AMAM talks about its 'New Acquisitions'

Talk describes process of acquiring and keeping art in AMAM

"The idea behind new acquisitions for the museum is that, essentially, `we are what we eat,' that is, `the museum is what it is,'" explained Anne Moore, director of Allen Memorial Art Museum. Thursday's gallery talk entitled "Selected Acquisitions 1991-1995" aimed to showcase precisely what the museum is, and how it got that way.

The talk began in the Nord Gallery with Moore describing the process that the museum uses to acquire additions to its permanent collection. She said that art comes to the museum either by way of gift or purchase. To the audience consisting of at least half college students, she was careful to mention that the money for new works at the museum does not come out of routine budget or student tuition. Instead, the money is given to the College in the form of "restricted funds," money donated by alumni and friends specifically for use in expanding the museum.

The past year, a committee of four faculty members, three curators, the director and one outside professional, was formed to handle new acquisitions. They use a process of research, debate and vote to decide whether any single piece will be accepted into the museum's collection. Moore specified that in order to be accepted, "a work must be something that fits the museum's needs perfectly… and helps us function better as a teaching museum."

Marjorie Wieseman, the curator of Western Art before 1850, addressed this process first-hand when she talked about her own campaign to obtain "Landscape with the Conversion of Saul on the Road to Damascus," a 16th-century Flemish landscape by Herri Met De Bles. She said the artwork was first brought to her attention by a dealer in New York and she saw it as an important contribution to the museum's collection of 17th-century Netherlandish painting. "What we didn't have was an example of the earliest stages of development in painting from the Netherlands, when landscape began being an independent genre," Wieseman said, "and it's a particularly good interaction of figure and landscape."

She was finally convinced that the museum should acquire the piece when it was brought to the museum "on approval" and hung in the Nord Gallery and "it looked like it belonged there."

From the Nord Gallery, the talk then moved into the Ellen Johnson Gallery and was taken over by Amy Kurlander, the curator of Modern Art. Kurlander's focus was on an acquisition obtained as a gift, a large installation making use of ready-made and found objects. The piece is entitled "Silent Barrack" by a Uruguayan artist Rimer Cardillo and was donated by two Oberlin graduates, Cristina Delgado and Stephen Frederick Olsen (OC '82).

Kurlander said she decided on this piece from a selection of five offered by the pair because, "visually and materially, the piece works well in the space." Also, she mentioned that this couple's small, focused collection of contemporary Latin American and African art coincided with the recent interests of the museum's direction with regard to modern art. And, in particular, she felt the work "Silent Barrack" "spoke to pieces already present in the E.J. Gallery."

Finally, Charles Mason introduced himself as the latest addition to the museum. He took his position as curator of Asian Art in January and joked that he, in fact, had not taken part in the acquisition of any of the pieces mentioned. Mason said, however, that he was "surprised and delighted by the depth and quality of the Asian collection overall." He said that while the museum holds a good collection of Japanese prints, and Chinese and Japanese porcelain, he and the other curators and the director are now working on increasing the collection of Chinese painting.

He talked about a Chinese scroll from the 1940s by an artist from the central southeast part of China. The artist, according to Mason, preserved traditions of Chinese painting although he "worked at a time when many Chinese painters had forsaken traditional forms for either Chinese folk arts or Western art forms."

The gallery talk - which actually took the form of a tour and the tone of proud mothers showing off their children - ended when Moore returned to the objective of the museum as a whole. She emphasized that all the thought put into the museum, including its acquisitions, refers back to the fact that the museum serves as a broad-based teaching facility, and that "Oberlin has taken a very catholic - with a small `c' - approach to the teaching of art."