Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

Trouble In Indianapolis: Does The Job Change The Man?

When Charles Venable got the job as director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art last August, I thought it would be a good thing. Now I am not so sure.

VEnableVenable came from the Speed Museum, where he had done several things of which I approved — mounting a series of one-painting (masterpiece) exhibitions, for example, and launching a comprehensive review of the Speed’s permanent collection.

But a recent article in The Indianpolis Star has me rethinking; was I fooled, has Venable changed his spots, or is he obeying a board that has its priorities in the wrong order?

The Star article shows Venable to be more concerned about money than about art and quality. It begins this way:

Charles Venable, the new director at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, envisions a giant car show — right there in the museum — an automobiles-as-art thing. Picture super high-end rides like Bugattis. Maybe it’s timed to coincide with an Indianapolis 500.

People would come, Venable is certain of that. They would come in the hundreds of thousands.

Customers. Dollars. Please exit-through-gift-shop. Cha-ching.

An art museum may be a place of beauty and truth and inspiration and epiphanies.

But it’s also about money.

Later it says:

In an interview with The Star, he voiced his displeasure at a recent exhibit of Islamic art because it drew 7,000 people but cost $500,000 to stage. He talked about the importance of packing the house.

After mentioning a coming Matisse exhibition, the article continues:

He sees the Matisse exhibit as the first of many blockbuster shows.

He plans to meet soon with Ken Gross, curator of last summer’s “Speed: The Art of the Performance Automobile” at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. A highlight of the exhibit was a public chat between Gross and talk-show host Jay Leno, a noted car collector; museum patrons ponied up $200 to see that.

Ken Gross, a guest curator, is described on his Amazon page as the former “Executive Director of the Petersen Automotive Museum, in Los Angeles, California, for five years following a career in advertising and marketing. His car, travel, and motorcycle writing has appeared in Robb Report, The Rodder’s Journal, Automobile Magazine, and Road & Track.” No mention of concerns about the design of cars.

The article continues:

[Venable] rearranged the [IMA’s] organization chart so that all curators now report to Preston Bautista, who joined the staff in 2011. Bautista has a Ph.D. in art history but also studied advertising and knows statistics.

Ok, there’s nothing wrong with concern about the audience for art. It’s when audience considerations drive the art choices that things are out of whack.

The Star reveals Venable as a prodigious fundraiser and that’s good — the IMA, it says, overspent and drew down too much from its endowment during the tenure of former director Max Anderson.

I agree with Venable that the way back to balance is through programming. He should not cut back on programming; but it’s possible, even in a sports-crazy town like Indianapolis, to organize exhibitions that will be big draws. I’ve seen other museums do it; why not Indy?

Here’s another sad comment, though: The Star article — which should have had an impact on the city’s art lovers — was published on Feb. 21. Five days later, not a single comment was left beneath it, whether refuting, agreeing, showing concern, or applauding.

Is Indianapolis really that apathetic about its art museum?

Photo Credit: Matt Kryger, Courtesy of The Star 

 

Do We Need To Reshuffle Native American Art Collections?

This decade may end up being the years of a great re-shuffling of art, with some museums — mostly in the U.S. — returning looted antiquities to the country in which they were found and, presumably, stolen, and others continuing to return Nazi-looted art that turned up in their collections. On the later score, The Guardian recently wrote about a promise by France to return seven paintings to the descendants of their owners, and today The Telegraph published an article about a new effort in France:

President Francois Hollande’s administration is setting up a group of experts and curators to pro-actively track down families, rather than simply waiting for them to come forward. The group, which will start work next month, will carry out its detective work with the help of a new computerised database compiled of digital scans of thousands of pages of relevant documentation currently gathering dust in archives.

hall-of-northwest-coast-indians_dynamic_lead_hero_imageIn a completely different area, I came up an article the other day with a new question: why is Native American art in the collections of natural history museums?

Written by Katherine Abu Hadal, a designer and researcher who is interested in Indian culture, the article was first published on her blog and then on Indian Country Today Media Network, it begins:

Natural history museums—they are all over the US and abroad too. They house amazing dinosaur fossils, exotic hissing cockroaches, and wondrous planetariums—right next to priceless human-designed art and artifacts created by Native peoples of the Americas.

Like me, you might wonder why these designed objects are juxtaposed with objects of nature such as redwood trees and precious metal exhibits. Yes, of course art is part of the natural world that we live in—but then, why are there no Picasso paintings or Degas sculptures on display in the American Museum of Natural History?

…When Native American, Pacific, and African art and artifact is lumped in with natural history exhibits, it sends a message that these groups are a part of the “natural” world. That the art they produce is somehow less cultured and developed than the western art canon. It also sends the message that they are historical, an element of the romantic past, when in reality these peoples are alive and well, with many traditions intact and new traditions happening all the time.

She raises some good points. It’s true, of course, that art museums collect Native American art — as they should. Natural history collections are a throwback in many ways, and they’ve had to adapt their displays as science has advanced. Shouldn’t they have to adjust to the now-prevailing view of Indian artifacts, that is – art?

No one likes to admit errors. And we can’t have museums reordering their collections with changing fashions all the time. But in this case, natural history museums could either sell or lend their Indian art collections to art museums.

That, at least, is what I think I think is the best answer to this problem.

Photo Credit: Hall of the Northwest Coast Indians, Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

The Walters Hires A New Director; Whither San Diego?

