Rockwell, O'Keeffe among works to come
Empty walls - they're every museum director's worst nightmare.
But Howard Taylor, director of the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, buzzed around the bare walls of his museum's upstairs galleries earlier this week with excitement.
With the fervor of an orchestral conductor, he drew his hands down from the ceiling towards the walls, tracing imaginary lines of the light paths he would use to illuminate the drab interiors.
An empty wall? Not for Taylor. More like an empty canvas.
When the museum unveils works from some of the nation's most celebrated painters on those walls on July 3, that canvas may very well be his masterpiece.
The 150-piece ''Visions of America'' collection, featuring works from Norman Rockwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Winslow Homer and other American painters, arrives at the museum tomorrow (under armed guard, no less) from its previous stop, the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Cincinnati Art Museum curator Julie Aronson spoke of the collection Wednesday.
''It's a spectacular collection,'' she said. ''We just packed up the paintings to send, and I miss them already.''
The Cincinnati Art Museum - that's the kind of place that is supposed to have this kind of exhibit. It takes a big wallet and a bigger sense of notoriety, Taylor says, to host an exhibit of this magnitude.
Though San Angelo isn't exactly dwarfed population-wise in comparison to other cities receiving ''Visions'' (Fort Wayne, Ind. and Glens Falls, N.Y. are among smaller stops; Cincinnati and Memphis the larger) its notoriety is miniscule as compared to, say, the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia - the oldest museum in the South - which received the exhibit from January to March 2005.
''There has to be a perceived sense of prestige,'' Taylor said of the museums selected to host the exhibit.
Telfair has that prestige. San Angelo doesn't. Good fortune brought the paintings to the West Texas museum.
Museum benefactors Ben and Beverly Stribling told Taylor more than a year ago they were looking to throw their money behind a major exhibit for the citizens of San Angelo and West Texas.
Ben Stribling, a local commercial realtor, and his wife are longtime supporters of the arts in San Angelo, underwriting the Annual Stribling Art Extravaganza the past five years.
They're particular fans of Taylor and aim to bring exhibits of the scope of ''Visions'' to the museum more regularly, Ben Stribling said.
''It has its educational value, but more than that, masterpieces like these increase the quality of life for all San Angeloans,'' Stribling said, ''and it establishes the museum as a major venue.''
Taylor had kept an eye out for an exhibit to pique the Striblings' interest for more than a year when he received a call from Douglas Hyland of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Conn.
The New Britain Museum was doing some remodeling, Hyland said, and was taking some of its finer pieces out on tour rather than storing them away. Ten stops were planned and booked, but now, Hyland told Taylor, one museum was backing out. He wanted to know if San Angelo would fill its spot.
''The price of the exhibit made me choke,'' Taylor said, ''but I thought, 'I'm going to try this.'''
Taylor won't say how much money the exhibit will cost the museum, how much of that is being donated by the Striblings or how much is on the line for the little museum on the banks of the Concho.
Suffice it to say, the answer is the same for all three.
A lot.
Taylor estimates the museum will need to pull in $50,000 from ''Visions of America'' alone to pay for the exhibit, not an easy challenge for a museum trying to keep admission prices ''San Angelo friendly,'' Taylor said.
''The myth is rich people take care of you in the museum business,'' Taylor said. ''That's not true. The truth is some people help you out; the Striblings have been helping us for many years.''
Normally, museum visits are $2. It will cost $6 to see the exhibit.
Much of the cost will go to covering marketing costs. Taylor displays an ambitious marketing strategy on a piece of scrap paper from a file in his drawer.
One small circle; that's San Angelo. Around it, circles for Abilene, Midland and Odessa. Further out, circles for San Antonio, Austin and the Dallas/Fort Worth area. One big hoop encircled them all.
Marketing ''Visions'' is not something Taylor is thinking small about. He is banking on the exhibit drawing in art types from throughout Texas.
Accordingly, the museum purchased a full-page advertisement for ''Visions'' in this month's Texas Monthly and smaller ads in newspapers across the state. Taylor would not release the marketing budget, saying only that it's somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000.
Even the name, ''Visions of America,'' is part of Taylor's marketing strategy.
At other stops, the exhibit is known as ''Strokes of Genius: Masterworks from the New Britain Museum of American Art.'' With the exhibit's San Angelo unveiling on the same day as the annual Town & Country July 3 Pops Concert, however, Taylor felt a more patriotic name might coax Pops visitors from the Bill Aylor Sr. Memorial RiverStage to walk next door to the museum.
Every marketing angle Taylor could conceive has been mulled over and played.
''It won't be a failure; that I guarantee,'' Taylor said
Taylor and the Striblings visited Ohio for the exhibit's opening in Cincinnati in the spring. They had seen small reproductions of the works they were to receive, but not until their Cincinnati visit did they finally see the full impact of what they had just signed up for.
''It was just awe-inspiring,'' Ben Stribling said.
The exhibit's Cincinnati gallery was twice the size of the San Angelo museum, Taylor said. The collection's 150 pieces hung horizontally, side-by-side - a display style impossible to repeat locally.
''Visions of America'' is worth making do for, though, he said.
In San Angelo this week, Taylor stood between the empty walls of his primary upstairs gallery. On one of the walls hung three diagrams representing each gallery, each adorned with miniatures of the exhibit's paintings and where each would go.
''We're going to have to do it salon style,'' Taylor said, not entirely enthusiastic about having to display the paintings one on top of the other. ''That's how they would have been displayed in their time, though.''
For all of the museum's empty walls, there is just not enough room to display
Taylor's masterpiece any other way.
Copyright ©2005 San Angelo Standard-Times
San Angelo Museum
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