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Betty Collings

The Role of an Art Museum on Campus

Ray Thorburn talks with Betty Collings, until recently Director of the Ohio State University Gallery of Fine Arts in her studio on  March 19, 1980.

Published in Columbus Art Vol. 1, No. 10.  June, 1980.

Betty,  In April 1974 you were appointed Gallery Director in the Division of Art at the Ohio State University soon after graduating with an MFA from the same college. Was this not unusual?  How did you secure the job without any previous professional gallery experience?

The chairman of the gallery committee, in the spring of 1973, was John Freeman.  The previous gallery director had just, somewhat precipitously, resigned.  It was John Freeman's job to find a replacement; he was one of the people on my thesis advisory committee and was impressed with two things:  one, my interest as a graduate student in the gallery, and secondly the quality of the writing and the ideas that were expressed in my thesis.  It was at John's suggestion that Frank Ruzicka offered me a short-term appointment in the Division of Art's gallery. At the time, I turned it down because it was for only 10 weeks. I was offered less than the funding that was budgeted for director. They subsequently offered me a job for a year and 10 weeks; this I felt gave me some time in which I could prove what I could do, so I accepted the position.

It would seem that you had a lot to do with determining your own job description. As the position evolved, the gallery policy became more defined. To what extent did you personally determine the direction and purpose of the Ohio State University Gallery program?

When I went there initially, there was a real vacuum.  This was to administer the Hopkins Gallery and that part was very clearly defined. Activity was contained within the Hopkins Gallery; you know the situation down there - exhibitions didn't even extend as far as the north corridor. Even as a student I felt that the gallery programs had been less than adequate. It seemed to me at the time that it could be a much more exciting and challenging art environment for students. So, in the first year I ran a program that literally had an exhibition a week in that space.  It was a program that I was determined to prove was essential.  The gallery, I believed, had to be seen as an essential part of the academic programming of the college. The people in the Art Department were delighted and applauded the results; even so it was somewhat of a Bell Jar.  They watched me and said, "Isn't it wonderful" although they didn't particularly interact.  At the end of the year, the Sullivant space was ready to open and the administrative people had not determined how the Sullivant Gallery should be administered; there was no funding, nothing. As a result, Dean Rigsby offered me the job of administering both galleries.  I accepted his offer on the understanding that there would be a restructuring, defining the policies of the two galleries: I would not have accepted the role of University Gallery Director - that's what the job eventually became - unless that occurred.

That's only part of your question.  The other part relates to the students and academic programming.  I always felt that what I was doing was done in response to the needs of the college, of the visual arts people.  When I moved, it was always with the sense that there was some positive response from somewhere in the college.  The response was not always from the same sources. For instance, I met the needs of the studio people to show their work so, yes, in that sense I defined policy.  I perceived a need for a faculty exhibition, a graduate student exhibition, also an undergraduate exhibition.  I also saw that the art education and art history people had certain intellectual requirements and so in terms of filling a vacuum, yes; I shaped the way things would go.

What was the first exhibition that you put together after taking up your appointment in '74?

The whole of that spring was simply administering an ongoing program of primarily graduate students' exhibitions and that's all.  What you really need is what happened the next fall. And you know, I don't really remember; I know that there were two exhibitions that I got in from New York.  One of them as Agnes Denes; the other was Jim Reineking; but I think the first exhibition was the faculty exhibition.

The running of an art gallery is a multifaceted operation. How did you organize operations? For example, did you have a master chart which defined an coordinated the many different aspects of the gallery's function.

Yes, sure.  It was a very complex program by the time I had finished.  I had in my mind divided it into the exhibition program, the advanced program, the development of the collections and the administrative aspects.  But basically and fundamentally it had two broad categories - exhibitions and collections.  The exhibitions were subdivided into in-house exhibitions where we showed the work which was occurring within the college and the invited exhibition program which was bringing in major artists. Essentially, this was an enrichment program for faculty, students, the university community and anybody else who was interested. The exhibition program included he collections that we began to show.  From 1975 on, we continually tried to show some aspect of the collections, mostly in the collections corridor by the Fine Arts Library, but in addition to that, we periodically put together an exhibition of the expanding collection.

