Description
Summary: Established in 1959, Phoenix Art Museum (PAM) has become the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. The collection of American art is a major feature of the museum’s holdings, with 2,700 objects across media and with particular strengths in the American West, American Modernism, and prints. The Western holdings, which have special significance to Phoenix and regional audiences, include works by Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Irving Eanger Couse and other founding members of the Taos Society of Artists, and contemporary artists including Arturo Chávez. Modernism is well represented by major figures including John Sloan and Georgia O’Keeffe, and others who spent transformative periods of time in the Southwest.
The museum’s permanent galleries for historical American art are traditionally configured spaces with low ceilings and permanent walls. The installation has remained static for a lengthy period, and attendance in the galleries has been comparatively low. PAM now proposes a comprehensive rethinking of the American galleries in order to present more of the collections in a more thoughtfully conceived and dynamic way.
For the past year, much of the American collection has been off-view owing to a major project to update the fire suppression systems in the art-storage vaults. This challenge has presented the ideal moment for reassessment and planning, which has been led by Dr. Betsy Fahlman, Professor of Art History at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, PAM’s Adjunct Curator of American Art since 2016. A widely published scholar, Fahlman’s areas of specialization align entirely with PAM’s American holdings.
The proposed reinstallation project, slated to open in summer of 2018, will combine a rich survey of the collection with planned gallery rotations (two per year for three years) to refresh the content with works on paper. In addition, the galleries will be animated by a series of two small focus exhibitions each year, which will allow for deeper consideration of particularly strong areas of the collection. Potential subjects include: printmaking for popular audiences; early American Modernism; Thirties and Forties abstraction; works by women artists; and the Grand Canyon.
The idea for changing focus shows within the spaces of the permanent galleries arose out of the success of several small exhibitions that were mounted in available spaces during the extended gallery closure. These included an installation of works by Arizona artists titled Philip C. Curtis: The New Deal and American Regionalism , and a particularly well-received collaborative project with the curator of Latin American Art titled
Border Crossings: Mexico and the American Southwest . In the latter case, Mexican and U.S. works were united to tell a richer and more authentic story of artistic production in the region. The curators plan to continue this productive exchange and the practice of introducing works from other collections areas into the American galleries.
The project team intends to maximize the impact of the reinstallation and ongoing rotation program with the production of interpretive tools including bilingual labels and innovative gallery guides, and strategically placed iPads that will deliver additional content.
Grant funds would support: costs related to the reinstallation, rotations, and focus shows, including gallery preparation and signage, and interpretive materials.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $100,000 to the Phoenix Art Museum for a collection reinstallation and rotating focus exhibitions.
