Deep in the belly of the Arkansas Arts Center, filed away side by side, artworks hang on rows of rolling racks. In the absence of a spotlight’s splendor and a long wall’s glorious abundance, they’ll spend much of their existence here, hidden from the gallery’s guests. Doesn’t matter whether they were created by Rembrandt or Picasso, no placards detail their attributes; no jacketed curators stand by for inquiries.
These windowless vaults harbor the story of the Arkansas Arts Center, as well as its teller. There are inquiries, almost daily. Nearby, in a cave of an office, on the end of a telephone, Thom Hall takes calls from museum officials, scholars, artists and collectors about the pieces in the 50-year-old center’s permanent collection, known worldwide for its works on paper and their exceptional quality. Hall, the museum registrar and collections manager who’s been with the center in some capacity for 35 years, serves as their human encyclopedia.
Of course, the person on the line usually knows the basics. How could any true art enthusiast not? Pieces of the center’s permanent collection have appeared in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée Marmottan-Claude Monet Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and other museums everywhere from Japan to Portugal, Switzerland to Yugoslavia. The center has the world’s largest collection of drawings by Paul Signac, the French neo-impressionist. Twenty-one major New York galleries plan to send works to its 42nd annual Collectors Show and Sale.
Ironically, it’s the people with the greatest access to the center who have perhaps the least awareness of its caliber. The director of the MET and the chief curator of drawings from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., have both visited, but several Arkansans, even Little Rock residents, have not, despite the fact that entry is free. The center isn’t appreciated by as many locals as it should be, Hall says, but he kindly paints them in a sympathetic light. “We may be 50, but we are just beginning to share our story with our local audience,” he says.
The tale unfolds at a pace that can be accommodated by the gallery, which devotes about half of its 20,000 square feet—thanks to a 1999 expansion—to the permanent collection. Like most museums, at any given time less than 1 percent of the collection is on display. Paintings stay on view for long periods; drawings for about three months. It sounds excruciatingly slow but deliberately so; much faster and the art doesn’t fully translate.
Sure, a walk through the high-security, climate-controlled vaults would fill even a casual observer with wonder. Art made of packing tape in fascinating detail fuels synapses with women’s issues. Around a corner, a huge sphere covered in words from real estate signage screams about overdevelopment. Somewhere along the journey a surrealist piece jumps out and puts sex right in the face of the drawing’s subject and yours. As intriguing as you find any one piece, you can’t examine it long before itching for the next treasure. The gluttony of the eye punishes the mind, leaving it behind without getting the whole picture.
“Good art makes you think,” Hall says. “It shifts you back and forth from maybe a literal thing to a totally abstract thing so that every time you look at it, you’re learning, you’re seeing something different. That grounds you. It frees you from everyday troubles, but it also lets your spirit soar and dream, and those are reasons that people find going to a museum a really wonderful thing.”
Hall seems to be one of the few who can process it all so quickly. “I’m kind of weird in that I have a very creative side of my brain, but I have kind of an OCD side of my brain,” he says. “I can shift gears easily, and all reinforces my ability to do my job.” An artist himself with pieces in the collection, he speaks with passion about each work and authority about the center’s mission and collection.
While more than 1,000 contemporary objects crowd the vaults, there are more than 5,300 drawings and counting, he says. That focus developed when Townsend Wolfe—executive director of the AAC from 1968 to 2002—purchased three drawings in 1971, not long after drawing as a stand-alone art form emerged in the late 1960s. “In a drawing a lot of times you can see where the artist has spilled his coffee, done some erasure, tried various things,” Hall says. “In some of the old master works, the artist would just keep turning the paper or turn it over and work on both sides because they weren’t thinking that this is the final product. So there is some real intimacy with the artist because of that.”
And that’s in the gallery. For Hall, it’s more intense. He handles pieces behind the scenes, overseeing their movement from the vaults to galleries in the center and around the world. “I’m not afraid of something that’s highly valuable because I know what I’m doing,” he says. Currently, he’s working with a gift of more than 1,500 Peter Takal pieces—the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of his work—a project the center may work on forever, he says undaunted.
“The museum world is not a place to get rich, but it is a place to get rich in your soul because you’re around things that really enrich lives,” he says from behind the locked doors where he spends much of his life. “I have no windows, but it doesn’t matter because I have thousands of works of art that are right at my fingertips.”