“One of my first impressions of Little Rock was how similar it is to Columbia, S.C. Heat aside, both are state capitals positioned near the geographic center of the state, and both cities are bisected by a river (resulting in a friendly rivalry with ‘the other side of the river’),” e-mailed Todd Herman, newly hired executive director of the Arkansas Arts Center (AAC). “Interestingly, Townsend Wolfe is from Hartsville, S.C., which is just outside of Columbia.”
Chief curator for six years at the Columbia Museum of Art, Herman was selected to lead the center based on his successful record with cultivating new donors and creating new audiences, according to a news release sent out by Bobby Tucker, AAC board chairman. According to Tucker, Herman began his tenure on July 5 after being selected from a field of many candidates after a nationwide search for the center’s third director since 1968. He replaces Joseph Lampo, who has served as interim director since April 2010.
Herman said he was recommended by a colleague and contacted by a headhunter. The process went relatively quickly after that. “The institution has a famous—and famously spectacular—collection of drawings as well as paintings (Redon’s “Andromeda” is a personal favorite) and contemporary craft. It is unusual in that it also includes an art school and children’s theatre, yet this seems a natural fit—a kind of cultural/creative ‘ground zero’ for the state.”
He continued, “All of these elements I knew before I came to Little Rock to interview. Once here, I experienced the commitment by the Arts Center and its board to bring the arts to Little Rock and Arkansas. I was also very impressed with the position the AAC seems to have within the community—put simply, it is beloved, and people have fond memories of time they have spent there.”
Herman said, “At my core, I am an educator, and I believe in the ability of art to enrich people’s lives. I don’t mean that everyone needs to love Picasso or Michelangelo or to ‘get’ Andy Warhol. What I do believe is that exposure to the arts allows children and adults to realize the richness of human creativity—it is vast, controversial, beautiful, thought-provoking, emotional, exhilarating. It is personal and universal. It’s what binds all of us together as a race and is something we should embrace.”
Furthermore, “What the Arts Center offers, and is committed to, is providing access to these experiences for all Arkansans through exhibitions, lectures, the art school, children’s theatre, traveling exhibitions, the Art Mobile, and the children’s theatre touring program,” he said. “This long-standing commitment to the arts and to the people of Arkansas is financially difficult but a rare, noble pursuit that is much needed and meaningful to society and is, essentially, what drew me to this position.”
Anyone who has followed media coverage of problems at the AAC over the past year might wonder why the young executive director would want the position. “The difficulties faced by the AAC have been well documented,” Herman wrote in his e-mail to Soirée. “Museums across the globe are facing financial difficulties, and the AAC is not immune to those factors. However, any move forward begins from an obvious position of strength in the case of the AAC—a very deep and excellent collection, a committed staff and board and a community that believes in the institution.
“From there, a course correction would include a more robust and diverse exhibition and programming schedule and a more compelling Web presence. I also would like to continue adding to the core strengths of the collection: drawings and contemporary craft. In the case of drawings, Townsend has set a very high bar, and so we must be diligent in maintaining that standard of quality. I would envision the AAC being a renowned center for the study and exhibition of drawings. This would include continuing to add to its strength in modern and contemporary drawings but also filling significant gaps in the earlier material, spanning the 16th-19th century, to present a more comprehensive understanding of the history of drawing as an art form. In tandem with this, I think the visibility of the center and the collection can be raised by organizing traveling exhibitions and embarking on a program of scholarly research and publication of the collection,” he said.
Herman was born in York, Penn. (home of York Peppermint Pattie). He entered college as a biology major with a concentration in microbiology, but he loved his first art history class as a sophomore and was hooked. “With most of my biology requirements out of the way, I loaded up on art history classes in my final 3 semesters. I was taking freshmen-level and senior-level classes at the same time! I graduated with a degree in both biology and art history from James Madison University in Virginia,” he said. “I minored in studio art (and did quite well in advanced figure drawing and painting) but realized that I didn’t have anything to contribute to the art world beyond yet another reasonable facsimile of nature. I enjoyed the classes and am certainly glad that I have that background, given my current career, but at the time I didn’t feel that the world needed another mediocre still-life painter. I didn’t have anything new to say.”
In 1996 he earned an MA in art history at the University of South Carolina, and in 2002 he completed his PhD in art history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
We didn’t have to nudge the new executive director to get him to really talk about the drawings. “What can one say? A treasure trove in the middle of the country! Townsend was quite savvy to concentrate on collecting drawings when he did. For someone really looking at the collection for the first time, there is a surprise around every corner—it’s like being a kid in a candy store! Of course, the collections’ strength is in 20th century American drawings, and within that, a focus on the figure and highly finished drawings is apparent. However, most all movements and styles are represented by very fine sheets going all the way back to the 16th century.”
He continued, “As we all saw in the Impressionism show, the Arts Center has a very strong group of 19th-century French drawings, with some real knock-outs (Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Bonnard, Vuillard). And, of course, the collection of Signac watercolors and drawings is world class. I have researched and written on Italian Old Master drawings, so it is a delight for me to find an institution that has embraced the immediacy that drawings offer. Another strength of the collection is in contemporary craft, and I would like to see that part receive more attention and visibility.”
He concluded, “The collection overall is very rich and surprising, and I look forward to introducing the public to its many facets.”
Favorite art museum:
Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Most powerful piece of art:
Picasso’s “Guernica.” Its impact is increased exponentially by standing in front of the massive work.
Having your visual field filled with the anguish in the painting is very moving.
Top 10 living artists you’d like to know:
Too difficult, given that we already have easy access to personal information these days, but my favorite living artists include Lucian Freud and Jasper Johns. (Both have works in the AAC collection.) Dead artists I would like to have met (and this is essentially a who’s who) would be Donatello, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, Giorgione (to ask him definitively which paintings are by him!), Dürer, Adolph Menzel, Rubens, Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso (he was notoriously generous and maybe would have given me something!).