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A bright, sunny day welcomes us in Middletown, Connecticut, home to Wesleyan University. We’re in for a real treat: a sneak peek into an otherwise little shown, diverse and rather eclectic collection of prints, photographs, musical instruments, archeological materials and East Asian artifacts. The collection is currently relegated to small and sometimes inadequate storage facilities, with little or no room for examination: its importance consequently underestimated and its accessibility to visitors and students made impossible or limited. |
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The Invisible Collection
Marco Antonini
A bright, sunny day welcomes us in Middletown, Connecticut, home to Wesleyan University. We’re in for a real treat: a sneak peek into an otherwise little shown, diverse and rather eclectic collection of prints, photographs, musical instruments, archeological materials and East Asian artifacts. The collection is currently relegated to small and sometimes inadequate storage facilities, with little or no room for examination: its importance consequently underestimated and its accessibility to visitors and students made impossible or limited.
The 35,000 objects in the Archaeology and Anthropology collection are arranged into a super-tight storage/examination room facility. Collection manager Juliana Shortell tours us through beautiful Meso American artifacts, carved wood rows from Oceania, exotic animals’ skulls and bones and a wide variety of material culture objects from almost every corner of the world. A well-preserved mummy (an Egyptian young man of Late Period, discovered in one of the university buildings) lies out of sight, adding a touch of extra eeriness to an already rather wunderkammerish set-up. The impressive collection of musical instruments, many of which come from far eastern cultures, lies in an equally cramped locale. Several ensembles are actively used for rehearsal, including the legendary Wesleyan gamelan, bought from the Indonesian government after the New York World Fair of 1964 and currently installed in one of the auditoriums. I end up learning that John Cage, a Wesleyan fellow, published “Silence” right here, and that the university still holds several of his preparatory sketches for prepared piano pieces. The Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies collection, curated by Patrick Dowdey, has some of the best facilities. Bright, climate and humidity-controlled rooms allow for almost ideal conservation and consultation of the Center’s diverse collection. Dowdey pulls out some of the best pieces for us, including an amazing photography of a group of Chinese students visiting the US in 1872 and touching visual documents from the Korean War. The Center features a perfectly groomed Japanese garden, a tearoom and exhibition spaces for temporary projects (currently on show, a collections of portraits shot in Beijing by Derek Dudek).
The morning fades into afternoon as we walk back to the Davison Art Center after lunch with Dowdey, DAC Curator Clare Rogan and John Paoletti. Paoletti is Art History professor at Wesleyan and future director of the long awaited University Museum. The Museum project is still in its fundraising phase, but plans for the development of the former Squash Court Building are already under way, and so are a series of funds and awareness raising activities. Paoletti recently introduced the museum project to a crowd of ecstatic alumni in New York, at Pace-Wildernstein Gallery, during a Elizabeth Murray opening. The idea of a University Museum appeared as a total necessity after our visit to the DAC print and photographs collection. The estimated 15,000 works on paper span for more than five centuries and include Rembrandt (currently on show in an amazing, student-curated show and extensively represented, with some 50 prints), Durer, Goya, impressionist works by Manet and Millet and an equally amazing collection of contemporary prints and photographs by Eric Fischl, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, R.B.Kitaj, Willem De Kooning, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha… I’m simply cherry-picking from the list and believe me, I could go on forever. This treasure is stored in a dark, climate controlled Vault. Perusing the prints is nearly impossible and/or complicated by the required security and conservation issues. Paoletti’s idea of an open shelf storage space for the upcoming Museum would allow the students and the curators to handle the material with far more ease and safety, bringing the collections to real life. The construction of larger, climate and humidity controlled exhibition spaces would ultimately allow Wesleyan to get artwork and artifacts on loan from other collections, allowing for more articulate and ambitious curatorial projects.
Wesleyan’s road to the realization of such an ambitious project has been open, but from now on the walk is uphill. A major fundraiser event is scheduled for 2008, date of the quinquennial Auction organized by the Friends of the Davison Art Center, but Paoletti and his colleagues are at work to make sure that their project reaches public attention and interest well before that.
