Embracing Change
Between the Newspaper and the Encyclopedia: A Model of Collaboration
Matthew Teitelbaum
As we anticipate and plan for the future, we must remember that museums are connected to everyday concerns, challenges and opportunities. The world is coming at us. If we think of museums on a hill–as if removed from a world far away–it is at our own peril. Museums are intertwined with our communities, connected not simply because of shared history, but because we have learned that museums come alive through the audiences they serve. In our era of innovation–with the emergence of new ways of creating community, new ways of activating populations and new ways of sharing knowledge–we do well to reach out. In this moment of seismic shifts, we can choose to embrace change and reconsider how we learn, how we share and how we gather with others.
Gender Bending Fashion exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. March 21–August 25, 2019.
Photograph: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
An exhibition recently opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, that grew from such spirit of open inquiry. Gender Bending Fashion looks across a century of haute couture and ready-to-wear fashion that has challenged rigid, binary definitions of dress. It features more than 60 boundary-pushing designs, presenting the work of groundbreaking contemporary designers–including Rad Hourani, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alessandro Michele for Gucci, Palomo and Rei Kawakubo– in the context of historical trends from the 1920s through the 1960s.
Here is the behind-the-scenes story: In March 2016, Michelle Finamore, the MFA’s Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts, had just mounted the terrific exhibition #techstyle with her colleagues Pamela Parmal, chair and David and Roberta Logie Curator of Textile and Fashion Arts, and Lauren Whitley, curator, Textile and Fashion Arts. This exhibition looked at how technology challenged fashion and design, making possible LED dresses and 3D printed shoes. Following that exhibition, I asked her “What’s next?” Michelle was considering an exhibition on a fashion designer at the forefront of blurring gender lines in runway shows. I expressed caution about focusing on a single designer and asked if this was the show she really wanted to do. Her reply: She wanted to do an exhibition on gender bending in fashion, to reach out to our communities in new ways.
And so, Michelle went on to create the exhibition now on view in our galleries–one that brings to life a history of self-expression and hidden narratives through fashion. It wonderfully expresses the MFA’s commitment to community, openness and civility.
The exhibition was informed, in part, by a series of roundtables in 2018 and early 2019. One included a broad representation of colleagues who have lived lives of activism and inclusivity. Another included a group of millennials who self-identified as interested in issues of gender diversity, identity and/or fashion and presentation. Another, the MFA’s own Teen Arts Council. These were remarkable conversations during which it became clear that gender fluidity is, for many, a norm.
Many questions were raised during this process. How do we capture lived experience within the show? How do we integrate the voices of visitors who wish to share their personal experiences with us? How do we determine which mannequins would–and would not–be appropriate? It was in working with our own and other communities through the roundtables, that we were able to deepen our response.
Exhibition practice must be active and evolving. I believe we must engage in collaborative systems to create and discover the nuance and language of belonging, which strengthens the exhibitions we develop.
We live in challenging times. Regardless of what and whom we believe and where our affiliations lie, it is clear that views are shifting. We are reconsidering the way we understand the past, the way we connect things and the way in which we imagine a future with each other. The great American artist Robert Rauschenberg famously said: “Painting relates both to art and life. Neither can be made–I try to act in the gap between the two.” For me, I translate: I want to act in the gap between the front page of the newspaper and the encyclopedia; between the urgency of the present and the place of knowledge accumulated across time. As I walk the bridge between the museum and life outside, I will be looking to create an open and welcoming space that invites exchange and reciprocity.
If we can create such a place of belonging, we can deliver on the great promise of museums in our time: to collaborate with our communities to create new levels of generosity, understanding and, ultimately, an engaged citizenry.
Matthew Teitelbaum is the Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Museum of Fine Arts
Boston, MA
mfa.org
Expanding Narratives: Bridging art and Environmental Science In Today’s College Art Museum
Sharon L. Corwin
One day this Spring, a group of Colby College students came to the Colby Museum of Art to study and discuss Maya Lin’s sculpture Disappearing Bodies of Water, Arctic Ice (2013). Such visits are almost everyday occurrences at the museum, which consistently attracts more than 1,000 undergraduates every academic year, from disciplines ranging from anthropology to statistics. It was exciting and instructive to watch this group, a class of environmental science students, as they engaged with Lin’s work; their questions emerged out of a distinct disciplinary perspective, an orientation that one might not readily encounter outside of a college or university museum.
Students at Colby College gather to discuss Maya Lin’s sculpture Disappearing Bodies of Water, Arctic Ice (2013).
Courtesy of the museum.
Fashioned out of Vermont Danby marble, Lin’s piece, which is part of the museum’s Lunder Collection, is a representation of the arctic ice shelf that shows, through a series of topographic renderings, the severe reduction in its mass from 1980 to 2013 (a period when more than a million square miles of sea ice extent disappeared from the Arctic Ocean). The professor leading the class, a marine biologist, led a discussion that considered the effects of warming oceans and rising sea levels on the marine ecosystem. The students then began to think about how the sculpture expressed themes of disappearance and loss, and how its materials and form–a table of thinly carved marble balanced atop a granite base–might serve as a cautionary metaphor for the increasingly perilous condition of the natural world. Even as they brought their own ways of seeing to Lin’s work, the sculpture, in turn, offered new vocabularies for them to explore the environmental topics that they were learning about in class.
The museum regularly fosters these sorts of interdisciplinary encounters with works of art connecting with the scholarly expertise of Colby’s faculty and its students’ wide-ranging pursuits. Our mission as a college art museumis rooted in a commitment to dialogues between art and the sciences as well as between art and the humanities, so we are well positioned to take up some of the most pressing issues facing the world today. One such issue, the ecological threat posed by global climate change, is precisely what the Lin sculpture asks us to grapple with. Over the next year, the Colby Museum and the Lunder Institute for American Art, launched at the Colby Museum as a new collaborative initiative in 2017, will dedicate a series of exhibitions and programs to climate change. These efforts will take place alongside Colby-wide initiatives in the environmental sciences and humanities across campus, including a new Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, the Environmental Humanities Faculty Seminar, the work of Colby’s Buck Environment and Climate Change Lab and the college’s partnership with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science.
This summer, for instance, the Colby Museum and the Lunder Institute will collaborate with Phong Bui, the founder and artistic director of The Brooklyn Rail, a journal devoted to the visual arts, culture and politics. As a 2019 Lunder Institute Fellow, Bui is organizing an exhibition at the Colby Museum entitled Occupy Colby: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 2, part of an ongoing Brooklyn Rail project that began in 2017 at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. The exhibition and its associated publication will examine environmental issues in contemporary art; related programs will provide an opportunity for scientists, artists, policy experts and historians to engage in public conversation with one another.
Our upcoming summer schedule also includes Wíw nikan…the beauty we carry, an exhibition of and by First Nations artists in what is now Maine and Maritime Canada. Curated by Jennifer Neptune, a Penobscot basketmaker and beadworker, and Kathleen Mundell, the director of Cultural Resources, Inc., the show has been organized in collaboration with artistic and cultural leaders from the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Abenaki peoples, who are collectively known as the Wabanaki. The exhibition, catalogue and programming will feature contemporary artists working in some of the oldest artistic traditions of North America, many of which are now endangered by changes in the environment. Because there are fewer days of extreme cold,for example, the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle species, is preying upon the ash trees that serve as the primary material used by Wabanaki basketmakers. Wíw nikan thus gives space and voice to a broader range of perspectives, within the sphere of contemporary art-making, on the global and local impacts of potentially catastrophic alterations in the earth’s climate.
A third summer 2019 exhibition, River Works: Whistler and the Industrial Thames, revisits a more familiar art-historical milieu but, in line with the museum’s commitment to foregrounding global climate change, offers a fresh and timely assessment of one of the museum’s most admired paintings, James McNeill Whistler’s Chelsea in Ice (1864). The exhibition reflects on how the work of Whistler and other artists responded to environmental changes–such as the miasma and pollution directly related to industrialization–wrought on Victorian London and its primary waterway. Chelsea in Ice, part of the Lunder Collection, has become a touchstone for Colby faculty seeking to understand historical evidence of anthropogenic changes to the climate. For instance, a recent course on biodiversity and global change visited the museum to study the painting as a marker of the early Anthropocene (a geological epoch characterized by human influence on the planet), centering on Whistler’s thickly painted depiction of the smoke that blackens the London sky above the Thames.