As far as collections were concerned, there were two major aspects. One was the historical collection and the other was to expand.  We devised a new policy in 1975 to determine whether we could expand, and if so what such an expanded collection might look like.  I simply followed those decisions. That broke down, for me, I mean for me personally, into being a director as well as being a curator, both of which were all-encompassing.

It is not impossible to run an art gallery as it were with two heads trying to function in different places at the same time?  What kind of support, additional support, did you have - that is people to help you to do the job?

You mean in terms of staff?  Initially in 1974 there was just me.  In 1975 I got an exhibit preparatory.  The next addition after that was when we put two 20-hour students' positions together which created another full-time exhibit preparatory position because we found that the way the program was going, we needed one more support person.  Finally we got half a secretary and last year we got a full-time secretary.  So, in the end there were four full-time people.  In addition to that, over the years more GRA appointments were attached to the gallery, so that in the end I had four GRA's.  That sounds exotic, and as the years went by the quality of that assistance skyrocketed.  It was valuable work experience for people intending to work in either museums or galleries. However, I was regularly faced with the situation where every GRA was new.  Hence there was a great deal of extra time that simply went into teaching each person what their job might be over the next year.  This was an additional strain; on the one hand I had the assistants, but at the same time I had to teach them what to do.

So, effectively you were both director, curator of exhibitions and archives as well as being responsible for developing the permanent collection. In a sense you were also the education officer, in that you were training people to function effectively in the gallery. What is the role of the director with regard to staff management and the daily functioning of an art gallery?

Well, my experience was limited, as everyone knows.  What I did as director is quite distinct from the reading that I did and the traveling that I did as curator, but essentially I organized a disparate group of people into a coherent whole.  That was something that I didn't find difficult to do. I like to organize things, but I also had to define everybody's job and to chart a way so the inexperienced people could fit into the total operation.  My role did not extend beyond that.  I felt that with the limited amount of staff we had, I could not personally develop or extend the publicity arm of the college - by that I mean to go out into the community to talk about what the University Gallery is about and what the university was doing in this area; there simply wasn't time.

To what extent should a university art gallery cater to the tastes and interests of the university community it serves?

First of all, of course, there's the academic community within the college of the arts, and that is its prime reason for existence. A university gallery, essentially, is to respond directly to the academic needs of the college. The program is funded almost entirely through the academic budget.  An extension of this aspect was the purchase of art for the collection, but this came from the development fund. Even so, it was my interpretation that this should be directed toward the academic aims of the college. The second aspect of this in terms of an expanded operation, and I think the most inspiring and the most incisive way to expand beyond the specific academic needs of the college of the arts, is to meet the more general needs of the university community – to provide an intellectually challenging program for people outside the college.  It's my belief that we did that – that we were beginning to do that, at least. We had people from mathematics; we had people from philosophy, other areas, interested in what was happening in the gallery in a way that had never happened at OSU before.

That only in part answers my question, if I can use a concrete example.  I am a member of that community, that is the university community, and I have a number of paintings, prints, whatever, that I have collected over a period of time and that I would like to give to the university. To what extent should a professional university art gallery accommodate those kinds of wishes?

Only to the extent that the objects that are being offered are within the parameters which have been defined by the museum. Now in our case we had very limited goals.  We had said that we would collect contemporary art; that was the thrust of the program. In addition to that, we had a historical collection.  You must always remember that objects cost money to be housed and that an eclectic collection is of very little value.  What is needed in an academic situation is something which encourages scholars, which allows the students who are in the academic context to develop their skills.  The best way to do that is to provide a collection which is high quality and fairly sharply defined whether it is contemporary, medieval, or early 20th century. If it's sharply defined and if it has objects which are nationally recognized, then the students who are dealing with in on whatever basis will acquire a national perspective.  If you fill it full of various people's desires to place things within that collection, you will not provide the students with sufficiently qualitative material for them to develop.

The exhibition program is subdivided into three main categories.  The first is th4e college general exhibitions, the second the collection exhibitions, and the third is the invited and special exhibitions, all of which you have alluded to. From my observation over the last five years, I have seen the gallery grow and it is the third category, that is the invited and special exhibitions, that has created a national reputation for the Ohio State University exhibition program.  Would you care to comment how this came about?

