PHOTOS © THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION, ARS, NY; COURTESY CHARLOTTE BROOKS AND THE DAVIS MUSEUM AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE


ANEWVIEW BY ASHTON COOPER


Clockwise from upper left: Anni Albers, Smyrna- knüpfteppich, 1984; Charlotte Brooks photographs for Look magazine: Duke Ellington’s band playing baseball in front of segregated motel, 1955; Cuban singer La Lupe in New York, 1970.


With all eyes on Wellesley’s most famous alum this election season, the women’s college’s Davis art museum also happens to be having something of a moment. The 61,000- square-foot teaching museum will reopen to the public on September 28 after a massive rehang of its encyclopedic collection that has been in the works for the past three years. But how does one go about organizing a collection? “You recognize both the eclecticism and the scope,” says Davis Museum Director Lisa Fischman. “Tracing histories of taste and collecting actually becomes an important critical and analytic tool.” The foundation of the rehang involved going into the museum’s holdings


and taking a thorough inventory of what was there—and what had been overlooked. Fischman explains that “rediscovery” is the theme. “We could take works usually hidden from public view and make them transparently available to our visitors,” she says. “We would focus on excellence—mining the best things from the collection and introducing these gems. Almost the entirety of our African collection proved to be A+ and very little of it has been on view in the past.” Among those rediscoveries were two 17th-century works—a freshly restored


pen painting by Willem van de Velde I and Alonso de Escobar’s newly attributed oil-on-canvas work Still Life With Side of Beef. There are also new acquisitions, a focus of which has been expanding the museum’s collection of work by African- American artists including Laylah Ali and Kara Walker. All of the work is foremost in service of the students. “The Davis collection is built by women in honor of women to educate women,” Fischman says. “And


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a lot of them go on to become professionals—Wellesley has produced more curators than any undergraduate program in the country.” One of those notable alumnae is Milly Glimcher, who co-


founded Pace Gallery with husband Arne. “Milly did me this great favor by saying to a group of donors, ‘If you have extraordinary works of art in your collection and you want to give them, don’t give them to The Met because they’re just going into storage,’ ” Fischman says. “‘Give them to The


Davis where students will learn from them every day.’” The art history program at Wellesley has an incredibly colorful past, including


being one of the first at an American college in the late 19th century when Alice Van Vechten Brown created “the Wellesley Method,” a strategy still in effect that emphasizes firsthand encounters with objects themselves. Another notable professor in Wellesley’s history (and MoMA’s first director)— Alfred H. Barr, Jr.— will be the subject of “Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson,” a show opening alongside the rehang on September 28. Ultimately, the new view nods to the college’s notable past with an eye on


the future, emphasizing university art museums as the ideal sites for experimentation. “We can explore more options than major municipal museums are in the habit of doing. We are always talking about inventive museological approaches,” Fischman says. “As much as people like to complain about museums and their kind of omniscient authority, people expect that and when you intervene in that, people get a little nervous. That is an interesting place.”


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