Opening the vault
When John Gordon was in graduate school, he visited a dark storage room with two art handlers and a curator to take out a French side chair from the 1920s. Guided by flashlights, the four finally found the object’s case — but the art handlers couldn’t figure out how to get it open. “So there we are with our flashlights looking through the glass, and they’re telling me about the object, and we all are laughing about it,” he says.
Gordon tells me this as we walk through a very different art storage space. Fluorescent lights illuminate row upon row of glass exhibition cases that Gordon can open with a key in his pocket. The cases are filled with small objects organized by material — wooden headdresses, silver saucers, and blue porcelain plates — each tagged with a label and barcode. The room is expansive, and our voices echo over the pleasant hum of generators in the background. Nothing is hidden away in boxes, and hundreds of objects are within arm’s reach.
“The idea here is that every case should be accessible by a curator or staff member working alone,” says Gordon, who is now the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) and has served as the curatorial lead for the development of this new facility.
On Sept. 29, 2014, the YUAG announced the receipt of a major donation from Margaret and C. Angus Wurtele to support the construction and outfitting of a new art storage facility at Yale’s West Campus in Orange, CT. This wouldn’t be a traditional sort of storage center, though. The YUAG’s collections wouldn’t sit in boxes, as they had for many years in several facilities scattered throughout nearby Connecticut towns. Instead, the Center would house between 30,000 and 40,000 objects in a combination of glass cases, drawers, and compact storage, easing access to objects that might otherwise sit unseen, untouched, and unstudied.
“I liken museums to icebergs, where the smallest bit is above the water, and the majority hidden from view,” Gordon says. The iceberg analogy is apt: for most museums, the proportion of art on display out of their entire permanent collection often hovers between 5 and 10 percent. A Quartz survey of 20 museums in seven countries found that two thirds of Georgia O’Keefe paintings and almost half of all Picassos are hidden away in storage.
The YUAG’s own collection has grown to over 200,000 objects since John Trumbull donated roughly 100 American paintings to Yale to found the museum in 1832. But only approximately 4 percent of this collection is on display at a time. Even some curators haven’t seen all of the art in their own department. “I have worked here for eleven years and have never seen the entirety of my collection,” Gordon said.
The Wurtele Center follows a trend of initiatives led by large galleries to make their collections more accessible to the public. The New York Historical Society, Brooklyn Museum, and Metropolitan Museum have all created open-access storage facilities of some kind. But the size and scale of the Wurtele Center is unprecedented.
As the Center opens its doors to students, scholars, and others, the museum is re-examining its role as a teaching institution and its responsibility to increase arts access for the community it serves.
The idea to create an open-access facility originated during a time of flux for the YUAG’s art storage systems. When the museum began a major renovation in 2003, objects stored in the basement of the museum’s downtown location needed a place to go. The Yale University Library offered the museum some of its space at the Library Shelving Facility in Hamden, CT. So the museum staff packed their objects into boxes by size, stuffed them with foam, and shipped a large share of their collection across town. When I visited the Wurtele Center, Gordon showed me an example of the old storage system: a large, beige vase encased in pegboard-like material. Foam supports and padding secured the vase in place like a straightjacket.
At the old storage facility, the boxes were stored warehouse-style: you needed a cherry-picker to access many of the pieces. This made the art stored there largely inaccessible. Anyone who wanted to view a piece in storage had to place an order with the art handlers two weeks in advance. And this type of storage system posed conservation issues, too: “In the past, there have been issues with different kinds of pollutants being trapped in storage compartments and actually causing degradation of art,” said Carol Snow, Deputy Chief Conservator and the Alan J. Dworsky Senior Conservator of Objects at the YUAG. Snow has led most of the conservation and preservation efforts in the design and planning of the Wurtele Center.
“We knew that was always going to be a temporary situation, and we just had to get our objects out of storage in the basement of the art gallery so we could renovate it,” Gordon said.
As the YUAG renovation went on and the Library became more and more anxious to get its storage space back, the YUAG started looking for other options. The University had purchased a 136-acre property from Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 2007 which eventually became Yale’s West Campus. In the middle of the Bayer Pharmaceutical plant sat an enormous 49,000 square-foot room used for packaging aspirin in the building’s past life. “I’m not up on my football, but apparently that’s getting close to football field size,” Gordon chuckled.
Gordon and his colleagues began eyeing the room as a possible destination for the YUAG collections scattered in storage units throughout Hamden. “It became a perfect storm of opportunities,” Gordon said. “The University said we could take over that space and we thought, ‘Okay this is great, we’ll turn it into a storage for all of those objects that are up at the Library Storage Facility.’”
But then the planning committee began to consider more thoughtfully what type of storage facility they would want to create. Would they simply mimic their old storage strategy? Would they house storage for all collections, or just African and Indo-Pacific? Or just American art?
“We finally realized that if we were going to move our objects and go through all of this work, we might as well try something really new,” Gordon said.
The committee began to explore the possibilities of open-access storage in more depth. A working group traveled to similar facilities — or visited open-access centers during personal trips — to learn from their successes and shortcomings. “We did our homework,” Snow said.
Gradually, plans for the Wurtele Center began to take shape. Following the model of many libraries, two-thirds of the collections would be placed in compact storage units, while the remaining third would sit in exhibition-style glass cases which would define the architecture of the Center. The contents of these glass cases would be organized primarily by medium, rather than by size, time period, or museum department. “People get very territorial in life, and museums are similar,” Gordon said. “Departments — we’re all colleagues, we all get along, but we all want to make sure our department has the wall space that we need. So I didn’t feel like continuing that here.”
The choice to organize the Wurtele Center storage by medium has enabled conservation innovations. “We’ve been able to create microclimates depending on the best preservation practices for each kind of material,” Snow said. Each microclimate zone is customized with its own humidity levels and temperature. Special pumps infuse each case with filtered dry air at just the right level, optimized for the materials that inhabit it. This has important implications for sensitive, corrosive metals, which might otherwise require special coatings or additional conservation. “We can put them in the glass cases and the metal cabinets, and just by being in that microenvironment, it preserves them,” Snow said.
The Wurtele Center’s location at West Campus has also opened the door for new conservation opportunities. The Conservation Laboratory belonging to the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage sits just across the hall from the entrance to the Wurtele Center. This lab space is open to all conservators at Yale, facilitating collaboration across disciplines. “We have art gallery conservators working side-by-side with British Art Center conservators and Peabody staff,” Snow said. “We have different specialties, but we’re all working within this one big open space, which we think is great.”
Previously, an object might travel to multiple buildings — or even cities — to undergo the necessary conservation work. Now, all work on a single object can happen under the same roof.
Still, there are some drawbacks to moving some of the YUAG’s conservation work to West Campus — in particular, the distance from the museum’s downtown location. “When conservators come and visit us from other museums, they can’t believe how much space we all have,” Snow said. “But it’s at the cost of the conservation staff not being together as much as we would like.”
The problem of location has posed a paradox for the Wurtele Center. On one hand, the expansive space at West Campus enables a place like the Wurtele Center to open up access to a museum’s collections in a way that would be impossible in downtown New Haven. But the Center’s distance from the museum’s central location makes it challenging to visit in the first place. It takes a 20-minute shuttle ride south on I-95 to get to West Campus. Even the West Campus shuttle stops downtown are inconvenient for some, with the pickup locations only at the School of Medicine and Science Hill. Access is simultaneously the Wurtele Center’s greatest strength and weakness.
“Most museums are in urban areas where every inch is precious, but here at West Campus we have the benefit of space, so we were generous with how much space we gave to the examination of objects,” Gordon said. “But our biggest challenge is access.”
Access is harder for some than others, according to Edward Cooke, the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts, and the Director of the Center for the Study of American Art & Material Culture. Along with Denise Leidy, Curator of Asian Art at the YUAG, Cooke will be teaching the first class based out of the Wurtele Center next semester — a graduate-level course on Lacquer in a World Context.
“The hardest part is for the undergraduates, who are so tightly scheduled and compressed here and have a difficult enough time walking to Science Hill,” Cooke said.
In the future, the Wurtele Center planners hope they can create a new shuttle line or stop to make travel to the Center more accessible from downtown. There are also hopes of working with the University Registrar to create a laboratory time slot on Fridays so that undergraduate courses can schedule prolonged, uninterrupted visits to the Wurtele Center.
For all its geographical challenges, the Wurtele Center has the potential to transform the nature and capacity of arts education at the YUAG. The downtown museum space is outfitted with three art classrooms where students can visit and study objects in the museum’s collection. In the past, though, this has required the taxing process of calling items out of storage and transporting them to the museum. At the Wurtele Center, the objects are stored just a few feet away from art classrooms.
There are four new seminar spaces designed for teaching at the Wurtele Center, enabling class visits or even entire courses to be taught out of the space. “What’s so revolutionary and transformative about the idea of having most of our collections stored in the same location as our teaching spaces is that it cuts down on the artworks having to be carried in trucks to our downtown location,” Issa Lampe told me. Lampe is the Bradley Senior Associate Curator of Academic Affairs in the Department of Education at the YUAG, and she oversees between 700 and 800 course visits to the museum each year. “The whole vision is to move the students to the art instead of moving the art to the students,” she said.
I asked Cooke what it would be like to try and teach the new Lacquer course without a space like the Wurtele Center. “It’d be peripatetic,” he said. “You’d be having to navigate so many different parts of the campus.”
