James S. Snyder, the Anne and Jerome Fisher Director at the Israel Museum and Helen Molesworth, the chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA) joined together for the keynote address at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on May 14, 2012.  What’s the result of aligning two institutions that seem to sit at opposite ends of the spectrum?  The Israel Museum is an encyclopedic museum located on 20-acre mountaintop campus in Jerusalem.  The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, (also known as the ICA) was once a Kunsthalle that rotates a newly established permanent collection on view as well as traveling or visiting exhibitions of contemporary art.  First, Snyder explained his institution’s recent major expansion.  He noted that, "renewal” better describes the transformation the museum experienced.   The renewal allowed many new exhibition possibilities.  Snyder gave the audience of curators a visual tour, beginning with the three new wings equipped to exhibit sculpture, painting and antiquities.  They are named the Fine Arts Wing, the Jewish Art and Life Wing and the Archaeology wing that leads to a temporary exhibition space as well.  Architectural plans and breathtaking photographs showed the increase in natural light in the gallery spaces.  Snyder says, the natural light was one way to preserve the spiritual dimension of the space.   He noted that contemporary art installations were a challenge at first though, he and his team of curators found new ways to exhibit antiquities with a connection to contemporary art practices as well.

Helen Molesworth also offered insightful ways of conceiving the modern-day museum.  Helen Molesworth came to the ICA from the Harvard Art Museum where she served as head of the department of modern and contemporary art and the museum’s Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art.  She posed a similar question to that of James Snyder’s, "How does a museum successfully exhibit and/or house ancient and contemporary art under the same roof?” Molesworth belongs to the ICA, an institution that was originally named the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936.  The ICA started as a Kunsthalle.  Molesworth explained that, the ICA models itself after similar institutions that focus attentions toward exhibit contemporary art.  The New Museum is a chief example of an institution that aims to both exhibit art and act as an alternative space.  Marcia Tucker, formerly the curator of painting at the Whitney Museum, found the New Museum in 1977 and deemed that it would only exhibit contemporary art.   The break from the Whitney Museum allowed Tucker to show work by lesser known living artists on the brink of discovery.  The break was a telltale sign that contemporary art had begun to outgrow the traditional museum format.  Alternative spaces like these could be more in tune to the societal and global shifts that occur, shifts that are almost imperceptible to those participating in the society, but that artists can isolate and reinterpret through their art practice. 

Where do the two converge?

Helen Molesworth probably summed up it best when she said, "Art historians are like astronomers, both are concerned with seeing things in the present which were made long ago."  Both Snyder and Molesworth explore the best ways to understand and communicate the cultural treasures of our world. 

Give and Take: Shifting Collection Boundaries in the 21^st Century Museum

The first full panel of the conference, this session on recent approaches that challenge traditional museum taxonomies offered some enlightening (and refreshingly cross-disciplinary) examples of collaborative curating. This philosophy is one that has been made central to my own museum’s collection plan over recent years, so I was eager to learn of how other institutions were approaching similar questions.

Emily Ballew Naff, of the MFA Houston, opened the panel by discussing how she had applied an ‘Atlantic history’ model to her installation of American paintings and sculpture, building a presence for the arts of New Spain and the Caribbean, for example, through loans from other institutions. Matthew Witkovsky, of the Art Institute of Chicago, discussed the practice of exhibiting a major gift that contained elements that fell into a variety of collecting areas, stressing above all the need for ongoing communication. At Chicago, this practice is taking shape through the creation of cross-collection working groups. Finally, Marla Berns, director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, spoke about the museum’s reinstallation of its permanent collection, which integrated its African, Pacific, Native American, and Pre-Columbian holdings in a series of thematic galleries that aimed to illustrate shared, global trends through culturally situated, local examples. She also spoke about the critical challenges and benefits of a recent exhibition of the work of Nick Cave, convincingly arguing that showing the work of a contemporary artist who challenges taxonomies in what is still thought by some to be merely a "material culture” institution in fact allowed visitors the chance to challenge their prescriptive expectations and to look at familiar and unfamiliar art in new ways. The discussion period raised the issue of cross-collection acquisitions, with the speakers concluding that such accessions should ideally be directed toward objects that have the potential to be used in multiple ways for the institution, to its long-term benefit.

