Put Yourself on Trial

As a force of habit, I usually pass through the galleries when I return from a meeting away from the museum. It's always interesting to see who is visiting and occasionally strike up a conversation with a guest with the hope of gaining some insight into the experience we are providing. Recently, I've seen a lot of head scratching and indifferent facial expressions, particularly in the gallery hosting the work of mid-century abstract expressionist, Cora Kelley Ward and the beautiful time-based sculpture by Grimanesa Amorós. This is a good thing. I've always believed that visitors should be moved emotionally, challenged intellectually or enlightened in some way. If a visitor is questioning the value and significance of an object, we're doing our job.

I came to understand, during my first years in the profession, how an art museum exhibition could shape an individual's point-of-view. After finishing art school at L.S.U., my expectant wife and I moved with our three-year-old son to Alexandria, Louisiana. I landed a position as a museum Registrar at the Alexandria Museum of Art. During my interview weeks earlier, I discovered a progressive little art museum in the heart of rural central Louisiana. Alexandria was a community of both generational wealth and desperate poverty. Located near the Mississippi Delta and in the heart of the state, the community was, and still is, a divergent breakwater where Catholic Acadiana to the south and Protestant hill country to the north converge. The Museum was housed in the tastefully remodeled Rapides Bank and Trust building located between Main Street and the Red River levee.

Shelia Stewart Leach, the Museum Director and my new boss, helped me understand early on that no matter the size of the museum, well-known scholars, curators, and artists are willing to share their time and expertise, especially if it is in what is often perceived to be exotic Louisiana. Shelia expected excellence in everything we presented. She understood that our mission was to bring the world of art and new ideas to the doorstep of our community. 

The Alexandria Museum also enjoyed the support of a progressive, well healed and well traveled, Board of Trustees. These wonderful people wanted to share what they enjoyed in the global community with their neighbors back home, an effort not easily facilitated through other social and religious organizations such as the church, synagogue or even a municipal program. Their private non-for-profit Art Museum was the perfect vehicle.

After my second year with the museum, Sheila left to assume another Directorship in Texas. The Museum Board President, Marilyn Wellan, approached me about serving as the interim director during the national search for a replacement. Since the new role paid and additional $3,000 a year, advancing my salary to $13,000, there was no question that I would take the job. All I needed to do was monitor the finances of the museum, oversee the activities of our small staff of three, and report monthly to the Board of Trustees. Program plans were set for the next two years, so "maintaining" was the operative word. I enjoyed that year as interim director so much I continued in this profession for the next 26 years.

An important moment in my Interim Directorship was the opening of the exhibition Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work, traveled by the Mitzi Landau Traveling Exhibitions Service. For the occasion of the opening, our Curator of Exhibitions, Audrey Hammill, asked Dr. Herschel Chipp, Professor Emeritus of art history at U.C. Berkeley, to visit central Louisiana for the exhibition opening. Chipp's book Theories of Modern Art was a central text during my graduate studies a few years later. Dr. Chipp would attend the opening reception Friday evening and provide a public lecture the next day. Of course, Audrey coaxed him with promised side trips to hear Cajun Music at Fred's Lounge in Mamou and local culinary delicacies. This tactic continues to be effective.

Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935)

Preparations for the exhibition opening had come together nicely. I was prepared for the regular crowd of Trustees and museum members. These affairs were usually brief cocktail parties with wine and hors d'oeuvres  provided by a local caterer and entertainment by a musician from the Baptist College located across the river in Pineville. Dr. Chipp and his assistant were staying in the historic Hotel Bentley across the street from the museum and they arrived a few minutes early to view the exhibition. I had an opportunity to visit with him and discuss his impressions of our presentation of the Lachaise sculpture. He had a pensive nature, almost bashful with long thoughtful pauses during conversation. He donned a beret which was sure to distinguish him as a unique guest that evening.