In partnership with the Lunder Institute, we are committed to bringing together artists and scholars to delve into the urgent issues related to the earth’s changing climate. Through collaborative exhibitions, collections and programs, we can offer new perspectives on humanity’s relationship to the planet and our impact on the natural world. College art museums enable disciplines to intersect to pose new and important questions and seek innovative solutions to global problems. And scientists, historians and philosophers help us look at works of art anew, comprehend them in unanticipated, revelatory ways and share knowledge that inspires new interpretive strategies and expands narratives of American art in local and global contexts. We have so much to gain from these shared explorations, with the museum embracing its role not only to teach its visitors but also to learn from them.
Sharon L. Corwin is the Carolyn Muzzy Director of the Colby College Museum of Art and chief curator.
Colby College Museum of Art
Waterville, ME
colby.edu/museum
Reflections from the Mill: Music, Art and Ice Cream
Joseph C. Thompson
With MASS MoCA’s 20th anniversary a few weeks away (on May 25, we’ll be celebrating with a free block party, free admission to a full slate of new exhibitions, and a benefit concert by Annie Lennox) here are some reflections from the mill:
As we first contemplated MASS MoCA in 1986, I would have never imagined a beer hall and a BBQ joint as our front door, and it couldn’t be better: tables, red-and-white gingham tablecloths, people hanging out, making music, eating ice cream–all in our front courtyard. Someone once asked who we should commission to design the picnic tables. I felt the standard model from our local Shed Man would do just fine. Picnic tables are universally familiar and welcoming.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, 2019.
Photo: Tony Luong.
David Byrne once wrote a song for a work of theater he was developing in residence here and it says, “God draws straight, but with crooked lines.” I love that lyric. The original idea for MASS MoCA was simple, and glorious (but included no BBQ or performing arts). The idea was to find vast industrial spaces for oversized works of art that required neither perfect climate control nor exquisitely detailed white-walled galleries. This was to be a largely fixed-in-place monument to American minimal art, with spaces resonant of the lofts in which much of that work was originally conceived and fabricated.
That MASS MoCA version 1.0 idea got built, just not in North Adams. It is called Dia:Beacon and was beautifully realized by Michael Govanin in 2003 (now director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) who, along with me, Zelda Stern and Rod Faulds comprised the tiny staff at Williams College Museum of Art, when our boss, Tom Krens, first suggested utilizing empty mill space in North Adams for large-scale sculpture. Tom’s original notion, inspired by his visit to documenta and Schaffhausen (but also influenced by Gehry’s the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh), was to renovate 30,000 sq. ft. of space in a nearby empty mill on the other side of North Adams. When then-mayor of North Adams John Barrett caught wind that deep-pocketed Williams College was poking around for alternative museum space in his city, he suggested that we look instead at the recently vacated Sprague Electric Company, which had just announced– in 1986–that it was shuttering all operations in its 800,000 sq. ft., 26-building downtown mill complex. What an utterly absurd idea.
Local attorney John DeRosa informed us that the city had just drafted a community redevelopment plan at the behest of Governor Michael Dukakis, and he thought the Governor might be intrigued by this “Berkshire Museum of Contemporary Art.” DeRosa proved to be correct. Though between Dukakis’s original endorsement and release of the pivotal state grant for construction, some 10 years of mad scramble ensued, during which time the entire program changed.
I love Dia:Beacon. But I also thank our lucky stars that we failed to realize that v.1.0 idea in North Adams, because I doubt it ever would have survived here. (Dia’s quasi-permanent collection is enjoyed by a steady stream of contemporary art cognoscenti arriving by train direct from Midtown Manhattan.)
