State of the ART
The mission of the Faulconer Gallery is to promote learning though artistic excellence and creative collaboration. In doing so, it has brought more than 200 exhibitions and 15 years of art programming to the College and the region.
Consider this semester’s exhibitions. The Faulconer Gallery is the second stop on the American leg of what is expected to be a worldwide tour for Edward Burtynsky: Water. Burtynsky’s massive photographs — most about 5 feet wide — of our planet transformed through human use are on display this fall. His images are works of art but can be viewed through political as well as environmental, economic, and social justice lenses.
Later in the semester, Dark Commander: The Art of John Scott, the Canadian artist’s first major exhibition in the United States, comes to the gallery. Scott’s work presents a more overt criticism of today’s sociopolitical environment and the military industrial complex. Daniel Strong, associate director of the art gallery and curator of exhibitions, finds Scott’s work especially insightful. “If you look at his work from the 1980s, much of it could be made next year. That’s how prescient it is,” Strong says.
Designed for Flexibility
Given both the varying types and great number of exhibitions the Faulconer Gallery presents, the space must be both ample and mutable. Faulconer Gallery is the largest wedge extending from the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts’ rotunda. Designed by Cesar Pelli, the Faulconer was just one part of the fine arts building expansion in 1999. The gallery is named for Vernon Faulconer ’61 and Amy Hamamoto Faulconer ’59, whose financial support was integral to its construction. And in the fall of 2015, the Faulconer Gallery will host — for the first time — an exhibition of works from the personal collection of its namesakes.
The gallery’s 7,420 square feet of exhibition space is a boon to artists, especially those used to showing their works in urban galleries where space comes at a premium. “Artists, especially from New York, love it. In New York, it’s usually a Chelsea loft or converted space where you’re showing your stuff. This is deluxe for them,” says Milton Severe ’87, the gallery’s director of exhibition design.
The gallery was designed as a kunsthalle, an open space with no permanent exhibition. Severe designed a number of movable walls to display works and divide the space, which frequently holds more than one exhibition at a time. So far, the space has accommodated everything from French painting to video art installations to sculpture.
Goya as the Collection’s Soul
The works housed in the College’s permanent collection — mostly works on paper — and the exhibitions in the gallery tend to share a common theme. “The soul of this collection is all of the artists who use their skills to point out injustices, to scream against the wrongs of human folly,” says Kay Wilson, curator of the College’s collection. Strong goes a step further, offering a single name at the center of the permanent collection: Goya. “If an art collection can have a soul, Grinnell’s is Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War,” he says. The series of 82 prints is a commentary on the state and the government’s role in waging war; the College is fortunate to own two complete sets. The collection and the gallery are focused more on art as social commentary — pieces that can be viewed from more than just an art history perspective.
In the early days of the collection, faculty and staff members were allowed to hang works from the College’s collection on their office walls. “And of course, everyone smoked in those days,” says Wilson. When the collection was inspected and valued, it was discovered that there was not a great deal of value, due to the damage of having the works out and exposed, as well as the lack of means and the desire to procure significant works. Now six endowed funds exist for acquisitions, created through the generosity of alumni and friends of the College. There’s also the idea that the art is for the students — for everyone really — so professors and administrators and staff members don’t get to hang pieces from the College’s collection on their walls where they would only be seen by a few.
Traveling Shows and Contemporary Art
A mix of regional, national, and international art has graced the Faulconer Gallery. A number of exhibitions have been curated by the gallery staff — some of them consisting exclusively of works from the College’s collection. The gallery also brings in major traveling shows.
The gallery welcomed its largest crowds in 2000, when it showed Corot to Picasso, a traveling exhibition from Smith College. More than 25,000 attendees came to see the exhibition. But this is art, one of the things in this world most resistant to quantification. So significance cannot be measured in numbers alone.
South African artist William Kentridge is known for his animations and scenic design, but the show that Wilson curated and the gallery exhibited in 2005 was his first of only prints. Kentridge is also one of the highest-profile artists to visit and speak about his work at the College. Fellow South African artist Diane Victor also made the long journey to Grinnell in 2011 for a one-month residency. Her exhibition of smoke drawings as well as her series Disasters of Peace are in keeping with the ethos of the College’s collection and respond to Goya’s Disasters of War.
In contrast to the contemporary international focus of most Faulconer Gallery exhibitions, two shows curated by gallery director Lesley Wright — Roots of Renewal and Culturing Community — have focused on Midwestern artists. Wright feels that any gallery that operates in the Midwest ought to showcase Midwestern artists because the politics of the art world tends to exclude them from shows on the coasts. Molly Rideout ’10, co-director of Grin City Collective, which operates artist residencies in Grinnell, put it best: “If you make art about your home in New York, you’re a realist. If you make art about your home in Iowa, you’re a regionalist.”
Still, Wright and Strong bring mostly contemporary art exhibitions from around the world to the Faulconer Gallery. Strong, in particular, emphasizes photography, presenting artists working in Scandinavia, Europe, and the United States. The staff often invites artists to Grinnell as part of an exhibition. Visitors from Morocco, Denmark, Brazil, Japan, Portugal, and China have enlivened the campus over the years.
Wright explains the questions she asks to determine whether an exhibition is right for the gallery: (a) Does it contain work by an artist who is represented in the College’s collection and is popular? (b) Is it something entirely new? (c) Does it have some kind of curricular dovetailing? She offers the recent Willie Cole exhibition, the international photography shows that Strong brings in, and the Stocked exhibition (with its connections to art, food, and commercialism) as examples for each respective criterion.