Before long, the small gallery was filled with guests chatting, pointing and mumbling with coffered palm about the explicit nature of the Lachaise tributes to his muse, Isabel. Some of the bronze sculptures were nearly pure abstraction with cratered orifices crowned with powerfully extended appendages. Now I was born in Louisiana and raised in the Southern Baptist tradition. My wife and I married in First Baptist Church, Baton Rouge upon the very podium where the late Governor Earl Long lay in state after his death. I understood how challenging this imagery could be for many of our visitors that evening. Most Protestants, especially Baptists, are traditionally apprehensive to place real value on beauty or the visual arts. Perhaps this can be attributed to our county's early Puritan influence, which placed more value on practical activities than artistic or decorative extravagances. Regardless of the fact that most of Lachaise's work was over 50 years old and venerated by the great museums in Europe and the United States, I still noticed dismissive glances and the backs of guests turned in awkward conversation while attempting to ignore the passion and life force indicative of Lachaise's sculpture.

Woman, 1912 by Gaston Lachaise

Over a sea of heads crowding the gallery I heard a familiar voice.  Harold “Catfish” McSween was a well-known character in Alexandria. No, I’m not making the name up. McSween was an accomplished Democratic politician who served two terms from 1958 to 1962 in the now dissolved Louisiana 8^th Congressional District. He made his first and most memorable run with a vigorous campaign against incumbent Earl Long, the brother of Huey P. Long. Even though he lost the party primary, "Uncle Earl" died a few days later from heart failure and the Democratic State Central Committee certified McSween the party nominee for the November election.

Looking back, I realize young people do not suffer their elders with grace and patience. While always respectful, I never really took the time to get to know some of the remarkable people I met in my first few years in museum work. Harold McSween was one of those men I regret not really getting to know.

Mr. McSween, as I referred to him then, because we had more familiar interactions years later, was bombastic, full of good humor and above all brutally outspoken. I saw him spot our guest from Berkeley across the room and head straight for him. Now I admit I was young and inexperienced, but anyone could recognize the potential disaster. I made it to Dr. Chipp's side about the time McSween arrived with a mischievous smile. I said, "Dr. Chipp, I would like for you to meet one of our celebrated politicians and a good friend of the museum." Before I could get further into the introduction, McSween leaned in close to Dr. Chipp and whispered, "Now come on...you call this art?"

Of course panic and embarrassment began to crawl up my spine and I couldn't find an appropriate segue to parry the question. Then, I noticed something change in Herschel Chipp. A cleaver twinkle came to his eye, and a smile came over his face, and he responded, "Mr. McSween, this artwork has already been judged by generations of art critics. They endure. Now you are on trial!"

I've always used the term "visual literacy" when trying to explain why many of our visitors spend scant seconds in a gallery and at times become insulted, expressing disdain or outrage over an exhibition of, for example, non-representational art. Why doesn't this make sense? Why does this please me? The most important skill one can bring to an art museum is introspection. Ask the right questions and, as Dr. Chipp suggests, put yourself on trial.

Tale of Two Seekers

I was overcome with a strange sense of déjà vu this summer. Our exhibition of paintings by Eunice, Louisiana native and mid-century New York abstract expressionist, Cora Kelly Ward (1920-1989) brought back memories of another artist and poet involved in a life-long process of discovery.

In 1989, I moved to Ocean Springs, Mississippi to assume a new position as the first Director of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) was an American Van Gogh, a gifted visionary and troubled soul who saw more in the natural world in one day than most of us do in an entire lifetime. During my first week on the job, I went to visit with W.I. Anderson's dear wife Sissy and his enchanting daughter, Mary. The Anderson family had agreed to give the new museum a number of objects from the family's collection. They would also lend a number of works on a long-term basis with the intent of giving them over time.

Ms. Sissy was sitting on the front porch of her home when I arrived. Mary came through the screen door with graciously open arms and bearing a warm smile. After a rather lengthy chat on the porch, Mother and Daughter escorted me across the crushed oyster shell roadway to a small cottage nestled in a grove of magnolia and old slash pine. I had read about this house in Sissy's book "Approaching the Magic Hour." Walter Anderson lived the final years of his life as a recluse, living under the shelter of his trusty rowboat on Horn Island, or in this modest three-room cottage. Nothing had been touched. Anderson's rowboat remained stowed under the pier and beam porch.

Mary Anderson removed the padlock, which secured the front door, and we entered what I would describe as the surreal haunt of a hermit genius. Carved chests, ceramics, lyrical furniture supported by animal and bird figures, and shelves loaded with books and drawings, filled the main room.

