Visual Art The Gates
posted by on June 2 at 15:54 PM
Bill Gates, are you listening? Does this really have to stay at St. Peter’s if you say it doesn’t?
Mimi Gates, the single most powerful person in art in Seattle, announced today that she’s retiring at the end of June 2009. By then, she will have been director of Seattle Art Museum for 15 years.
This is no surprise. Last year was the mother of all SAM years, and directors habitually depart on a high, usually after a building project. SAM had two: the opening of its brand-new sculpture park and the expansion of its downtown hub. At the same time, the museum announced what it called a billion dollars’ worth of gifts of art from private collectors. And then it followed its opening exhibition—of those gifts—with two blockbuster displays, of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s restored Renaissance Gates of Paradise panels, and of Roman art from the Louvre.
Her headlining accomplishments—buttressed by her fundraising—are plain to see. There are subtler components, too. Gates quietly inaugurated the only on-site conservation studio in the region at the museum in 2001. And while SAM has made the most of limited collections through creative installations that integrate art from around the world, Gates has worked behind the scenes to update the board of trustees from what chairman Jon Shirley says was once “a bunch of elderly white people.”
Gates’s regime has specialized in leverage. Under Gates, SAM has partnered with museums in China, Japan, India, and across Europe and the U.S.—and with Bill and Melinda Gates, Mimi’s stepfamily, too. (From them, SAM borrowed Leonardo’s Codex Leicester before they sold it to the Hammer Museum after they bought it from the Hammer Museum [duh]. As for India, there’s a historical show of large Indian paintings that sounds interesting coming to SAM next year.) Before coming to SAM, Gates was director of Yale University Art Gallery; now she’s on the boards of the university and its museum. Yale’s vaunted American collection will visit SAM next spring.
To replace Gates, SAM’s trustees will search internationally. Gates will become director emeritus, and Shirley hopes she’ll stay involved in the field of Asian art, which is her passion and her background.
When I asked Gates why now, she said, “It’s just a good moment; it just feels right.” It does feel right. After a certain amount of time, every museum needs to press refresh.
There’s one quality from the Gates years that must be preserved: Gates may be able to woo the wealthy, but she also is a serious scholar, even a nerd. No museum can afford to lose that root of substance. It helps to explain the sense of intellectual freedom you see in some of her curators’ choices as well. (The first time I saw Gates speak, I gasped at her almost total lack of conventional, hucksterish charisma.)
There’s also one deficit that must be eliminated: Gates doesn’t get the web. During an interview a few months ago, I found myself introducing her to Wikipedia. In Seattle? (In the Gates family? OMG! WTF?)
What will Bill and Melinda give the museum in honor of Mimi’s distinguished tenure? They’ve never given a work of art to SAM from their personal collection, and it’s time to pony up—with a thoroughbred. Is, say, Michelangelo’s Pieta out of the question for such a couple on such an occasion? We’d settle for a simple Vermeer, Rembrandt, or Caravaggio in a pinch.
Presumably for family reasons she's still stuck with a CD-ROM of Encarta.
I agree with you, though; she's an engaging speaker, and she knows her stuff.
So many important European artists I would love to see land in this fair city...
Women who are moved to gasp in awe of serious, nerdy scholarship? Hot.
i love mimi gates
Yeah, we'd all love to see the Pieta, but isn't that a Vatican property? Fat fucking chance.
I want a big pre-Raphaelite exhibition, myself, but would definitely be cool with the Gates giving Vermeer or Caravaggio. Tintoretto, even.
Due to some 'holes I find it better to stay out of art discussions now with poorly-armed critics...but the Pieta in Seattle would be re-flipping-markable. Or any Michelangelo piece.
I'd travel to see them. And I'm 1500 miles away.
(my parents were married in Seattle 56 years ago)
I agree, we need a parting gift to SAM.
I'd settle for a decent Rafaela. But a Vermeer would be nice ...
bill & melinda own art besides chihulys? we don't need chihulys.
ahem, ahem, will. it's 'raphael', or 'raffaele'. yes, it would be nice. howevah, the insurance on babies like that is sky high. i'm predicting an endowed curatorship, or a big ol' wodge o' dosh.
@6 -- I thought your dead lover was T(intoretto) or T(oulouse-Lautrec)...can't you pull some strings?
#5, I was thinking the same thing! We need some Millais up in here.
Renoir, Lautrec, and Degas would also be excellent choices.
WOlf lives 1500 miles away!? That makes me hate him even worse!
I signed on to see how the Wolf controversy was coming along and I'm so pleased to see you're still at it! Such fun!
@8 They wouldn't would they? That little pirate-looking bastard has done enough damage to this city.
@9 - no, it depends on whether you're referring to the school or the specific artiste, and in what language.
So long as we don't get more cubists.
Hell... If Bill's gonna raid the Vatican, lets go for something really good... why not the Laocoön Group?
Hey kids, SAM already had a Pre-Raphaelite show.
I find something strangely interesting that Mimi doesn't do the internets, and Bill doesn't do gifting his Step mom's Museum...
@15 -- The Laocoön Group...isn't that Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley and Hume Cronyn?
It was a crummy provincial museum when she arrived and its a dressed-up crummy provincial museum when she leaves, with wildy overated sculpture park (containing hardly any sculpture in the don't touch and keep-off-the-grass park) and improved galleries (containing a sparse and weak permanent collection). Her legacy, primarily an edifice which is far from world-class (more Benaroya Hall than Main Library), will of course be celebrated extravagantly. But this city, with its Gates-sized resources, should be ashamed at how inconsequential its culture remains fiften years after Mimi got here.
I don't discount the accomplishments of Mimi Gates in her involvement with SAM. It cannot be said, though, that the museum has offered quality exhibits over the years. Yes, there have been impressionist exhibits (another goes up this month - yawn), and spanish exhibits, and the Rome exhibit, and Sargent and other stuffy exhibits that tour the country in other museums. These are the tried and true exhibits that lower level galleries show all the time. But give me something relevant! Give me an abstract painting exhibit of Gerhard Richter's work. Give me a Neo Rauch exhibit. Give me an Eakins exhibit, or Philip Guston, or a photorealist exhibit, or a contemporary latin american exhibit. Something beside the standard fair shown year after year. That is not Gates's job per se, it's the curator's job. The director's job in such exhibits is to pay for it, and these types of exhibits cost more and require more work. Let's hope SAM vastly improves the exhibit selection in the coming years.
I don't discount the accomplishments of Mimi Gates in her involvement with SAM. It cannot be said, though, that the museum has offered quality exhibits over the years. Yes, there have been impressionist exhibits (another goes up this month - yawn), and spanish exhibits, and the Rome exhibit, and Sargent and other stuffy exhibits that tour the country in other museums. These are the tried and true exhibits that lower level galleries show all the time. But give me something relevant! Give me an abstract painting exhibit of Gerhard Richter's work. Give me a Neo Rauch exhibit. Give me an Eakins exhibit, or Philip Guston, or a photorealist exhibit, or a contemporary latin american exhibit. Something beside the standard fair shown year after year. That is not Gates's job per se, it's the curator's job. The director's job in such exhibits is to pay for it, and these types of exhibits cost more and require more work. Let's hope SAM vastly improves the exhibit selection in the coming years.
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