Executive Director Rachel Teagle wants those who experience her museum to come back for more. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Camera shy, Coco hides in a tree. Coaxed out and then picked up by her mom, the pair playfully lean in and out from a behind another tree while photos are snapped. Not quite just another day at the office for Rachel Teagle, but close. Nearly a year into serving as executive director of The New Children’s Museum, Teagle jokes she took the job to impress her two young children (Coco is 3, Zeke is 1). The real test comes in May when the museum re-opens and she must impress the public.

Teagle was brought to San Diego six years ago to help the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego open its new Downtown buildings, the restored Santa Fe Depot baggage building now called the Jacobs Building and the adjacent new three-story Copley Building. Last January, after going on maternity leave to have her second child, the Children’s Museum called. “I was approached to do the work I love, with contemporary artists, but in an environment where I was challenging the artists to focus on children and families.”

She accepted, starting in April and moving into the new museum in mid-November while it was still a construction site.

Heading the search committee were Laurie Mitchell, the board president, and Patsy Marino, a board director. “We wanted to find someone who really knew contemporary art and had a lot of knowledge about how art works, but also was somebody who understood children and was ready to do something new,” says Mitchell. “We stayed away from looking just in the area of people who had experience as directors of children’s museums.”

While former boss Hugh Davies sings Teagle’s praises, he confesses to initial grief on hearing she was leaving.

He got over it when one of his trustees said to think of it not as losing a curator, but as gaining another great director for San Diego. “This is somebody who is going to help all of us define the future of this city culturally,” Davies says. “That is so much better than having her go to another city. Rather than being a grumpy old man, it helped me be more positive about the situation.”

Davies, who lunches periodically with Teagle, has great expectations. “That institution is just rising to the occasion in a very impressive fashion,” he says. “It is hard to get these things started. The Children’s Museum was essentially in mothballs. It is a heroic undertaking and she was the ideal person to do that.”