DC Heading to the Bronx

My friend and colleague Deborah Cullen, who for the past 6 years has been Director and Chief Curator of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, has just been named the Executive Director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. ARTNEWS has written up a great piece on her new role, as has The New York Times. I've never actually been to this museum, I'm sorry to say, but over the past few years it has raised its profile and I am eager to visit because of some of the exhibitions on at present and opening soon. (My family, on my mother's side, is all of Bronx extraction, but I wonder if any of them had ever been to this museum before?) She lives in the Bronx with her husband, sculptor Arnaldo Morales, so it likely means a lot to the museum that she has been a resident in that NYC borough for quite some time now.

Deb and I are both alum of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, although she graduated about a decade before me so we only just met when I started at Columbia about a year after her. She is a major art critic and curator of the art of contemporary African-American, Caribbean, and Latinx artists; prior to role at Columbia, she worked at El Museo del Barrio. At Columbia, she successfully transitioned the Wallach Gallery to its gorgeous new space, a white-cube windowed gallery in the Lenfest Center for the Arts on 129th St. The inaugural show "Uptown" that she curated there, the first of what she has called a triennial, focused on NYC artists who work north of 99th St., so essentially the Harlem and Washington Heights area. The show was fantastic. She and I have served on each other's respective planning committees for the gallery and the permanent collection at Columbia, and she and I have worked together to secure some amazing new art work by contemporary artists in the permanent collection. John Pinderhughes, a fantastic Harlem-based photographer, was among those artists, and he took the photo of Deb you see at the top of this post. I'm thrilled for Deb as she moves onto this new position, but I will definitely miss working with her. Here's a selfie of us in Seattle in May 2014 when we attended together the annual conference of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.

Public Sculpture II: Columbia University

Following up on the post I just wrote about Storm King Art Center, another public sculpture-themed post is in order. My interest in public sculpture has taken another step forward, in that part of my job as Curator of Art Properties is to oversee the care of the public outdoor sculpture at Columbia University. (You may recall I went to a seminar recently on the care of metal outdoor sculpture!) We have a number of works that date from the late 1890s through the 2000s, and some are by major sculptors known to most people (can you say Rodin?). I'm pleased to announce that today we released the first iteration of what will be a growing collection of webpages or a blog about the public outdoor sculpture collection at Columbia. You can read the first webpage here, which was publicized today on Twitter and Facebook by TG. The image you see above is the subject of our first webpage: George Grey Barnard's The Great God Pan. I won't repeat all the information here about the sculpture, because that's on the webpage I just referenced. But I'm very pleased about this webpage, as it is a major step forward in helping to promote just one component of the art collections at Columbia, a task which is monumental in its scope, but something which I am eagerly challenged to take on. Stay tuned for more about the public outdoor sculpture collection at Columbia!

Exhibition Installation Views

Art history today is more than just about connoisseurship. It involves social history, criticism and theory, gender studies, and so on. Museum studies in particular has grown rapidly as a discipline, and the blending of that area with visual art comes together beautifully in the history of temporary exhibitions. Recording these visually allows scholars to see how art objects were literally viewed and arranged in the past. Although this can be especially interesting in attempting to recreate exhibitions from the 19th century and earlier, "history" can be as recent as last year too. ARTstor recently released more than 8000 digital images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art showcasing views from special exhibitions dating from 1970 through 2008. This is a fantastic addition to ARTstor's collection (it complements in part a previous collection of digitized installation views by the Museum of Modern Art). Not everyone realizes this, but installations do matter when you visit a special exhibition. Next time you visit a museum to see a show, you should of course look at the works of art on display. But also pay attention to how the works in the room "speak" to one another, and how the themes of the rooms and their overall appearance (from wall color to how visitors engage with the objects) evolve room to room. In many cases, installation is an active part of the story of the exhibition. On one level it's the packaging, much the same way a shop window entices you to buy the merchandise in the store. But on another level installation design is about the scholarly dialogue, how art works relate to one another based on the curator's intent for the exhibition itself. Sometimes these installations are tremendous successes; other times they do nothing for the art and can in fact impact the show by making it a failure. Pairing specific art works near one another in exhibitions also gives the viewer the opportunity to see works that normally cannot be seen together, typically because they are owned by different museums or private collectors. Seeing them beside one another provides a fresh context about the works that in turn generate ideas and discussions about how artists or their audiences may have seen these objects in their own time. All this said, I admit I have a vested interest in the sharing of the announcement about this collaborative project between ARTstor and the Met. When I was working in the then-Image Library (now Digital Media Dept.) at the Met, this was one of the big digitization projects I worked on with my colleagues, so I'm rather proud to see this project's successful release. Of all the possibilities in the collection to share, I chose the installation view above because it triggers a fond memory for me. Back in 1998, I was thrilled to visit the Met to see the Edward Burne-Jones centenary-of-his-death exhibition of his late Pre-Raphaelite paintings, installed in the Tisch Galleries. If you look in the image above, you can see his large painting The Sirens, 1891-98 (Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota), paired beside a portrait of Lady Windsor, 1893-95 (Collection of Viscount Windsor), among a few other works. I can't remember all the specifics as to why these works were paired together, but they both are examples of his late Symbolist-style work. In addition to these special exhibition installation views, there also are hundreds of historical views of permanent galleries at the Met in this ARTstor collection, which we also worked on, so if you have an institutional subscription through your local library, be sure to check them out.

