Museum curators produce just a handful of exhibitions each year, and that can leave the public wondering what it is, exactly, that they do all day. Itap a reasonable curiosity; the business of institutional art is a mystery to many people.
But as any curator is happy to tell you, they have more than enough to stay busy. They give tours, manage storage and conservation, and watch their departmental budgets in that stressful way workers at most non-profit organizations are obliged to do.
They also acquire new objects, and that may be the most important part of the job. An encyclopedic museum is only as good as the art in its stockpiles, and that requires a lot of research. Curators constantly assess where their collections stand, where they are going and what holes they need to fill in terms of both the art and artists represented in the vault. Itap not just about shopping.
The Denver Art Museum has been putting a great deal of focus on its own collection in recent exhibits and has been quite effective in connecting the museum-loving public to both the work it can be proud to have ownership of and the museum’s staff, which decides what comes and what sometimes goes.
That backdrop is important to understand when it comes to appreciating “What We’ve Been Up to: People,” DAM’s current photo show. The title says it all, really. The exhibitap main goal is to remind people of all that labor curators do under the radar, while offering the simultaneous pleasure of looking at some attention-worthy things.
In this case, there are 60 images on the walls, all making their first appearance in a DAM gallery, and some are by stars of the genre, including Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon and Graciela Iturbide. That alone is a good reason to go see the show, even if it does not reach so deeply for a richer curatorial theme.
In that regard, the curators set reasonable expectations upfront with the sentimental text intro to the show displayed at the entrance. Rather than setting up some deep intellectual or biographical dive as the best exhibits do, they suggest that these images, all featuring human beings, might invite viewers to “consider, despite our differences, all of the hopes and needs, the fears and joys that people hold in common.”
Fair enough. We are a divided planet right now, and museums can offer hope. I’ll take the trade-off from time to time. Plus, most of the photos are, indeed, museum-worthy, and many reflect trends in institutional art collecting that have been fashionable since the museum’s photo department was created in 2008.
That means there are familiar names making their signature moves. Dorothea Lange is represented with her 1935 “Imperial Valley, California,” a portrait in the field of a youthful male figure during the difficult economic time she documented so deftly. There are portraits of people in Mexico, taken by Italian photographer Tina Modotti in Mexico, captured in 1929.
Moving closer to the present age, there is a portrait of “Truman Capote, Writer” that Avedon created in 1974. The subject is pensive, expressionless and looking away from the camera. But history has built the man, and viewers can assume he was thinking of something clever.
The show does have some provocative moments, including a series of portraits by Andrea Modica from 1999. Her contribution to “people” consists of a quartet of same-sized photos of human skulls, positioned at various angles, that mirror the intensity of still-life paintings. The photos have simple, anonymous titles, like “B4 Female, 34 Years” and “A14 Male, 56 Years,” but the precise way she lights these specimens and the special care she takes in showing them as individuals gives them a hyper-personality. The series is a testament to the power of photography to make us see the world in ways that are both personal and profound.
From 1999, there is one of Francesca Woodman’s monochromatic self-portraits, “It Must Be Time for Lunch Now…,” which has the artist crouching or sitting mysteriously on the floor of a dimly-lit room — in the company of forks and spoons — and gazing directly at the lens. Woodman’s photos — she died at the age of 22 in 1981, making her an external enigma — are always a combination of playful and mysterious, this one included.
Bringing the exhibition — and collecting habits — into the present are works by artists who are defining current trends in photography. Tim Sullivan’s self-portrait from 2003 (titled here “Tim Sullivan,” appropriately) is a carefully staged shot of the artist wearing a jacket, shirt and tie in a classic floral print. He is standing before a wall covered in ceramic tiles that have the exact same print. This elaborately produced, over-the-top and often humorous way of taking photos has become a trademark for 21st-century portraitists, in both painting and photo.
Following another trend is Jess T. Dugan’s 2020 “Oskar and Zach (embrace),” which captures two youthful, gender-nonspecific humans in a close hug. Only one of their faces is visible and it stares directly at the viewer, appearing to be neither happy nor sad — just sort of saying “I exist.”
Dugan has built a successful career by making intimate images of LGBTQ subjects (emphasis on the “T”) mirroring the trend of photographers to bring attention to marginalized communities. This photo alone would be enough to fulfill the exhibition’s promise to remind us of “the fears and joys that people hold in common.”
Like many of the pictures here, it rides a line between documenting human behavior and exploiting its drama to get attention. There is a tension in that, and it makes many of these objects a tantalizing, sometimes beautiful, puzzle to comprehend. The best of these works make the show’s theme of “People” seem more interesting than it might appear on the surface.
Nearly all of these photos on display represent a thoughtful choice by curators in the photo department at DAM — whether they were purchases or gifts from donors that the museum accepted into its holdings. What do curators do all day? They build collections, and they balance them and, when they get the chance, they show off their work to the customers.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.
IF YOU GO
“What We’ve Been Up to: People,” continues through Sept. 29 at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Ave. Parkway. Info: 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
