Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

Mellon And MoMA: A New Kind Of Research Team?

Museums conduct all kinds of research, if sometimes fitfully. Recently, I learned of a new effort, though, which might break some ground. It brings graduate students and faculty to a museum’s collection. It’s happening at the Museum of Modern Art and funded by the Mellon Foundation, though neither one of them has published a press release.

Keifer-WoodenRoomThe best information I found online was in the form of a job posting. It’s for the role of “museum research project coordinator,” and despite the low-end title and mostly administrative duties, it requires a master’s degree. Go figure.

From the posting, we can glean something about the project:

With the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Museum of Modern Art has embarked on a four-year (January 1, 2013–December 31, 2016), Museum-based pilot program for the study of objects in MoMA’s collection in partnership with graduate students and faculty from the art history programs at Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. This Museum Research Consortium is intended to facilitate the joint study of key works in MoMA’s collection by curators and conservators from the Museum and faculty and graduate students from participating universities.

This will be accomplished through semi-annual Consortium Study Sessions for the study and discussion of selected groups of objects.  In addition, the Museum will host five annual full-time Fellows in a one-year mentorship program to work with a MoMA curator in the execution of various scholarly curatorial projects and programs, including the organization of exhibitions, collection displays, and collection development and interpretation.

One good thing about this is that it puts graduate students in close contact with MoMA’s  great works of art — they won’t be studying just theory or depending on slides. Another: MoMA will dig more deeply on a sustained basis into its permanent collection. It will learn new things that might lead to public disclosures, new exhibitions, new connections, or something completely different.

I like it.

Now what should be the research priorities? I surely do not know. I selected this work, Wooden Room by Anselm Keifer, simply to show something from the collection that, while on view (according to the website) is not already known by everyone.

Photo Credit: © 2013 Anselm Kiefer, Courtesy of MoMA

 

Carnegie Museum Bids To Become A “Living Laboratory”

Photography is big at museums of late — more exhibitions, more dedicated curators and so on – and today came an announcement from the Carnegie Museum of Art on the topic: With a gift from the William T. Hillman Foundation, it is launching the Hillman Photography Initiative — “a living laboratory for exploring the rapidly changing field of photography and its impact on the world.” Lynn Zelevansky (below), the museum’s director, said that “The Initiative positions the museum to be a leader in a subject area with broad appeal and profound relevance to contemporary society. We are deeply grateful for the [Foundation’s] support and partnership in this effort.”

LYNN2-235x300As a daughter of Rochester, home to Eastman Kodak and the George Eastman House, I have mixed emotions… but competition is good.

Let me quote from the press release –which admittedly is a little vague. Here goes:

For much of its history, photography has pervaded our world, but never more so than today, when non-stop technological innovations make it ever easier to take photographs and share them instantaneously. There are over eight billion pictures on the social media site Flickr; photographs on the Internet appear for seconds and then disappear, lost in a pictorial “newsfeed.” How does that affect their meaning? Our belief in their veracity? Our way of valuing them as keepsakes? And where in the midst of all these images and new technologies does art reside? What are the intellectual and aesthetic criteria by which we value photographs made with new means (for example, cell phones, computational photography) today? And how will we value those made by other means tomorrow?

the Hillman Photography Initiative is a special project within the photography department of Carnegie Museum of Art that will offer an adaptable framework for engaging with these provocative issues. Favoring an approach that is experimental and open to new perspectives, the Initiative will be driven by the collaboration of five “agents,” consisting of four external experts and Carnegie Museum of Art curator Tina Kukielski, who is also co-curator of the 2013 Carnegie International. The Initiative will follow a 12-month cycle, beginning with an intense three-month planning period during which the agents will work together with program manager Divya Rao Heffley to identify a key theme that will inspire a wide range of activities such as exhibitions, programs, collaborations, publications, commissioned works of art, artist residencies, and online experiences. Nathan Martin of the innovation/design studio Deeplocal will facilitate the process. Following the planning phase, Kukielski and Heffley will work with other museum staff to manage the implementation of the activities over the nine months that follow. Rollout of activities is expected in early 2014, although some may begin more quickly. Additionally, the Initiative will co-sponsor and/or collaborate on related projects at the museum and with other institutions.

