poster

Wandering Gallery Project (spiritual mobility)

Jeffrey Abt

Biography

Jeffrey Abt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Wayne State University, Detroit, USA.  He received his BFA degree from Drake University studied at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, and later completed an MFA degree at Drake.  He initially was in curatorial and exhibitions work, first at the Wichita Art Museum, then in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago, and finally at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, before coming to Wayne State.  Throughout this period he has remained an active artist and exhibited his work widely throughout the United States.  His work is in the permanent collections of several museums including the Des Moines Art Center (Iowa), the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Fine Arts (Kansas City), as well as several corporate collections including Dow Automotive and Polk Technologies, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (Detroit branch).  Abt is also a writer and he has published two exhibition catalogues and nearly two dozen articles, most recently focusing on museum history and criticism.  His book, A Museum on the Verge: A Socioeconomic History of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1882-2000 was published by Wayne State University Press in 2001.  His essay, "The Origins of the Public Museum," was published in 2006 in A Companion to Museum Studies, issued by Blackwell, UK.  Abt's next book, tentatively titled: Entrepreneurial Egyptologist: James Henry Breasted and His Oriental Institute will be published by the University of Chicago Press with a projected due date of 2008.

Abstract

This work is one in a series that explores the display, transportation, and storage of art.  Because these activities extend beyond the finished products of art objects and exhibitions, the ambi¬tion of this piece is to capture their breadth—the space of art in a larger sense, and to do so in the context of an ever more transient culture.  Accordingly this work embod¬ies the tasks of packing and shipping art, as well as its display.  The mini-exhibit it contains addresses an aspect of display, the uses of a "period room," a chapel interior installed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
 Designed to be a self-contained shipping crate, exhibit space, and documentation-collecting device, the work is intended to absorb and show its passage through various settings, the choices made by gallery staff about its display, and responses from viewers.  Based on an accordion-fold structure of four hinged panels, it closes into a flat crate for shipping, and opens into one of three setups for display as chosen here.  The other alternatives are shown in the ADisplay Options@ diagram.  Evidence of this work=s travels is recorded in the travel log and other information is contributed by viewers in remarks written in the comments booklet.
The framed images in the white panel show different views of the same period-room gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, each intended to depict different uses of the space as a display site.  The drawing on the left imagines the space installed as an overtly religious setting with a crucifix placed at the visual and, one might say, spiritual center of the room; the painting in the center imagines the same view without any works mounted in that location; and the photograph on the right shows the space as actually installed with a tapestry hanging on that wall.  Other changes made in the treatment of wainscoting, placement of chairs and figures, and lighting are intended to explore the vocabulary of spirituality as used in museums where religious content is often present but carefully controlled.
All in all then, the work embodies the space of the art world broadly conceived in order to explore the mobility of a seemingly fixed museum space.