Just in from Baltimore: The Board of the Walters Art Museum has appointed Julia Marciari-Alexander as its new executive director, replacing Gary Vikan, who announced in March, 2012, that he would be stepping down after 18 years as the museum’s executive director.

Julia Marciari-Alexander -2_CPMarciari-Alexander is currently the Deputy Director of the San Diego Museum of Art, and her move requires several lines of comment, not least the conditions she is leaving behind in southern California.

First, for Marciari-Alexander, this is a great opportunity, but not without worries. Vikan is highly regarded, a man who accomplished many things at the Walters. Among them: the elimination of the Walters’ general admission fee which led to an increase in attendance of more than 45%, several fundraising milestones, plus noteworthy exhibitions and the creation of  a Center for the Arts of the Ancient Americas, with a $7.25 million endowment. They are outlined here in the press release that accompanied his announcement last year.

Marciari-Alexander, in her mid-40s, has been in San Diego, heading curatorial affairs, since 2008, and before that was Associate Director for Exhibitions and Publications, among other roles, at the Yale Center for British Art. In San Diego, she oversaw the reinstallation of most of the museum’s galleries and was “also instrumental in launching an initiative to publish the SDMA’s collection online, similar to the Walters’ ongoing digital projects,” according to the press release.

In that release, Marciari-Alexander is quoted saying, “As the new Executive Director, it will be my goal to leverage the collection and the professional expertise of staff to strengthen the Walters’ reputation as an international leader in the field of collections development, museum scholarship and community engagement.”

Marciari-Alexander is,  however, married to John Marciari, the Curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum, and he’ll be going with her to Baltimore — minus a full-time job. Instead, he told me, “I am going to continue working for San Diego, completing my catalogue of Italian, Spanish, and French paintings before 1850, and also continuing to work on an exhibition on the art of Seville (Velazquez, Zurbaran, Murillo & co.) that is scheduled for 2015. So I’m not breaking all ties.”

Marciari, then associate curator of early European art at the Yale Art Gallery, discovered that Velasquez in its closet in 2010.

He will need replacing, given that collection.

And last year, the San Diego Museum also lost Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, its curator of Asian art, to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Three top people out the door at a museum where the entire full-time staff numbers 55 can be a problem. It can also be indicative.

The San Diego Museum’s executive director, Roxana Velasquez, praises Marciari-Alexander in the Walters’ release, but I’ve heard rumblings of tension between the two for months — almost since Velasquez arrived in San Diego in fall, 2010, from her post as director of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

In fact, the tension seems to be more widespread that just the two of them. It’s not unusual for me to hear complaints from the ranks at museums, but I would say that whenever I mention San Diego someone sends me a beef, and sometimes more than one person.

So, something appears to be wrong there, though I can’t tell exactly what it is from afar. Different outlooks, views of art, management styles, poor spending decisions, curatorial independence? All of the above? I hope Velasquez uses this shakeup in her staff to fix it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Walters

Cleveland Museum Expands Quietly To City’s West Side

Transformer Station, a private museum that opened to the public on February 1, has hatched a very exciting plan that will eventually give the Cleveland Museum of Art a branch on the city’s west side.

TransformerStationAn Ohio couple named Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell bought the station, which was built in 1924 and served as one of sixteen substations of the Cleveland Railway Company until 1949, and in the last couple of years have spent nearly $3 million turning the brick structure, which has 22-foot ceilings in the main hall, into a mini-museum. The station encompasses 7,944 square foot with about 3,500 square feet of gallery space, plus a catering kitchen to support events, concerts and lectures, offices and a library for the Bidwell Foundation. 

The Bidwells have been collecting photography by artists in the beginning or middle of their careers (listed here), the website says, and along with the commissions, they’ll be shown at Transformer Station in two shows a year, lasting about six months in total. The first showing of their art is called Light of Day, and the first special exhibition is called Bridging Cleveland by Vaughn Wascovich, which displays large-scale panoramic images of landmark Cleveland bridges that were commissioned by Bidwell Projects. One more is already planned.

 The Cleveland Museum has committed to program the station during the rest of the year.

What I had not focused on until today, when I read the News section of the Station’s website, is that the Bidwells have pledged to give the station to the Cleveland Museum at some date 15 or 20 years in the future – along with half of their collection, with the rest going to the Akron Art Museum.

Back in January, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer published an article that included this passage:

David Franklin, director of the Cleveland museum, said he’s elated that his institution is breaking out of University Circle for the first time in its 97-year history and that it has its first toehold on the West Side. “It’s terribly exciting,” he said. “I regard it not simply as a satellite, but as a different type of exhibition space that will create a new kind of Cleveland Museum of Art curating.” 

Now that’s exciting.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Transformer Station

 

Shakeup At Crystal Bridges

Having spent the entire morning on the phone with Apple support, related to iPhone and iCloud problems (do not download the later), I don’t have time to parse this announcement from Crystal Bridges, but here it is:

BigelowExecutive Director Don Bacigalupi has been “promoted” to the newly created position of president and appointed to the museum’s Board of Directors. Deputy Director for Operations and Administration Rod Bigelow (at right) has been promoted to executive director. “Both promotions are immediately effective,” says the press release.

This is a surprise, and probably not a good thing. Two people can’t both be boss — it doesn’t work. Witness the problem at the Getty all these years. One has to suspect that there is more to it.

That’s it for now.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Crystal Bridges