UPDATE 7/22/13: ARTstor has published its own blog post about art installation views, highlighting different collections from museums now available and providing their own take on why viewing art in context is important. You can read their blog post by clicking here.

Avery Library

The Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University recently released the official announcement about my appointment as Curator of Art Properties. You can read the announcement by clicking here. After having completed 3 weeks of work, I can say for sure that I truly am thrilled by this new position. There's an unbelievable amount of work involved in this job, but I'm up for the challenge. In the last few weeks alone, I've been involved in potential donor opportunities, a sculpture conservation project, the photographic reproduction of an 1890s portrait painting, meeting a few administrators for the loan program, rethinking some policies and procedures, and looking into some exhibition ideas for areas of the collection. My staff members have been great to work with; I'm learning a lot from their years of experience. All in all, it's been an incredibly busy but rewarding 3 weeks.

I also feel rather privileged to be back in a library community, and one of the most prestigious art and architecture libraries in the world at that. Avery Library has world-class general and special collections, including the recent acquisition of the Frank Lloyd Wright archive. Avery Library was established in 1890 when architect Henry Ogden Avery (1852-1890) died unexpectedly and his parents established his book collection as the foundation of what became Avery Library. In 1912 the library was the first to be established in its own Renaissance palazzo-style building on the campus of Columbia in a building designed by McKim, Mead, and White. You can read more about the history of Avery Library by clicking here.

Commencement and Career News

 

Yesterday, May 23, was my graduation from the CUNY Graduate Center. During the ceremony, I had conferred upon me my hood as a holder of the Ph.D. degree and I received my diploma. The ceremony was held at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. I was so happy to have my cousins the DG-JBs there, along with my good friends AA and JM. I know Momma was beaming with pride from above, and Papà was there in spirit, as were a number of my close friends and family. It's a rather startling moment to march across that stage, hear your name called out, and receive the official notification of your degree. I admit I started getting choked up, but I kept it together, determined to hear my name called out and enjoy with pride my moment. I began the Ph.D. program in Art History in August 2005, and along the way took numerous art history classes, did foreign reading language classes in German and French, took a ridiculous number of exams along the way, then finally had the opportunity begin work on my dissertation, which you will recall happened just last month. And now it's official. I'm Roberto C. Ferrari, Ph.D. Afterwards, a group of 10 of us went out for a lovely dinner (with cocktails!) at Robert's in the Museum of Art and Design building on Columbus Circle.

What makes this moment even more amazing, however, is that I also have a new job. I had been getting very concerned for over 8 months that things were getting more and more difficult, and I started to panic wondering how I even would be able to pay my rent. I had applied for numerous jobs but nothing seemed to be working out. Finally, my networking, experience, and determination paid off (thanks in part to the ongoing support of a number of close friends too). In the spirit of graduation being a true "commencement" (a beginning, not an ending!), starting June 10, I am the new Curator of Art Properties at Columbia University, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. I am essentially in charge of the university's art collection, which ranges from ancient decorative arts and Chinese sculpture to photographs and public sculpture on campus. The job is a faculty-librarian position and has a strong educational component, but I also will be involved with conservation and digitization projects and working to publicize the collection as much as possible. I am absolutely thrilled to have been given this opportunity. Stay tuned on the blog though, as I'm sure there will be numerous Columbia-related art postings in the future!

For now, however, enjoy this short video showing my graduation ceremony with me receiving my hood and official congratulations (thanks, DG, for taking this video!). If for some reason you can't see the video, click here to see it on YouTube.