PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 21, No. 6, Sept. 20, 2001

Krannert Art Museum staff shapes exhibitions and future of museum

Melissa Mitchell, News Bureau Staff Writer
(217) 333-5491; melissa@illinois.edu

Photo by Bill Wiegand Looking Ahead .Josef Helfenstein, director of the Krannert Art Museum, and Karen Hewitt, the museum's associate director, are leading the museum into the future. In addition to assembling a new staff, Helfenstein is planning for long-range programming. "You can't just plan from one year to the next," he said

Visitors to the Krannert Art Museum may notice an almost tangible sense of excitement in the air there this season.

Certainly, some of the electricity is being generated by this week’s opening of a major exhibition featuring the work of cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and his contemporaries [See related story]. But the source of the spirit and enthusiasm is coming from beyond the gallery walls, according to museum director Josef Helfenstein, who assumed the top post there a year ago, following a period marked by significant staff turnover.

"The first year has been difficult in many ways, but also very satisfying," said Helfenstein, who came to the UI after serving as associate director of the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland, and chief curator of the museum’s Paul Klee Foundation. "There are a few key things [that have taken place at the museum], and we have made substantial progress.

"The first one is staff," he said. "We had between five and seven open positions. Now, for the first time, we are full, and I think we have a great staff. We have very competent people, but we also have people who are interested in forming a team. And that is crucial."

Among the new team members is Helfenstein’s right-hand manager, associate director Karen Hewitt. Although new to the museum, Hewitt is no stranger to the campus or the arts. Before coming to Krannert, she served as executive acquisitions editor at UI Press. Hewitt says the administrative skills she honed as an acquisition editor, coupled with the enthusiasm she has for programming taking place at the museum, leave her well-suited for her current position, which is largely managerial in nature.

Business aside, Hewitt said she feels right at home at Krannert.
"Museums are an extremely comfortable environment for me," she said. "My mother is an artist, so from an early age, I’ve been going to museums and to art fairs and shows where she was an exhibitor."

Hewitt’s blend of managerial skills and art-world experience is a perfect combination for the job, according to the museum director.

"Karen is fantastic," Helfenstein said. While he and Hewitt work together closely, Helfenstein noted that "there is a clear distinction between our roles. She is responsible for all the business-related affairs, staff matters and day-to-day operations; I’m responsible for the artistic leadership and vision."

Other new professional staff members at the museum are contributing substantial experience from previous work at museums and art institutions around the country. They include visiting curator Gisele Atterberry; exhibitions preparator Lisa Costello; collections curator Kerry Morgan; education director Ann Rasmus; Cynthia Voelkl, assistant to the director; and Gretchen Wood, assistant director of development, who also works for the School of Art and Design and I space, the UI’s Chicago gallery.

Besides assembling a finely tuned staff, another of Helfenstein’s priorities in coming to Illinois was to craft a plan for long-range programming. "In this profession, you have to plan ahead. You can’t just plan from one year to the next," he said.

"I think we have a very attractive program for the future," he added. It’s not complete, but I’m glad it’s not because I want my colleagues to have an impact and to help shape this."

Another primary goal for Helfenstein was to focus on the creation of new networks – specifically, identifying and working with a variety of partners. Such partnerships, he said, range from collaborations and research initiatives with faculty members, departmental units and institutional partners, such as other art museums, to professional organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities.

"Sailor with Guitar," Jacques Lipchilz, 1914, Bronze sculpture, Height 76.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

"We already have established some good connections, he said. "For example, we will work with the Berkeley Art Museum next year to do a project together – an exhibition on Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She died when she was 31 years old, but was a very important conceptual artist in the 1970s. Like many women artists, her work was underestimated and never shown. So this will be the first presentation of her very interesting work here in the Midwest. It should attract a lot of interdisciplinary attention on campus."

Another noteworthy exhibition in the works is "Drawings of Choice," which Helfenstein described as "a very important and famous collection of post-war American drawings by minimalist and conceptual artists – probably the best private collection in the country. We are organizing a tour of that exhibition to other museums. Almost every project we are working on right now will originate here and travel to other well respected museums."

Some of Helfenstein’s other visions and plans for the museum also are beginning to take shape. Since coming to Krannert, for instance, he has lobbied for the creation of a publication that would document the museum collection.

"To me, it was obvious that we have to have such a book that would allow us to show collectors, donors and scholars throughout the world who we are, and to convey the strength and history of the collection. Without a catalog of the collection," he said, "the museum is kind of invisible."

Last year, a museum steering committee began working on that project, with help from several graduate students. Morgan is now overseeing the work, a collective effort that will ultimately involve graduate students, art history faculty members and the museum’s volunteer research committee. Helfenstein said the publication, which will be supported largely through fund-raising efforts by the Krannert Art Museum Council, is expected to be available in about a year and a half.

Another of Helfenstein’s ambitious goals for the museum is to produce catalogs to accompany exhibitions that originate at the museum – whenever financially feasible.

"I think the Lipchitz [catalog] will be an example of what the standard should be," he said. This catalog will feature a substantial amount of new, unpublished research, including essays by four internationally recognized scholars, and significant text by contemporaries of Lipchitz that have never been printed before.

"Krannert Art Museum is publishing these texts, these primary sources, for the first time," Helfenstein said.