I directed considerable efforts toward cross-collection acquisitions and borrowing in my own recent installation of our African collection, so it was heartening to hear how central these attempts to question and push traditional museum taxonomies remain for a broad array of other museums. We are in very good company, at the very least. I was also struck by an undercurrent of Marla’s presentation—that these questions of taxonomies are, in fact, quite natural (if not ‘old hat’) for curators of non-Western art, whose very place in encyclopedic collections reflects a now-settled readjustment of seemingly fixed distinctions between "fine art” and "ethnography,” "craft,” or "material culture.” All the more reason for those of us caring for collections of African, Native American, Pacific, and Pre-Columbian collections to attend these conferences and share with our AAMC colleagues in the future.

In reading through last year’s blog postings in an attempt to discover what the readers of this blog are interested in, I noticed that several writers commented on Paola Antonelli’s comparison of geishas and curators in the keynote address. As Sarah Schultz quoted in her post, Antonelli said, "Curators are like geishas, well-trained in ancient instruments yet dependent on institutions and donors.” Be that as it may, my favorite session at this year’s meeting, the panel on technology and community engagement, proved that curators must now also be trained in the modern instruments of technology.

 

Karleen Gardner explained how her museum has incorporated technology-based exercises that focus on the museum experience from the visitors’ perspective, and the findings have helped them better understand their audience. Jennifer Scanlan gave us a taste of the audio guides produced for the permanent collection by the impressive group of high school students in the ArtsLife Summer Internship program, which allowed the museum to affordably add to the audio material available in the galleries and on their website. Karen Kramer Russell showed us how technology can enhance an exhibition by incorporating visitor feedback and reflections on the art directly into the exhibition space, a lively though somewhat labor-intensive element that significantly added to the exhibition experience.

 

Most interesting to me, however, was Graham C. Boettcher’s thorough explanation of his museum’s journey to create an iPad app for their exhibition "The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection.” I found the step-by-step discussion of how to bring the app to life, from the initial decision process of deciding the best platform to how to app would be used in the gallery experience, to be a refreshingly structured look at a new forum for audience engagement. Boettcher’s excitement about the project was contagious, especially when discussing the advantages of such an app: magnification of the works of art, the ability to have different viewing options for each object, the extension of the audience-base for the exhibition to include people who haven’t physically visited, and, of course, to allow the exhibition to have life beyond the dates of the exhibition.

 

While the traditional role of the curator is still alive and well, as evidenced by the great discussions in the meeting’s other panels about various projects, exhibitions, and challenges in the museum world, the discussion of the new technology-based roles of the curator was inspiring.

Collaboration is key. I found myself writing those words again and again in my notes as I attended the sessions at AAMC’s 2012 meeting. The phrase came up whether the speaker addressed collections management, exhibition development, or technology and community outreach.

As museums continue to balance their roles as cultural temples and cultural forums, collaborations often present themselves as an ideal solution for creating innovative and engaging programming and building strong collections. Conference speakers shared their experiences as part of resourceful and ingenious collaborations. Two particularly inspired me.

Martina Bagnoli introduced us to museums that are encouraging and supporting public contributions to the exhibition development process. Crowd sourcing is a way to privilege the personal experience over the didactic while inviting civic participation. Public-curated exhibitions at the Walters Art Museum, Clark Institute, and Brooklyn Museum are providing their audience with a greater sense of ownership and investment in their museums while also imparting a wealth of new ideas to museum staff.

Shifting collection boundaries also force curators to find inventive ways to augment and refine their collections. Rita Freed described an exchange of antiquities between the MFA Boston and Poznan Archaeological Museum in Poland. Such exchanges successfully remove duplicative material or secondary objects outside of a museum’s scope while ensuring that important artworks can continue to be appreciated by the public and remain in the stewardship of a cultural institution.

The future of museums lies in creative collaboration. If collaboration is key, communication is paramount. What I learned from each of these sessions is that successful partnerships depend upon the flexibility of each participant and the maintenance of open and honest communications.

At the 2012 AAMC Conference in Boston, curators expounded upon ways in which their institutions have realized profound transformations of physical and mental space. Museums across the world are undergoing metamorphosis as they shed old skins and ways of doing to regenerate, transform, and expand into new entities, more capable of flourishing and reaching out to broader demographics in a quickly changing world.

The Keynote Conversation between James Snyder and Helen Molesworth was a glimpse into the Israel Museum’s reinvention of place driven by the desire for enriching content. Museums with encyclopedic collections, like the Israel Museum, are focusing on finding common threads and themes that make cross-departmental connections. Reinvention was a major theme throughout the conference. Curators spoke about how museums are undergoing intense self-reflection and mining their collections in order to create exciting new reinstallations and exhibitions from within.

