Let’s turn the page on the National Academy Museum (below). As the art world — no, make that the museum world — will remember, it was sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors a few years back for deaccessioning two Hudson River School paintings to make ends meet. A short time later — but not short enough for the NAM — the sanctions were lifted.

This weekend, after being closed for a renovations, the NAM reopens with six exhibitions, and all seems to be well.

Or does it?

In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, I discuss the issues with Carmine Branagan, the director. Aside from balancing the budget, which will take several years, she says, the main issues are two:

• In a city loaded with museums, what niche exists for hers?
• And, in the 21st century, what artists want to belong to an academy?

The Academy can elect up to 450 members, but it has only 320.

Recently, as the article says, the Academy has opened up its membership to go beyond painters, sculptors, graphic artists and architects — it may now admit any kind of visual artist, including those working in new media and installations.

So although many member abstained from the vote on that change, which you will see in the article, Branagan has succeeded in making a substantive change there.

The niche is a big problem. Before the renovation, the NAM was attracting 20,000 people a year — very low in NYC. Branagan has purposely set the bar low, hoping for only a 20% increase in the next three years.

It’s smart to avoid raising expectations. I reserve judgement on the current exhibitions:

• An American Collection, which provides an overview of the colletion up to 1970, about 100 paintingshung salon-style.
• A retrospective for Will Barnet, who was elected to the Academy in 1982 and turned 100 in May.
• The Artist Revealed: A Panorama of Great Artist Portraits, which should be a strength, because by tradition each member donates a work to the Academy and many gave portraits – including Thomas Eakins, whose only fully realized self-portrait will be on view.
• An architecture display highlighting post-war drawings, models and photographs by the likes of Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei
• Recent works of five members, including Elizabeth Catlett and Malcolm Morley
• A show of works made since 2000.

I haven’t seen them. But I hope they’re good, giving the Academy a jumpstart. It’s going to need it.

Do art museums have an image problem? Many people think so —  that they’re seen as places for the upper classes. A year ago, in a Cultural Conversation with Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for the Wall Street Journal, I quoted him explaining his decision to use a lot of glass in the museum’s new American wing with the line, “so people outside can see people inside and know you don’t have to wear black tie to come in.” As he pointed out, most people see museum directors and patrons in those society pictures taken at fund-raising galas, when they are all dressed to the nines.

As the saying goes, perception is reality. So maybe it would help if museum directors were seen in different circumstances — like how about playing baseball?

I saved this example from last July when it was recorded in an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. That’s Cleveland Museum of Art director David Franklin at left, in his  moment on the mound throwing the first pitch in a game between Cleveland Indians and the Toronto Blue Jays.

I thought of this today because of my recent post on the botched job of involving the community in Springfield, Mo., which prompted a few critics to say I’m in favor of privilege. I’m not; I want everyone to love the arts and feel comfortable going to museums. And I do think image may be a problem for some museums (though I am not equating this with the director search in that post).

When I talk with directors, some say they are already visible in the community. One told me he was out virtually every night — often courting donors. That’s a tough, important job, but it’s not their only job, and they might even like the relief of being with regular people.

Franklin’s pitch, btw, was not an outreach effort: He’s a Canadian, and a group called “Canadians Living in Cleveland” invited him to do it.

But, last December, Franklin also dropped the puck before a Cleveland Monsters hockey game, and that was set up by the museum’s marketing effort. “It was a highlight of my life,” he told the Plain Dealer then. “I loved it so much!”

And it certainly didn’t hurt for a museum director to be seen by baseball and hockey fans. Many may already be museum patrons, and might be reminded to go again. Others may think about it for the first time, now that they know the director is a regular guy. I hope Franklin hung around after pitching and dropping the puck.

So play ball! 

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Plain Dealer (top) and Cleveland Museum of Art (bottom)  

Further on boundaries. This is another “small thing,” really, but it’s indicative of an entrenched problem at the New Museum: the lack of boundaries with the commercial world.

According to the New Museum’s website, an artist called Dzine is giving manicures and doing people’s nails in the museum’s store: it’s called “Getting Nailed at the New Museum.” And that’s not all. Here’s the description:

Continuing his investigation into Kustom Kulture and its relationship to art, sub cultures and self fashioning, Dzine will set up a mini-mobile nail salon in the New Museum Store lobby window, a project in collaboration with Salon94 and The Standard Hotel. Part sculpture, part performance, the nail salon will offer free nail designs to museum visitors on three consecutive Saturdays during the month of September. New York nail artists from different cultural backgrounds will be present to paint their unique style of designs on visitors’ fingers.

Due to the overwhelming response, we are fully booked for all nail sessions. We apologize for not being able to accommodate everyone.

Those are my boldface names — added for emphasis. Italics wouldn’t do in this case.

Plus, there’s this: in the New Museum’s store, Dzine is selling his “limited edition of 40 unique 24kt gold-plated Pinky Nails for the New Museum. They’re all a little funky, a little eccentric, and completely ghetto fabulous.”

Why not just rent out the museum to commercial ventures?

People complain all the time about the contemporary art world, saying it’s too much about the money and about being cool (and maybe even ghetto fabulous — where is Tom Wolfe when we need him?). This sure does not help.

After getting bad press when it allowed trustee Dakis Joannou to show his own collection, in a show curated by his artist-friend, Jeff Koons, the New Museum might have been a tad chastened, even careful. Guess not. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Dzine/The New Museum
 

Talk about boundaries, and lack thereof.

