One of the first things visitors will see when entering the newly renovated Susan Morse Hilles Gallery at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art on Jan. 31 is a lighted sign reading “Like, Man, I’m Tired (Of Waiting).”
Sam Durant’s creation is a reflection on a 1963 Civil Rights march. But it could just as well be a reflection on the Wadsworth Atheneum. After months of waiting, museum visitors are yearning to see what the Hartford museum has done with the closed-off gallery behind the reception lobby.
What they will see will be an invigorating jolt. The Hilles gallery has been transformed into a light, brightly lit, hardwood-floored celebration of late-20th- and 21st-century art, almost all of it American. The gallery is now the land of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Carl Andre, Alex Katz, Cindy Sherman, Romare Bearden, Nick Cave and Richard Tuttle, pieces with feminist, political and racial themes and a video space.
The Jan. 31 opening of the Hilles and two other galleries focuses on post-war and contemporary work in the museum’s permanent collection. It is the first event in a yearlong rollout of the spaces in the nation’s oldest public art museum, which have been refurbished and renovated as part of a $33 million project. Also on Jan. 31, the exhibit “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008” will open. (Full coverage of the “Coney Island” exhibit will appear in the Jan. 25 Arts section.)
The Atheneum has spent the last few years shoring up the building’s infrastructure in a two-phase renovation project that concentrated on the exterior first and the interior second. The first phase patched up leaks, built new granite front steps and a new Main Street entrance, upgraded electrical systems and improved roofing and the skylights in Morgan Great Hall. Morgan reopened in spring 2011.
The second phase is focusing on interior improvements, with the goal of reopening gallery space for public viewing. For years, much gallery space was closed off and used for storage, because the storage facilities were crumbling. At the peak of the renovation project, 32 galleries totaling 23,137 square feet were closed, out of a museum total of 54 galleries totaling 57,948 square feet. After the storage facilities were brought up to speed, items stored in galleries were moved back into storage and renovation and reinstallation of the galleries themselves began.
Hilles Gallery
Pop art and minimalism pop out of the wide spaces in the Hilles, which features many artworks never shown before or not shown for decades. The big art stars are represented well, most notably with the ever-popular “Triple Silver Disaster” and “Early Colored Jackie” by Warhol and “Retroactive I” by Rauschenberg. Katz in 1971 created a charming oil-on-aluminum stand-up painting called “Margie,” a portrait of a woman who was a registrar at the Atheneum for decades. It is juxtaposed amusingly with Duane Hanson’s “Sunbather,” a realistic sculpture of a woman in a beach chair. Bearden’s elegant and vivid “She-ba,” from 1970, isn’t shown frequently because it’s a work on paper. Cave’s “Sound Suit” (2009) stands out like a freakish creature in the middle of the gallery, a costume made from multicolored bath mats.
The works infused with sociocultural commentary are the most intriguing. Hank Willis Thomas’ “Basketball and Chain,” a 2003 photo never exhibited before, is a commentary on the limited career options imposed by stereotypes on black youths. Kiki Smith’s steel-and-bronze “Daisy Chain” depicts a dismembered woman, held together by chains, a statement about violence against women. Ana Mendieta’s “Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints)” from 1972 turns on its head the art tradition of men creating female nudes, and lets Mendieta depict herself, distorting her form with a pane of glass. Iraqi-American Ahmed Alsoudani, whose work was last seen in the MATRIX gallery in 2012, is represented by an acrylic-and-charcoal on canvas showing bodies torn apart by war. Kara Walker’s cut-paper wall creation, also a new acquisition, aggressively ponders the legacy of slavery, and Lorna Simpson’s “Bits and Pieces,” not seen for 20 years, is a literally in-your-face study of the impression left by repeated images of a black woman.
One ghoulish item in the exhibit is unforgettable because it looks so commonplace: Charles LeDray’s “Untitled/Tower” from 2001, a tiny stack of everyday items, carved from human bones.
The Hilles video space is bringing back its 2012 hit James Nares’ “Street,” a hypnotic 61-minute, super-slow motion ramble through the streets of New York, with a solo guitar score by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Nares shot the “actualité film” in 2011 with a PhantomFlex camera mounted inside an SUV that drove slowly around Manhattan, capturing everyday moments that take on a sort of poetry when viewed from this drawn-out, contemplative perspective.