Museum bodies, now leaner in a stressful economy, are flexing interdisciplinary muscles to support increasingly energetic exhibition programs. In the session Give and Take: Shifting Collection Boundaries in the 21^st-Century Museum, panelists spoke about co-curated exhibitions that crossed boundaries of media, department, time, and geography to realize ground-breaking shows with great scholarly significance. Marla Berns described how the Fowler Museum was founded on interdisciplinary boundary-crossing exemplified by the thematic Inter/Sections installation.

The Expanded or Reconfigured Spaces session touched on architect Renzo Piano’s additions to the Elizabeth Stewart Gardner Museum and the Harvard Art Museums. Piano practices a sort of architectural yoga, stretching museum environments to breathe light, air, and movement into the dwelling spaces of extraordinary collections. And, as almost all of the speakers relayed in one way or another, it is exactly those extraordinary collections that inspire the drive to reinvent and transform.

 

Lisa Simmons

Curatorial Assistant

Department of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands

The Baltimore Museum of Art

If there was one idea that seemed to permeate this year’s annual conference, particularly day one, it was that of breaks and starts. Jumpstarted by Helen Molesworth’s Keynote, the idea first took form in her observations about the tension of contemporary art and design in an encyclopedic museum. She stated that the contemporary was often seen as too radical a break from the art historical narrative, leading for instance to the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston as new institutions to display and examine art that broke from the past. Matthew Witovsky also touched on this in the following panel, noting that breaks and ruptures from the past create the contemporary. Critical to these ideas, however, is the notion that the new is always responding to history. In order to appreciate the present, we need to better understand its past. Molesworth called for the need to create a larger vocabulary and literature around the new, to contextualize it. Rather than simply familiarizing a viewer with contemporary art and design, we need to instead connect the contemporary to tradition and to explain it within the context of art and design history, building up the narrative and enriching the literature. How can the contemporary enable us to tell new stories about the past? How does tradition inform the contemporary?
 
At the same time, museums are rethinking existing definitions of collection categories and how those collections are shown in galleries, a topic addressed in the "Shifting Collection Boundaries” panel. Whereas geography, chronology, and medium are among the most common criteria to define departments or collections, as Witovsky observed, those criteria are becoming more difficult to formalize due to the multi-disciplinary nature of art and design today. "Roaming around is healthy”, Witovsky asserted. Cross-departmental collaborations are starting to become a new normative, pushing curators, museum professionals, and ultimately the public to make new connections and broaden our thinking both within the galleries and the collections themselves.
 
Breaks and starts also appeared (even if loosely) in the remaining two events from the conference’s first day. The "Expanded or Reconfigured Spaces” panel presented lessons from colleagues whose institutions are breaking from their existing spaces and undergoing architectural change. As we heard from Jim Labeck for instance, sometimes the push for the new enables us to rediscover the past, as with the restoration of the Historic Tapestry Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Renzo Piano’s sweeping wall of glass to visually connect the old building with the newly renovated space at the same museum. And the AAMC’s inaugural "Curatorial Slam” introduced the Pecha Kucha presentation format to the convening, a break from past conferences. Picking up on Witovsky’s earlier notion that "roaming around is healthy”, well, it seemed healthy here, too, getting a taste for the diverse work that makes up our field in thoughtful, albeit brief, presentations. Breaks and starts keep pushing us forward. As a field, I’m proud we’re embracing them.

            When greeting a new colleague at the AAMC Annual Meeting, the standard introduction seems to include your name, your institution, and then your field. Even as someone fairly new to the profession, I’ve quickly learned to identify myself as part of a sub-category,  a designation that affects what journals and listserves I follow, which exhibitions I attend, and what jobs I applied for when I finished graduate school. While these divisions are often taken for granted, bringing different fields into conversation at the 2012 Annual Meeting revealed how the legacy of these institutional missions and departmental boundaries have shaped scholarship and collections.

            In the keynote discussion,  Helen Molesworth raised these questions for contemporary art, examining how museums have treated a category that is uniquely ephemeral. She traced the history of presenting new art, contrasting the Museum of Modern Art, whose cultural role has changed as a once contemporary collection has aged into a historic one, with Kunsthalles like the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, whose initial decision not to collect led to a program based in an ever-evolving but decontextualized present.  The latter, where Molesworth serves as Chief Curator, has only recently begun to build a collection. This shift provides the septuagenarian museum with the ability to consider longer narratives, recognizing that the present happens within the context of history.  Looking at encyclopedic museums, such as the Israel Museum,  headed by her co-presenter James Snyder, she queried whether the ancient and new demanded such different criteria for display and acquisition, ultimately challenging contemporary curators to ask historic questions of their works.

