Portland Press Herald: See these new acquisitions by Portland Museum of Art, before they go back into storage

The museum has a collection of 19,000 objects and counting, and only a fraction are on display at any given time. We look at how these pieces get to the museum and where they go when they're not on display.

March 10, 2024
By Megan Gray

This article appears in the Portland Press Herald.

In 2023, the Portland Museum of Art added more than 200 pieces to its collection, mostly through donations. It was a new peak in a trend of increasing acquisitions in recent years.

Now, some are on display for the first time, as a new exhibition spotlights objects added since 2020. The works on view in “+ collection” range across medium and time period, from Passamaquoddy baskets to Marsden Hartley oil paintings to modern screen prints.

But the exhibition does more than debut new art. It dovetails purposefully with the ongoing $100 million campaign to expand the museum’s downtown footprint. Museum leaders have said the existing campus cannot sustain the growing collection, and their proposal to tear down a neighboring building to make way for a larger one has become the topic of heated public debate. The “+ collection” show is meant to offer its own argument for the museum’s side.

“We’re seeing this really incredible growth in the collection,” chief curator Shalini Le Gall said. “And as an institution, we have a responsibility to care for all the works here and to share them. … Keeping up with the pace of the growth is something I think about every day.”

The wall text in the exhibition speaks to the acquisition process, which can take months or years. The museum has specific policies for gifts, bequests and purchases. Curators conduct detailed research on proposed donations. Registrars handle the logistics, such as hiring fine art shippers to bring the objects to the museum for review and creating detailed records of the pieces under consideration. All acquisitions have to be approved by a collections committee and then the board of trustees.

Erin Damon, director of collections, said one question she and her fellow registrars have to answer as part of that process is where the museum would put the item when it’s not on display. Only a fraction of the 19,000 items in the collection are out at any given time, so they’ll all be in storage at some point. And once they’ve been in the gallery, best practices dictate that items have to “rest” for a minimum period of time in order to preserve their longevity. So Damon is always asking, “Do we have enough room for this?” She hasn’t had to say no yet, but she said the museum has to be more selective than ever.

“That’s where the addition and the storage space would be really crucial in helping us alleviate the pressure that we’re feeling within these spaces,” Damon said. “Where does that leave us with growth for the next 25 years? Are we planning enough for that growth? Some years will be smaller than others. If we keep having these extraordinary years, we’re going to feel the pinch sooner rather than later.”

The “+ collection” exhibition will come down in April, and many of the works on display will take their turn in one of the museum’s seven storage rooms. Here are some of the works you can see – for now.

THE ART: “Chest of Drawers” by Tom Loeser doesn’t look like any chest of drawers you could buy at IKEA, but it does work. “The drawers open,” Le Gall promised. “At the same time, it seems like the most impractical, whimsical, humorous dresser.” The artist, who is a woodworker and an art professor at the University of Wisconsin, describes his work as “functional and dysfunctional.” It is part of a section of “+ collection” that recognizes the large number of decorative arts objects in the Portland Museum of Art collection; other cases house a Tiffany table lamp, glass vases and Wabanaki baskets.

“I think it allows us to think about the personality of the decorative arts objects, the personality of things that are in our home,” Le Gall said.

HOW IT GOT HERE: When a Down East resident contacted the museum about this piece in 2020, it could have been a nightmare for Damon. It is “a potentially frightening object to move,” she said. For starters, it stands more than 6 feet tall. The museum would have hired a fine art shipper, who likely would have packed each individual drawer in its own box and built a customized crate for the framework. But the donor was moving at the time, so her moving company just dropped it right off at the museum. Inside the museum, a rubber-wheeled dolly got the sculpture to its display platform in the gallery. (“We never carry artwork by hand for any distance,” Damon said.)

WHERE IT GOES NEXT: This chest of drawers is made out of mahogany, poplar and different kinds of plywood. “Much like your wooden doors at home swell and shrink during warmer and colder seasons, this sculpture is inclined to do the same,” Damon said. That’s why the American Alliance of Museums has strict best practices for the temperature (70 degrees Fahrenheit, plus or minus 2 degrees) and humidity (50%, plus or minus 5%) in the storage rooms.

