[NEWS] Security guards become guest curators at the Baltimore Museum of Art


July 16, 2021 


 

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Large Shell (1939) Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.




The BMA announced that one of its exhibits for 2022 will be Guarding the Art, a show that will be curated entirely by 17 members of its security team. Scheduled to go on view from March 27 to July 10 next year, the exhibit will draw from works of art in the museum’s collection, with each work selected by one of the participating officers. Considered a professional development initiative for the staff, it’s the first exhibit of its kind for the BMA.


In addition, the team will work with an outside art historian and curator, Lowery Stokes Sims, who has been on the staff of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.


"The security officers are guarding the art, interacting with the public and seeing reactions from visitors that most museum staff don't have access to from our offices," Stokes Sims said. "I was struck and moved by the extraordinarily personal, cogent arguments that each officer made for their selection, which was so different from the intellectual and filtered approach that a trained curator would take."





 

"House of Frederick Crey" (1830-1835), attributed to Thomas Ruckle. Credit: Courtesy The Baltimore Museum of Art 




For Example, Officer Kellen Johnson, who has a background in classical singing and performance, chose German painter Max Beckmann's 1939 work "Still Life with Large Shell." “It’s a portrait of his second wife, Matilda, who was a violinist and gave up her career to support Beckmann and his painting aspirations,” Johnson says. “His first wife was also an opera singer, and I felt that this painting reflected my own trajectory as an operatic singer.”

And Dereck Mangus selected a painting by a local self-taught painter called Thomas Ruckle titled House of Frederick Crey (1830-35) that partly depicts the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon.


The other officers taking part in the exhibition are Traci Archable-Frederick, Jess Bither, Ben Bjork, Melissa Clasing, Bret Click, Alex Dicken, Michael Jones, Rob Kempton, Chris Koo, Alex Lei, Dominic Mallari, Sara Ruark, Joan Smith and Elise Tensley. They are now working with museum staff to determine the installation design and to generate a catalogue and develop public programmes around the exhibition.


“I am honored to be working with the security staff as the curators of this innovative and groundbreaking exhibition,” Sims said. “It sends a potent message to the art world at large about the BMA’s commitment to present diverse voices that expand our experience of familiar works of art in the collection. The security staff’s relationship to the art they safeguard and their interactions with visitors are essential elements of this project.”



 

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