The other day I ran across this article in yesterday’s  News-Leader about the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri (at left).

The community is invited to share feedback about the search for a new Springfield Art Museum director at tonight’s regular museum board of directors meeting….Community members — particularly local artists — have expressed interest in what qualities a new director will have and in how the museum will evolve…Arts advocate Jeanie Morris says she and other community members have written letters about what they hope to see in a new director….

She wants to see the museum evolve into something more like an “art center”…””What a wonderful opportunity for the community to help craft the future of our art museum”…

…Many of us feel that now it’s important for the museum to collaborate and partner up with the many wonderful arts organizations in our community. We also feel it is important to do things to make the museum inviting and exciting to the community. It should be alive with people enjoying the art, learning, shopping and dining. It should be a go to place for many! Our area art educators should feel welcome to bring in their students. We would love to  see workshops from nationally known artists, art talks, slide shows. The auditorium should be used by theater groups and other organizations!”

Now, it’s true that this is a city-owned museum, and that it is NOT accredited by the American Association of Museums. Nor are we talking about the Met. And no museum — or its director — should be unapproachable. But choosing a director with so much public input, voiced at a public meeting, will raise expectations about that poor director’s consultations with the public in the future. He/she will be expected to consult, even on matters — such as curatorial and exhibition decisions — that should not be voted upon. Will anything be the purview of the director? 

Who’d want that job? 

But wait, it got worse. A subsequent article, published Friday, said attendees demanded to be heard vocally after the board asked them to make their comments on Post-It notes. Well, trustees raised expectations — they had to suffer the consequences. 

A facilitator from the city’s human resources department said verbal comments were not scheduled that evening, but the floor was opened when Judith Fowler, a local artist, said: “As a board member, I’d like to hear what they have to say.”

Morris was the first to speak.

With several pages of notes in hand, Morris gave myriad suggestions to the board.

She also voiced some disappointment that the number of director candidates had been narrowed to three from 80 applicants.

“I think we should cast a wider net,” she said, adding that the new director should focus on marketing and outreach in the community.

Wider than 80? Or was she simply upset that the board narrowed the choice before they invited people to speak up?

This has been handled very badly by the board. Hiring a CEO is always the responsibility of the board. I pity the person who takes the job. It’s hard to restore boundaries once they’ve been breached. 

This is a small museum, but it seems to me that some much larger museums are treading too close to boundaries as they experiment with “access.”

That’s the headline on an article I’ve written on single-picture exhibitions, published in the September issue of The Art Newspaper.  It’s not online, at least at the moment.

But I have posted it – in a longer version — on my website. That’s one of the joys of having no space limitations on the web. It’s still not long — just about 800 words.

The story adds a few examples to those I’ve already chronicled on Real Clear Arts (e.g., Titian’s La Bella at the Kimbell, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum and Moran’s Shoshone Falls on the Snake River in Portland.) The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art and the Frick are among others doing it, too.

At the Speed Museum of Art, director Charles Venable told me that he’s negotiating the loan of a sculpture, thematically linked to the Kentucky Derby, for a show next spring. He can’t say what — any guesses?

Meantime, isn’t the picture here, of visitors viewing Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller at the Speed, fabulous?

Here’s how the Cedar Rapids exhibition came about, according to Sean Ulmer, a curator at the museum:

Three years ago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art approached the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art asking to borrow its seminal work, Grant Wood’s Woman with Plants (1929), for an upcoming traveling exhibition they were planning focusing on the art of the 1920s.  “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” opens at the BMA this October and then travels to the Dallas Museum of Art and then the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

 

Knowing that Woman with Plants is a pivotal work of art in our collection, the BMA generously offered us a choice from their collection in exchange.  In consultation with the Director, we decided that we wanted a truly significant work, one that had much to tell our visitors.  Part of this decision was based on our previous experience of displaying our 8 Rembrandt etchings during the 400th anniversary year of the artist’s birth, along side enlargements and accompanied by magnifying glasses.  Visitors welcomed the opportunity to slow down and look more carefully at these works, seeing Rembrandt’s craftsmanship in a way they never had before.  In choosing a work from the BMA’s vast collection, we wanted to create another opportunity for the museum visitor to focus on a singular work and to consider all it has to say. 

 

Fortunately, Terry Carbone, the curator at the BMA was able to help us narrow our field by listing several works she found particularly rich, not only in form but also in content.  We arrived at Charles Willson Peale’s 1776 portrait of George Washington, commissioned by John Hancock.  Created less than a year after being named Commander in Chief and shortly after his early success in the Siege of Boston, Washington sat for this portrait in late May 1776.  Hancock, President of the Second Continental Congress, was a successful merchant and major landowner in Boston and commissioned this work as a way of acknowledging Washington and how he saved Boston, and thus Hancock’s fortunes.  This important painting will be displayed in a gallery by itself and accompanied by panels that discuss several different aspects of the painting: George Washington, John Hancock, Charles Willson Peale, the Battle of Boston and the Revolutionary War.  There will even be a panel that discusses Grant Wood’s fascination with George Washington and the Revolutionary War.   In this way, we will offer the visitor a chance to look carefully at an American masterpiece and to consider all the stories it has to reveal.

Photo Credit: By Kertis Creative, Courtesy of the Speed Art Museum