Lughnasa New (Artemis) Moon
Sometimes thing go as planned. Sometimes not. The session with David Little (curator of photography) this morning did not go as planned. For whatever reason we had an hour to spare, wandering the wonderful Bergman exhibition as Bill Bomash teased out clues to the stories behind the photographs. A young girl, wanting to talk about her experience, joined the group and added her observations. Who’s to say that was wasted time?
David Little comes out of a museum educators background and has a real feel for what is useful to docents. He showed some new acquisitions including a surprise by Ansel Adam, a surrealist shot of a scissors and thread. We also wandered into the 55 degree refrigerator, larger than a large meat locker, where the MIA stores it’s 11,500 photographs. Cool, man.
He also talked about how he makes curatorial decisions, relationships with dealers and photographers, in particular as it relates to borrowing objects. In the contemporary art and photography realm shows need relevance and he finds working with dealers and photographers much more expeditious than working with museums where the decision turn around for a loan can take as much as a year.
He and Liz Armstrong, the new contemporary arts curator, have a commitment to collecting and exhibiting work being made now and in the recent past. The two of them, as well as Kaywin Feldman, have brought a fresh energy and verve to the whole museum and I, for one, am glad. Not that the old museum was bad, it wasn’t, but the new folks have juiced things up, creating new ways to view and understand art.
We finished up with David Little over lunch. He promised to get us some bibliography and to develop more in depth photography ed as new exhibitions are hung. A good event with the timing slightly off. The quality of the contact with David was high. Thanks, Lisa.
Kate and I had a guy, Glenn, come up tonight and give us a presentation and bid on creating a water feature by the patio. He seems to know his stuff and have a sensible plan to give us what we want.
Been fighting this same damned virus I had a month or so ago. Kate says having clusters of illnesses is not unusual in that the body can retain a reservoir of the virus or bacteria. Your body builds up antibodies and knocks it out at some point. At least this time I have not had the pink eye or the ear infection.
