Chrysler revives its modern and contemporary art post

NORFOLK

For the first time in eight years, the Chrysler Museum of Art has a curator focusing on recent art.

Amy Brandt started last week as the museum's curator of modern and contemporary art. She'll be responsible for the museum's 2,300 or so post-1945 artworks in the permanent collection. She also will organize temporary shows of borrowed art.

The museum has hosted and created contemporary shows in the interval, but curators with expertise in other areas have organized them.

"From what I've been told, audiences here are really ready for contemporary art," Brandt said last week in an interview at the museum.

"I want to bring in some of the most important, cutting-edge work, and hopefully bring in new audiences."

She said she plans to expose local art patrons to the wide range of new media that artists are working in, from performance to video.

Brandt's formal title is the McKinnon curator of modern and contemporary art, because her position is funded through interest earned on a seven-figure endowment donated over several years by Oriana McKinnon of Norfolk and her late husband, Arnold, said Bill Hennessey, the museum's director.

The McKinnons underwrote the museum's modern and contemporary galleries, which also were named for the local couple.

Hennessey said Brandt "has a wonderful background and academic training."

"She has worked actively in the New York art world for a number of years, so she knows what's going on," he said.

Brandt, 32, is close to completing her doctorate at The Graduate Center at City University of New York in Manhattan. Her dissertation subject: a 1980s art movement called Neo-Geo.

Each of her jobs since 2005 has been based in New York.

She started as curatorial assistant for Lisa Dennison, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. "It was a fantastic experience. She became a mentor to me," Brandt said.

Then she landed a job as exhibition coordinator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She helped with every aspect of one of the new Sackler Center's 2007 opening shows, "Global Feminisms," involving 87 artists.

"It was kind of the buzz that year," she said.

Brandt spent a year working in the commercial gallery arena for The Pace Gallery, which handles such big-name artists as Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko. While the experience was instructive, she realized, "I wanted to be in the museum field."

From 2008 until last month, Brandt learned dozens of tasks associated with curating shows at the American Federation of Arts, a century-old group that organizes touring exhibitions.

She was the managing curator for the federation's upcoming show, "Richard Bell: Uz vs. Them," featuring a contemporary aboriginal artist and about to begin a national tour in the fall.

Besides working alongside top curators, she also has organized shows on her own at New York art spaces Affirmation Arts, NurtureArt and other venues.

She was raised in Kalamazoo, Mich., by parents who often took her to museums across the country. Her mother played a guess-the-artist game with her that she was motivated to win, she said.

She earned her undergraduate degree in art history and French at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and graduate degrees in art history and museum studies at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and at The Graduate Center.

"I'm excited about working with this outstanding collection," she said. "It includes all of the major artists from the postwar period, and very significant examples of signature works that demonstrate the pivotal moments in their careers."

She gave as an example James Rosenquist's "Silver Skies," a mural-scale work from 1962 that is a painted montage of pop-culture imagery. "He was just at that moment of developing his signature style."

Hennessey said no decision had been made on how many shows Brandt might curate in a year. "This is all going to take shape as we go ahead."

He did not envision a lot of contemporary shows dominating the large changing gallery, he said. Rather, he imagined smaller exhibitions of recent art focused on a single artist or theme.

Lynn Marsden-Atlass was the museum's last contemporary curator. She worked at the museum from 1999 until she was laid off in 2003 during a budget crunch. (She runs the Arthur Ross Gallery of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.)

While at the Chrysler, Marsden-Atlass' job also entailed American art.

The museum is searching for a new curator of American art, too. "We're not close yet. We've just started the screening process." Hennessey said the museum has no deadline to fill that newly created position.

"It all depends on how lucky we are in finding the right person."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com