THE ART: Molly Neptune Parker was a renowned Passamaquoddy weaver, National Heritage Fellow and a cofounder and president of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Her “Flower Top Basket” is on display right now next to another by her daughter, Dolly Barnes. Ramey Mize, the museum’s American art curator, wrote this about the pairing: “Delicate flowers, carved from the same black ash wood that forms the basket, often crowned Parker’s work, an expressive flourish that perpetuated the style of her own mother, Irene Newell. Barnes pays homage to the long legacy of this signature family detail with her own flower finial that sprouts from her basket’s lid, anchored by a sweetgrass braid. Looping ash curls encircle the basket’s form; called ‘cokiqisok’ in the Passamaquoddy language, these supplemental weavers frequently feature as decorative accents in Wabanaki basketry.”

HOW IT GOT HERE: A donor gave the basket by Parker to the museum in 2021, and the museum purchased the other by her daughter the following year through the Contemporary Art Fund. Damon said roughly three-quarters of acquisitions are donated, and the remaining quarter are purchased.

WHERE IT GOES NEXT: The dye on this basket is extremely susceptible to light exposure, which can cause fading and other damage. The museum will track the amount of time it is exposed to even low levels of light. “We balance that against 20 times the amount for it to be stored in the dark,” Damon said. This exhibition will run for three months; the basket will then “rest” in storage for five years. “These objects will not be shown after this exhibition for some time,” she said. No amount of time in the dark will restore an object to its original appearance, Damon cautioned, but these rules are meant to extend its life as long as possible.

THE ART: Gordon Parks was the first Black staff photographer at Life and was on assignment for the magazine when he made this image of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, members of the Black Panther party forced into political exile in Algiers. The museum wrote: “The combination of their entwined pose with a poster of party leader Huey Newton emphasizes the mix of personal and political ambitions that shaped their lives.” Parks was also a humanitarian, filmmaker, author and composer.

HOW IT GOT HERE: In 2021, artist and philanthropist Judy Glickman Lauder promised to give more than 600 photographs in her collection to the Portland Museum of Art. The donation included works by renowned artists such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White and Parks. At the time, executive director Mark Bessire said the collection put the Portland Museum of Art “at another level.”

WHERE IT GOES NEXT: Photographs are also light-sensitive. (“Tricky and temperamental,” Damon said.) This is a gelatin silver print, she said, so it may not experience as much degradation as a color print. Still, it will go into storage for five-plus years after this exhibition, based on the same calculation as the basket. So while this collection includes many images, their display time is limited. Paintings are typically hung in their frames on screens, but photographs typically go unframed into special boxes that are stacked on shelves.

THE ART: Pia Fries’ “lochtrop” by Pia Fries is an oil painting on top of a silkscreen. Fries is a contemporary Swiss artist. The paint is built up to three dimensions on the surface, and Le Gall noted that it still seems almost wet and smearable. “I call it a painting, but it is the kind of work that breaks your understanding of media,” Le Gall said.

HOW IT GOT HERE: This work came into the collection as a donation in 2023.

WHERE IT GOES NEXT: Paintings such as this one are much more stable than works on paper, so “lochtrop” doesn’t have to go straight to storage. “I would expect to see that painting in heavy rotation in the galleries in future,” Damon said. “The thing that I’m looking at for this piece in terms of care is the surface, which I can only describe as deliciously tactile. Because the impasto is so very, very thick, we are always on the lookout for cracking and losses.” Those issues can happen when the paint dries unevenly or if a person bumps into it. (Don’t bump into it.) This object is large (roughly 6-and-a-half feet wide by 8-and-a-half feet tall) weighs around 150 pounds. A typical framed work is 10-20 pounds, although the museum has handled some that weigh more than 550. So when it does move from this gallery to its next location, it will move on a special conveyance called an A-frame, which looks sort of like an easel crossed with a rolling cart.