Well, of course six years ago nobody would have thought that exhibiting or coming to the Ohio State University was worth anything on one's resume, cut today that is exactly why artists come.  Often artist have said that not only have they had an interesting timer but they have been somewhere of value.  Six years ago that was not so.  Why is that so now?  It is because the reputation of the program is such that people want to be identified with it.  And that was a carefully orchestrated move. I began in 1975 by inviting, as I mentioned before, two New York artists out, Agnes Denes and Jim Reineking.  They were relatively well known.  They agreed to come because of my enthusiasm and fundamentally because they were offered an honorarium, and in this manner the program developed.  The next major move that I made was to invite Dr. Pincus-
Witten out.  He came to give a lecture but following the lecture he discovered it was possible at Ohio State to establish meaningful dialogue with people.  It was a very good dialogue between Robert and people in Art Education who came to a seminar the following morning.  If he could be stimulated, anybody else could be stimulated.  And so we began a tandem program between Robert Arnold and his criticism in art education course, the OSU gallery and initially the Columbus Museum of Art when Donna Turner was there.  It was a wildly exciting time where we invited all kinds of interesting people who came because they found it interesting to talk to our students and the response they got was productive for them.  Form this beginning, it built on itself.

How important is a permanent collection of contemporary art in a university?

In relations to the exhibition program, the collection is peripheral.  If you asked me, "What is the most important thing to place at the Ohio State University right now?" I would say a stimulating and exciting events and exhibitions program. There is no doubt about that.  However, a university has needs beyond stimulating the people in studio and art education and the people in art history.  It also must provide some record of the culture.  And the way in which we could do that at the Ohio State University was to begin to collect contemporary art, so that in the future, 15, 20 years' time there will be a historical collection which could be used not only for all the museological reasons I have mentioned but also simply as a means to interpreting the culture.

So the collection, even as it stands at the moment, will be an immensely important regional resource in time.  There are very fine objects we've carefully selected from a range of important artists. Additionally, after the first couple of years we taped everybody who came to talk, so we have both an oral tradition and a visual tradition, which encapsulates at least a portion of that period and this is regionally terribly, terribly important.

I think the OSU collection is interesting for a number of reasons. One of them is that the nation's historical museum collections are private collections which have been donated to institutions or governments or whatever.  Very frequently they have been put together by persons interested in art as an accessory to their main occupation in life and whose personal predilection controlled the selection of the objects. I'm not knocking that as an idea - for there have been some very fine collections donated by private patrons - but the OSU collection is unique because it is a collection that is being put together by people who are professionals in the arts.  I had an informed committee including an independent advisor to the collection advisory. Now, I think there were some limitations.  We were dealing with avant-garde art because w had to, but it was avant-garde art that was safe.  For example, there was a marked difference4 between the exhibitions and the collection. In the exhibition program, I would try a new idea, deal with avant-garde issues, but with the collection we did not do that. Nevertheless our collection policy was fairly up-front, was also challenging for those involved.  Yet I would like to have seen, in fact it would be my recommendation if I were there now and we were structuring a new situation, to see a collection advisory committee made up of those people directly involved in teaching contemporary art, in art education and in art history.  They would be more appropriate people than the chair-people of those respective departments.  However, that's minor to the major idea.

You have stressed the importance of the special exhibition program within the framework of the university. But nevertheless this has been criticized in some quarte4s because it has been focused too narrowly on New York.  How do you respond to that charge?

\I am a very pragmatic person, really pragmatic person - the budget that we worked on was a base budget of, I think this year $21,600. Now any museum that has a comprehensive program works on a budget of $60,000- $80,000  or $90,000 as a base. That's before they go out and bring in money for programs. We were unable to bring in extra money for programs because I didn't have the time to stop to write the grants, to administer them, and so on. We could not generate exhibitions, we could not put exhibitions together which required packaging, touring, etc. How can you get a busy exhibition program as cheaply as possible?  I designed a program that was as cheap as possible, yet at the same time was also extraordinarily stimulating.  For example, we would bring out about four exhibitions at once in the state-wide art services truck and we would return them all at once, so that we were averaging about $800 or $900 an exhibition in contrast  to a normal exhibition price of maybe $25,000. Then we would bring in and put together objects from museums across the country, because the pieces from our own collection were going into exhibition in institutions that had much larger budgets. The second thing was that because we had a defined but narrow focus we could get grant funds.  We could write to the endowment say, "The exhibition program is doing this - and we're buying  these…" hence every time we applied for a collections grant, we got it.  A lot of that had to do with the fact that there was a clearly defined image for that program.  That was as true for the exhibitions grants as it was for the collections grants.

