A few good words about a mensch

Santa Fe and the art world recently lost a great friend and a great mensch: Arden Reed. Arden was a real “mensch” — a word he used freely to compliment people he admired.

Leo Rosten, the author of The Joys of Yiddish, defines a mensch as “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being a real mensch is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous.” The term is used as a high compliment, implying the rarity and value of that individual’s qualities. In New Mexico we refer to such people as gente de corazón.

Arden, who split his time between Santa Fe and Southern California, where he taught at Pomona College, was a scholar of 19th-century English and French literature and of visual art as well as contemporary visual culture. He was the recipient of numerous fellowships, including ones from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Clark Institute. He lectured widely, from the Russian Academy in St. Petersburg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to Kings College in Cambridge, England, and the Ecole Normal Supérieur in Paris.

He recently wrote Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell. The book is about attending to visual images in a culture of distraction, specifically extending the six to 10 seconds that Americans, on average, spend looking at individual works on museums walls and why that matters. Slow Art dwells with various media: photography, painting, sculpture, film, fiction, video, digital and performance art from the present and the past. Taken together, these art forms shape a new and distinct aesthetic field. For viewers experienced or novice, Slow Art models ways to enhance acts of looking to make them more meaningful.

Arden thought that the longer you looked at something, the more interesting it became. He applied this methodology not only to the works of art he experienced, but the people he met. He gave his undivided attention and listened intently to fully understand, empathize and offer commentary on whatever the subject or issue being discussed.

A thoughtful, caring lover of the arts and the people who create them, Arden distinguished himself as the Arthur and Fanny Dole Professor of English at Pomona College.

When he wasn’t sharing his expertise of 19th-century English and French literature, he enjoyed being an important member of the Santa Fe art community, where he interacted with artists, museum curators, gallerists, other writers, his wide circle of friends and admirers and anyone interested in experiencing Santa Fe’s vibrant art scene.

He owes much of his contemplative spirit to the sanctuary that he and his life partner, Dru Sherrod, built at their home and studios in an old piñon forest and meadows outside of Santa Fe. It is there that the two would listen to the trees rustle and the birds sing, and where Arden found the solace he needed to collect his thoughts. He applied this calming thoughtfulness to his invaluable contributions to the world of art criticism.

From On Suspension, a piece he wrote for the catalogue of the exhibition, Tom Joyce: Everything at Hand at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Arden writes, “To anticipate: Joyce’s work is suspended between nature and culture, peace and war, hot and cold, moving and still, hard and soft, levity and gravity, the delicate and the adamantine, fast and slow, time and space. More, suspension leads us directly to the ethical, political, and ecological core of Joyce’s practice.”

For those of us who were fortunate enough to know him, a final quote from the mensch: “By slowing down we can actually experience paintings as if they were moving pictures: ever so subtly, or not subtly, they keep changing, keep moving and keep moving us. If you can give an artwork time, it will give back.”

Thank you, Arden, for all that you gave back.

Stuart A. Ashman is executive director and chief curator for the Center for Contemporary Arts. The Center for Contemporary Arts and Tom Joyce are dedicating the exhibition closing event and catalog signing to Arden Reed from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 30.