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Christoph Heinrich Named Denver Art Museum Director
Christoph Heinrich has been named the new director of the Denver Art Museum. Heinrich came to DAM in October 2007, from the Hamburg (Germany) Kunsthalle, as the curator of modern and contemporary art. In January 2009 he was named assistant director, a move that hinted his next promotion could put him in director Lewis Sharp's seat come January 2010, following Sharp's scheduled retirement on December 31. Sharp has been the museum's director for 20 years and presided over the development of the Hamilton Wing, by architect Daniel Libeskind, for which public and private funds had to be raised.
No other candidates were interviewed for the position, Frederic C. Hamilton, board chairman said, and Hamilton made clear that the museum had no interest in other museum directors as candidates for the job.
"One of the worst things we could do in my opinion," Hamilton said, "is to go out and try to hire a director from a museum today, who is set in his own ways and doesn't adapt to the local environment, the community, museum and so on."
In other words, let's not do anything risky.
Financially, this decision makes sense for the museum, which has a relatively small endowment ($87 million in 2008). I interviewed Heinrich in early September and he assured me that the 2010 budget is "smart and strategic" and the museum remains on "stable ground."
"What is totally clear is that we are all living in the same economy," Heinrich said. "It is clear that we have to do an exciting or even more exciting program with lesser means."
And that will be Heinrich's mandate and challenge.
While a seamless transition is guaranteed, one wonders when the first clues will appear that DAM actually has a new director. Heinrich's hiring as the modern and contemporary art curator sought to bring a European perspective to Denver. Under his curatorial leadership DAM was the first American museum to host an exhibition of the work of German painter Daniel Richter, also from Hamburg. Heinrich then reinstalled the modern and contemporary galleries, which former modern and contemporary curator Dianne Vanderlip had re-installed timed with the Hamilton Wing's opening in 2006. Heinrich decided to focus on the figure, but many of the works on display provided a social commentary rather than the staid historical timeline that Vanderlip, who had spent 30 years as DAM's first contemporary curator, chose to underscore in her installation. Heinrich, rather, utilized the contemporary collection to explore the figure in themes of beauty, hate, sex, life and death; and ideas such as racism and marginalization, gender and politics.
His current project Embrace! Features 17 site-specific works by contemporary artists from around the world including the overexposed El Anatsui, Dallas Cowboy stadium artists Lawrence Weiner and Matthew Brannon, and Golden Lion-winning Tobias Rehberger, among others.
The premise of the exhibition is to get artists and visitors to embrace the angular walls and shapes of the critically panned Hamilton building. A museum space that is more art than place to view art. During our interview in September, Heinrich said that he understood from his first trip to Denver that the building would have to be embraced by artists.
"This is a building made by an artist for artists," Heinrich said. "As a point of departure, artists have the ability to think and to get in a dialogue with the architecture and to work against the architecture."
He's invited artists who work on the edge of several media to embrace the building and respond to Libeskind's sculptural approach to architecture. "Embrace!" will not open until November 14, but the exhibition is growing every week, in an experiment to find a new way to install an exhibition other than the typical two or three weeks of intensity that Heinrich said leaves curators, artists and museum staff all hating each other and stepping on each other's toes.
"Can we have an exhibition grow and have the audience participate?" Heinrich asked.
The museum is answering that question with "Installation Insider Moments" where visitors are invited to converse with the artist during their installation process. To ask questions, not just quietly observe someone at work. Attendance has ranged from a handful to a crowd.
And will it draw visitors back time and time again to follow the progress, increasing attendance numbers? Who knows?
Nicola López (left) assembled a mixed-media work on the 4th floor in a section of the building where the angles of the roof go from 10' and reach up to 30.' It's a web-like construction that twists and snakes across walls and ceilings. The lines are spaghetti style roadways that pile up together and then stretch out alone in fingers around the space. Other projects include a hyper-realistic, true-to-scale painting, created by Denver artist Rick Dula, which appears to penetrate the building and peel back the interior to expose the steel girders. The most visible and expansive installation, by Katharina Grosse (right), features a gorgeous airbrush painting that spans the four-story atrium and is visible from every floor. (Look for a video of Embrace on this site soon!)
Personally, I'm most looking forward to Tobias Rehberger's installation, after his spectacular sculpture as café opened in Venice and he was awarded a Golden Lion award. And speaking of contemporary art awards, I asked Heinrich if he thought DAM would ever present an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in the vein of Philadelphia Art Museum's Bruce Nauman retrospective this year?
"We're not competing," he said. "We [DAM] don't have to be cutting edge. We can be broader in our appeal."
Heinrich also said DAM is committed to being an encyclopedic museum, and mentioned the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA Denver), as if to suggest the cutting-edge programming belnogs at the smaller museum of Denver whose simpler building, by architect David Adjaye, has proven a galvanizing space for public gatherings.
Heinrich's apparent challenge is to determine what DAM has to offer that can be found nowhere else in the world. His Embrace! seems to be a step in that direction.
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Sunday 27 December, 2009