12
|
curatorial report The Museum’s Curatorial Department provided an ambitious exhibition program in fiscal year 2011. The 10th anniversary of the Museum’s SantiagoCalatrava–designed Quadracci Pavilion drew heightened attention to the Museum, and the exhibitions delivered on the promise of that building. The feature exhibitions looked critically at the evolving artistry of design in our everyday lives, provided new perspectives on the work of Wisconsin’s own architectural genius, and celebrated the first Museum-wide presentation of Chinese art. Acquisitions made for the Museum Collection were equally stunning and further assert the continued relevance and scholarly rigor of the Museum within the national and international art world. The Museum is always looking to reactivate the Collection Galleries and to expand the narrative its works of art present. An exciting pilot project with the Terra Foundation for American Art provided just such an opportunity for the Museum’s early modern American galleries. To complement the Museum’s works by The Eight artists, the Terra Foundation lent several objects by artist Charles Prendergast for display in the Donald and Barbara Abert Family Gallery. The two-year installation celebrates Prendergast’s legacy as a premier Arts and Crafts frame maker, painter, and sculptor and his important collaborations with his brother and Eight painter, Maurice Prendergast. The Museum further organized corresponding educational programs, including an opening lecture and a special teachers event, thanks to a grant from the Terra Foundation. The Curatorial Department was happy to welcome William Keyse Rudolph to the Museum in 2011. Formerly curator of American art at the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, Dr. Rudolph is the first Dudley Godfrey Jr. Curator of American Art and Decorative Arts. This appointment represents the growing significance of the Museum’s collection of American Art.
Acquisitions AMERICAN ART
Under Rudolph’s leadership, the Museum didn’t waste any time making a major acquisition—John Singleton Copley’s Alice Hooper (ca. 1763), a work that both solidifies and elevates the Museum’s collection of early American portraiture. The work is a marvelous example of American
| 2011 annual report
painting, displaying all the traits that made Copley desirable in Colonial Boston. The painting is now featured on the Lower Level in the newly reinstalled American painting galleries, together with some favorites that had been long off view. MODERN/CONTEMPORARY
The Museum expanded its collection of video installations, one of the most significant developments in contemporary art, with two key acquisitions. Jim Campbell, a San Francisco-based artist with degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering from MIT, created by hand the components for the video projection Taxi Ride to Sarah’s Studio (2010). Western Union: Small Boats (2007) by London-based artist Isaac Julien is technically one of the most sophisticated film installation works of the twenty-first century. This culminating work of his Expeditions trilogy (which will be exhibited together for the first time at the Museum), poetically explores the human costs of migration in the age of globalism. The Museum also acquired the stunning On Duty, Not Driving (2010) by Milwaukee-based painter Reginald Baylor. Drawing from Renaissance painting and popular culture, the visually and metaphorically dense painting is autobiographical for the artist, who was once a truck driver. DECORATIVE ARTS
Mathias Bengtsson’s aluminum Slice Chair (1999) provided a stunning centerpiece to the European Design Since 1985 exhibition and is a choice acquisition for the Museum.