Earlier this month, the Bolinas Museum named Jessica Shaefer as its new executive director. She succeeds Louisa Gloger, who departed in November after less than three years to lead the Headlands Center for the Arts. Ms. Shaefer, with her two decades of experience spanning galleries, arts nonprofits and curatorial work for Bay Area tech giants, will now oversee the 42-year-old institution’s operations and its roughly $500,000 annual budget. Before joining the museum, Ms. Shaefer worked with Gray Area for Google and at Meta Open Arts, where she commissioned site-specific installations in corporate offices worldwide. Despite the corporate context of those projects, she emphasized their creative autonomy. “It wasn’t online projects, it wasn’t necessarily tech-associated,” she told the Light last week. “It was just using Facebook resources to commission these amazing projects. And it was an incredible way to redistribute tech wealth.” Previously, Ms. Shaefer held positions at Sites Unseen in San Francisco and Creative Time in New York City, both public art nonprofits known for large-scale, community-driven installations. Ms. Shaefer moved to Bolinas two years ago, but she has been visiting since she was a teenageer. Raised in New York City and Fairfield, Conn., she grew up immersed in the art world through her father, an artist whose signature medium is large-scale charcoal drawings on vellum. Witnessing him “succeed but also struggle” as he negotiated the challenges of an ever-evolving creative market made her wary of pursuing a career in the arts herself. “I thought I wanted nothing to do with it,” Ms. Shaefer said, “but unintentionally I found my way back in, in order to support artists.” After earning a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, she spent several years in Krakow, Barcelona, and the small southwestern French village of Latour-de-France —“a European analogue of Bolinas,” she said—before returning to New York, where she worked as an assistant for artist Julian Schnabel and his son, art dealer Vito Schnabel. Ms. Shaefer said she intends to confront pressing social and environmental questions through the museum’s programming. Building on her history of bringing art beyond traditional gallery walls, she aims to expand the museum’s reach across West Marin and develop partnerships with other regional institutions. She hopes to highlight artists examining ecological issues and climate resilience; feature both local talent and outside creators “in conversation with local artists, local history and local practices”; and establish an artist-in-residence program in Bolinas. “I want to listen,” she said. “I want to hear people’s ideas. I want to incorporate what the comunity wants and make sure that while we’re moving into the next chapter and looking toward the future, we’re also firmly rooted in the past and the legacy of both the museum and the town.” Currently, museumgoers can see Stinson Beach-based Charles Hobson’s artist books, Bolinas resident Arline Mathieu’s meditative works on paper and Muir Beach artist Mary Daniel Hobson’s mixed-media altered photographs, all open through March 30.