See what I mean? A bit more:

The first group of agents includes, along with Tina Kukielski, Marvin Heiferman, independent curator and writer; Alex Klein, program curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics and director of the CREATE Lab, Carnegie Mellon University; and Arthur Ou, assistant professor of photography and director, BFA photography, Parsons The New School for Design. The group will meet for the first time on April 21–22 to begin the development cycle.

I can’t post the press release because it’s not yet online, but the good news is that the initiative has a website with a few more details. I will be curious to see how this develops.

UPDATE, 5/3: the museum has now released a video update with more information on the project.

 

 

 

 

On Wisconsin! And Cincinnati And Others

It’s widely recognized now that there’s no one art world, no one art market — and that perhaps is what underpins a couple of recent developments.

Museum of Wisconsin ArtWe’ll start with the news early this month that the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, WI., — which has existed for some 20 years — has a new building that will raise it profile and provide more space for showing art by residents of the state. Art writer Mary Louise Schumacher wrote about it in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

One of the goals of the museum’s new director and CEO, Laurie Winters, is to reconsider how to think about the art of the state and the role that a museum can play. With no major contemporary art institution in the region, save the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, she’s interested in finding ways to cultivate connections with contemporary artists, among other things, and has created an advisory board of working artists, curators and critics.

The JS has a wonderful slide show at the link above, which includes the photo I’ve copied here of Graeme Reid, director of exhibitions, amid an installation by Michael Meilahn.

Today, an article caught my eye about the groundbreaking for a museum in Daytona Beach, FL., that “will house the world’s most extensive collection of Florida art.” A couple named Cici and Hyatt Brown have donated the art they’ve amassed — some 2,600 works — over the years. It’s not contemporary, apparently: The local paper, The Ledger, says the earliest work dates to 1839 — a painting of the gates of St. Augustine, Fl. The Browns gave $13 million for the design and construction of the museum and have just said they will give $2 million to kick off an $8 million endowment campaign. Read more details here.

No. 3 on this list of unrelated developments is a blog post in Houston (ArtAttack on the Houston Press site) proposing that the city needs more museums, including one it would call the The Museum of Texas Art:

You would think we’ve got art covered what with the MFAH’s ever growing campus, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Pearl Fincher Art Museum and the rest, not to mention the hundreds of galleries in the area, but on any given day, you’d be hard-pressed to find an exhibit that included anything that could be called Texas art.

We don’t mean just works by Texas artists or works created here in Texas. It takes a little bit more than that to qualify a painting or sculpture as Texas art. It takes an only-in-Texas vision and direct connection to other local painters and sculptors who either influenced or were influenced by the artist. The Texas Art Museum would have a collection of works by artists such as unique Lone Star state talents as Emma Richardson Cherry, considered one of the most forward thinking artists of her time.

Finally, the other day I received an email from the Cincinnati Art Museum noting that its Cincinnati Wing is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The museum says it was “one of the first art museums in the nation to dedicate permanent gallery space to a community’s art history.” It adds:

The 18,000 square feet of gallery space showcases more than 400 objects that represent art made by Cincinnati or Cincinnati trained artists, art depicting Cincinnati or Cincinnatians, or art commissioned for Cincinnati, including many works by American masters. The artists in the Cincinnati Wing include Frank Duveneck, a painter of international reputation; Hiram Powers, one of the nation’s finest sculptors; John H. Twachtman and Edward Potthast, regarded as two of the finest American Impressionists; Lilly Martin Spencer, the most celebrated female painter of her time; and decorative arts from the internationally renowned Rookwood Pottery.

I couldn’t find a link to the release online, sorry to say.

So there you have it — I align with the Houston blogger, Olivia Flores Alvarez, on this issue. Showing reginally made art is another way museums can differentiate themselves.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Journal Sentinel 

 

 

Different Strokes: How To Tell A True Masterpiece Nowadays?

Vermeer-WwJugToday’s Wall Street Journal carried a review of the renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which reopens to the public on Saturday. It’s pretty much a rave, and I recommend it. But I found one passage extremely interesting and worthy of singling out and commenting on.