Three things happened during that desultory period between 1988 and 1997, as we completely reimagined MASS MoCA as a vast open platform instead of a bunch of big warehouse boxes (or to quote another one of our favorite artists, Beck–more like “two turntables and a microphone”).
1. Performing arts became integral to MASS MoCA’s mission. We now expend a full 50% of MASS MoCA’s resources and emotional bandwidth on performing arts– from contemporary dance, multimedia, theater, to indie-rock, film and multiday, multivenue festivals that range from decidedly new music (Bang on a Can) to decidedly traditional (FreshGrass) alongside events that are difficult to even try to describe. We produce many of those right here during artist residencies and technical workshops, including a recent work by William Kentridge that brought some 60 South African actors, musicians and designers to the smallest city in Massachusetts for the better part of a month, prepping the show for its premier at London’s Tate Modern.
2. MASS MoCA diversified its portfolio.We became home to some 35 commercial tenants who share space with us on this beautifully recycled 16 acres, bringing jobs and activity (and local real estate taxes!) to downtown. These businesses bring about $8 million per year in economic activity, which alongside MASS MoCA’s $42 million per year, means that this complex is the catalyst for $50 million of economic activity every year. That figure is about twice the original economic impact forecast, which is a terrific return on the state’s investment. And we know now that it is not yet enough; there is still much work to do to achieve full socioeconomic recovery in North Adams, as the city navigates the challenging arc from industrial to post-industrial life.
3. We focused on temporary exhibitions. Instead of showing largescale, fixed-in-place minimal sculpture, we shifted our thinking to focus on temporary exhibitions–most of which feature brand new work–work that would be very difficult to realize in space-bound, time-bound urban settings. Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole–in which museum patrons are invited to navigate across an actual ice pond before plunging into a 12-foot deep chasm of frigid (38°F!) water–is about to make way for works by filmmaker and multimedia artist Cauleen Smith. Trenton Doyle Hancock has just opened a technicolor, character-driven theme-park of an exhibition that explodes his paintings and action-figure narratives into three dimensions. It doesn’t all rotate every 10 months, though– MASS MoCA’s long-term installations of Sol LeWitt, James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson and Anselm Kiefer harken back to the original MASS MoCA 1.0 model.
Happily, these programmatic shifts align with the more inclusive and nonhierarchical way that people (especially young people) absorb arts and culture today. A recent study that I think of as the “ice cream museum report” showed that for millennials, going to a museum of ice cream or listening to a street musician play beside an ethnic food truck carries the same sort of cultural weight as visiting a museum of art. While alarming in parts, that study also demonstrates the more experiential, porous, participatory and open-minded attitudes of younger generations. When Wilco’s ambitious drummer, Glenn Kotche, creates participatory percussive sculptures to activate our Sol LeWitt galleries, and then returns to write music for an avantgarde dance and theater piece that also happens to feature Jon Hamm, and then returns to play for 10,000 people with Wilco at the band’s Solid Sound Festival …that sort of cross-cultural mash-up speaks volumes to our growing audiences.
As does the beer and BBQ at the front door.
Joseph C. Thompson is the director of MASS MoCA.
MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
massmoca.org
Building Bridges: Fifty Years of Collecting Art for Middlebury College
Richard Saunders
Our museum is a tyro in comparison to most of its peers. This past year, we reached the half-century mark in building a permanent collection and we marked this milestone with the exhibit 50/50: Fifty Years of Collecting for Middlebury (on view through August 11, 2019).
Artists and students at Middlebury College working on the street art-inspired community mural.
Photo: Todd Balfour
In reflecting on this moment, I have come to realize that all museums face the same inherent challenge. They are created by people who have as their mission to collect, preserve and interpret objects they believe have cultural value. But like history itself––a story told by the victors––museum stories are also the handiwork of those with agendas. Those of us in positions of responsibility need to be reminded that we possess such privilege and authority.
This responsibility never subsides. The issue is how it is exercised. Based on many factors––resources, collections, audience, location––each museum charts its own path to tell its narrative. Since the history of the museum is well chronicled, we know what choices have been made by our predecessors.
