Questions surround fate of art collection
No quick answers on what to do with rare books, photographs, sculptures that belong to city
All the collections at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design belong to the city — and so they belong to you.
Rare books, LPs, sculptures, drawings, photographs, oil paintings and ancient ceramics are a trove that helped make an art school an art school. And prior to that, much of it was the pride of the College of Santa Fe.
But when the institution surrounding these collections simply disappears, what happens? What’s to be done with the precious research materials and antiquities, the collections that were once curriculum, the inestimable public assets stashed on the city-owned campus?
The imminent closure of the forprofit arts college opens the question. The answer is: We’ll see.
Those who helped compile the collections in the first place, and some who served as their stewards, have clear ideas. They want to keep the items together and keep them in Santa Fe, certainly. Let the people who bought them, when the city purchased the college campus in 2009, see them, use them and enjoy them.
“I don’t think it should be in anybody’s basement,” said Mary Anne Redding, a former curator of the Marion Center for Photographic Arts, who was once chairwoman of the photography department.
City officials continue to deliberate on what to do with the materials, saying the short-term priority is to simply finalize the latest inventory and keep the items secure.
“Decisions about the art collection will be made in step with the city’s larger plan for the campus,” said Debra Garcia y Griego, who leads the city Arts Commission. “Obviously those collections were developed for educational purposes in Santa Fe. The intent would be to maintain them for that to the extent possible.”
The various assets — split across the Fogelson Library, the Marion Center and its Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Library, the Chase Art History Library and Thaw Art History Center, the grounds and wall space of the campus — are valued in the millions. But it’s their cultural and aesthetic value that makes them treasures.
They include thousands of photographs by leading 20th-century artists; an extensive rare book collection; Mimbres pottery and other ancient Southwestern ceramics; pre-Columbian Mesoamerican, South American and Native American art; private research libraries of leading photographers; pieces from familiar names, like Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso; and much more.
An inventory compiled in 2009 is more than 110 pages long, much of it in a font too small to easily make out.
What ought to be done with all of it “is a million-dollar question,” said Khristaan Villela, the director of the Museum of International Folk Art, who was the founding director of the Thaw Art History Center.
Interviews with various people involved with the collections and at the city made clear there’s no fast and easy answer. “It’s definitely orphaned,” Villela said. While city officials suggest the materials would remain in the educational realm, the prospect they could be parceled out to different institutions remains.
“It’s a tragedy,” said James Enyeart, a photographer and scholar who was founding director of the Marion Center. “It’s an absolute, unabated tragedy, the possibility that all of this, the extraordinary collection and institutions designed for the arts, could not be sustained by Santa Fe.”
The city has nearly completed a “comprehensive” inventory of the 1,150 objects in the art collection, which began in December, Garcia y Griego said. She credited Laureate Education Inc., the art school’s parent company, for the maintenance of the items.
“All parts of the collection have been kept in as good a condition, if not better, as when the campus was purchased,” she said.
The total value of the art collection is $4.2 million, said Garcia y Griego, citing several appraisals from 2002 through this year. The photography collection accounts for most of the value at $3.3 million.
The collections are presently housed across four “secured” areas of the campus, which Garcia y Griego declined to specify.
The city plans an exhibit of 25 to 30 items from the art collection this fall, tentatively scheduled from August through October, said Rod Lambert of the Community Gallery in the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.
“With the whole redoing-the-campus concept, we thought it’s a nice synergistic moment to include a cross section of a collection the taxpayers own,” Lambert said.
But that won’t be a permanent fix, owing to the absence of any municipal museum, even in a city filled with them — unlike the Duke City, where the Albuquerque Museum is a function of the city’s Cultural Services Department.
The lack of a Santa Fe city museum “is a real shame, actually,” Villela said. “From my perspective, with the amount of money tourism is bringing in, it would be great if somebody might consider that idea.”
Most with a hand in the collections said they expected them to remain in Santa Fe in some form or another. For some, there was a clear preference they stay right where they are.
“It’s not possible — it is not possible — to replicate those collections in that environment, which is humidity-controlled, built with those collections in mind as they were developed,” Enyeart said. “It makes no sense to begin splitting it up and moving it out and doing whatever commercial interest might follow.”
“The city works slowly, and this is a slow process,” said Andrew Smith, a gallery owner who has appraised parts of the college collection. “You’re dealing with multiple bureaucracies.”
“I don’t think there’s a story here yet,” he added. “I suspect this will find a home in Santa Fe, but these things take a little time.”
The Beaumont Newhall Library is an exception. Last year, the City Council approved a resolution temporarily donating the research library and its thousands of books and catalogs on photography to the New Mexico Museum of Art, which last year celebrated its centennial.
The museum director, Mary Kershaw, said she has made known to the city she would not turn down the photography collection, as well. “Should they be looking for a place for it to go,” she said. “I respect it’s the city’s decision how it wishes to deploy those resources.”
That decision will come. For now, the vaults are locked.
“If the city simply can’t take care of them, then something is going to have to be done,” Villela said. “I don’t know what that would look like. Whether that’s dividing the collections among museums, looping in [The University of New Mexico], I don’t know.
“In the short term, it seems like, leave ’em down in the vault, for now.”