A feast for the eyes The Visual Arts Center and its collections
THE VISUAL ARTS CENTER AND ITS COLLECTIONS
Art collections and special libraries were envisioned from the beginning as essential for teaching students as well as resources for the Santa Fe community.
ith its bright colors and bold forms, the Visual Arts Center at the College of Santa Fe turned heads in our brown and round town when it debuted in 1999. Designed by the renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta (1931-2011), the Visual Arts Center encompasses the Thaw Art History Center, the Marion Center for Photographic Arts, Chase Art History Library, Tishman Hall, and Tipton Hall.
Legorreta also designed the neighboring Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI), and it is with the institute that CSF’s Visual Arts Center and its involvement with the Mexican architect began. SFAI was founded in 1985 by William Lumpkins and Pony Ault. By the mid-1990s, SFAI sought a permanent home, and board chair John Marion approached CSF president James Fries about the possibility of constructing that home on the campus. According to David Scheinbaum, who joined the CSF faculty in 1980, Fries agreed to SFAI building on campus if they could open a conversation about an additional building for the college. Scheinbaum proposed a center for photography modeled on an idea originally proposed for a California university by photographer Ansel Adams and photo historian Beaumont Newhall. The idea grew into the Visual Arts Center, helmed by art department chair Dick Cook, who joined the college in 1984.
The building committee included, in addition to Fries and Marion, gallerist Laura Carpenter, developer Don Tishman, retired art dealer and philanthropist Eugene V. Thaw, and SFAI executive director Kerry Benson. When Legorreta won the competition to design the Visual Arts Center and the SFAI in early 1995, those who were at the presentations related that the architect arrived alone, accompanied only by a box of slides, whereas the other firms invited to campus — Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and James Stewart Polshek and Partners — had teams of associates, models, plans, and wall charts. Legorreta and his team proposed well over 100,000 square feet of structures divided among the Santa Fe Art Institute and two phases of the Visual Arts Center. Only the first two, totaling about 50,000 square feet, were realized. Among the planned but unbuilt structures was a center for sculpture. (In the early 2000s, Legorreta proposed a student union at CSF, which was also never built.)
Art collections and special libraries were envisioned from the beginning as essential for teaching students as well as resources for the Santa Fe community. Scheinbaum recalled how Thaw stressed to the building committee that library resources were essential to any serious academic undertaking. Through his foundation, Thaw purchased many art books for CSF’s Fogelson Library. He and others acquired the library of Beaumont and Nancy Newhall for the photography center, which was soon christened the Ann and John Marion Center for Photographic Arts. Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993) was the first curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and he built an unparalleled library on the history of photography, complete through the 1980s.
Newer publications on photography were added to the Marion Center Library for use by students, visiting scholars and the Santa Fe community. At the same time, the Marion Center also amassed a remarkable collection of photographs that was intended as a teaching collection with examples of all the historic photography processes. The trove of more than 1,000 images includes works by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Paul Caponigro, Sebastião Salgado, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, Kara Walker, and many more. The Marion Center also had an active exhibition program curated and installed by students, a program that was strengthened by the arrival of noted photography museum professional James Enyeart, who was hired in 1995 to direct the Marion Center and serve as the college’s first endowed chair.
The Thaw Art History Center, which housed the CSF art department, also built notable collections, including a visual resources library (slide library), and the Chase Art History Library, funded by David and Kathy Chase. The Chase Library contains thousands of books, many of them rare, devoted to the arts of the Americas and contemporary art, focuses of the college’s art history and studio arts programs. Between 1999 and CSF’s closure 10 years later, the Chase Library acquired several significant collections of art history books, including books on Spanish Colonial, Iberian, and pre-Columbian art from Yale professor George Kubler, and anthropology, archaeology, and Native American books from longtime Santa Fean Peter Furst. The Chase Library was also a place to show highlights from CSF’s art collections, such as an important Santa Ana Pueblo jar given by Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, a massive Zuni ceramic from the 1920s, examples of pre-Columbian ceramics from Mexico and Peru, and ancient Southwestern ceramics from the Mimbres and other traditions. The library also showed two colonial Mexican paintings of St. Jerome and St. Ambrose, probably from the 1700s, which were part of the original collections of the Christian Brothers. Like the Marion Center photography collection and Newhall Library, the Chase Library book collection and the art objects displayed therein were intended to allow students direct experience with primary materials.
All of the Visual Arts Center collections were assembled by gift or by private donation and none were purchased or acquired with CSF funds. While the collections primarily served the undergrad photo, art history, and studio art programs, all were intended to be a resource to Santa Fe. They now belong to the City of Santa Fe. They should remain a treasure to our community.