First, here’s the setup passage:

The museum’s director of collections, Taco Dibbits, and his curatorial staff have completely restructured the installation of the museum’s holdings for the renovated building, arranging 8,000 objects from the museum’s permanent collection (an increase of about 40% in the total number of objects displayed) across 80 galleries, 30 of which are devoted to 17th-century Dutch art—the so-called Golden Age. …

…Prior to the renovations, exhibits were organized according to department, with paintings, sculptures and applied arts completely segregated. But now, as is increasingly common in museums, a more chronological approach prevails, so that varied objects from a given era can be shown in tandem to give a sense of the period—fine art, for instance, may be seen alongside furniture, craft items or even machinery—beginning with the Middle Ages on the lower floors and culminating with the 20th century under the eaves of the tower galleries…

And now the important part:

Traditionalists will feel perfectly at home in the Gallery of Honor, where the greatest masterpieces of the Rijksmuseum’s 17th-century Dutch paintings collection—many of which, including Vermeer’s famed “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” (1663-64) [at left], have recently been cleaned or restored—can be enjoyed in perfect tranquility, blissfully free from the video screens and iPad displays that have become the bane of modern museum-going. Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” (c. 1660) [above right] is not shown beside an earthenware jug, nor is Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride” (1667) hung beneath a wedding canopy. But elsewhere in the museum, an eclectic and at times whimsical approach does help to enliven the display by providing a rich context for less familiar works.

VermeerNow that says something to me. It signifies that some works of art — the very best — need no technology, no bells and whistles, to serve as explication. The Journal’s reviewer, Jonathan Lopez, endorses the museum’s bells and whistles, saying:

…For instance, a formidable military portrait of the Dutch naval hero Adm. Michiel de Ruyter hangs alongside plundered treasure—gold coins, mighty cannons, a carved bowsprit— that he wrested from Spanish ships in battle. Exhibits of this type not only help to fulfill the Rijksmuseum’s dual art and history mandate, but based on my own observations of how things worked in the Philips wing, they seem to be particularly effective in engaging the interest of children—a shrewd strategy.

But to me, the lack of helping aids in the Gallery of Honor speaks volumes — which is that the greatest works of art, works by the true masters, speak for themselves. The rest need help. Whether or not the curators intended it, they have tipped their hand on this question.

 

A Little More About SPUN

“It’s a way to activate our collections.” That’s one of the outtake quotes from Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, that I did not use in my article published last week in The New York Times headlined In Denver, Exhibits Interveave Genres. (Did anybody catch the importance of “interweaves” in that headline, which signified that the exhibits were about textiles?)

bbbbI like Heinrich’s choice of verb: activate. He was talking about SPUN, Adventures in Textiles, the museum’s spin on the range of exhibitions that will be on offer throughout the museum’s two buildings this summer, from May 19 through Sept. 22.

I’ve written several times before (see here and here, for example) that museums MUST make more to-do about their own collections, and Heinrich is pioneering one way. His approach, biennial museum-wide festivals that focus on one aspect of the collection, may not work everywhere. A collection has to have depth in several areas — not all — for it to work. Aside from having the goods, a museum has to have the marketing creativity. In 2011, ceramics became Marvelous Mud. Before settling on SPUN, Denver toyed with using fabric, fiber, threads, material and other words in the exhibitions’ title.

SPUN goes with the museum flow on another aspect, though. Like many other art museums, the new, expanded textiles gallery — a gift for which was the impetus pushing SPUN — will have a “PreVIEW Space,” where visitors can, for example, watch a textile conservator work on pieces.

Among other things. Alice Zrebiec, the textiles curator, told me that “the museum is committed to showing what goes on behind-the-scenes. It’s not just conservation, it’s the whole process — looking at an object for the next rotation, or an acquisition, a conservation assessment, then the conservation work itself. There is a big glass window for people to look into the space even when we’re not there. “Open Window” [when a conservator or curator is there] will take place every Thursday, and there will be selected programming at other times, special ones for members.It’s all a trial balloon.”  There will also  be a Textile Art Studio and a family installation.

If you read my article, you got a gist of the range of exhibitions SPUN entails — but not the images, which are great. Please take a look at this document: Spun – Adventures in Textiles_Image Highlights. (Here, too, is the press release.) .

Although I started this post talking about permanent collections, I can’t resist showing something the resourceful paintings department has gone far afield to borrow: a picture called Women Sewing with two Children (at right) by a late 17th Century Venetian painter known as the Master of the Blue Jeans.

Aside from being relevant, it shows people who believe that jeans were an American invention that the term is actually derived from their city of origin, Genoa. And they may also learn that “denim” is related to Nimes, the city in France that originated a similar blue fabric. The Galerie Canesso in Paris had a show for the Blue Jeans painter in 2010, whose 68-page catalogue can be perused here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Galerie Canesso