There’s something transformative about teaching with objects — a practice that Cooke says has been somewhat lost in recent decades. “The Enlightenment model in the 18th century is all about becoming learned through reading, and observing, and handling,” he said. “We’ve forgotten parts of the looking and handling.”
When Carol Snow first came to the YUAG and began assisting in classrooms, she was hesitant to see fragile items passed around in such an open way. “I thought this is crazy, you know? There’s too much risk involved and there’s going to be damage,” she said. Over time, though, Snow says she saw how gratifying it was for students to handle objects. “There’s no way to get that same appreciation just by looking at a 2,000 year old Greek kylix in a case on view at the museum,” she said. “When you take away the barriers, it enriches the learning experience so much. I’m a total proponent now.”
It’s still unclear how accessible this type of object-based learning at the Wurtele Center will be to those outside the Yale community. Protocols for how school field trips, collectors’ clubs, and other social organizations will be able to schedule visits are still in development. For now, trips to the Center are coordinated through the curators on a case-by-case basis.
Isaac Bloodworth, a New Haven resident and recent graduate of the University of Connecticut who interned with the YUAG through a New Haven Promise program, said he hopes the University makes the space as accessible as possible to the broader community. “It’s going to be as open as Yale will allow it to be open, which I think is what they really wanted to do,” he said.
Over time, the YUAG staff expect the Wurtele Center to develop into a space that is worth the extra travel time. “Our goal is to make a space that is so alluring that people would want to overcome the issues of distance to come visit.” Gordon said.
The Wurtele Center seeks to address the chronic problem that all large art museums face: what should they do with all their stuff? Increasing access and creating innovative spaces where viewers can interact with art in a more tangible way might be one way to answer this question. But some scholars see the tradition of museums constantly collecting more and more art as the real problem — a problem that cuts deeper than opening the doors to the storage vaults.
“[Open-access storage] doesn’t sound like a long-term solution to the constant inflow of art and the limited attention span of museum audiences,” says Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively on how museums should handle their collections. The real issue, according to O’Hare, is not how to increase access, but how to decrease accumulation.
Given the staggering proportion of works that are not displayed and likely never will be, O’Hare argues that museums should sell part of their collections.
“Museums are collecting institutions, and a question that not a lot of museum people want to discuss is, are we just going to collect forever? Can we just continue to acquire all these pieces?” O’Hare said. “But it can’t go on forever.”
John Gordon acknowledges this problem, but sees potential for the Wurtele Center to play a role in helping curators consider what they should keep and what they should let go. “I do feel strongly that if you have an object, you should have it for a reason,” Gordon said. “Part of the process in moving these collections is there were some things we realized we don’t need. We’re constantly thinking and reassessing the collection. It’s like any of us cleaning out our closet every once in awhile.”
The unique purpose of college and university museums might also require collections to expand over time. Museums at academic institutions are charged with both exposing the public to art and training the next generation of curators, conservators, and art historians. “We come from a slightly more complicated stance than most museums, and I think spaces like this really help our mission because we want students to come and look at things; we want scholars to come and look at things,” Gordon said.
The word “curator,” Gordon tells me, doesn’t mean “to choose,” but “to care for.” As a curator, his responsibility is to protect the art in the museum’s collection — not only for the sake of preserving history, but to pass down the skills required to properly care for art.
“We are stewards of history,” he said. “The appropriate storage of objects is part of it, but I do feel strongly that if you have an object, you should have it for a reason. On a university or college campus, that imperative is even stronger.”
I asked Edward Cooke what he thought about the problem of accumulation. “It depends on whether you think of the museum as primarily collecting objects or forming knowledge,” he said. “And the fact is that so much knowledge is derived from objects.”
The Wurtele Center is taking objects — and the knowledge they bear — out of boxes and into the open. There are still kinks that need to be worked out and challenges ahead. But as I walked through the Wurtele Center on a tour last Tues., there was evidence of progress everywhere. Blue painter’s tape labeled compact storage cabinets with “ASIAN ART STARTS HERE” and “ROLL SLOWLY!” A yellow ladder stood propped open in front of an open glass case. Two red carts scattered with a smattering of colorful glass vessels sat between two shelves where Gordon had just been at work, organizing inkwells and selecting pieces for display. Many cases were empty, awaiting the choice objects of YUAG curators.
Even with the opening of the Wurtele Center, a large portion of the YUAG’s permanent collection remains out of view. But the Center is an essential first step toward expanding access to other types of collections in the museum’s possession, such as paintings and furniture, Gordon tells me.
“I would feel much more ambivalent about having these really incredible collections or working to get donations if I knew that they were going to spend their life in darkness,” he said. “Here we’re giving them second, third, fourth lives. These objects have had many lives, and this is only one.”