Had we attempted a more diverse program we would have ended up with one major exhibition a year and a lot of in-house exhibitions. We would have had no basis for developing th4e collection because there would have been no rationale. People would have said, "Why does Ohio State University want to buy a Robert Morris, or a Donald Judd - there's nothing going on there that you would want to attach this fine object to.  It would be wasted in Ohio."  It would have been a fair comment.  As it was, it wasn't---because of that focusing.  It was very important, and from such a nucleus one can then expand, but you cannot bring a nucleus together when you spread your energies and your efforts too thin. The very focusing, the very narrowness that people were criticizing was the thing that allowed us to achieve as much as we achieved.  Now, given extra funding, it should be entirely different.

Hasn't the Chicago school, the West Coast school, feminist art, black art or the funky ritualism of the southwest corner of this country, etc. also go a place in this kind or program.

Absolutely!  In fact we had a Chicago show; we had everything we could get from Phyllis Kind's gallery and it was a very good show.   We had Peter Plagens come from the West Coast to talk to our students.  We had so many funk ceramicists over a period of time that you didn't have to work on that particularly hard. A program such as the program at OSU should take everything into account, but you always have to remember that if you're going to bring something from the West Coast, it's going to cost money.  So I would keep my eyes and ears open when there was a traveling exhibition that we could participate in, because if it didn't have to travel from too far away, we could share the cost. But nevertheless there were real limitations, budgetary limitations.

Even so, what justified performances as extreme as for example, Otto Muehls "blood and guts" performance, I think in 1973, or the purchase of works as austere as Richard Tuttle's first paper piece of 1966, which after all is a white paper shape pasted to the white wall of the fine arts gallery in Sullivant Hall? How do you justify it?

The purpose of the university gallery and the purpose of a university is to deal with new knowledge.  Such knowledge is not safe for it crackles at the very frontiers of knowledge; there is no proven way to evaluate it - it is difficult.  I mean that.  But it's there and it has to be dealt with. The students who are at the Ohio State University right now will be going out into a highly professionalized, highly articulate, extraordinarily experienced national art world.  If we don't provide the most stimulating and challenging experience for our students, they're going to go out handicapped.

What about the rest of the 57,000 souls who are a part of the student body of Ohio State University this year?  What does Otto Muehl do for them?

Well, of course, Otto Muehl wasn't one of my exhibitions.  He was introduced by Bert Katz.  However, what does it do for them?  It introduces them to the idea that art is something that you might think about. And if we have done nothing else, we have suggested to those students in Arts 160 and other students who wander into the galleries on their way to the library or wherever, that art isn't just postage stamps hanging on the wall. It is something which also challenges your mind.  Otto Muehl does that, Richard Tuttle does that, Mel Bochner did that;  they are all people who are challenging not only the minds of those 57,000 students but the faculty and the staff and everybody who came by.  They had to say, "What is art?"

Has the University Art Gallery got an educational function?

Of course.  That's its prime reason for being there.  If it isn't corresponding to academic needs it shouldn't be there.  It simply should not be there.  It's a waste of taxpayers' money if it is simply a compendium of safe experiences. If it simply regurgitates the known, then it's not doing anything.  Every university gallery has been developed from different kinds of situations, but this is one where there was nothing, where we had to define what it might be.  In this case, it was possible to say, "Hey, this university gallery, in this situation, should ensure that its educational function involves the expansion of people's minds."

Nevertheless, given that the Ohio State University is responsible to the State of Ohio, what role do you see the state, or the university on behalf of the state, playing with regard to the management and policy of the gallery program?

