Thomas Brent Smith
Director, Petrie Institute of Western American Art, Curator of Western American Art,
Denver Art Museum
Denver, CO
(720) 865-5000,
www.denverartmuseum.org
The Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum. Photography provided by Denver Art Museum.
What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
The Denver Art Museum anticipates reopening its Gio Ponti-designed Martin Building in the late fall of 2021. This will include a reinstallation of all the permanent collection galleries, including the Western American art collection on the seventh floor. It will be an opportunity for audiences to see the collection like never before!
What are you reading?
For general reading, I have just started Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land. In the art realm, I have been reading Clyfford Still, a book edited by John P. O’Neill that accompanied the artist’s 1979 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. The latter is an interesting case of an artist allowing personal letters to shape the reader’s perception of him rather than a scholars’ characterization of his work.
Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
The Petrie Institute recently acquired a Southwest painting by Thomas Moran, titled Indian Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico (1905). It will be included in the new Martin Building gallery installation on the seventh floor. The artist is best known for his grandiose canvases of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Lesser known are Moran’s sojourns to New Mexico and the works that he created from these trips.
What are you researching at the moment?
I am increasingly interested in the portion of the American West that was part of the Spanish colonies. I am curious and have been researching its relationship, both temporal and spiritual, to what was once the world’s largest Empire.
What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I would like to see an exhibition about the early influences on Richard Diebenkorn. While an art student in San Francisco, Diebenkorn studied with the likes of the figurative painter David Park and abstract expressionist Clyfford Still. Diebenkorn also studied with the modernist and transcendental painter Raymond Jonson at the University of New Mexico. While these might appear disparate artists, you can see remnants of each of them throughout the varied and consequential career of Richard Diebenkorn.
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