Something old, something new

Bowdoin museum’s Katy Kline has made a home for contemporary art

By Jenna Russell

“DIALOGUE,” by Walton Ford, 1996, watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper. Curator Katy Kline (inset).

Katy Kline reveals her doubts right up front: she can’t imagine why anyone would want to write about her. This might seem a bad beginning, but the comment actually bodes well, given that boring, babbling interview subjects tend to act as if they’ve been waiting (impatiently) for the journalists to show up.

Kline directs the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where she arrived two years ago last month after 20 years at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Coming from a completely contemporary, publicly located collection, Kline was perhaps not the obvious choice for the Bowdoin museum, steeped as it is in history and tied in traditional fashion to a single building. The match appears to have its own chemistry, however, and with a major building program just ahead for the Bowdoin museum, Kline’s flexibility and her affinity for the unexpected will be particular assets.

Kline is not a large or loud person. Her manner is reserved on first meeting, in the dim corner of a Thai restaurant, and nothing about her shortish blond hair or understated dress cries out for attention. She has certain urban-bred expectations — her standards are high for both newspapers and restaurants — but it’s not difficult to imagine her settling into the keyed-down Maine lifestyle, at home on the quiet, country fringes of Brunswick. She was raised in the Massachusetts Berkshires, after all.

“It’s easier to go and get an urban hit than it is to come up here and see the sun rising through the trees,” she reflects. A job offer in Texas wouldn’t have been such a magnet; as a 10-year-old kid on vacation, Kline connected memorably with Maine. “The color, the light, the smell of it got into my blood,” she remembers.

There wasn’t much that was low-key about her first year in Brunswick. Just before she took the position at Bowdoin, Kline and her former MIT colleague Helaine Posner were selected by a national committee to organize the US entry in the prestigious Venice Biennale. The project, an abstract, poetic installation by Ohio artist Ann Hamilton, divided Kline’s focus in the months before the Venice exhibition, but brought her incalculable international notice.

“It was a wonderful, complex, mysterious project so ambitious I can’t believe we pulled it off in the time frame,” she says. The pair had practice. In 1994, a proposal by Kline and Posner was chosen for the first season of the high-profile American Center in Paris, putting MIT in impressive company that included the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Kline describes the Venice installation — with the wonder and enthusiasm of a first-time curator — as a rumination on the emotional and moral health of America at the millennium. Invading the architecture of the US pavilion, it involved Braille poetry, a whispered speech by Abraham Lincoln, and the installation of an elaborate duct system that allowed pink dust to trail down the interior walls. Risky, haunting, and powerful even in the telling, it’s enough to make a listener wonder what Kline might have seen to intrigue her in the hallowed halls of Bowdoin.

“At MIT, it was a challenge to explain to people that contemporary art didn’t arrive full-blown, that it came out of a tradition,” she says. “I was attracted to the idea of working with a historical tradition, doing contemporary art in the context of art history.”

One might imagine that Bowdoin felt strange to Kline at first, even claustrophobic, but in fact it felt familiar. Raised in Williamstown, Massachusetts, she studied art history at Ohio’s Oberlin College after taking “one of those wonderful, eye-opening classes,” and she stayed after graduation for a curatorial internship. Whether it’s Oberlin, MIT, or Bowdoin, she believes the college campus is a place ideally suited to the museum purpose. “Art is about ideas,” she says. “Place it in the context of an academic community, and it allows you to do almost anything, because you’re investigating an intellectual idea, and supporting it with material evidence.”

She likes calling on Bowdoin’s community of scholars, and has been impressed by their contributions. Seeking a catalog essay for the current show of paintings by contemporary artist Walton Ford, she looked no further than the Bowdoin English department, and was rewarded with a piece of writing by Professor Franklin Burroughs she describes as the most important ever on Ford’s work.

Kline clearly thrives on ideas, but her second year at the college wasn’t any intellectual reverie. The demands of the Biennale finally behind her, the museum’s bricks-and-mortar problems reared up to consume her immediate attention. “Occasionally I was thinking, where’s the art history?” she confesses.

A plan for renovation and expansion will continue to require Kline’s attention for three years. If all goes according to schedule, the museum will be emptied of its 14,000 objects this summer to make way for $12 million in improvements to the 106-year-old Walker Art Building. The museum will reopen in the fall of 2003 with handicapped access, about 2000 additional square feet of floor space, and consolidated storage, now scattered among four locations.

Most important, the building’s climate control systems will be modernized. Current inadequacies severely restrict the art that Bowdoin can borrow, and climate control has driven the renovation project. Ironically, existing restrictions have made Kline’s baby — contemporary art — the natural choice for recent museum shows, because environmental standards are less strict for newer works. Already, Kline says with regard to newer art, “the way had been shown” at Bowdoin by curator Alison Ferris, another contemporary specialist now in her fourth year at the college.

