The Phoenix Art Museum: Chinese Cloisonné to Rapid Transit Rembrandt

Phoenix Art Museum Chinese Cloisonné to Rapid Transit Rembrandt

It was a gloomy afternoon in December-ironically, the first rainy day Arizona had seen in weeks when Keith Haring stood before his fans in the Phoe nix Art Museum's Roy Wayland Gallery of Western Art. He was about to begin a workshop based loosely on a child's game of musical chairs. The Wayland Gallery had been dismantled and hastily pressed into service when the museum's outdoor courtyard was lost to the weather, and now the only traces of Thomas Moran and Frederic Remington were rows of bent nails protruding from the empty walls.

Phoenix Art Museum

(RIGHT) New York artist Keith Haring, known as “the Rembrandt of Rapid Transit” because of his earlier activity as a subway graffitist, conducts a drawing workshop at the museum. (BELOW) Workshop participants of all ages add their personal touches. (BOTTOM) During his week-long stay in Phoenix, Haring created this downtown mural, assisted by students from the South Mountain Center for the Arts at South Mountain High School. The project was sponsored by the City of Phoenix and a developer, Cordish, Embry and Associates.

Around the edges of the room stood a line of large portable bulletin boards covered with white paper, a makeshift canvas for the artist whose career began seven years ago in the subways of New York City. The cartoonish chalk figures he had scribbled there on blank advertising panels had led to numerous arrests for vandalism and defacing public property, but since then Haring's “graffiti” had risen from the underground to make him a hero of pop culture and, at the age of twenty-eight, a wealthy man. His canvases now sold for as much as 50,000 dollars apiece. Television journalists christened him “the Rembrandt of Rapid Transit.” He had designed Swatch watches and produced a music video with rock star Grace Jones. He had taken his frenetic trademark characters to Germany and, under the ever-present scrutiny of television cameras from back home, he had painted them on the Berlin Wall. In Phoenix, long after his emergence from the subways, Haring still looked like an anonymous man waiting for a train. He was thin and gangly, with an open, innocent face. He wore patched jeans, a red jacket, and thick high-topped sneakers. The only sign of his advancing age was the receding line of his curly hair. He gazed amiably at the people who had crowded into the museum to meet him. They looked back expectantly. Many of them wore T-shirts decorated with his This Father's Day, give Dad an outdoor adventure with two books published by Arizona Highways.

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"The Rivera exhibit was a triumph of determination. It was also a major step in a young museum's quest to put itself on the map."

Jim Ballinger is a tall, slender man who does most of his running on a basketball court. He is thirty-seven years old. He is openly proud of his museum, but his administrative style is deceptively casual and marked with frequent humor. He came to the museum as curator of collections in 1974 from the University of Kansas Museum of Art. When the Phoenix museum's former director resigned in 1981, Ballinger was urged by members of its board of trustees to consider the job.

"He did not care, at first, to apply for the position of director," says Edward (Bud) Jacobson, a Phoenix attorney and museum board member. "He envisioned himself as a scholar. He viewed administration as a chore and fund-raising as something he simply was not suited for.

"He does all of those things now, in a very low-key way. When people meet Jim, they cannot believe that this basketball player, usually wounded and limping, could possibly be a museum director. He is quiet; his humor is gentle. He is also a major talent in a national sense."

In the five years since Ballinger became director, the Phoenix Art Museum has organized or hosted national exhibits that have been both beautiful and challenging. In 1985 the museum presented "The Elegant Brush: Chinese Painting Under the Qianlong Emperor, 1735-1795," an ambitious and highly successful show organized by Claudia Brown, the museum's curator of Asian Art, and Dr. Ju-hsi Chou, professor of art history at Arizona State University. "The Elegant Brush" traveled to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Last August, the museum hosted Richard Avedon's "In the American West," a collection of enormous photographic portraits of drifters, waitresses, gravediggers, miners, mental patients, and truckers from the Western states. More than 25,000 people visited the gallery during the show's stay in Phoenix. Children stared wide-eyed at Avedon's beekeeper, an extraordinary hairless man who posed with ghostly detachment while bees swarmed over his body. Others were fascinated by the distorted torso of a young carnival worker from Colorado or the religious tattoos on the chests of prison inmates in San Antonio, Texas. The visitors looked, Westerner to Westerner, into the somber, disturbing faces of Avedon's hard-bitten subjects. Not everyone was pleased with the experience, but the museum's attendance records soared. "There is nothing wrong," said Jim Ballinger happily, "with a little controversy."

Next fall, "Craft Today: The Poetry of the Physical," the inaugural exhibit of the American Craft Museum in New York, will come to Phoenix. The museum also plans to bring in a show of the sketchbooks of Pablo Picasso that premiered at the Pace Gallery in New York last spring.

"The museum has skyrocketed into the top show circuit," says Jacobson with obvious pleasure. "No city as new as Phoenix has the right to hope that its museum could put together shows that would go to the Metropolitan or the IBM Museum. I give Jim five stars for producing such results."