Mary opened a wooden chest with Elephants carved in relief on the top and sides. She began removing notebooks and drawings rendered on common typewriter paper. I recognized the voluminous echoes of an artist's process, a mania that great painters, musicians and writers suffer through in loneliness. These were the remains of the act of "working out" an idea, repeating a notion or a concept over and over again until the "realization" comes. For Anderson, “realization” was a product of process. The process might require standing chin deep in a pond for hours on end observing the patterns created by diving bell spiders on the water's surface. It could also be re-reading classic poems, holding the book in one hand, and pen and paper in the other, all the while illustrating your impressions with a subconscious hand. Anderson did not believe in accidents. He identified with specific incidents, those happenstance moments when accident and intent rhyme. Nature, he wrote, was “only too glad to have assistance in establishing order.” The artist's role was to be attentive and empathic, a patient observer, prepared for the moment when true meaning is discovered.

W.I. Anderson Journal Entries found in Cottage

W.I. Anderson Watercolor on typewriter paper

In 2007, I received a telephone call from a Professor of Sociology at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. Maurice Badon told me his late sister had been an artist in New York. He was left with her remaining works and was looking for "a home" for the collection. I asked him to send more information and images. I came to discover that she worked within a circle of friends including renowned art critic and historian Clement Greenberg. Enclosed in the material Badon provided was a small catalog published in 1989 for Ms. Ward's memorial exhibition in Manhattan. In the introduction Greenberg wrote, “Ward is an exemplary case of the artist who wins out by persistence...Subconsciously, she was waiting for her vision. It came in her last decade."


There was indeed cause for further investigation into the artist and her work, but I was in the process of hiring a new Curator of Exhibitions and had little time to make a site visit to view the collection. After Dr. Lee Gray joined the Hilliard staff in 2008, we finally made the journey to Hammond, Louisiana to visit a climate controlled storage unit located near I-10. Dr. Badon opened the rolling metal door revealing wall-to-wall rolls of canvas, boxes of drawings and framed paintings.

Some of the rolled canvases from the Ward estate. Most were labeled with gallery names and exhibition dates.

A figure drawing by an unknown artist found in the Ward estate.

The first object I pulled from the stack was a charcoal drawing of a female nude. In the bottom right hand corner was an inscription in red crayon "For Cora from Clem."

The nature of this investigation suddenly became very interesting. It was obvious that Ward and Greenberg had a deep friendship. I informed Dr. Badon that we would be interested in cataloging and surveying the entire content of the storage room. He explained that he and the rest of the family were not interested in the collection and they would donate the artwork and contents unconditionally. Through the skilled efforts of the Museum volunteers under the direction of Museum Registrar Joyce Penn, the museum completed a survey of over 1,100 objects included in the collection.

A painting cart loaded with framed canvases by Ward.

A museum volunteer sewing an identification tag on a Ward canvas.

Eventually, the Hilliard accessioned in perpetuity a select number of paintings and drawing for the permanent collection. We also distributed a number of paintings to sister museums in Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, and the balance was shared at public sale last spring with the proceeds going to the collections preservation fund at the UL Lafayette Foundation. The outcome of this nearly four year effort is the current exhibition, Cora Kelley Ward: A Work in Progress.

This exhibition reveals a unique spirit, one that Walter Inglis Anderson would recognize. Both artists worked in different genres and lived in opposing environments. One was influenced by nature, philosophy and classical literature, the other was influenced by Modernist ideals and criticism. Both Anderson and Ward were creative souls possessed with passion for process. They were both seekers of the "realization."  Ward's obsession with Twombly-esque doodles on paper or the Color Field painters meditative color bleeding on un-primed canvas is evident in the hundreds of repetitive drawings, paintings and studies discovered in her Manhattan studio. Our Curator has recreated the semblance of Ward's studio in the museum beside a display of the works lauded by Greenberg.

Cora Kelley Ward ink on Paper, 1960

Cora Kelley Ward, watercolor on paper, 1954

Surely spending some contemplative time in the Hilliard Museum with her work will bring one closer to an understanding of what it truly means to be a passionate and intuitive seeker of a personal realization.