact.
For example, the "Beauty and the Brain" exhibit that ran at the Walters earlier this year was possibly the first time that a U.S. art museum has helped conduct a science experiment. Visitor responses generated data for Johns Hopkins University researchers exploring whether humans have an inborn preference for certain aesthetic shapes.
The Walters is also one of three institutions — and the smallest — to help found a pioneering training academy in northern Iraq. The school teaches Iraqi museum employees how to repair treasures damaged during the 2003 U.S. invasion.
"I want the Walters to be taken seriously," Vikan says. "I want to be part of serious topics. If we are satisfied with things as they are, we ought to get out."
Even as a boy growing up in Fosston, a town in northwestern Minnesota with a current population of 1,470, Vikan displayed a talent for thinking outside the box, occasionally to the detriment of his classmates.
"Gary was always the smartest guy in the room, but also the funniest and most fun," says Stuart Lade of Brainerd, Minn., who has known Vikan since he was 3 years old.
"In high school, he was frequently the originator of highjinks, but he was rarely caught. Once, he was in charge of the concession stand at the football game and cooked the hot dogs by boiling them in leftover coffee.
"It was good practice for running the museum," says Lade. "I wonder how many hot dog stunts he's pulled off at the Walters that nobody knows about."
Chances are that Vikan's staff, the people charged with making his bright ideas work, could tell a few tales. Like many creative people, their boss can border on the impetuous, and Vikan at a full gallop can be a bit alarming. When he identifies a good idea — or five — he acts, details to be worked out later.
"I think at times this has been true," Vikan says, "though I've made some real progress with patience."
He jokes that "Willie Don Schaefer, the 'Do It Now' mayor, is a hero of mine," but acknowledges that at times, when he is in mid-brainstorm, his staff reacts as though he'd "just dragged another odd duck into the room, and folks are trying to figure out what it is."
Vikan is still boyish-looking, and his formidable charm makes him highly effective as the Walters' public face. His most engaging physical characteristic is his smile, which spreads as wide as his jawbone will allow and is full of impish delight.
But though he is quoted in news articles just about every week, Vikan is no self-promoter. He pursues projects that intrigue him, and publicity follows.
Nor is he a natural extrovert. Being "on" requires conscious effort. Lade says his friend is happiest cooking in his Guilford kitchen or roughhousing with his bulldogs. (Vikan and his wife, Elana, a teacher at Roland Park Country School, have two grown daughters.)
That contradiction, if there is one, may stem from a Midwestern upbringing that emphasizes service and self-effacement.
For instance, Vikan initially was not a candidate to head the Walters when the directorship opened up in 1993. But he had a revelation during a trip to Minnesota to bury his father — a kindly, silent, enigmatic man.
"At the time, I was chief curator, and I had no thought at all of putting my name in to be director of this place," Vikan says.
He sat at the kitchen table and opened his father's black tackle box before trying to write an obituary. Out spilled documents that were evidence of a civic life of which the dead man's five children were unaware.
"He was president of all these clubs," Vikan says. "He'd taught Sunday school. This guy who I'd thought had nothing to say had worked behind the scenes and been a defining force in our town."
At that moment, Vikan realized: like father, like son.
"It occurred to me that's maybe who I was, too," he says. "And that's when I decided to apply for the job."