Of the scores of art institutions I have visited during my lifetime, I feel a particular kinship to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in my hometown of Kansas City, Mo.
My father recalled first going there by streetcar on a school field trip shortly after it opened in 1933, when the museum did not yet have enough art to fill all the galleries.
I too first visited as a child and have returned again and again both in a professional capacity and as someone who just wanted to spend a pleasant afternoon looking at art in one of the country’s great museums.
So I was excited to get the chance to travel to the Nelson-Atkins recently to interview architect Steven Holl, who is designing Denver’s new courthouse and was responsible for a $200 million museum addition at the Nelson-Atkins scheduled to open in 2007.
At the same time, I was curious to see how that daring new structure compares with the Denver Art Museum’s soon-to-be completed $90.5 million expansion, which has attracted similar international attention.
Different approaches
Unlike the upwardly jutting, eye-grabbing exterior of the Daniel Libeskind-designed project in Denver, Kansas City’s 840-foot-long, grass-roofed addition hugs the gently sloping topography and is meant to divert attention.
The big question is which building will ultimately be judged more successful. While it is too early to say, at first blush it’s hard not to wonder if Holl’s design doesn’t have more going for it.
There is a compelling poetry to its graceful if emphatic asymmetry and subtle light play. The airy architecture appears as though it will be more in tune with and in service to the art than Denver’s new building, with its decidedly look-at-me-first attitude.
And unlike the Denver Art Museum, which is raising its admission fees 25 percent for Colorado residents and even more for non-residents when its addition opens Oct. 7, the Nelson-Atkins will have free admission.
Such a bold move, funded primarily through parking fees and visitor donations, removes a signficant barrier to attendance – either real or psychological, said Marc Wilson, just the third director in the Nelson-Atkins’ 73-year history.
“I hope that it will be a part of influencing how people not only perceive the institution,” he said, “but that coming to the museum is kind of a casual event like dropping by the grocery store to pick up milk: ‘I’ll just go see a few things, and I’ll leave when I feel like it.”‘
Old-time values
At a time when there is much discussion of the Disneyfication of American art museums, the Nelson-Atkins remains a refreshing bastion of old-time institutional values, even as it leaps into the future with one of the most technologically advanced buildings anywhere.
As context and trendy educational props become ever more fashionable in museum displays, try to find another museum leader who talks about the desired visitor experience in Wilson’s no-nonsense fashion.
His overriding mantra: “At the end of the day, if you don’t connect the genius in the art with the genius that’s in your visitor, you’ve failed.”
Wilson’s point is simple. Museums must set aside all the peripherals and focus on their central mission of helping visitors enjoy a meaningful and emotionally powerful engagement with the objects on display.
“I’m not here to teach art history,” he said. “When you become an aficionado, you will pick up the art history. Art history is a tool, not a goal. The goal is … to gratify that visual sensibility that you have natively. Everybody’s got it.”
Naturally coinciding with such a philosophy is Kansas City’s refreshing emphasis on its permanent collection. Using the old retail trick of putting the most sought-after merchandise at the back of the store, the addition is configured so visitors must walk by all the permanent collection rooms to reach the special exhibitions.
“If we do our job right, I’m going to make it so enticing to you as you walk down that corridor you can’t resist buying the tomato soup as you are on the way back to the milk,” Wilson said.
Special exhibitions are important, he said, because they draw people who might otherwise not attend. But they can also divert attention from a museum’s principal job of building, maintaining and sharing its permanent collection.
“Special exhibitions really, in my view, exist to complement or supplement what you have,” Wilson said. “They’re not just there for cake. They should be mission-driven and not financially driven, and that is a very big distinction.”
Amen to that.