Shows since Kline’s arrival have been neither shocking nor impenetrably obscure. They have shown an eye for the fresh and unexpected, especially Polly Apfelbaum’s velvet fabric-based “Skin and Bones” installation last winter. Two drawing shows this past summer and last summer, Susan Hartnett’s “Maine Grasses” and “Littoral Abstractions” by Emily Nelligan, were especially strong. “Those felt good to me,” Kline says of the drawing exhibitions. “They acknowledged our responsibility to show landscape” — and met public expectations — “but in a way no one else was doing it.”

In the current show, “Brutal Beauty,” Walton Ford’s paintings of birds look at first like a tribute to the famed illustrator John James Audubon, but they are “slyly critical” of the natural history tradition, Kline explains.

Defying expectations is a key to Kline’s approach. Ask her about the importance of being unpredictable, and she lights up with affirmation. “Oh, I like that,” she answers, with a lively hint of mischief.

Helaine Posner, now an independent curator in New York, calls Kline “truly creative,” and said surprise and innovation were signature features of her leadership of the List Center. Adventures included an artist-in-residence series whereby contemporary talents were regularly immersed in campus works-in-progress.

“Contemporary programs can get repetitive, but it was never the same things being trotted out,” says Posner. “Katy is more original in her thinking than many museum curators.”

Of course, in contemporary art, risk can be a deadly serious matter. At MIT, Kline showed a will of steel in supporting worthwhile projects in the face of public pressure. In 1992, when a List Center exhibit with graphic sexual content was denied funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kline resolved to proceed with the show, “Corporal Politics,” as scheduled. The band Aerosmith gave the museum $10,000 to make up the lost funds. It wasn’t lost on Kline that the uproar sparked the kind of attendance and attention that would have been otherwise unlikely.

When the Bowdoin museum closes for renovation, the days are likely to turn unpredictable. The staff will keep working on an ingenious mix of out-of-building programs, including shows of outdoor sculpture, a film and video series, and lectures on the value of art by a variety of speakers from outside the art world. It’s the kind of place-flexible program Kline is expert at, given her years with the MIT collection. In Cambridge, the art was sited to be part of everyday life, an arrangement which saved Mohammed the trouble of going to the mountain. At Bowdoin, audiences have to be drawn to a destination, a task made easier in Kline’s estimation by students’ openness to the museum.

“At MIT, it was a different level of interest in what we could do,” she says. “Students are so driven at MIT, unless you can offer them course credit, you can’t get them there.” An annual art-loan program made 350 artworks on paper available free to MIT students, who were happy to take them home for a couple of semesters, “but you saw them at the pick-up, and maybe not again until the end of the year.” At Bowdoin, Kline said, students are regulars at the museum, especially in the teaching gallery, where all the work on display is related to college courses in progress.

Kline is adept at drawing people in, not only students, but faculty, administration and the larger community. For “R.S.V.P.,” a current show of 28 transportation-themed photographs, she asked 28 college personalities to write a personal response to one image apiece. The mini-essays will be used as wall labels and conversation-starters. Contributors include professors, the president’s wife, and a museum security guard. Kline said the goal is erosion of the notion that only art historians can respond to art.

Susan Kaplan, director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin, sees faculty from many different departments using the Museum of Art. A leader of the search committee that chose the new art museum director, she said Kline has fostered a lively museum environment that’s increasingly seen as an everyday resource, “not a place you bring your parents when they’re visiting and you don’t know what to do with them.”

“It’s a beautiful building, and yet, if you’re not used to museums, going up the steps between those stone lions and through the revolving door — there’s no way you can do it quietly,” Kaplan says. “So it’s a challenge.”

Always looking to broaden access, Kline’s to-do list includes virtual computer access to the Bowdoin collection and possibly, as part of the renovation, a museum cafe that would ramp up the social aspects of the museum experience.

Lattes or no lattes, the art objects will always take precedence.

“Especially now, when so much of our experience is disembodied, virtual, electronic, I believe the ultimate touchstone is the individual and the actual material object occupying the same space at the same moment,” she says. “It’s up to the museum to insist on that, to insist that the [reproduction] of the thing is not the experience.”

The experience is important to Kline on a personal level. When she recently stayed with her old friend Posner during a trip to New York, the pair made time to check out some gallery shows.

“She really pauses, and tries to take things in,” said Posner. “She’s someone who really looks, which sounds like a simple matter, but you get to the point where you read so much, and hear so much criticism, it’s difficult to look with fresh eyes. She’s someone who has always emphasized the looking . . . She slows me down when we go to galleries together.”

On this particular evening, in the restaurant, Kline’s conversation is thoughtful and patient, but with dinner finished, her next move is anything but slow. There’s an evening lecture at the museum, by a Rutgers University professor, on images of the Holocaust in the work of contemporary Jewish-American artists. Setting aside her Thai eggplant special, she’s out of her seat and headed back to campus. If she’s lucky, dessert will be her favorite: substantial new ideas, and striking visual evidence to support them, served up in a rich historical context. How sweet.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.