Well, I think it's terribly important.  In fact, it was a seminar in art education that defined my ideas on this, way back when I was first offered the job.  I had been gallery director for a week when Ken Marantzinvited me to participate in a discussion of the role of museums in a community.  It was clear to me then as a result of that seminar that as the program at Ohio State University developed, it had to develop in relation to what other aesthetic experiences were available within the community.  Now, within the State of Ohio there are an enormous number of museum experiences.  Within Columbus itself, there is the Columbus Museum of Art and there is the Ohio State University Gallery.  For the university gallery to be repeating the Columbus Museum of Art experience would be a total and absolute waste of the taxpayers' money. The Columbus Museum of Art is responding to a more general public;  it's responding to school children and people who are coming in from the community, whose experiences can be expanded by that very fine collection and program they offer. Our role was very different.  Dealing with the contemporary, dealing with the avant-garde, is something that takes a great deal of time, effort and energy.  The Ohio State University is not alone.  Other programs are equally challenging - for example Wright State and Akron University.  Likewise, Ohio Wesleyan does it to the best of their limited resources.  But the major university in Ohio, the Ohio State University, should be playing a major role.  I think we did that.

How is it that, given the difficulties that you have referred to, you managed1 to develop and sustain an extremely challenging and stimulating visual arts program?

Well, I think that art and art ideas are nationwide; I think that the nation of provincialism is passé; I think if there is a notion of provincialism, it's a regionalism of the mind.  Ideas can be generated in Ohio, which can be communicated to New York, San Francisco, Athens, or any place.  That's one thing.  I think that Ohio State University can contribute to the national discussion.  Its faculty and its students are capable of doing that.

The other reason is a very personal reason.  I grew up on a farm and the opportunities for me as a child were extraordinarily limited; no one every presented me with challenging visual ideas.  Many of the students who come to the Ohio State University come from farming communities.  They respond like rockets to challenging ideas.  I have observed over the last six years. Someone must present them with the best challenge possible so they can shed their conservatism and become very much a part of the national discussion and contribute to it.

One of the most rewarding experiences I has over there was the day that we opened the first collection exhibition.  It was a day that I had gone into the gallery with a member of the development fund and a prospective donor.  The gallery doors were not open; the collection was to open the next day.  A class of students came in from Columbus College of Art and Design.  They weren't even supposed to be there.  The exhibition was assembled under the most strenuous conditions.  There were storms; it was the period of time we were conserving energy; I was worried about my staff traveling through the night and day across the mountains in the snow.  When the exhibition went up, I heaved a huge sigh of relief and thought "Never again!"  The next day these young people were in the gallery and I heard a student say to her friend, "Ah-h-h, it's an Eva Hesse; I have never seen an Eva Hesse until now." At that moment I realized that all the effort had been worth it; because this student was given a visual opportunity which would not have otherwise been obtainable.  It was very important.

Now that you have had time to reflect, what would you hold to be the single most important contribution you personally or the program has achieved, or conversely, not achieved?

I believe the visual arts program at the Ohio State University is a paradigm example for any other university.  It has provided the opportunity for the visual arts community of the Ohio State University, and of Columbus, to recognize that they have a place and make a statement, and can make a commitment that is an important and valuable part of the ongoing national tradition.  I have given the university an edge.

What still has to be done?

What has to be done is that the ideas that were part of that program have got to become more closely integrated with the teaching activities of the college.  There has to be a better response from the faculty to what is happening in the gallery.  I think this was always a gap.  I felt that this year, however, the gap was closing.  In fact, the whole series of events of the last three months were a great surprise to me because I really felt that the gap was closing.  But right from the very beginning I felt a sense of operating in a Bell Jar - making a performance which everybody applauded, but didn't always want to participate in.  I do not mean everybody, obviously.  However, for a program of that kind to be really productive, there has to be a really exciting relationship between the teaching departments and the gallery program.  I felt that finally we were beginning.  This year, there was a much better program advisory. There were five, including Peter Megert from design who was very enthusiastic about what could be done.  There was Bob Arnold from Art Education; there was Barbara Groseclose from art history, as well as studio art participation.  For the first time, there were people who were really interested and believed in establishing a closer liaison and working relationship with the studio art department.  I was looking forward to a very exciting program in 1981, resulting from the work of the gallery committee this year. That, I think is the essential key to a successful program.

 

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