If she had stayed in Chicago, Katharine Lee likely would have played a role in assembling the blockbuster Monet exhibition that has been drawing hordes to the Art Institute of Chicago this summer.
But Lee left the Art Institute in 1991, and recently she has been directing the crating and shipping of 60 African art objects for a show in rural Virginia.
Lee is now the director of what she calls “a museum without walls”–a distinctive place on the cultural landscape. Her new job has placed her prominently among the growing number of women heading U.S. art museums, where until recently men monopolized the top posts.
At the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Lee has spent weeks overseeing the details of a new traveling exhibition of African pieces from its permanent collection. It’s a scaled-down version of an earlier show she had organized and will open at Roanoke’s Art Museum of Western Virginia in late September before moving to the Piedmont Art Center in Newport News early next year.
Continuing a tradition of expanding the audience for art, Lee says, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts provides exhibitions and programs throughout the state for 26 affiliated art centers and galleries as well as schools, libraries, communities, colleges and the University of Virginia.
During the early 1950s, the museum began to send artmobiles, or vans, around the state, in which artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome, 18th Century furniture and original paintings–including works by Monet and Cezanne–were exhibited. Their destinations were schools, libraries and shopping centers, offering many people their first encounter with high-caliber art.
Although often overshadowed by larger, older institutions in the Northeast and Midwest, the Virginia museum is the largest in the Southeast. And Ed Able, the president of the American Association of Museums in Washington, describes it as among the creative leaders in the field.
“It’s highly respected not only for the quality of its collections,” says Able, “but also for its focus on community outreach and its willingness to make its considerable riches accessible to a larger audience.”
(The Virginia museum, founded by the General Assembly in 1936, is unusual in another way: Sixty percent of its annual budget of $10.4 million comes from the state, unlike the typical museum, which, according to the museum association, receives only 20 percent of its funding from government sources. The museum also is the beneficiary of private supporters and collectors, such as philanthropist Paul Mellon and a retail executive, Sydney Lewis, and his wife.)
“It’s not enough to collect and do scholarly works but you must make it understandable to a broad audience,” Lee says. “I think it is our job as an art museum to present a range of options for visitors so they can expand themselves and learn about something and people they don’t know about.”
Many treasures
The museum’s mission, Lee emphasizes, is to reflect world culture–Eastern and Western, ancient and modern.
Like other major museums, its galleries are hung with the glories of European and American art. The range is wide–from Nicolas Poussin’s 17th Century masterpiece of classicism, “Achilles on Skyros,” to Andy Warhol’s giant “Triple Elvis” and Anselm Kieffer’s haunting “Landscape With Wing,” in which the German painter has incorporated straw and lead onto the canvas.
In the decorative arts, the museum has many treasures, including an Art Deco bedroom suite of wood, leather, mirrored glass and metal made for the French artist-writer Jean Cocteau, and a collection of Art Nouveau furniture touted as the best outside of Paris.
But what really gives it a leg up among American museums, according to Washington-based critic J.W. Mahoney of Art in America magazine, are its collection of jeweled objects from the workshop of Peter Carl Faberge during the final decades of Czarist Russia; its Byzantine art, an area in which only a few American museums boast holdings; and its art from the Himalayan region of Asia, with few rivals outside Tibet.
Mahoney heaps superlatives on its 20th Century collection, saying he is “transfixed and blown away” by a number of pieces, such as a flower painting by Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Morris’ “Firestorm Series” of paintings.
Two years ago, Lee decided it was time to assemble the museum’s African collection for the first time. With a million-dollar grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, she created a special exhibit, “Spirit of the Motherland.”
In preparing for the exhibit, Lee says the museum discovered that using posters featuring only the art objects was “off-putting” to many African-Americans.
“Art and life are continuous in African culture,” she explains during a tour of the museum. “And you can’t just show gold earrings alone but have someone wearing them.” Appropriately, a photograph of a woman wearing gold earrings is displayed next to the earrings.
Lee spent 20 years in Chicago, except for a three-year stint as curator of the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina. A graduate of Vassar College and Harvard, she went to Chicago in 1971 after studies in Paris and at Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art on Fulbright and Ford Foundation fellowships.
At the University of Chicago she was director of exhibitions for the Renaissance Society, a lecturer in the art department and the curator of collections at the then-new David and Alfred Smart Gallery from 1973 to 1979.
“I was there when it was founded,” she said of the gallery, now a museum of more than 7,000 objects ranging from Greek and Roman antiquities to contemporary Chicago art. “Basically, we had to launch a university museum with pencil and paper. But there were very generous donors.”
Chicago explorations
She went to the Art Institute as assistant director in 1982, a job title that was changed to deputy director in 1986. Her responsibilities included the education programs and libraries, conservation, keeping tabs on the collections and arranging for the shipment of artworks.
In Chicago, Lee became interested in the English arts-and-crafts movement, which revolutionized Victorian taste by promoting the revival of handmade decorative objects. She recalls exploring this aesthetic at Chicago’s Glessner House on Prairie Avenue, a museum of its own with intact period furniture, tiles and textiles.
“Back when I was a student and starting out in my career,” says Lee, “this was an area not collected by museums, as the 18th and early 19th Century was where dignified art stopped.”
Further, Lee points out, museums were not notable for being people-friendly places–a relatively new phenomenon.
“In the late 17th Century and the early 18th Century,” she says, “collections of the nobility began to be open for public viewings a few days a week, but that usually meant a very select public.”
Not until the 19th Century did the idea take root that museums should routinely be open to the general public.
Especially influential in the development of the modern museum, Lee said, were Baron Vivant Denon (1747-1825), who played a key role in creating the Louvre, France’s major repository of art; and Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929), the scholarly mastermind of the world-class collection in Germany’s Berlin museum.
In Richmond, Lee draws praise for making the museum’s collection more accessible.
“She’s rehung the collection in a way that makes it jump off the walls and easier for people to understand what they are seeing,” says Adrienne Hines, the former executive director of the Arts Council of Richmond.
The museum’s schedule of future shows underscores its catholic tastes: British fox-hunting prints; Indian miniature paintings; the arts-and-crafts works of New York’s Roycrofter community; Italian old master paintings from Britain’s Cecil family collection; and Jacob Lawrence’s paintings illustrating the lives of abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.
Lee grew up in the museum world. Her father is Sherman Lee, retired head of the Cleveland Art Museum and a leading authority on Oriental art.
“We were the kind of family where his work and life was the family life,” recalls Lee, 53 and married to retired Chicago business executive Bryan Reid Jr. “He loved showing us what was going on at the museum. We followed him around like ducks. And he always shared with us his latest project.”
In her father’s day at the Cleveland museum, she notes, a dining room was reserved for the male staff, and the lone female curator ate by herself. This epitomized the second-class status accorded women in the art-museum field.
But the situation began to change dramatically in the 1980s. In 1983 Anne d’Harnoncourt, a friend of Lee’s and a former curator at the Art Institute, became director of the prestigious Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Association of Art Museum Directors reports that one-third of its 150 member museums have women directors. Among these are the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Cincinnati Art Museum, New York’s Jewish Museum and the Smithsonian’s African Museum and National Museum of American Art.
“It’s changing very rapidly,” Lee says, “but the vast majority of the high-profile, high-budget positions are still held by males.”
