March Issue 2000
An Inaugural Gift Showing at Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, NC
Gary
Knox Bennett
The point to any art exhibition is the face to face interaction between viewer and art object. The artist, the circumstances of the work's creation, its imprint in art history, even its provenance, are supportive details that may enhance viewer experience, but are secondary to the ability of creativity to transcend cultures and time.
An Inaugural Gift: The Founders' Circle Collection on display at Charlotte's Mint Museum of Craft + Design through Sept. 12, is presented not as an exhibition in the orthodox sense, but as a triptych of a craft museum in the making. A museum's permanent collection is built on an on-going relationship between art object, collector/donor and institutional mission.
The unexpected arrival of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design on the national arts scene is an unprecedented opportunity to extract lessons from the history of museum collecting and interpreting craft in the twentieth century. Those lessons guide the building of the Mint's permanent collection, exhibition and education programs that seek to provide an authoritative history in connecting craft's past and present.
Bank of America officials approached the Mint Museum of Art in 1997 with a proposal to convert an abandoned four-story department store in the heart of Charlotte's uptown into an urban museum. With the Mint's renown decorative arts collection and a strong, historic regional craft collection, it seemed possible that a museum with an international crafts focus could be built and supported in North Carolina, a state with a long craft heritage where traditional and studio craft artists co-exist and interact in beneficial harmony. The Asheville area alone is home to the highest concentration of craft artists outside of California and New York's Hudson Valley. Making such an ambitious goal attainable is the large number of private contemporary craft collections assembled throughout the country in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Director Mark Leach invited a group of collectors and art administrators to Charlotte in 1997 to explore the potential behind the French Revival façade of the former department store in the midst of the city's evolving cultural district. What came out of the weekend exploration was a commitment to establish the Founders' Circle. Ninety individuals and couples became charter members, each pledging an important craft work.
The objects featured in An Inaugural Gift range from the work of seminal artists in the evolution of craft, such as potter George Ohr, ceramic artist Henry Varnum Poor and studio glass pioneer Harvey Littleton, to works by acclaimed contemporary masters Stephen De Staebler, Bob Ebendorf, Dale Chihuly, Richard Landis, Mark Lindquist, Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova. While the majority of the works are by American artists, international artists include British potters Philip Eglin and Mark Hewitt, Ukranian potter Sergei Isupov, Russian wood turner Nikolai Ossipov, Korean basket maker Lee Sipe, Finnish fiber artist Ulla-Maija Vikman, Czech glass artist Frantisek Vizner and British metalsmith David Watkins. Former Seattle Art Museum Curator Vicki Halper provides the catalogue entries for each Founders' Circle donation.
To illustrate the significant depth brought by the Founders' Circle to the craft museum's permanent collection, An Inaugural Gift will be displayed interspersed in the Gorelick and Duke Energy permanent collection galleries and the Jones changing gallery. Donations among the collections will bear an insignia to single out and highlight each piece.
Of special interest in the exhibition catalogue, art historian Glenn Adamson writes an insightful history of museum applied art and craft collections. Featured are the pivotal roles of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Newark Museum, and how the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert) influenced the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Museums, the Art Institute of Chicago and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to collect contemporary applied art objects as well as historical decorative arts. Adamson traces the influence on museum collections of William Morris' Arts and Craft Movement, the age of industrial design culminating in the Art Deco movement, the rural craft revival of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild and League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts, the Syracuse Museum of Art's Ceramic National Exhibitions, the era of the designer-craftsman, the avant-garde California movement, the development of the American Craft Museum and the Renwick Gallery, and the roles of collector/donors and galleries.
"American Craft badly needs authoritative history," writes Adamson, "so that museums can design their collections with an understanding of the total picture of studio craft."
An Inaugural Gift: The Founders' Circle Collection will provide an interesting glimpse one year into the life of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design as to the progress made in building an institution that speaks to the authoritative history Glenn Adamson so eloquently writes about in his essay.
"The exhibition is an impressive display of technical virtuosity, material diversity and creative genius," stated Director Mark Leach. "Building this program is an extraordinary journey for museum and patrons to share. The Mint is achieving its objectives one step at a time, but this exhibition represents a colossal step."
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 704/337-2000 or contact our web site at (www.mintmuseum.org). The catalogue for An Inaugural Gift: The Founders' Circle Collection is available at both Mint Museum Shops, by mail or by calling 704/337-2061.
Mailing Address: Carolina Arts, P.O. Drawer
427, Bonneau, SC 29431
Telephone, Answering Machine and FAX: 843/825-3408
E-Mail: carolinart@aol.com
Subscriptions are available for $18 a year.
Carolina Arts
is published monthly by Shoestring
Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc.
Copyright© 2000 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts
from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts
Online, Copyright© 2000 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved
by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use
without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina
Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.