Why Does the Ogden Matter?
by: Adam Falik | posted: Feb 1, 2010
When considering the renaissance of visual arts currently happening in New Orleans, it seems easy to dismiss the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Or if not dismiss, then at least be distracted elsewhere. To be excited by art in New Orleans is to always have one eye on the St. Claude district, hoping to once again be startled when, on the second Saturday of the month, the galleries open their doors. With the other eye you scope Julia Street, or the new galleries somehow in the midst of this damaged economy popping up in the Quarter or on Magazine Street, sometimes sustaining themselves and sometimes not; and that seems exciting, too. Or there’s getting pissed off at the New Orleans Museum of Art for publicizing its Disney exhibition with such citywide efficiency. Or rehashing Prospect.1 and anticipating Prospect.2. But rarely are eyes turned towards the Ogden. Which is wrong. It’s chief curator, David Houston, is convincingly capable of defining why ignoring the Ogden is wrong. He is about to explain this to me.
As Houston and I sit in the fifth floor gallery of the Ogden on a Monday morning, surrounded by the huge canvases of Bo Bartlett, I wonder how it is I didn’t know these canvases were currently on show in town. Bartlett is part of the new American realism movement from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He was heavily influenced by, and was a close friend of Andrew Wyeth, a relationship that is echoed in Bartlett’s work. These canvases are huge, and like Wyeth’s work they speak of the expansive American sensibility and landscape. They are majestic paintings, mysterious, naturalistic, symbolic and fantastic all at once. Houston talks of Bartlett, who’s from Columbus, Georgia, for a moment, then begins speaking of the Ogden itself.
The legend of the Ogden collection is that just over 30 years ago, Roger Houston Ogden, at the time a Louisiana State University student, got his father to purchase a painting with him for Roger’s mother as a birthday gift. That first purchase infected Roger with the collecting bug. A business and real estate financier, Roger collected some 1,200 works, beginning first with Louisiana artists, and then branching out regionally. In the 1990s, after three decades of collecting, Roger, along with Dr. Gregory O’Brien, Chancellor of the University of New Orleans, decided to make the collection a public institution. A complex of buildings was procured to house the collection. Stephen Goldring Hall, where David Houston and I now sit, was opened in 2003. The 1889 Howard Memorial Library (later renamed the Patrick F. Taylor Library) designed by American architect and Louisiana native, Henry Hobson Richardson, is currently under renovation. This building will ultimately house the Ogden’s 18th and 19th century collections, the museum’s technology center, classrooms, and a public research library. Whatever monies are gathered by the museum, either as income or donations, are devoted towards this building. It’s like renovating an old house: get some money, and fix up another piece.
David Houston, who was a professor within the Art, Architecture and Humanities program at Clemson College in South Carolina, became the Ogden’s founding curator in 2001. The building we now sit in was then barely a hole in the ground, and the museum’s collection was housed in an inadequate gallery on Julia Street. In nine years, Houston has been instrumental in expanding the collection from 1,200 to 4,000 pieces of art.
“We really started looking at areas Roger didn’t collect and filling in the blanks,” Houston explains. “More photography, which is a very important contemporary medium, craft traditions, and contemporary art. We have a very simple mission statement to exhibit and document the culture of the American South, which is defined as 15 states from the District of Columbia to Texas.”
As all the monies, either earned or donated, have always gone towards renovation, I ask how the collection is amassed.
“Donations. Through foundations, collectors, individuals and artists. I have people come and say, ‘My grandfather was an artist in Alabama, well known in the period and not a lot has been done with his work since his death. We have this family collection that we’ve been trying to find the right place for and this seems like it.’ The art that I have bought has been with money donated specifically to buy a collection, or a small body of focused work. We have never had a large functioning exhibition budget because we’ve been putting all our fundraising efforts into finishing the library.”
Houston continually reminds me that the Ogden is a new museum, still wet behind the ears. “We were new and [since Katrina] re-birthed, and are really re-birthing again. You think of institutions with tens of thousands of objects. You think of institutions that are firmly established with large endowments and stable in a way that a new institution is not.”
The museum is in a state of flux. J. Richard Gruber, director of the Ogden since 1999, is retiring to move to Ashville, North Carolina. In addition, the museum is renegotiating its affiliation with the University of New Orleans, which is experiencing its second round of state budget cuts. The university was paying for the museum’s utilities, as well as certain staff positions. The Ogden is neither a city nor state institution. It must create its own income. In terms of visitors, foot traffic though the museum reflects the ebb and flow of the city. During major festivals, out of town contingent increases significantly. “Post-Katrina, our visitation has become considerably more regional,” Houston acknowledges. “I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the pre-Katrina profile because the footprint of the city and the occupancy of the convention center is not going back to that.”
