Art Review

A Contemporary Showcase at Wadsworth Atheneum

"Six Degrees" by Qimin Liu.

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

Published: June 3, 2007

“Connecticut Contemporary” is the first show in recent memory at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, America’s oldest public art museum, to deal seriously with contemporary art. The show is spectacular but comes at a difficult time for the 165-year-old institution, with the departure in April of the director, Willard Holmes, after less than four years in the job, for reasons that have not yet been made public. More than a dozen other staff members have also left in the last year, leaving vacant senior administrative and curatorial positions.

Mr. Holmes arrived in Hartford in 2003 from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where he had been chief operating officer and deputy director. In a tough funding and philanthropy climate, the museum ran up deficits every year of his brief tenure. In 2004, the operating shortfall was almost $700,000 out of a $9 million budget.

Attendance also dropped. After a peak of more than 228,000 in 2001, it reached a historic low of 108,614 visitors in 2005. At the same time, the curatorial staff diminished, from 8 at the time of Mr. Holmes’s arrival to 3, sharing the responsibility for the museum’s collection of approximately 44,000 objects and some 58,000 square feet of exhibition wall space.

The curatorial staff provides the intellectual leadership of a museum, creating exhibitions for the public and acquiring new artworks for the collection. The curators are especially important at the Wadsworth, where they have a large endowment for purchases — about $1.5 million annually. In the past, good judgment enabled them to purchase major works by Dali, Picasso, Mondrian and others, often before the artists became household names.

The museum, which was founded by Daniel Wadsworth in 1842 to display contemporary art, was for many years on the leading edge of showing and collecting work by living artists. Its mission has since broadened — understandably, given that art collected a century ago is no longer contemporary — but Connecticut artists have complained that the museum has turned its back on them. Few of them have been able to show there, or to see their works become part of the collection.

Perhaps as a response, “Connecticut Contemporary” was organized by Joanna Marsh, the former associate curator of contemporary art at the Wadsworth; she departed shortly after the exhibition opened in April to become the James Dicke curator of contemporary art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. She left behind a terrific show, sampling a diversity of talented artists living and working in the state. It includes more than 70 works by 24 artists ranging from veterans to newcomers.

Ms. Marsh used a rather novel organizing principle for “Connecticut Contemporary.” She selected eight artists to show their work, then asked each to nominate one other Connecticut artist for inclusion. The second group, in turn, was asked to select another eight artists, resulting in what might be considered a kind of cooperative project. The results speak for themselves, for much of the work is great.

One of the things I like best about this show is that it encompasses work in various media by artists from different generations; this is somewhat rare in museum shows, which tend to split along artistic media or generational lines. In one area here, you can drift past four scribble drawings by the late Sol LeWitt and into a darkened room to watch digital video animations of landscapes by Eva Lee of Ridgefield.

There is lots of painting here, much of it very good. Kathryn Myers, from Mansfield, makes gouaches on antique paper of street scenes from around the world that are so ethereal and lovely I was tempted to sneak one away with me. Nearby are marvelous figurative oil paintings by Maximilian Toth of New Haven that look like impromptu chalk drawings on a blackboard. In their form they remind me a bit of the early work of Sigmar Polke, though they deal with youthful urban American subject matter — kids on skateboards, for example — that is all Toth’s own.

Best in show is a tough call, but my vote goes to Peter Waite of Glastonbury for what is essentially a bizarre and obsessive pursuit: a mixed-media assemblage of a “death ship” made of scavenged trash and studio junk — old paint tubes, brushes, cans, sunglasses, paper, plastic bottles, glue. It is a messy, icky, creepy-looking structure that could well be a whimsical tribute to the Flying Dutchman, with its squid-faced captain, Davy Jones, from the movie franchise “Pirates of the Caribbean.” A work in progress, it’s already a masterpiece of accumulation.

There is so much terrific artwork here that the museum should probably make some purchases for the collection, especially among the pieces by lesser-known artists. The snapshot photographs of roadside stores selling cut-price Valentine’s Day gifts by Jessica Schwind of New Haven might be a good place to start, as might the paintings of young hipsters by Barkley Hendricks of New London. The trouble is, without a contemporary art curator, who is going to decide what to buy?

“Connecticut Contemporary,” Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main Street, Hartford, through Aug. 12. Information: www.wadsworthatheneum.org or (860) 278-2670.