For more than a decade, until recently, the Memorial Art Gallery’s main contemporary art space was segmented off by a series of internal walls. These walls divided the exhibits into small groups and dissociated the room from the outside. Visitors sometimes didn’t know whether they were on ground level or below it.
One of the first things Timothy Peterson did when he was appointed contemporary art curator last September was to remove those dividing walls, restoring the gallery to its original, more spacious design.
With the additional space, he seeks to establish subtle connections between pieces. In one corner are paintings and sculptures with graceful curvilinear arcs. A shadow box containing thin, juxtaposed slices of sculpture stands between two intact sculptures.
The relationships are not explicit; instead, Peterson hopes they’ll spark insight and emotion within viewers. He lays out the space with patrons in mind, but also children marching through in day camps and employees entering the building from the parking lot.
“The goal is to tell multiple stories at once and put things in conversation with one another,” he said. “One of the things I’ve learned is that everything is a dialogue.”
In nearly four decades as a museum curator, director and contemporary art observer, Peterson said he has increasingly tuned his ear to that dialogue. His talent in doing so was what led the Memorial Art Gallery to hire him last year as its inaugural Ann and Irving Norry Curator of Contemporary Art.
Part of his responsibility is expanding MAG’s contemporary collection. About 1,000 of its 12,000 or so pieces of art are from the contemporary period, which includes work dating back to 1970, he said; about three quarters are from the last 25 years. His goal is to increase the depth and scope of the collection, with an emphasis on artists from underrepresented groups.
“It’s exciting to have a hand in saying what a well rounded collection looks like,” he said. “Over time, as visitors walk through the doors, they hopefully will see themselves represented more and more.”
One of Peterson’s first acquisitions for the museum, and the centerpiece of one of the five exhibits he’s produced in his first year on the job, was a piece by Bethany Collins, a Black Alabama-born artist now living in Chicago. She reproduced four translations of the classic Greek play “Antigone” on heavy paper, then laboriously rubbed out all the text except for variations on a single line: “I spoke my honest mind at least.”
Collins’ other pieces in the exhibit use the same idea of translating, obscuring and recasting historical texts to project their meaning across time. One is the coiled score of a Confederate battle hymn overlaid by charcoal drawings of billowing tear gas from the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 (the exhibition is on display through Nov. 30).
Peterson was born in Minnesota, but his career has taken him to institutions across the country. They include a private foundation in Los Angeles, a startup gallery in a reclaimed urban space in Minneapolis, the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.
He crossed paths at the latter with Sarah Bouchard, who runs her own gallery in Maine. She said Peterson distinguished himself by looking beyond the typical “handful of artists with gobs of money and vast tendrils of social capital” to find new currents in the state’s art scene.
“As an outsider, Tim made, either consciously or unconsciously, the decision to seek outside of [traditional circles],” Bouchard said, “and as a result opened himself up to a whole array of Maine artists who hadn’t received the attention they deserved.”
Peterson not only made an effort to attend events at Bouchard’s gallery, but scheduled visits with her artists about their work and the arts in Maine and what direction they were taking.
“The fact that someone within that elevated position at an institution would have the openness to ask questions was wildly refreshing,” said Bouchard.
Peterson is now undergoing the same sort of initiation period in Rochester, including selecting pieces for the annual Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition (on display through Oct. 5).
“I’m working to develop a sense of what’s missing here and what needs to be seen by this community,” he said. “What I’m seeing is a great deal of love for this institution.”
As he plans his first major solo exhibition at MAG, Peterson is also making time to browse the gallery’s own holdings and plan smaller installations. It is a synaptic fusillade of a workflow that sets his toes into a perpetual jangle.“I could drink culture out of a firehose,” he said. “I love learning more, and that’s what’s beautiful about contemporary art — it’s forever growing.” mag.rochester.edu