            These issues were taken up with force in the second panel, "Give and Take: Shifting Collection Boundaries in the 21st-Century Museum.” Emily Ballew Neff described her challenges in broadening the scope of the MFA Houston’s American Art department to reflect the growing acknowledgment that "America” describes two continents, not just one nation-state. While academic art historians have been drawing these larger connections for some time, American art curators must balance new discoveries with the weight of institutional precedent, drawing from collections developed in earlier eras, and convincing funders with more traditional conceptions of the field. Matthew Witkovsky provided further evidence of the sometimes arbitrary nature of disciplinary boundaries, noting that many of the works whose medium brought them to his Department of Photography could easily fall under Modern or Contemporary headings, or under any number of geographically defined-departments.  Marla Berns explored how the Fowler Museum’s history – it was founded as a Museum and Laboratory of Ethnic Art and Technology – led to thematic installations that compare forms and functions from around the world, and curatorial positions that are defined by continents, not chronology. When presenting contemporary artist Nick Cave’s sound suits, the Fowler’s emphasis on the cultural as well as aesthetic role of objects brought new context to the works, which were shown in kinetic performances as well as static displays.

            Each of these presentations struck a balance between the newest questions of the academy and the historic expectations and realities of individual museums. Stepping back to see how these missions and boundaries continue to impact how art is shown proved incredibly instructive, challenging curators to see beyond the expected categories, and to allow the questions and approach in other fields to illuminate our own practices.

I look forward every year to being in a room filled only with curators. Since I started officially in the profession in 1998, I remember many years when no such space/place existed to formally come together with like-minded souls.  Being able to swap experiences, skills and contacts is invaluable. I see the conference working in a two tiered way, social time to meet others and in depth conference presentations on the meaty issues facing curators. In general, there were many sessions I was engaged by and numerous people I was happy to meet, the conference just went by too quickly, while certain periods felt like they could have benefited from more customization.

 

An emphasis was placed to big building expansions, but I spent more time in the auditorium of the MFA Boston hearing others uncondensed presentations than on actually seeing the museum itself. This highlights two items: there should be more optional time to view the institutions and presentations should be much more condensed. The Pecha Kucha session was a favorite—efficiently learning about a plethora of curatorial strategies. I would have appreciated an alternative to the "Expanded and Reconfigured Spaces.” I’m not living through one of these and would have benefited from learning how others are dealing with the concerns I face everyday. How to negotiate independent curator contracts? How does the concern with the local and global affect individual curatorial decision making?

 

I especially enjoyed Helen Molesworth’s keynote address—the most provocative and thoughtful presentation on actual curatorial thinking and philosophy. As a contemporary curator who worked in a museum with an hundred and fifty year old collection of "contemporary art” myself, her plea to attend more to the historical in the contemporary was a long needed critique and commentary on this end of the profession and a well articulated example of how rarely the "academy” and the procedural aspects of being a curator find a space of rigorous thought.

 

The session "Technology and Community Engagement” was probably the best session in its entirety, with presentations that were well crafted, diverse, and attending to a concern, or rather galvanizing force, that is all pervasive in contemporary art practice, but whose topics here I would have likely not encountered otherwise. "Exhibition Management” and "Negotiating Loans” were helpful, well organized, and specifically relevant.

 

Perhaps there is a way that one of the lunches or breakfasts could have tables like those for the different committees. People interested in specific concerns could just show up and meet others with those concerns. I did meet a number of other independent curators, but I longed for us to all to sit at a table together and talk shop. Later the same week I went to another conference, Open Engagement in Portland, Oregon, which focused on social practice and art. There, one artist was leading a kind of speed dating session where people were able to quickly and efficiently get to know each other, something especially valuable when time is tight and the resources so plentiful. 

 

Finally, as a travel grant recipient, I want to end with a gushing thanks to the people who make the conference, physically, financially and intellectually possible. Your hard work is sincerely appreciated.

 

Claire Schneider, Independent Curator, Buffalo, New York and Consulting Curator of Contemporary Art, Ackland, Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Currently organizing More Love: Art, Politics and Sharing Since the 1990s (Feb. 1 – Mar. 31, 2013).