Curator Talk with Cliff Ackley - A Personal View

A Personal View: Works in the Museum of Fine Art Collection that resonate with works by artists in Observation & Imagination with Clifford S. Ackley, Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Curator of Prints and Drawings.

Wednesday, November 13, 6:30pm

Join us for an exciting and informative talk given by Clifford S. Ackley, the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Curator of Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Notes from the Curator:

Observation & Imagination: Works on Paper

In 2017 artist Joel Janowitz invited me to the Concord Center for the Visual Arts to see the group show he had organized of contemporary painting with the unifying theme Space as Narrative. I was very taken with the show as well as with the program of the Center itself. While there, I met the director of the Center, Kate James, who asked if I would be interested in doing a show for them. I indicated that I might be willing to do an exhibition of works on paper by some of the Boston area artists whose work I had been following for a number of years. We also settled on a provisional future date for the show. Shortly thereafter, I went through a period of uncertain health that kept me out of circulation for a year. When things improved, I was reminded of my commitment to the exhibition and quickly came up with a list of fifteen Boston area artists for whom works on paper played a significant or central role in their work. Rather than striving for any thematic unity beyond “works on paper by Boston area artists” the exhibition is conceived as fifteen small one-person shows. Recent work is favored, but in certain instances older works have been included.

Why works on paper? For the last fifty years I have recommended for acquisition and curated exhibitions of prints, drawings and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hired in 1966 to work with Old Master prints and drawings, in particular the etchings of Rembrandt. I brought with me an unexpected interest in modern and contemporary prints, drawings and photographs.

In graduate school I had been encouraged to consider museum work because of my preference for a wide-ranging, eclectic approach to art rather than a more specialized academic one. The Museum’s collection of prints, drawings and photographs that ranges from the fifteenth century to the present day seemed a promising way in which to satisfy my avid visual curiosity. There was also my commitment to the object, to the way the object was made, and to the messages encoded in the object itself rather than in intellectual theories about it. My idea of “conceptual” art is personified in the work of Jasper Johns where there is something to look at as well as something to think about.

I trust that the artists and works shown here justify at least in part my self-proclaimed breadth of interest. At one extreme there are drawings made direct from nature or  prints traditional in their use of printmaking media, but the selection is more generally characterized by hybrid works: drawings from photographs; collages from found or appropriated images; varying degrees of abstraction, from pure geometry to echoes of architectural structures; mark-making assisted by templates or stencils as well as free-hand gesture and a great variety of unique prints, monotypes and monoprints that hover somewhere between painting, drawing and printmaking.

And finally, it is notable that in virtually all the works exhibited here one can observe a lively intermingling of Observation and Imagination – to better delight both eye and mind.

Clifford S. Ackley

Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro

Curator of Prints and Drawings

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston