Avant Guards

The great Baltimore Museum of Art counts me as a regular visitor (last time was December, 1991) but I know they are a world-respected gallery of fine art, loved by people familiar with the best in the cultural field, just like our beloved Baltimore Town Band (aka the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra). 

But think about it a minute. Who spends more time in the museum checking out the pictures and other objets d'art  than the museum's security officers? So it's only fair that this is happening: the security guards are going to be organizing an exhibition at the BMA. They will be serving as guest curators.

They're going to call the show "Guarding the Art," and it will open next March. As the Museum says, it will "bring together a selection of works that resonate with each of the 17 participating officers, and offer "different perspectives from within the museum hierarchy." 

The regular curator is art historian Lowery Stokes Sims (seen at left). She has been helping to put this whole thing together. 

"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."

Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, ca. 1964

I like what she's saying - that Joe Public can have an opinion about art without having taken years of classes and seminars about stuffy art-type topics. Philistines such as I can see the merits of a painting of a gigantic monster driving a hot rod, a velvet portrait of Elvis, or a lifesize oil painting depicting a grocery freight truck being unloaded. It's the untrained eye that often experiences greatness. 

Officer Richard Castro is of Puerto Rican lineage, and he will exhibit a series of pre-Columbian sculptures "as a means to inject some of my Puerto Rican-America culture in the exhibition." Officer Dereck Mangus wants you to see a painting that shows Baltimore's Washington Monument off in a corner in the picture called  "The House Of Frederick Crey." A Baltimorean, Thomas Ruckle, was a self-taught painter, and he did this work in the 1830s.

"The House of Frederick Crey" shows a long-gone house in Baltimore's Mount Vernon
neighborhood. The Washington Monument is way off to the left.

"The painting was hung salon-style in the American Wing and stuck out among all these other disparate images," Mangus said. "It's a glimpse into an old Baltimore by a Baltimore-centric artist that most people have never heard about before, and it shows the neighborhood I live in."

The officers involved are now huddling with the museum brass to set up the design for the show and to make a catalog and public educations outreach based on the exhibition.

"I've been impressed by the diligence, devotion and investment they have into this project," Stokes Sims said. "It will be interesting for the public to see that there can be a multiplicity of curatorial voices in major institutions."

I think it's quite cool that our town's art community is saluting the people who keep an eye on the art all day.