The museum's growth has not come easily. Today it still reflects the circumstances of its young city. Phoenix is a retirement haven for people whose financial loyalties belong to other states, and recent years have brought an influx of younger residents who offer only moderate financial support. Ten years ago, the museum's budget was less than 400,000 dollars. This year, it is 1.8 million dollars. Almost all of its of its acquisitions have been gifts. With little endowment aid or government assistance, the Phoenix Art Museum has worked for every dollar it has made and every work of art it has acquired.

"In such a young city there are no Mellons or Carnegies, few major patrons or collectors," says Ballinger. "It's terrific to have the grass roots support that we have. But when it's time to do a major project that requires 300,000 dollars and you have to work hard for every 500or 1000-dollar contribution, there are many moments when you wish that you had that big donor who could give you half a million a year."

The museum's permanent collection has six areas of emphasis: European art of the eighteenth century and of the nineteenth century; Western American art; costumes of the twentieth century (the Phoenix collection is one of sixteen in the country); Asian art; and twentieth century art.

"We've got some exquisite paintings," says Susan Gordon, curator of European art. "We're missing some works by major people, but we're going to collect selectively to fill the collections out. I wouldsay that Asian and contemporary art have been given the most attention over the last few years."

Phoenix Art Museum "If you get them when they're young, they're going to grow up feeling at home here.... That means they'll keep coming back."

The core of the museum's Asian section is the Wong Collection of Chinese Ceramics, donated during the 1960s, and the Clague Collection of Chinese Cloisonné, acquired in 1982. Two years ago, the museum received a collection of later Chinese painting and calligraphy. "The three collections dovetailed," says Ballinger, "and our Asian collection has come out of nowhere to be really very good. The contemporary collection is still evolving. Contemporary art is inherently controversial, but it offers a young museum the opportunity to purchase work by emerging artists while prices are still relatively low. At Phoenix Art Museum this task is in the hands of Bruce D. Kurtz, curator of twentieth century art since 1985. Kurtz is forty-three, but looks younger. He is aware of fashion, he is aware of the cutting edge of contemporary art, and he is aware of his own position in one of the hottest seats on the museum staff.

"I think every curator of contemporaryart in the country has been called arrogant," he says. "It goes with the job. I'd like to work toward a level of quality for people in Arizona who are conscious of the national and international picture, who seriously look at art and know what's going on in major contemporary museums around the country."

December's Keith Haring workshop did more than bring graffiti to the halls of Western art. It brought to the museum a contemporary artist with an international reputation. It also brought teenagers and children who may never have been in a museum before.

Earlier this year, the museum opened an expanded children's gallery with space for exhibits, workshops, and storytelling. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, the parking lot is often full of school buses bringing the city's children for their first taste of the visual arts. "If you get them when they're young, they're going to grow up feeling at home here," says Rozanne Stringer, curator for education. "That means they'll keep coming back."

Expansion also is in store for the rest of the museum, which is cramped in its facility at the Civic Center on the near-north side of Phoenix. The timetable for the expansion is uncertain but, says Ballinger, “from our point of view, the deadline was yesterday.” (LEFT) Docents provide an invaluable contribution to the museum and its patrons. The efforts of hundreds of volunteers, both women and men, make possible regular tours for children and adults, weekly programs at senior centers, and research and staff support. Here Suzanne Learned, the museum's activities coordinator, leads a tour and explains the exhibit titled “Modernist American Works from Phoenix Collections.” Pictured are several works by Georgia O'Keeffe.

The city may need a new building to accommodate the ambitious plans of the museum staff and its director. Only five years ago, the Phoenix Art Museum was known best for the Cowboy Artists of America show and sale, which it has hosted every fall since 1973.

“It's a strong show and a part of our community, but now the cowboy show is just another of the very good things we do,” says Ballinger. “We have presence with regard to our exhibitions and our staff. We also have a presence nationally in the museum community. We are a twenty-seven-year-old institution in a young city. We've had to take what other cities did over a hundred years or more and condense it into a decade.” Ballinger now is helping to organize a major Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit sched-uled to travel nationally between 1988 and 1990. The project is a joint effort of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin West, the Scottsdale architectural school founded by Wright that was re-cently designated a national historic landmark; Scottsdale Arts Center Association; Phoenix Art Museum; and Arizona State University.

It is a daring project that, says Ballinger, “has us all holding our breath.” Its focal point will be a 1955 “Usonian Automatic” house, designed by Wright, that will be assembled and dismantled at each mu-seum to complement an indoor exhibit of photographs and models.

In January of 1990, the show will return to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, opening in conjunction with a major retrospective of Wright's drawings that will be seen only at the Phoenix Art Museum. (Eventually the traveling ex-hibit's Usonian Automatic house will be on permanent display in Scottsdale.) “People will come from all over the world for the 1990 event,” says Ballinger. “This is a valley-wide project to show that Taliesin West, one of the great cultural assets of the world, is right here. This area has more cultural amenities than we give ourselves credit for. It's time to stop talking about our potential. Phoenix had potential when I came here twelve years ago. If we're still talking about it now, it means we haven't made any inroads. I don't think that's true. I think we're on our way.”