No matter what sort of artistic renaissance New Orleans might be going through, institutions like the Ogden are still essentially bound to tourism. Fewer conventions, fewer museum visitors. One of Houston’s efforts to increase foot traffic is Ogden After Hours, which brings live musical performances into the museum’s lobby each Thursday night. “We realized from the start that as an institution we don’t have a lot of brand names,” Houston explains. “A lot of the artists we show are not household names. It’s not like a Picasso or a Manet or Disney, or any of those things that draw. So we started the music nights the first year we were open. Often they thematically represent what we’ve got in the galleries. I’m working on a project of New Orleans bounce music, so we’re looking at how After Hours can bring in some of the bounce musicians, who aren’t ordinarily part of an institutional culture––to bring the music as well as the images that are making that world.”
Houston takes me on a tour of the galleries. The museum is closed and we have the five museum floors to ourselves, which really is a privilege. It’s the right setting for Houston to define his, and the Ogden Museum’s, decisive purpose.
“One of the reasons I came here is that there is no established cannon of Southern art. In fact there’s no narrative of Southern art,” Houston says. “This is a place that’s helping define a regional narrative and the relationship of Southern art to American art. That’s critical. It’s not trying to create a separatist narrative, but to relate to the larger idea of American history. So rather than trying to find trends or the next up-and-coming young artist, I’m looking comprehensively at who was working when, what’s their significance and what’s their relationship to others in and outside the region.”
Creating a narrative of Southern art is bound to the experience of its collection. As Houston earlier acknowledged, the museum does not possess the type of names that easily draws art tourism. Instead of having a De Kooning or a Lichtenstein, the Ogden has Jack Stewart, who studied with De Kooning at Yale. Instead of a Jackson Pollock, Fritz Bultman (from the New Orleans’ funeral home family) serves to represent Abstract Expressionism. Are Stewart’s and Bultman’s works less aesthetically pleasing than their northern counterparts? Not necessarily. The others are definitely worth more, but they don’t support the arc of a Southern narrative.
But what about worth? Is it the Ogden’s intent to raise the market value of the artists on its walls?
“Quite frankly, if you talk about the idea of an art ecology, having your work in a museum is the artistic worth of having died and gone to heaven. Since we’ve opened, the price of Southern art has been slowly escalating. We’re not the reason, but we’re part of the mix,” Houston says, acknowledging that simply being in a museum does, in fact, create economic value. Houston is not a snake-oil salesman solely seeking to escalate the Ogden collection’s value, but neither does he falsely squirm from the notion, from the how and why of institutional roles.
“We’re all in this together, looking at how to create a sense of community, of what role we each play within that community, to validate what we’re all doing to a larger public,” he says. “We very self-consciously have a role in that.”
Houston is savvy. In an interview he doesn’t dodge. He might not have the high profile of the curators of the Contemporary Art Center, or New Orleans Museum of Art, or even Louisiana ArtWorks, but instead possesses a sort of behind-the-scenes savoir-faire, with a historian’s expansive, long-term point of view. He likes the word ecology because he’s ecologically minded, has a systems approach, sees how all the pieces fit snugly together. Just as he recognizes how Ogden’s foot traffic is bound to the city’s tourism, and its represented artists are filling in the spaces of history-wide artistic movements, so does he systematically recognize the Ogden’s (occasionally off the radar) place in the contemporary New Orleans art scene.
“St. Claude is providing a wonderful critical function, giving this effervescence of activity to contemporary art,” Houston says. “Galleries are the ones who are the feelers, the antenna into the art world. The Contemporary Art Center and Prospect.1 are bringing major people from all over the world, very contemporary and very now. Whereas a museum is both an exhibiting and a collecting institution, that sifts through trends and stylistic changes. The view is really much longer in terms of time, intent and content than either a contemporary art institution or a gallery. A museum by nature is a historical institution. We have the long-term responsibility of regional interpretation from the 18th century to the present. If you look at that ecology you might say that each has a function. In working together, in bringing a painter like Bo Bartlett that you wouldn’t see elsewhere, the Ogden has created an inventive museum culture appropriate to its mission and its stance.”
