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WHAT'S UP? Adam D. Weinberg holds a B.A. degree in art history and education from Brandeis University and an M.F.A. degree in museum studies and photography history from the Visual Studies Workshop of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He served as director of education and assistant curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, artistic director of the American Center in Paris and senior curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York before becoming the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of Phillips Academy's Addison Gallery of American Art. He joined the Addison in January 1999, succeeding Jock Reynolds ’65. A Westchester, N.Y., native, Weinberg now lives in Andover with his wife, Lorraine, a graphic designer and instructor at Harvard, and their two children, Zoe, 9, and Kira, 2. Here, he talks with Andover Bulletin editor Theresa Pease about his first two years at the Addison. |
by Theresa Pease You are the fifth person to direct the Addison Gallery and the first who was not an artist and a teacher. Some people might see New York's Whitney Museum as a more glamorous milieu and might wonder what drew you to a secondary school. Was it a chance to direct your own institution that led you to Andover? Being the director of a museum is a rewarding challenge, but I would not have accepted just any directorship. I had always been interested in the idea of the museum as an educational institution. As a student, I wanted to teach elementary school. I actually minored in education, completed the Massachusetts teacher certification requirements and did my practice teaching. But I had a strong interest in photography and art history, and I found myself seizing every opportunity I could to get experience inside a museum. After my first year at Brandeis, I did a summer internship in the children's program at the Guggenheim in New York, and it was love at first work. When I returned to Brandeis, I interned at the university's Rose Art Museum and curated a senior thesis exhibition. I also did an internship at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Finally, I recognized that, while I loved education, there are other ways to educate people than literally standing in front of a blackboard. A museum is fundamentally an educational institution, and confronting people with the experience of art and with opportunities to see things in a new way is an educational exercise. Also what attracted me is that the Addison is one of the few museums of any scale where the director not only can, but must, take a curatorial role. At the Whitney, I'd curated major shows by Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and Richard Pousette-Dart, among others, and I delighted in this work. I enjoy doing fund raising and marketing, but I enjoy it most when I've had a role in creating the artistic product I'm trying to get people excited about. Indeed, in Andover I have been able to curate one to two exhibitions a year. In 1999-2000, those included a Robert Mangold retrospective; more recently, I organized Alex Katz: Small Paintings, which runs through July 31. How did you learn about the Addison position? There's a story there. I had known Jock Reynolds for about 15 years, but I did not always know the Addison, except by reputation. Then Jock came to borrow a painting by George Tooker, an Andover alumnus from the Class of 1938, for an exhibition. Jock was raving about the Addison, and I said, "Listen, when you're ready to retire, let me know, and I'll come and take your job." He just laughed. But he didn't forget. In the years that followed, I made three visits to the Addison and came to share his enthusiasm, and when Jock was invited to become director of the Yale University Art Gallery, he telephoned me and said half-jokingly, "Adam, I'm not retiring, but do you still want my job?" I was interested immediately. Does the arrival of a new museum director signal a new vision and a new direction? Not necessarily. One great thing about the Addison is that each director stands on the shoulders of previous generations. I see myself as continuing work begun by Charlie Sawyer, Bart Hayes, Chris Cook and Jock Reynolds. A key part of their collective vision has been the value the Addison places on living artists. It's the notion that fine art is not only of the past, but of the present. It's important to understand why Homer and Hopper and Eakins are great, but not to embrace the current moment is a missed opportunity. That's why Jock, with 1952 Andover graduate Edward E. Elson, started the Elson Artist-in-Residence program, and why Ann Hatch, a member of the Abbot Class of 1967, and Mark Rudkin, a 1947 PA graduate, provided funds for an artist-in-residence apartment and studio. Together those three gifts have enabled us to bring young talent to campus. Do you see yourself as being in the business of discovering new artists, then? I think our role is not so much to discover new artists as it is to figure out who are the most promising artists, the ones likeliest to have lasting importance in American art, and purchase their works while they are still affordable. We also try to bring them here to work with our students, and we exhibit their works in our galleries. That takes a good instinct, but, more than that, it takes research and comparative study. What new initiatives are you working on? The most exciting things involve the Addison Advisory Council, a 25-member support group of alumni and friends under the leadership of Melville Chapin of the Class of 1936. A committee of council members, led by Sidney Knafel of the Class of 1948, is working with us on the first strategic plan ever done for the Addison. Together we are trying to figure out the best way to deal with the exhibitions, the programs, the collection, the staffing and the building over the next five to 10 years. We will be looking at everything from our library to exhibition space to storage to the sculpture garden. We're bursting at the seams here in terms of space. Half our library is packed up; our storage room is almost full; we don't have proper space for students to spread out and really look at art; our sculpture collection is totally inaccessible, you can't even get at it. So we're asking, What should be our goals? What do we need to do? While the strategic planning is under way, the council has two other committees considering acquisitions. Michael Scharf, of the Class of 1960, is head of the eight-member historical acquisition committee, and David Winton, of the Class of 1971, is chairing a nine-person committee on contemporary acquisitions. With these two groups, we've begun assessing the strengths and weaknesses in our collection. For example, we just brought a curator from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to analyze our pop art print collection. Pop art is an area where we're really lacking. We don't have paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein or Ed Ruscha or sculptures by Claes Oldenburg or George Segal. We are also missing works from the turn of the century and mid-20th century. We don't have works by major American artists such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Romare Bearden or Isamu Noguchi or major oils by Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman. Do we have the means to acquire them once the analysis is done? We have a modest acquisition endowment of about $2 million, which generates some $100,000 a year in spendable funds. Campaign Andover has an endowment goal of $4 million for the Addison, $2 million