Countdown to the Blanton opening

Stewards of ideas

Three chief curators shape what you see at the Blanton Museum of Art

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Saturday, April 15, 2006

Ultimately, curators care. The evidence can be traced to the word's origin: "curatus," from the Latin word for "care."

Custodians of a museum's collection, curators organize exhibits, write catalogs and educational materials, supervise the preservation of the artwork and seek out new additions. Typically, they also raise the money for those purchases, while they ponder the past, present and future of art.

What sways the three chief curators at the Blanton Museum of Art flows from different sources. But in two weeks, it all converges in one place. When the Mari and James A. Michener Gallery opens its doors, the University of Texas' noteworthy collections of Latin American, American and European art will cohabitate in a single building.

The art on display — and how it is displayed — is the charge of curators Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Annette DiMeo Carlozzi and Jonathan Bober, who have spent almost every hour of the past several years preparing for the new museum.

Rewriting art history, for now

For Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, art history is a book continually written and never finished.

"Any chapter of art history is only tentative until the next definition is proposed," he says, folding his wiry frame into an armchair in the new museum's public study lounge, half-unpacked boxes of books and computers encircling him.

Dressed casually, Pérez-Barreiro looks more like a graduate student than a curator of Latin American art charged with combing several continents for new trends and new understandings of art. Since landing at the Blanton three years ago — after professional stints in Madrid and New York — he has fleshed out a definition of American art history that considers the creative production of North, Central and South America as well as the Caribbean as a complexly related entity sharing more commonalities than differences.

Along with American art curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, he crafted "America/Americas"— the Blanton's permanent installation of more than 230 works by 200 artists spanning the late 19th century to the present. Mining the Blanton's noteworthy collection of Latin American art — long one of the best outside Latin America — Pérez-Barreiro and Carlozzi demonstrate how artists of the past century wrestled with many of the same ideas.

"This museum doesn't look like any other museum, because it includes a much broader base of artists than most museums," he says of the trans-American presentation. "Most of what you see elsewhere is the tip of the iceberg. I'm interested in what the entire iceberg looks like."

Sure, Pérez-Barreiro would love to have a big-dollar acquisitions fund to fill out the Latin American collection with pricey colonial or 19th-century art. In fact, he'd love any kind of regular acquisitions budget. But like his colleagues at the Blanton, he must raise money to purchase new items for th

e collection or seek out donations of artwork. And that process leads him directly to the work of emerging or under-recognized artists, those whose work is not frequently seen — or put on the market — outside Latin America.

"It's about going directly to artists and engaging with what they're doing right now," he says. Like visiting Leon Ferrari in Buenos Aires last year, shortly after a major retrospective of his work there was vandalized by religious fundamentalists. During Pérez-Barreiro's visit, the 86-year-old artist donated a suite of prints to the Blanton, a complement to the museum's already-respected gathering of his work.

Born in Northern Spain, raised and educated in Great Britain, Pérez-Barreiro speaks with the type of British accent that occasionally slaps an "r" onto an ending vowel.

At the time of this interview, he's speaking Spanish and phoning Daniel Joglar, a young Argentine artist who is in town to create the first Workspace exhibit. Every eight weeks the small Workspace gallery will feature something new by an emerging contemporary artist. Pérez-Barreiro likens it to a laboratory, a place for experimentation and discovery.

"We really needed to have some area for new work at all times in the new museum," he says. Tucked away on the second floor amid the permanent collection, the Workspace gallery is meant to be something of a surprise. "Hopefully encountering new work will invite people to continually reread the permanent collection," he says.

And then perhaps go back rewrite their own definition of art history, again and again.

A place for every voice

If she's been awake since the predawn hours, it doesn't show on Annette DiMeo Carlozzi's face, and certainly not in her energy level. She flits birdlike around an expansive, high-ceilinged, windowless gallery on a recent morning. It's an ideal space for the exhibit that Carlozzi, the Blanton's curator of American and contemporary art, has just installed — video and prints by Hong Kong-born, New York-based artist Paul Chan.

Chan is hot right now. Visually intense, his painstakingly created videos are timely, carefully constructed miniature operas about the role of faith played against today's political backdrop. Chan's work has garnered considerable critical acclaim in the past year. And Carlozzi is the first curator to grant him a premiere solo museum exhibit.

In fact, at 6 a.m. this morning, she just finished writing the essay for the catalog.

