I just want to take a moment to brag on some museum friends and also reinforce the idea that one shouldn’t discount the experiences found in small towns as of lower quality.
Long time readers know that before I moved to Georgia, I lived in Portsmouth, OH, a fairly rural town in Appalachia which has often had the misfortune of being the go-to poster child for the opioid epidemic despite having started rebounding from its worst point before other communities even recognized they were in crisis.
When I was living there, the local museum presented the work of Elijah Pierce, a man who started wood carving and barbering at a fairly young age. He did a number of biblical scenes whose imagery he used to support his work as a traveling preacher. Pierce had been born in Mississippi, but settled in Columbus, OH. When the work came to the local museum, they had a couple people talk about Pierce’s work, including a gentleman who would often walk over from the nearby Columbus College of Art and Design where he taught to chat with Pierce in his barber shop, surrounded by many of the carvings.
Last week there was a story in The Art Newspaper about a big show of Pierce’s work at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia that contained the following quote (my emphasis):
But when Nancy Ireson, the chief curator of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, first saw them in 2018 she was amazed she had not encountered the work before. Ireson asked her fellow curator Zoé Whitley, the director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, what she knew about Pierce. “Neither of us had come across his carvings in the siloed contexts of so-called ‘fine art’ exhibitions of 19th and 20th century artists,” Whitley says.
If you type Elijah Pierce’s name into a web search engine now, you will see this show is a big deal with many news stories written about it. (Granted, in the cultural news vacuum created by Covid, this may be less of a feat than it seems. Though the civil rights themes of the work would have likely still gotten traction.)
When I think about the fact I could wander in to look at Pierce’s work for free multiple times at my leisure, which I definitely did, and was able to learn about the work with people who really knew it well–and now people are swooning over the significance of Pierce and his work, it goes to my original point about not discounting the potential quality of an experience.
Gaining access to Pierce’s work was not an anomaly for this museum. There were a number of artists whose work showed there and got picked up by galleries. Some of them I bought before they gained greater notoriety, some I didn’t. Sometimes I regretted that later. I know for a fact that I walked out the door past two gallery owners who were coming down to look at the painting I had purchased and was carrying. Though certainly it wasn’t the only or most prestigious work they were coming to see that trip.
In this particular case, the community benefits from the fact museum directors were people who had curated good relationships over the course of their careers and were able to arrange for some interesting art to show. Likewise, gallery owners trust their judgment and check out work they display–or work with the museum to display the work of artists they represent.
I am sure the number of pieces of Pierce’s work that I saw are just a small portion of what you might see in Philadelphia so I wasn’t getting the blockbuster experience The Barnes Foundation might be offering. However, to drive into Portsmouth, it would be easy to assume you wouldn’t get to experience that small portion. What you definitely wouldn’t get in Philadelphia is an invitation to wander across the street to the museum directors’ home/gallery to nosh on some food and chat–something everyone who showed up for the opening got whether you were an old friend or new.