of which has been raised through a $1 million contribution supporting exhibitions from Sidney Knafel ’48 and another $1 million from an anonymous donor. Acquisitions are a very high priority because what makes this institution great is its collection. As part of that effort, art lovers William Lewis, of the Class of 1974, and his wife, Carol, who sits on our Advisory Council, recently pledged $70,000 to kick off a new African-American art acquisitions fund. We are also focusing on attracting gifts of artwork, not only from alumni, but from artists and people in the wider community. We're trying to get out the word that people can derive tax advantages from making gifts or bequests to the Addison, benefiting the museum and the school while also benefiting themselves. What's up on the exhibition front? One of my aspirations is to put together exhibitions that complement each other. Three recent shows provide a perfect example. One was Reinventing the West, a landscape photography show of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams. At the same time, we had The American Land: Selections from the Addison Collection, comprised of landscape works from the 19th and early 20th centuries, representing artists from Albert Bierstadt to Winslow Homer. Finally, there was an installation by a Cuban-American-based artist, Jose Bedia, dealing with mythological and symbolic notions of the land relating to Native and Latin American cultures. These three shows covered installation, painting, photography, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and other media starting from the beginning of the 19th century right up to the present day. This gave students a chance to consider the full range of how landscape can be thought about. It also provided fodder for environmental studies classes, for history classes and for language classes. Similarly, alongside this spring's Alex Katz: Small Paintings, which consists mostly of portraits, we're offering Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures from the Yale University Art Gallery. Thus students and visitors have a chance to look at portraiture from two different perspectives. We also want to present more cross-disciplinary exhibitions. For fall 2002 we've planned a show called Trisha Brown: Art and Dance and Dialogue, 1965-2000, in concert with PA's theatre and dance department and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, established by Andover trustee Oscar Tang of our Class of 1956. We will look at this contemporary dancer's collaborations with artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Judd, as well as her work with composers like John Cage and Laurie Anderson. Trisha Brown will do a residency, and there will be performances on campus. We also expect to put together more intercultural projects. A show of art by Russian émigrés to the United States at the turn of the century is being planned for fall 2003 through a collaboration with the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. I recently spent nine days in Russia along with Associate Director and Curator Susan Faxon and advisory council member William Agee, who is an art professor from the Class of 1955, doing some groundwork under a $45,000 planning grant from The Trust for Mutual Understanding. Are you featuring anything new in terms of community programming? We have just started a film series in conjunction with the Harvard Film Archive; three times a year we will present three programs of art films from Harvard, with screenings free and open to the public. Although our outreach workshops for public school teachers are not new, they are really exploding. Formerly, we typically had 20-25 people; now we're attracting about 50-60 educators from throughout the region three times a year, in conjunction with major exhibitions. Also, we began this spring a yearlong program called SiteLines. Students from the Lawrence and Andover public schools and Phillips Academy will work with nine nationally known artists to create temporary public art pieces on the campus and in downtown Andover. Some groups might do figurative sculptures; others might set up projections or various kinds of installations. One artist proposes to put a giant camera obscura (literally, dark chamber) into the Andover public library; going into the library, you would see projected on the wall an image of what's outside. Another artist creates mechanical things‹machines that actually do something. The students will write a SiteLines walking guide that will be available around town. At the same time we'll have an exhibition inside the museum of the nine artists' works, so folks can connect what's going on outside the museum with what's going on at the Addison. We have a major grant from the Surdna Foundation in New York to help make this all happen. What else is new at the Addison? Because we hold over 12,000 objects in our collection, and only about 300 can be on view at any one time, I am trying to show off more of these items both by rotating the works on view more frequently and by traveling more of our exhibitions nationally and abroad. We're thinking about doing an exhibition of master works from the Addison and traveling it around the country over the next few years, particularly to areas where there are a lot of Andover graduates. Staffing-wise, a gift from Mike Winton of the Class of 1946 and his wife, Penny, has enabled us to start a curatorial fellowship program, and through the generosity of Roger Strong of the Class of 1944 we have engaged a much-needed part-time archivist and cataloguer. We've also succeeded in drawing more PA students into the Addison for informal events like the annual Art Fashion Show and last year's "Writing on the Walls," which incorporated student poetry. We've invited student composers to perform their music at the Addison, and even the student newspaper, The Phillipian, is paying more attention. Hardly a week goes by that they don't have an article about the Addison, which is great because it means more youngsters are writing about and thinking about art. We've also begun a regular series of gallery talks and exhibition tours for faculty and staff. Happily, we've just gotten the first National Endowment for the Humanities grant ever to come to the Addison. It's a $45,000 research grant for an upcoming show called Lincoln Kirstein and the Promise of Modernism. We'll go back to them later for an implementation grant. Finally, we have a whole cluster of shows in the planning stage, including one on American symbolism with works by people like Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove and a major touring exhibition featuring the photos of Abbot alumna Wendy Ewald ’69. Longer-term, we hope to collaborate with the Calder Foundation on an Alexander Calder exhibition. If you had one wish for the Addison's Weinberg years, what would it be? I would need two wishes. The first is that the collection will be refined properly: I hope we are able to fill the gaps with historical works that complement what we have, and I also hope that when people look back on us in 2050, they can say, "Adam Weinberg and his staff succeeded in buying the Homers and the Hoppers and the Eakins of the late 20th and early 21st centuries." My second wish is that people will come to look at us as the epitome of excellence in a teaching museum. I hope they will regard us as a laboratory for students, with many opportunities for them to try things. I want the Addison to be seen as a fully rounded teaching institution that provides as much access and as much guidance as possible. |
Copyright, Phillips Academy, 2001