Yet museums are always at the mercy of the vicissitudes of society. And because museums’ sense of collective self-worth is determined by how well they meet the metrics of these changes (i.e., what to collect and exhibit, whose narratives to tell, etc.), the challenges of remaining relevant and engaged are relentless.
Decades ago, museums did not worry about inclusivity. Museums were for the educated, and if you found your way to one of them there was an assumption you understood what or why an object was on view. For the most part, visitors neither expected nor needed labels, catalogues or supplemental programming. Nor did they expect exhibits that were sensitive to those with disabilities. These experiences were created for the few and there was no expectation it should be otherwise. Thankfully, those times are past.
In the modern museum, inclusivity and access are our watchwords. While many people still look to museums for guidance, the reality is that we struggle even more today with the decisions of what to collect, exhibit and interpret. And we believe curators can and should struggle with the choices they make. Every decision to acquire an artist’s work or create a temporary exhibition means the rejection of something else. Just as the music we listen to, the books we read and the films we watch reflect choices, museums are no different.
As the director of a college museum, which is part a of larger institution and, to a great degree, insulated from the pressures independent museums face, such as the need for income from admissions, our primary challenges reflect obligations to our students and faculty. Because of this safety net, we are sometimes able to take risks––such as assembling exhibits that appeal to a small audience, if we feel the energy and expense are warranted. We exist because we are deemed an important part of the American liberal arts college experience, and our primary goal is to see that our students grapple with challenging ideas and achieve some modicum of visual literacy. Our hope is that Middlebury students graduate with some awareness for and comprehension of the visual world that surrounds them.
Based on a combination of statistics and anecdotal experiences over the past 30 years at Middlebury, my sense is that fewer than 50% of our students visit the museum over the course of their undergraduate years. While this has grown steadily over the past decade (we have a student friends group that hovers around 900), I am still not sure this represents a passing grade. It was, in part, with this challenge in mind some years ago that we created a public art on campus program. Today, this art collection of approximately 30 works can be seen across our 450 acres. It includes works that range from those by heralded artists such as Jenny Holzer, Tony Smith and Dan Graham to most recently a street art-inspired community mural created as a collective campus experience. I am sometimes asked which works I particularly like, as if my preference revealed some inside story. I am most often attracted to those works that our students find engaging, as it is a sign they have paused from their daily routine to consider why an artist created a work or what they take away from it. So, when I hear students divided over the merits of a particular sculpture or painting, I am less concerned with their arguments than being delighted that it has gotten them to articulate a point of view. To me, it is a central way that a college museum can exceed its physical footprint and contribute to the greater goal of experiential learning.
Over the past three decades as I have watched our permanent collection grow, I have also seen what we collect evolve. While objects that celebrate the canon of Western art are still important to us, we are increasingly drawn to acquisitions that embrace the breadth of cultural diversity across time and around the world.
Because collecting contemporary art is such an enormous part of our collection plan, we created a set of questions that are useful tools in pursuing that strategy. We ask ourselves:
- In what ways will the proposed acquisition significantly enhance the scope of our collection of global contemporary art?
- In what ways does the acquisition expand the diversity (i.e., ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, culture) of our collection?
- Who among the faculty support this proposal and are likely to utilize the proposed acquisition in their Middlebury courses, and in what ways will this object build bridges with other disciplines?
- How will the acquisition relate to the other objects in the collection (i.e., through medium/media, scale, narrative, etc.)? What stories does it enable us to tell?
- What makes the acquisition deserving of inclusion? (In what way does it give pleasure, provoke wonder, provide opportunity for research, validate ideas or experiences, inspire us or stir us to think?)
Collecting contemporary art is not for the faint of heart. At Middlebury, we are not so naive as to believe all our acquisitions will stand the test of time. But along the way, we hope to ensure what we acquire resonates with our larger institutional mission.
Richard Saunders is the director of the Middlebury College Museum of Art.
Middlebury College Museum of Art
Middlebury, VT
museum.middlebury.edu