The new director of the Toledo Museum of Art Brian Kennedy has big plans to connect the institution's world-class collection to contemporary art.
The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet caught up with Brian Kennedy three months into his new job as the director of the Toledo Museum of Art. Many consider the museum, where Harvey Littleton held his seminal workshops in 1962, the birthplace of the Studio Glass movement. We asked Kennedy about his preliminary plans to mark the 50th anniversary of the Littleton workshops in 2012, as well as his overall goals for the institution that was founded through the largess of the glass baron Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901. Kennedy is the ninth director in the museum’s 110-year history, and has big plans for making its internationally-known collection of more than 30,000 objects connect to the contemporary art moment with grand projects as he did during his recent tenure as director of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. There, in 2007, he organized an epic installation of a screen woven from human hair by Chinese avant-garde artist Wenda Gu. He’s also earned himself a reputation for his familiarity with, and support of, indigenous art both in Australia and at the Hood.
Prior to his taking over as director at Toledo on September 1st, Kennedy had been at Dartmouth’s museum since 2005. Before that, he served as director of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1997-2004) (where he organized a major Chihuly exhibition in 1999), and as assistant director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (1989-1997). A native of Ireland, Kennedy received his BA, MA, and PhD at University College, Dublin. The Hot Sheet had a chance to speak with Kennedy by telephone about his plans for the future.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: What brings you to the Toledo Museum of Art?
Brian Kennedy: I was tremendously impressed by the collection, that was a major reason for coming here. Work for work, it is a superb collection throughout its permanent display slash rotating display collection, as well as its extensive collections of work on paper. The third element is the glass collection, which is pretty comprehensive and aspires to become encyclopedic. Also, I’ve always been an advocate of free admission to museums, and Toledo is free, which has helped it gain tremendous adherence and support from the local and regional community. The Toledo museum is deeply embedded in this city, and there can’t be many museums that have admission numbers considerably more than the city’s population each year, as we do. The third aspect I’ve found very agreeable is the fact that the museum’s finances are very well-structured in terms of endowment that gives us 62 percent of our operating income. All of those three things—the collection, the adherence of the community, and the support it’s had over the years give us a tremendous platform for moving forward.
GLASS: I know you’ve just started in the position of director, but is it too early to share a bit about your plans for the museum?
Kennedy: I can tell you that my plans are primarily to demonstrate that art is a continuum. All art was contemporary once. Of course great artists today will be looking at what the strongest of artists of the past aspired to and achieved, but also, we want to keep current, to make sure that the “now” is very present in the “then.” The museum has a strong role here in Toledo, where there’s a special circumstance which I find particularly attractive. A number of cities have a museum of contemporary art as well as a separate historic museum, but here in Toledo there is not a contemporary institution. There is much opportunity to engage the art of the present here, any number of possibilities, in whatever medium, you’re trying to provide a space within which artists can work. I see there are significant spaces here in Toledo, significant buildings with a lot of opportunities. I like the idea of bringing people to Toledo, to encourage engagement with the collections in whatever way they respond to it. I’d also like to add that in terms of the resources, the collections, the people, the funds, the buildings, all are superb. Both the original building combined with the additions by Gehry and SAANA.
GLASS: Can you talk about your experiences with glass as an art material in your career, and how that might inform what you do at Toledo?
Kennedy: I grew up in Ireland, with Waterford glass. Despite everything that happened recently with the changing fortunes of that glass factory, they sponsored other glass projects, and many artists came out of the Kilkenny Design Workshops in the 1960s. I grew up in the whole period of the huge growth of glass art, furniture, silverwork, and everything that came into the Irish culture based on its historic origins. When I got to Australia, seeing the importance that the decorative arts had in Australia led me to recruit a senior curator of decorative arts Robert Bell, who’s been very strong on glass. I came to know Klaus Moje and many, many others. I made a choice to do an exhibition with Dale Chihuly in 1999, I wanted to bring attention to glass. I know some Australian artists would have appreciated if the exhibition had been about their work, but it had a powerful effect and the sponsors of the exhibition were so enamored with glass and what the show revealed about the history of the material in Canberra that it lead to the creation of a glass center in an old power station there.
Regarding our plans for 2012, we’ll be working closely with the Glass Art Society in their planning for their conference here that milestone year, and we want to help them achieve as good a conference as can be. We are also working closely, of course, with Jutta Page, our curator of glass, to refine our ideas. We’re getting close to announcing our exact plans soon. We want to focus just on the local point of view, but also on what happened in the 1960s with Studio Glass, what caused this intense interest in the material, and to look at the significant movement that has emerged. Being here only for a few months, I can already see the centrality given to glass as part of the museum experience, which has always been here as far back as when the Curtis Collection was acquired in the museum’s earliest days.
I would say that I’m particularly interested in what’s happening with glass in contemporary art, and not just with glass artists using glass, but how the material is being used as an art medium. The way that artists working in other media are engaging with glass offers significant possibilities. The next step is for glass to become pervasive in the general artistic discourse.