February 16, 2012
On Wednesday, Hamilton welcomed Laurel Bradley, one of two final candidates for director of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Art Museum. Next Tuesday, the community invites the other candidate, Tracey Adler, to the Hill. These visits represent the culmination of an in-depth search for a director who will foster and promote the values that Hamilton expects from the new museum.
Although the already looming, temporarily-yellow structure may seem to have risen almost instantaneously, the construction plans for the Wellin Museum of Art have been in the works for quite some time (over 10 years for the College’s Facility Committee). The search for the museum’s director officially began with the creation of a search committee in early June of last year. Members of the committee include representatives from the Art, Art History, Music and Anthropology Departments, the President’s and C&D offices, the Arts Facilities Committee, the Hamilton Committee of the Visual Arts and consultants from Skidmore’s Tang Museum of Art and Haverford College’s Fine Art department. The search committee is joined in their efforts by a professional headhunter of the firm Phillips & Oppenheim, which specializes in employment in the arts.
The criteria for picking candidates, according to Associate Professor of Art History and member of the search committee Deborah Pokinski “ultimately boiled down to the fact that we were defining this as a teaching museum.” Where other public museums aim to attract audiences with their shows and collections, Wellin Museum will be a “museum in which we use visual objects in connection with not only art and art history, but classes across all disciplines,” said Pokinski. Responsibilities of the Director will include those familiar to the head of a traditional museum, such as collection and exhibition management, but will also involve duties unique to a college museum. Wellin Museum’s ultimate purpose, after all, is not simply to cater to the arts but to involve visual analysis across the full range of Hamilton’s liberal arts curriculum.
As both the head of the museum and a liaison between the museum and the broader Hamilton community, the director will help to make this involvement possible. Bradley and Adler’s differing backgrounds speak to several of the museum’s goals. Coming from Carleton College’s Perlman Museum, Bradley has a background in college museums and is undoubtedly experienced in involving the visual arts in an educational environment. As a New York-based art consultant, Adler would bring a familiarity with contemporary art which would be valuable in securing and creating interesting, innovative shows for Wellin Museum. Both candidates have extensive training in Art History—Bradley holds a Ph. D and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, and Adler an M.A. from Hunter College—which will prove necessary in building a collection befitting Hamilton’s history and prestige as a dynamic and diverse institution.
Ultimately, though, it is the involvement of the campus and community in the museum that those supporting it deem most important. Wellin Museum has been a long time coming, and its opening makes a strong statement about the arts at Hamilton and about our dedication to a true liberal arts education. “This being an institution that includes the whole campus will have a big impact on how we view the arts at Hamilton,” said Pokinski. Indeed, it makes it clear that Hamilton is dedicated to the arts and to their power for education across disciplines.
Significantly, when Bradley and Adler make their respective visits to the Hill, they will meet not only with Art and Art History faculty and Emerson Gallery staff, but with a wide range of students, alumni, professors and members of the Hamilton community, emphasizing the importance of the museum’s integration at Hamilton. Ideally, Wellin Museum’s influence will spread even further than just the confines of the College’s acreage to become a positive force of inspiration not only at Hamilton but within the surrounding community as well. Whichever candidate is selected will be entrusted with the exciting task of forging a new comprehensive identity for the arts at Hamilton and presenting this identity both within the Hamilton community and the museum world.