Huntington Gallery
In the hallway outside the Huntington Gallery will be installed 18 of Allan McCollum’s “Surrogate” paintings, which comment on the experience of viewing art. Facing the McCollums will be Andrea Fraser’s 1991 video “May I Help You?” which humorously complements McCollum’s vision.
“It’s very funny and critical of the art-gallery scene, how gallerists talk about works in a way that are difficult to understand,” said Patricia Hickson, Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art. “We want people to feel that they’re not alone. Abstract art, they may not be able to understand it. It shows we can laugh at ourselves.”
To those who do or don’t understand, lighthearted permission to be confused is a fun frame of mind in which to enter the Huntington, which is filled mostly with long-time museum favorites. The first bay of the gallery, seen in a straight sightline from the hall, is dedicated to abstract expressionists. A bold, black-and-white 1952 Franz Kline faces across the room from Robert Motherwell’s polyptych “The Blue Painting Lesson: A Study in Painterly Logic (#1-5),” from 1973.
The Motherwell used to be on exhibit in the wider, longer, taller Morgan Great Hall (which is showing the Jason tapestries during the museum’s transitional time). “These suddenly are just more monumental in such a smaller space,” Hickson said.
Willem de Kooning’s “Montauk I,” from 1969 and Helen Frankenthaler’s 1959 “Sea Picture with Black” share the bay space with Adolph Gottlieb’s “Under and Over” and a collage by Lee Krasner of torn-up bits of her own works and possibly some pieces of work by her husband, Jackson Pollock.
The second bay of the Huntington is all about color field and op art. Trippy optical illusions created by Richard Anuskiewicz (“Summer Sunset Reds,” 1982) and British artist Bridget Riley (“Shuttle II,” 1964) and an earlier op-art piece by Victor Vasarely (“Ixion,” 1956) share the space with color works by Ellsworth Kelly — beloved by the Atheneum as the first artist in its long-running MATRIX contemporary-art series — Barnett Newman, Paul Feeley and two of Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square” paintings, which complement two works by John McLaughlin.
The third bay can be called “Tony Smith and Friends.” The bay’s window overlooks the front lawn, where Smith’s large-scale sculpture “Amaryllis” sits facing Main Street. In the gallery, two small sculptures by Smith, one never shown before, are surrounded by works donated by Smith to the museum: a 1949 Pollock, a 1951 Clyfford Still, works by Theodoros Stamos (never shown before) and Ralph Humphrey and a 1949 Mark Rothko, acquired in 1967, which has an interesting history at the museum.
“We had always hung it vertically. We were prepping for this installation and we took the backing off and realized it was supposed to be horizontal, not vertical,” said Susan Talbott, whose tenure as the museum’s director and CEO will end in the fall, around the time the last phases of the renovation are unveiled.
Sol LeWitt Gallery
On the second-floor mezzanine, a space that used to be the administrative offices of the Amistad Center for Art & Culture has been transformed into a gallery of work by Sol LeWitt and other minimalists. For the gallery’s debut Jan. 31, the only other artist to share the space with LeWitt is Tara Donovan, whose 2009 “Untitled (Toothpicks)” will be on view among two LeWitt floor sculptures, one LeWitt hanging sculpture and a LeWitt mural.
That mural, which has not been seen by the public in 15 years, is the reason the gallery is dedicated to LeWitt. The Hartford-born conceptual-minimalist artist created it in 1980. That mural also has a back story, which delves deeper into the museum’s dedication to LeWitt.
“He was supposed to do a mural at the Civic Center, but Carl Andre had just done the Stone Field [in 1977, across the street from the Atheneum] and people hated it. As soon as the grumblings died down, he got the [Civic Center] commission, but he didn’t want to go through all that, so he withdrew,” Hickson said. “The museum decided that if the city wouldn’t embrace him, this institution would embrace him.”
The final new installation, in the museum’s rotunda, is a new acquisition, Christian Marclay’s 1995 video “Telephone,” a 7 1/2-minute compilation of old movie clips of people — Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Michael Keaton, Meg Ryan, Whoopi Goldberg, Katharine Hepburn, etc. — talking on telephones.
WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ART is at 600 Main St. in Hartford. The first phase of the museum’s renovation will be unveiled on Jan. 31. www.thewadsworth.org.
