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It's a real building process, and one exhibition builds upon the other, and you gradually begin to develop more access to exhibitions and more access to collections. As people see the quality of the work that you're showing at the museum, they will either embrace it or turn away from it, and so for us the more we can do to bring in major exhibitions like Rodin, the more we're going to be able to generate awareness about the museum and open up the museum to collectors and other exhibitions and such. This began, really, with a major exhibition we did in July of last year, the Dubuffet/Miro exhibition. And it was because of that exhibition, and the catalog we published for that exhibition, that we were able to leverage the Rodin. That exhibition was significant value, over forty million dollars. We were handling very valuable works of art, we were able to present it in a nice way, did a good publication for it and received a lot of community support for it. Going to the Cantors we were able to say, "Look, we could do it with this, we can do it with your work as well." And that really was the deciding factor. I think without that Dubuffet it would have been harder for us to sell the Cantors on bringing the Rodin exhibition here. And then likewise we've just signed on for an exhibition of the work of Alphonse Mucha, and this is an exhibition that's going to be coming here in the summer of 1999. This is a major, it's going to eight of the major museums in the country, and we've been able to tag on to that to bring it here to Reno as a direct result of having Rodin's work here, and also the Dubuffet work that we had before. |
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| | That should keep people coming in. |
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Well, you know, it's a balancing act. You can't do all major exhibitions. These exhibitions cost a phoenomenal amount of money. We're still a relatively small size, small operating budget institution, and we can't afford to pay a hundred thousand dollars for an exhibition just to rent it, let alone pay insurance. And insurance can cost anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars for these high value shows. So we can't do it very often, but we can do it once or twice a year to bring in major, major exhibitions. And then in the other exhibitions that we do we try to complement those major exhibitions. For instance, the show that's coming right after Rodin actually happens to be a major exhibition as well. It's Thomas Hart Benton, and with that we have the sculpture and then with Benton we have the paintings of the American scene. So extremely different kind of perspectives and points of view, but I think in many ways they complement one another in, you know, between the 3D and the two-dimensional. In the same frame we are having an exhibition that will be looking at aspects of the permanent collection. Our next major exhibition, before the Mucha exhibition, is going to be the Sierra Nevada project. And that's a hundred and fifty years of Sierra Nevada, how artists have articulated that landscape. It's an exhibition that we're putting on ourselves, doing the catalog and borrowing work from The Metropolitan Museum and other major institutions around the country. |
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| | Let's talk about the Touch Tour program. Has it been around for a while or was it instituted for the Rodin show? |
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The Touch Tour program is a brand new program that we developed here at the museum, specifically with the Rodin bronzes in mind.  | | Touch Tour program |
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We've been very interested at the museum with trying to open up the museum to as many different audiences as we can, and we have focus groups -- we bring in people and talk about their needs and find out ways that the museum can serve them. People with visual impairments don't normally link up with a visual arts museum. It's kind of a contradiction. And this is one exhibition that we felt would make a perfect marriage. And so we developed this program which was funded through Washoe Medical Auxiliary and through C.I.T.Y. 2000 to train our docents in working with people with visual impairments. Then in one on one, or sometimes in group tours, they would go through the museum on Mondays in these special tours. They were just really powerful, moving experiences. It's something we're proud of in many ways because it, first of all it is a symbol of what we're trying to do here at the museum, of trying to reach out to everyone in Northern Nevada. And no matter what boundaries, either artificial or severe boundaries to participate in the museum, we can find a way to get you involved, to get you interested in what it is we're doing. And so the Touch Tours were just a perfect opportunity that we were able to jump on. Exploring Rodin by touch alone is something truly unique.
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| | It was amazing to watch. We followed one woman as she described the sculptures, particularly one of a man with a broken nose, and she knew immediately that the nose was broken. Many sighted people wouldn't get that, because they haven't developed that kind of skill.
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Right. The Touch Tour program was also good, I mean, it's not a good idea to touch the sculpture. The oils from your hands will actually decay the patinas on the sculpture and so we have to encourage people not to do that. But the Cantor Foundation was very supportive of this project and, with special gloves, all of these people were able to go and sort of rub their hands all over these pieces and with the full cooperation of the Cantors.
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Link: Art Beat feature on Martina Young
| | Let me move to the Martina Young performances. Can you explain how that came about?
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Sure. We try to do a lot of different programs when we have exhibitions going on as a way of articulating the nature of the exhibition. We'll have lectures - in fact we had a major Rodin scholar come in and speak. We'll do different types of tours like the Touch Tours. But for something different this time we'd been talking with a local choreographer and dancer Martina Young and we had hosted one of her dances about a year previous to this that she had developed that was all about the flood. And so we were developing a good relationship with her and she proposed doing this dance specifically for the Rodin exhibition, the idea being that she would use the work of Rodin as a way of inspiring her choreography, and then we would, in a sense, commission this piece specifically for the exhibition. And so that's how it occurred. Again, we received support from C.I.T.Y. 2000 for this, and she spent a great deal of time developing the choreography, spending time in the gallery, learning about Rodin, and then the actual performances themselves were very private kind of performances. Only about thirty people were allowed to see each one. There were only two performances. So, it was a very limited audience. We lost money on the deal as far as finances go, but the point of it was to create a very unique and kind of exciting experience, and I think people who attended the dance performances were quite moved by them.
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Part II of Art Beat's interview with Steven High, Executive Director at the Nevada Museum of Art.
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