Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Five Questions For Jay Xu, A Year After The Asian Art Museum’s Near-Bankruptcy

It was just over a year ago that the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco got itself out of trouble, when the city fostered a five-party agreement to restructure the museum’s debt. At the time, I also wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal suggesting that, while circumstances did add to the museum’s troubles, perhaps it wasn’t all that wise to get itself into high finance.

All that is behind the museum now. In fact, last September it re-launched with a new logo (which requires an explanation, alas) and a new mission, as covered in The New York Times. And it has been acquiring works, one outlined here.

It seemed time to check in with the museum’s director, Jay Xu, who was hired in 2008. A native of Shanghai, Xu became curator of Asian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003, after heading the Seattle Museum’s department of Asian art and serving as curator of Chinese art theres for seven years. He also worked at the Shanghai Museum, and earned a master’s degree in art history from Princeton and worked as a fellow in Asian art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Earlier this month, I sent him Five Questions – here are his repsonses.
1) 2011 was supposed to be fresh start for the museum, a reinvention with new branding to reach new audiences: it’s early days, but given attendance so far, will the 2011-2012 attendance number be closer to the 187,000 last year or the 300,000 average?
We plan to be above 200,000, which, according to benchmark data from AAMD, is relatively high compared to museums of similar budget and exhibition space. In our case, lower attendance over the past 18 months is a result of reducing the number of exhibitions. We chose to emphasize unique, first-of-their-kind exhibitions (Shanghai, 2010; Bali, 2011; Maharaja, currently), and have them on view for a longer period, in order to maintain a balanced budget during the economic downturn. If you present a third fewer major exhibitions per year, you’re naturally going to see a corresponding impact on attendance. Still, our Shanghai exhibition was our third most popular exhibition in the past nine years. Maharaja is tracking close to that. We’ll return to a more robust exhibition schedule this year.

Our membership base has stayed steady over the last 18 months, and the most recent visitor surveys suggest that there’s stronger visitor satisfaction, which was one of the goals of our rebranding project.

2) In your blog, you mention that all three current exhibitions show “traditional and contemporary artworks side by side” – do you see that continuing with all special exhibitions going forward or are you striving for some optimal mix?

Where appropriate, we will seek to incorporate contemporary elements. Our next two shows—both organized by us—will have strong contemporary components. Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past (May 18–September 2) is our first really comprehensive effort in presenting contemporary art. Taking Asian spirituality as its theme, Phantoms is curated by Mami Kataoka, chief curator of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum; she has partnered with our curators in juxtaposing new and traditional works. The show will fill our special exhibition spaces, and spill into our collection galleries.

The second show, Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy (October 5–December 30), features 45 examples of Chinese calligraphy—some dating back to the 14th century, together with an original commissioned work by contemporary artist Xu Bing that will respond to one of the calligraphies. The show also includes paintings by Brice Marden, Franz Kline, and Mark Tobey borrowed from SFMOMA.

3) What is the museum’s financial situation now – is the total principal owed still $98 million, what has the museum had to pay in interest this fiscal year, and is the museum operating in the black?

"Maharajah" - Courtesy of the Asian Art Museum

Museum operations are always in the black. Our general operating budget is separate from our debt servicing. Contributed income from supporters remains strong. Our recent gala for the Maharaja exhibition drew 630 guests, and netted more than $750,000—the most successful fundraising event in the museum’s history.

We instituted a $5 surcharge for recent special exhibitions, which allowed us to maintain a consistent level of earned income despite fewer visitors due to the reduced exhibition schedule. We are now able to eliminate the surcharge for our next two exhibitions. It’s important to remember that revenue from ticket sales only makes up 5-8% of our annual budget.

The loan facilitated by the City of San Francisco to restructure our debt is $97 million, over a 30-year term with a 4.6% fixed interest rate. The principle begins to amortize beginning with the second year of the loan, beginning February 2012.

4) Of the $20 million the museum must raise (stated in the 2011 agreement with the city), how much has been raised so far?

We’ve hired a national capital campaign consulting firm to help us determine the scope of a fundraising campaign, one that potentially goes beyond the required $20 million. A larger campaign would allow us to strengthen our endowment, plus pursue new programs. The consulting firm will complete its planning study early this year. Our partners at City Hall have been kept up to date on this plan.

