It’s nearly noon on a weekday, and the Delaware Art Museum is seemingly bathed in serenity. A man types on a laptop in the Thronson Café, which overlooks the sun-splashed sculpture garden. In a gallery, a woman wanders from painting to painting. The clunk of her heels on the hardwood floor creates a pleasant echo matched by the footsteps of the guard who passes her, hands clasped behind his back.
In reality, and unbeknownst to most visitors, the museum is a hive of activity. Behind curtains near the gift shop, workers are building the next exhibit. On the basement level, below the galleries, Jonathan Schoff, the museum’s chief preparator, is matting artwork for the exhibit. And in the wing that houses the administrative offices, Susan Zellner, the development director, makes phone calls, while in the office directly above her, executive director Danielle Rice hosts a lunch for an artist and three patrons.
There’s a hum of energy in these rooms that’s palpable. That’s because the exhibit that opens on Nov. 12 and runs through March 4, 2012 is important. It represents the roots of the museum, which in 2012 celebrates its centennial.
“Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered” highlights the art of one of America’s most popular illustrators, whose work appeared in Harper’s Monthly, Collier’s Weekly and Scribner’s Magazine. The Wilmington native taught such well-known artists as N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and Frank E. Schoonover.
- Click here to see a selection of Howard Pyle
Pyle’s death 100 years ago this month prompted his friends, students and admirers to form the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts to preserve his legacy. The society would become the Delaware Art Museum.
“It’s so much about who we are,” said Danielle Rice, the museum’s executive director. To mark the centennial and Pyle’s death, the four curators agreed they had to feature Pyle. “But we had to do this in a way that hadn’t been done before,” Rice said. “I would say this is one of the hardest shows we’ve had to do, because we’re always about Howard Pyle.”
Indeed, the museum already has a permanent exhibit of Pyle’s work. Creating something new and different—and getting it funded—has required an enormous amount of work.
Yet, that is just business as usual at the landmark museum. “There’s so much that people don’t realize goes into an exhibition,” said Molly Keresztury, manager of marketing and public relations.
Here’s a glimpse behind the scenes at just a few of the people who make it all happen.
The Curator
The Pyle exhibit has been a labor of love for chief curator Margaretta Frederick, who’s spent a minimum of three years on it. “The way a curator’s life works is that you have one foot in the present—the exhibition that’s going on today—and you have one foot in the future—the exhibition happening in the next three years,” said Frederick.
Frederick and her team had to look at novel ways to present Pyle to the local audience, who might know him. At the same time, they had to attract a new audience, who may never have heard of him. Pyle lacks the household name recognition of his students, N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. Although an illustrator, he’s not as celebrated as Norman Rockwell, a 20th-century darling.
Before photographs and at a time when short stories peppered magazines, American illustrators brought characters to life. Illustrating involved painting, yet it was often considered a commercial occupation, which gave it a stigma, particularly toward the end of the 19th century. Some illustrators transitioned solely into fine art; Pyle chose not to. As a result, his name doesn’t pop up in art history books.
“So that’s part of what this exhibition is about—to insert him into the history of art,” Frederick said. It’s also about showing that Pyle, like most artists, was influenced by others.
The museum has interspersed certain artists’ artwork into the exhibition to demonstrate similarities. “The point is that he [Pyle] was using all the stylistic stratagems that artists working in the fine arts were using,” Frederick said. “He was competent to work in a way that fine artists were working; but he doesn’t get the credit.”
Frederick divided the exhibition into three thematic areas: visions of the past, which showcases Pyle’s history paintings; America past and present, which deals with American history or contemporary scenes; and fantasy and fairy tales. Pyle’s many pirate illustrations presented a challenge. Though mythical in stature, pirates were real. After discussion, the staff opted to put pirate paintings in both the American and fantasy section.
The curators then had to select about 70 works from the museum’s collection of some 1,200 Pyle pieces. Among them is a mural that Pyle painted for his Delaware Avenue home. The red-haired women with their cupid lips are reminiscent of the Beaux Arts period, popular in the late 19th century and Pyle’s studies in Italy, where he died.
The mural ends the exhibition. “It shows that toward the end of his life he was moving on in new directions,” Frederick said.
Delaware Art Museum: Behind the scenes of a centennial celebration
A behind-the-scenes look at preparations for the Delaware Art Museum’s Centennial celebration and the “Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered” exhibit.
The Chief Preparator
Jonathan Schoff, the museum’s chief preparator, works in a place with no windows. But thanks to the artwork, he always has a view. Paintings and illustrations waiting for frames sit on an expansive worktable, and framed works are propped against walls. On the table rests a Japanese wood block print that’s already been framed. It’s among the works that will hang near certain pieces of Pyle’s art to demonstrate what may have inspired him.
The preparator’s job duties differ depending on the museum. Schoff’s job is full of details. He creates graphics, cleans paintings with a badger-hair brush, adds humidity to paper to flatten it and installs the art and the exhibit lighting.
He’s been working on the Pyle exhibit for about six months, during which he’s also worked on other projects. “It’s a challenge to keep all the shows simultaneously working and meet the deadlines we need to reach so each show can go off without a hitch,” he said.