But Chan's current popularity is not Carlozzi's motivation. "There needs to be a variety of voices heard here," she says. "And then it's important to make connections between new voices like Chan's and the trajectory of artists who came before."

So to augment Chan's exhibit, Carlozzi plumbed the permanent collection, pulling out a 15th-century Albrecht Duhrer woodcut, a French Baroque engraving and a 19th-century French print — all of which depict charged scenes of political unrest.

"It's about working from the inside of art history and demonstrating how contemporary art resonates with the past," she says. "Artists have for centuries mined the same raw material of their time."

Boston-born-and-raised, the 52-year-old is among the first generation of her family to attend college. An early passion was studying the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, the Depression-era public art venture. Landing at the Blanton in 1996, Carlozzi felt an immediate affinity for the collection put together by James Michener, the famed novelist who himself came from modest origins. But she also recognized its shortcomings: The work was mostly by white, male, New York-based painters from the 1950s and 1960s.

"We needed to diversify and make sure a

variety of voices were heard coming from this museum," she says. Thus, despite limited acquisition funds, she's accumulated work by women and multicultural artists as well as those working in media beyond painting. She also trolls the nation for up-and-comers such as Chan.

Her Blanton tenure is not Carlozzi's first time around Austin. In the 1980s, she was curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now part of the Austin Museum of Art). She's also done stints at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans and Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, and was the director of the Aspen Art Museum.

Though her current job can take her to art world capitals, Carlozzi finds time to curate local exhibits or speak at community discussions. And she's often spotted at art galleries and happenings around Austin, sometimes with her 17-year-old son, Danny, in tow.

"All of my work as a curator reflects back through my experience as a viewer, as a member of the public, as well," she says.

Delighting in surprises

"I love sharing the real thing," says Jonathan Bober. The curator of prints, drawings and European paintings stands in a high-ceilinged octagonal gallery awash with subtle northern light. Leaning against the walls awaiting final hanging are four enormous gilt-frame paintings. All were created between the late 16th and 17th centuries to adorn the altars of majestic European churches.

Though Bober has been at the University of Texas museum for 18 years — a tenure during which he's spearheaded the acquisition of literally thousands of artworks, including some headline-grabbing major collections — he still delights in surprises.

Such as the one revealed in "The Visitation" by Italian master Camillo Procaccini. Seven feet tall by nearly five feet wide, the luminous painting, created about 1602 in the Lombardi region of Italy, was acquired just last year. And now, in the carefully balanced natural light of the new gallery, Bober can point to areas on the canvas that reveal where Procaccini changed his composition. Bober speculates that the artist excised the figure of a saint and moved it to another part of the dramatic scene, then extended the background to include a distant landscape. "Most likely, Procaccini was striving to achieve a proper dramatic balance," he explains.

Tall and still somewhat lanky at 51, Bober speaks with rapid-fire intensity and a cerebral flair that tends to dazzle university leaders and unsnap the pocketbooks of patrons and collectors. "This is something I never saw before in this painting until I could see it in this quality of natural light," he says.

Indeed, these types of academic finds intrigue the New York-born, Harvard-trained art historian, himself the son of two noted art scholars. But he'd rather the visitor to the new museum be impressed with the sheer beauty of what's in the 12 galleries that have been his charge to fill. He's assembled a generous portion from the Blanton's collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings along with prints and drawings spanning the late 15th century through to the present day. (Another publication dubbed him "The man who brought the Renaissance to Austin.")

In particular, Bober's culled the riches of two major collections acquired in the past seven years and seen only through brief highlights: the Suida-Manning Collection of more than 300 Old Master paintings and prints, and the Leo Steinberg Collection of 3,200 prints and drawings spanning five centuries.

"My first hope is that people come here and simply say 'Wow, these are really beautiful things,' " Bober says.

His next wish is that visitors discover connections.

"It's important to see how the European paintings, the prints and drawings together capture the continuity of human creation over the centuries," he says.

In other words, he'd love to see people wander from gallery to gallery first taking in, say, a pastoral scene painted by Claude Lorrain, widely considered the creator of classical landscape painting, then discovering one of the 17th-century master's etchings bearing a similar pastoral image.

"That particular kind of artistic synergy is something unique our collection can illuminate," says Bober. "And it's something everyone can realize for themselves."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699