5) So many museums around the U.S. are expanding their Asian art offerings – we’ve seen several terrific special exhibitions of late, as well as expanding permanent collections – to respond to population change. What can the Asian Art Museum offer that they don’t?

That’s the question we asked when developing our approach to contemporary art. What can we offer that no one else can? The answer came back to our collection. While many museums have Asian offerings, our museum is one of the few that can present its pan-Asian collection as a comprehensive whole, using standard nomenclature, with themes and storylines that run throughout the museum’s galleries. This comprehensive presentation makes the collection comfortably accessible, providing a rich experience to all museum visitors—from novice to connoisseur to scholar.

We are uniquely positioned to juxtapose, compare, inform, and tell stories with artworks past and present. Our aim is to highlight interconnectivity across time and place, connecting our visitors with Asian art and culture in new, engaging ways. This is what makes our upcoming exhibition, Phantoms of Asia, so compelling, and such a great example of the revitalized Asian Art Museum.

The Art Institute Of Chicago Links Up With India

In some art circles, as in economic circles, Asia looms very large — as competition.  Some worry aloud that the West may lose its influence over culture to China and India, that someday we’ll all be gazing at and buying art from contemporary Asian artists rather than American and European ones. And worse, that tourists will be prowling all over new Asian museums rather than our own. Bye, bye, the 5 million visitors at the Metropolitan Museum and the 8 million at the Louvre.
 
Untitled, 1934. Courtesy of the AIC

I’ve always thought the hand-wringing was overdone, at least for my lifetime.

And this weekend, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted a delegation from India that is all about cooperation, rather than competition; it’s a welcome development. Although no dollar figure was disclosed, the AIC said that it had received “a major grant” from the government of India — the first grant ever made by the Indian government to an American art museum. In return, via the four-year Vivekananda Memorial Program for Museum Excellence, the AIC “will serve as a resource center regarding best museum practices for museum professionals in India; will create fellowships across many different museum departments for colleagues from India; and will send a group of Art Institute staff regularly to India to conduct workshops, seminars, lectures, and courses.”

Now, some may see this as selling our competitors the rope to hang ourselves with, as the old Soviet-era axiom went. I don’t — and the AIC certainly does not. It traces its relationship with India to September 11, 1893, when Swami Vivekananda spoke about religious tolerance at what is now the Art Institute at the first World’s Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. And it’s thrilled with the lasting nature of it.

“It is a supreme honor to be recognized by the Government of India as a partner in the preservation, exhibition, and promotion of India’s cultural heritage,” said Douglas Druick, the director. 

On Saturday, the Art Institute also opened as exhibition loaned directly by the Government of India, The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore (1861–1941) – novelist, poet, musician, philosopher and the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913) — was also a painter. Sixty-one of them are on view in Chicago, offering “a glimpse into the visionary mind of this influential thinker.”

One picture, all that’s up on the AIC website, is not enough to tell anything, and I haven’t found a review of the exhibition yet. But  I’m looking forward to seeing more of his work.

And as I look around the exhibition schedules of U.S. museums for the coming months, I see more and more shows about distant cultures, which makes the life of art museums a lot more interesting.  

 

Boston Patrons Shell Out: Two New Endowed Directorships

As I’ve said before, two’s company — so once again I’ll mention something because there’ve been two instances in a very short time.

b9ghvr.jpgOn Tuesday came the news from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston that, for the first time in its history, both the Director and Chief Curator positions were being endowed. Jill Medvedow will now  be known as the Ellen Matilda Poss Director and Karen Molesworth will be the Barbara Lee Chief Curator.

Today, the nearby Peabody Essex Museum announced that its director had also been endowed. Dan Monroe will be the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Director and CEO of PEM, thanks to an eight-figure gift from “the Most Important Collectors You’ve Never Heard Of” — a total overstatement of a headline, which I did not write! They are pictured in their home above right.

Since that article, in any case, the van Otterloos’ collection has been on tour — I saw it again recently in Houston — and the couple is far from unknown.

Their gift is part of the PEM’s $650 million capital campaign, which went public in November. So far, the museum has raised $570 million, $20 million more than announced at the time. All from the van Otterloos? We don’t know. But you can read more here.

