September/October/November
It was a pleasure to walk through the recent Norman Rockwell exhibition and
see so many smiling faces—both on the walls and on visitors looking at the art
on the walls.
I received many favorable comments, both from those who savored Rockwell's
messages and those who were fascinated by our analysis of it. Through the
Rockwell exhibition, the DIA examined the power of a carefully constructed
national identity and, in a very different way, we will continue to do so
through an exhibition featuring the fashion photographs of Richard Avedon. Where
Rockwell conjured up a wishful universe of unassuming decency and surprised
innocence, Avedon created a more brittle world of sophistication and
disjunction. Going against the seamless, sometimes ethereal aesthetic of earlier
fashion photographers, Avedon fractured illusions of perfection by revealing the
backdrops (literally) of his trade, introducing glaringly disjunctive elements
(such as elephants), or having the models leaping about against a blank
background rather than posing in the manner of a seventeenth-century Van Dyck
portrait. It is in his disruption of older Madison and 5th Avenue norms that his
most singular contribution to art and popular culture is found.
Next season we will be featuring a trail-blazing exhibition, Through African
Eyes. Organized by Nii Quarcoopome, the DIA's curator of African art, the
exhibition follows the way West Africans depicted Europeans from the first
recorded contact in the late r400s down to today. Believe me, it will be truly
eye opening.
As the severe economic crisis continues to work its way through the
nonprofit sector, the DIA's cost-cutting measures have been replicated
across the country as "wealthy" institutions saw their operating endowments
sliced by as much as a third. Is this, we are all asking ourselves, a matter
of battening down the hatches until a return to business as usual, or is it
some sort of sea change that will require a permanent change in behavior?
I'm inclined toward the latter, but this may be a reflection of what things
are like in Michigan, where fundamental changes in the business landscape
are forcing corresponding reform in state financial mechanisms. In these
structural changes, one story goes, lies the real hope for re-establishing
some semblance of stability in state arts funding. That would be nice.
One of the results of our need to cut costs wherever possible is the new
look of our quarterly printed cal endar and the move to a monthly
e-newsletter with more detailed and up-to-date information. I know that not
everyone has the ability to access the web easily—some not at all—and I can
only apologize for whatever inconvenience results. But if you do have e-mail
access, think about signing up at www.dia.org for our e-newsletter and help
us reduce our printing and mailing costs even further.
Graham W. J. Beal
Director
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