Museum liaison David Rohr
David Rohr, an avid cyclist since he was a teenager, has participated in the annual Biking Across Kansas event for four decades. “I’m one of the organizers, so I plan the route every year,” he said. Rohr was speaking in his office at the Stewart L. Udall Center for Museum Resources, the hub for his three-pronged job description. When he’s not on his bike, he is the art director for El Palacio magazine, creative director for the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, and director of the Museum Resources Division.
El Palacio falls under that division’s purview. So do the Museum of New Mexico Press; the exhibit services, conservation, and marketing departments; and the mobile museum Wonders on Wheels. “Exhibit Services produces exhibitions for the four state museums,” he said. “In my role, I get to step back and see the big picture and make sure that everyone on the team is following the same playbook. We want the designs to be stellar and visitors to be dazzled by what they see. Then conservation takes objects that are part of collections and they make sure they are fit to be displayed, and if they are not, they’ll work on them gently to get them where they need to be. It’s a combination of science and art.”
Born in Kansas, Rohr earned his degree in graphic design from Wichita State University. After college, he moved to New York, where he worked as assistant design director for Art in America magazine. “That was under the same umbrella with Interview magazine, so I learned a lot,” he said. “I lived there for about four years and that was the time when computers were first being used to produce pages: desktop publishing. I knew QuarkXPress and I was hired to bring the magazine into the digital age. That’s where I got my interest in the cultural arena, seeing so many great works of art coming across our desks.”
He moved to Santa Fe with his wife, artist Roni Rohr, who today is the longtime art teacher at El Dorado Community School. In the early 1990s, he co-founded the Santa Fe Mac Users Group and served as its first president. In 1996, he and a partner started a pioneering web-development company.
“Web design was my entree to El Palacio, because I was known to several people who worked at the museums,” he said. Rohr also does videography for the museums. A recent example was conducted in conjunction with On Exhibit: Designs That Defined the Museum of New Mexico, a current New Mexico History Museum exhibition he curated. For the video component, he selected 10 museum staff members to talk about their perspectives. Two examples from those interviews are International Folk Art Market cofounder Charlene Cerny talking about working on the Girard Collection with designer Alexander Girard, who donated his trove of folk art to the Museum of International Folk Art; and Fran Levine, former director of the New Mexico History Museum, discussing El Hilo de la Memoria: The Threads of Memory, an exhibition that featured important documents from Spain.
A central point of On Exhibit revolves around an examination of how museum design has changed over the years. “You just don’t have items on shelves now,” Rohr said. “The Museum of International Folk Art [which opened in 1953] did radically different things from what you saw at the Palace of the Governors or the art museum. Everything was more open, and they didn’t want to have barriers between the objects and the people.
“The strict description of my job is to oversee exhibitions and conservation, but I continue to be hands-on. I have a very broad skill set and I enjoy that,” he said. He mustered his design moxie to create New Mexico’s centennial license plate, which won best plate of the year in the 2010 competition of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. In his spare time, Rohr is working on a master’s degree in history at the University of New Mexico.
Perhaps his well-balanced character is grounded in his predilection for bicycling. Rohr rides a 2003 Klein. “So much of my work has been behind the computer screen, so it’s good to get out and experience the world. I also do a lot of running events.”
He loves that his work with the state museums is multifarious. “I’d much rather be involved in the front lines helping to open an exhibition than be secluded in my office with paperwork. I also enjoy researching and writing. This position has allowed me to take all of the interests and talents that I have and combine them in this crossroads of technology, culture, and creativity. It’s a dream job.” — Paul Weideman
“I’d much rather be involved in the front lines helping to open an exhibition than be secluded in my office with paperwork.”