The focus of “Re: Collection,” the Museum of Arts and Design’s farewell exhibition to recently retired chief curator David McFadden, “is not about me,” McFadden insists, but rather, about “people who know what they’re doing.”
Not that McFadden doesn’t know what he’s doing — quite the contrary. Prior to announcing his retirement in October, he served a 16-year tenure at the museum. As a final send-off, MAD asked that he put together a show of greatest hits pulled from the acquisitions made during that period, in which the collection tripled, growing from 800 pieces to more than 3,000.
“My first cut had almost 200 objects,” McFadden told ARTINFO over the phone, “and then the reality of the gallery space set in.” After painstakingly hewing down his selections, he produced a densely packed, 70-piece exhibition of a wide breadth of media, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics, furniture, and textiles meant to highlight various aspects of the museum’s history.
McFadden said that he stuck to “work that is extremely accomplished in its physical fabrication,” many methods of which are experimental. The exhibition spans late 19th-century Moroccan silversmithing to contemporary works, like Nendo’s 2008 Cabbage Chair Prototype, comprised of hundreds of sheets of discarded paper rolled into a tube and slit down the middle to unfold into a seat, and Jennifer Trask’s “Intrinsecus,” 2010, a shiny play on the 17th-century vanitas, tailored to MAD’s 2010 “Dead or Alive” show by incorporating gilded animal remains. “Re: Collection” also highlights the tendency of artists to make forays into crafts atypical of their bodies of work: Judy Chicago and Audrey Cowan’s large-scale tapestry “The Fall (from the Holocaust Project),” 1993, blankets a gallery wall with woven images of thousands of years’ worth of atrocities; Cindy Sherman’s “Madame de Pompadour (née Poisson),” 1990, transfers her signature self-portrait work onto a design object.
The show is a rarity in that, given the occasion, its curator was able to provide his personal point of view. Each object is presented alongside a narrative that reinforces its relevance, either to the museum or to the artist. Sandy Skoglun’s “Breathing Glass,” 2000, for example, a photograph of sculpted mosaic, is an image that marks the moment the museum bridged photography with three-dimensional art. Belarus-born Vitra Mitrichenka’s “Victoria” tea set, 2008, a sculptural collage of shards of china, is an homage to her Russian grandmother who had always insisted on reusing rather than discarding broken wares.
“All of these objects speak to us,” McFadden said. While it sounds cliché, the selection of greatest hits, culled from the museum’s past, actually sets down a trajectory for museums to follow when considering design, a point that some seem to have lost. It’s not “objects that are made just to look good,” McFadden continued. “They have tremendous reverberations throughout culture, society, ideas about ourselves, relationships about each other, and the human condition.”
“Re: Collection” is on view at the Museum of Arts and Design through September 7. Click on the slideshow to see highlights from the exhibition.