At ICA, meanwhile, the gifts are part of a $50 million campaign, more than half of which has been committed — including 10 seven-figure gifts, according to its press office. This will certainly help Boston continue the development of a vibrant contemporary art scene.

Time was, Boston was dogged by a reputation for stingy donors. But these gifts, plus the many given to the Museum of Fine Arts there, as well as the Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Harvard Art Museums — all in the course of a decade — should change that.

Don’t good things come in threes? I’m expecting another big gift announcement any day now.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of PEM

Hidden Masterpieces: Science Takes Us Underneath The Paint

Out of the Shadows, a film by Kevin Sullivan about the use of advanced technology to discover the way artists work, made its debut in New York yesterday — a showing at the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory. I went to look, and concluded that it’s a good film for museums to screen — and build a program around.

dvd--oots.jpgMany museums have discovered that people like to see what art conservation is all about, and this film takes that interest and runs with it.

Narrated by Donald Sutherland, the documentary — don’t Google it, use the link above, because you will otherwise get a movie about depression – closely follows the stories of two paintings, Rembrandt’s Bearded Old Man and van Gogh’s The Patch of Grass. It shows how technology like x-ray fluorescence and 3D imaging and expertise – from scientists in Europe as well as at Cornell and Brookhaven National Laboratory — discovered paintings behind the surface of what we can all see and, in the Rembrandt’s case, led scholars to authenticate the picture as by him because of what’s underneath.

The hero is Joris Dik of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who has credentials in both art and science. He helped discover a Goya last year.

The film isn’t perfect, imho. It uses actors to play the parts of Rembrandt and his followers, for example, which is a little hokey. But they don’t speak, and their moments on screen are short. In a couple of places, it overdramatizes — but not too badly.

What it set out to do — show science in art — it does pretty well. Nicely, the film’s website provides not just the trailer, but also other video snippets that take you behind the scenes at the Rijksmuseum, the Kroller-Muller Museum, the Rotterdam museum, and other places prominent in the film, telling their stories. It explains a bit of the science, too.

I’d like to see the film get theatrical distribution, but it’s already available on DVD (above). That shouldn’t hold museums back, though. Visitors will pay (modestly) to see this and discuss it.

 

 

Since When Does The Departure Of A Museum’s Education Director Make News?

It’s not very often that the departure of a museum’s education director merits an article in a city’s newspaper. But that is what happened last week, when Williams College announced that it had picked Christina Olsen to head its museum of art.

Christina Olsen.bmpOlsen is leaving the Portland Art Museum, and the Oregonian acknowledged her work there, and before at the Getty, as well as her ambition, in a meaty article. The writer, D.K. Row, had also featured Olsen in an article in 2010. Then, he called Olsen one of the most important people at the museum and said she had “improved the museum’s relationship with children, young adults and other communities that have felt marginalized by Oregon’s flagship art institution.”

The museum’s director, Brian Ferriso, had wanted to upgrade education, and Olsen, the daugher and wife of painters, did that:

With military zeal, Olsen has directed special efforts to bring children and families into the museum through a multitude of events and workshops; she’s deepened the experiential component of exhibitions with greater Web-based interaction and interpretative strategies, such as employing Periscope illustrators; and she’s helped strengthen the museum’s partnerships with the local art community’s younger and less traditional artists.

Now, in the article announce her departure, Row said:

She was one of the most zealous practitioners of technology within the museum hierarchy and aggressively tried to make exhibits intersect with the aesthetics and practical uses of the Internet age. Olsen also diversified the department’s influence within the museum. The education department began to work more closely with curators, for example.

She also established programs that linked the museum more closely to the public, particularly viewers under 40…

In some ways, this is a blow to Ferriso, who had high hopes for Olsen in Portland, and now must find someone with equal zeal — but probably different ideas. On the other hand, it’s a compliment that Portland wooed her from the much larger, more influential Getty, and that she was chosen to lead the renowned Williams College Museum after less than four years.

It may also be a sign that the education departments at museums are gaining in stature. Many people have told me that museum educators feel like second fiddles to curators, called in at the last minute to discuss educational programs — if consulted at all.

Few have made it into the directors’ ranks.

But a few museum directors, lately, have also said, like Ferriso, that this should change. Not that educators need take the upper hand — but they aren’t appendages either.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Williams College