Focusing on Collaboration
The Faulconer Gallery’s efforts to collaborate among programs and across disciplines are especially apparent this year. As part of the Center for the Humanities’ program, “A Century of War,” the print and drawing study room in Burling Library will host an exhibition of the War and Peace Project, a collaborative work conceived by Laura Baltzell ’83 and employing the talents of five other Grinnell alumni, and other team members. Baltzell and the other artists created a collage for each of the 747 pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The exhibition has a broad appeal; and the gallery staff sees the potential to work with the Center for the Humanities, the Russian department, the peace studies concentration, as well as the English and art departments.
“It’s important to remember that in addition to being a gallery, the Faulconer is also a public space,” says Wright. A number of events not focused on the artwork on display happen each semester. Vocal and instrumental music ensembles perform regularly, and the gallery sometimes hosts readings for the Writers@Grinnell program as well as a weekly noon yoga session.
One of the main reasons the gallery hosts so many events is to encourage students, faculty, staff, and community members to go inside. Art can be intimidating, especially when placed in an intellectually rigorous environment such as Grinnell’s. “A lot of what we do is make people comfortable going into a museum,” says Wright, “You can come in and look at one thing, say, ‘Hey, that’s weird,’ and leave. Then you can bring someone back with you and say, ‘Do you think that’s weird?’”
Every semester since 2005, the gallery has had a student intern, and each intern has the opportunity to curate an exhibition from the collection. The Department of Art and Art History also teaches an exhibition seminar every three years, giving students hands-on curation experience. The Faulconer Gallery presents the final exhibition and publishes a catalog. These shows have ranged from German Expressionism to works by Giovanni Batista Piranesi to exhibitions that embody the concept of repetition. Wright also teaches a museum studies course and has served as a Mentored Advanced Project adviser for students.
Reaching Out to Campus and the Community
Outreach has been an essential part of the Faulconer Gallery since it first opened its doors. In fact, during the first five years of its existence, under curator of education Karla Niehus ’88, the gallery focused more on bringing people from outside the College onto campus and into the gallery than it did on students, faculty, and staff. Since Tilly Woodward filled the then-new curator of academic and community outreach position at the College in 2007, outreach efforts on campus have expanded substantially. In the past academic year alone, the gallery hosted more than 300 events, a third of which were aimed at the off-campus community. Twenty-two academic departments were directly involved in gallery events, and 34 classes made use of the gallery in the 2013–14 school year.
Woodward’s approach to outreach is aided by the fact that she is an artist herself. “The way I process a piece of art may be different than someone coming from the point of view of an art historian,” Woodward says. She wants to engage people in the physical, mental, and emotional process of making a piece so they have an understanding from a studio perspective of what an artist is trying to do. She also uses visual thinking strategies to encourage both children and adults to look at and think about art. “It’s a pretty simple strategy that involves getting people to look at a work, talk about what they see, and then build meaning through the ensuing discussion,” Woodward says. What she wants to give visitors to the gallery more than anything is a level of ownership.
During the school year, Woodward’s work focuses more on the campus community — working with professors, administrative offices, and student groups to create both academic and nonacademic experiences in the gallery. She also visits local schools, even bringing works from the College’s collection to show the students.
In the summer, Woodward leads the Faulconer Arts Outreach in the Parks. Over the course of six weeks, she makes a circuit of the parks in Grinnell so kids in every neighborhood can have access to a high quality art experience. With activities ranging from painting, drawing, and collage to tie-dyeing and glittering Woodward’s truck, the participants are limited only by their own creativity. Each year, there’s also a group project. “This year, we worked on a 3-foot tall rendition of the Statue of Liberty in clay,” says Woodward. Several hundred children contributed to the statue.
A Look to the Future
Although the focus of the gallery and the soul of the collection haven’t changed in the 15 years since the first exhibition opened, the Faulconer Gallery has changed. Some of the changes can be attributed to larger shifts in museum and gallery culture. “I think we’re more laid back than when we started,” Severe says, “and I like the idea of it feeling more like a living space than a mausoleum.” The gallery staff is working to make the gallery comfortable enough to be a viable study space.
Now, the gallery more frequently shows more than one exhibition at a time, which allows for increased opportunities for professors to use one to supplement their courses.
The gallery is also notable for the longevity of its staff. Wilson and Severe were here well before the Faulconer Gallery and were involved in the planning and design process. Wright and Strong were hired as the gallery was finished and have been involved since the first exhibition. Woodward is a more recent arrival, starting her outreach work with the College in 2007. Looking to the future, though, they are aware that in 10 years, all but Strong will be at or beyond retirement age.
As the staff of the Faulconer looks to the future, the primary concern is space. “When he designed the building, Cesar Pelli made it very difficult to add on to,” says Strong. They also want to do more outreach and collaboration, continue expanding the collection, and add another position. Most museums have a registrar or collection manager, who manages the permanent collection. That task is now split among the staff members.
Although 15 years is not a long history, the Faulconer Gallery has made a monumental impact on both the College and the community. Its artistic excellence and creative efforts have enriched the lives of thousands of visitors — students, staff, faculty, and community members — through exhibitions and collaborative events held each year. It’s hard to imagine Grinnell without the Faulconer Gallery.