A designer, brought in especially for the Pyle show, and the curators together decided how the exhibit would look, from the cappuccino color of the walls to the blow ups of Pyle’s portraits. “It’s my job to make it into a reality,” Schoff said.
He works with the curators to decide how the art should be presented, right down to the mat size and the frame style. The 30 works Schoff framed for the Pyle exhibit, which took three weeks, are just some of the 500 pieces he will frame this year.
The Docent
The arrangement of the illustrations is one way to tell Pyle’s story. The captions beside the works are another. And then there are the docents, who lead tours of the museum.
- Stanley Arthurs, Howard Pyle and Frank Schoonover standing in Pyle’s Franklin Street Studio, 1910. Howard Pyle Manuscript Collection (Courtesy: Delaware Art Museum).
Like other volunteers, Cynthia Falcoff, a retired teacher, spent 10 months in training. Classes were held on Tuesdays, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. “You knew when you signed up that you’re making that commitment,” she said. Of the 10 trainees, only two dropped out. People who leave the program do not necessarily leave because they’re overwhelmed. Some have health issues or other personal matters that force them to withdraw.
The docents had reading assignments and prepared presentations and projects. Their teachers “led by example,” she said, taking trainees throughout the museum on tours. They learned how to describe certain aspects of the art and how to transition from one painting to the next “effortlessly.”
Once docents graduate, they attend meetings about two times a month to learn about new exhibitions. Before the Pyle exhibit, the docents watched a slide show and listened to the curator explain the exhibit’s mission. “We also do our own researching, reading and observing,” Falcoff said. “There’s a lot of work that goes into just presenting even the regular collection.”
A recently graduated docent, she’s impressed with her peers, some of whom have been with the museum for 20 years. “It’s a dedicated group of people who are very, very lovely to work with,” Falcoff said.
The Development Director
All of this takes money, and money has been harder to come by in tough economic times. It also takes time to raise money. Susan Zellner, the development director, applied to the Wyeth Foundation for American Art for a grant in 2008. “It was written as a multi-year pledge to help with the planning phase especially,” she explained. “It ended up supporting conservation of the works.”
Because of the ties to the exhibit—N.C. Wyeth studied under Pyle—the foundation offered the grant.
Finding a connection is part of a successful strategy. One supporter, the family-run Starrett Foundation, has trustees who are Pyle’s descendants. Some individual donors are also descendants, which depending on the exhibit provide an arena to tap.
DuPont Co., a corporate sponsor, is supporting the Pyle exhibition as well as the centennial programming. The exhibit also received funds from the New York-based Henry Luce Foundation.
“Illustration isn’t usually one of their focus areas,” Zellner said of the Henry Luce Foundation. “But they showed their confidence in us. The even gave us more than we asked for in the grant proposal. I’ve never seen that happen.”
With corporate giving down, the museum like many nonprofits has put more time into legacy programs that encourage patrons to remember the organization in their will. “The future is in individuals,” Zellner said. It’s not an easy conversation to have, but it helps to talk to patrons about how they want their legacy with the museum to continue into perpetuity.
No matter whether she is discussing legacy gifts or grants, personal conversations about the museum are an everyday part of Zellner’s job. “The ultimate purpose of development is to create relationships that lead to close ties with the organization with the final result, hopefully, being financial support,” she said.
The Executive Director
Some longtime relationships were shaky in 2005, when Danielle Rice joined the Delaware Art Museum. The museum at that time was still closed for its massive renovation and expansion, and many longtime residents were irate over the two contemporary wings that now flank the Georgian-style red brick building. The museum took it on the chin for the expense and the design.
“My first three years here I spent polishing the museum’s really, really tarnished image,” recalled Rice, who spent hours in the community, talking to groups. “The expansion left a lot of people with a bad taste in their mouths. I did a lot of work to repair relationships. I think we accomplished that.”
While people still voice their displeasure, they’re more likely to mention an exhibit or event that they’ve heard about, said Rice, who was previously the associate director for program at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
- Howard Pyle at his studio easel, taken by C.P.M. Runeford, 1898. Howard Pyle Manuscript Collection (Courtesy: Delaware Art Museum).
Since she’s come on board, the museum has placed an emphasis on recruiting young board members and targeting family programs, because the “museum habit” is learned in childhood, Rice said. With its expansion behind it, the museum is now updating its technology infrastructure and considering landscaping and growth in the sculpture garden.
Rice still spends about 60 percent of her work day outside the museum, meeting with people in the community and in the arts. “My favorite part is when I get to sneak a peek at the exhibition in progress,” she said. At that point, she’d been too busy to see the Pyle mural that had just been hung.
When she joined the museum, she was excited to discover what a good artist Pyle was. “I used to get very excited when Andrew Wyeth would come into the building to stare at a Pyle painting for an hour,” she said. “To me, that was, ‘Wow. OK. I get it now’.” Andrew Wyeth, who died in 2009, was part of a family of famous American artists. His father was N.C. Wyeth and his son, Jamie, is also a well-known artist.
She realizes that the exhibit title, “Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered,” may surprise some art history buffs. The Henry Luce Foundation initially balked at a grant, worried that some of its trustees may not consider Pyle a “real artist.”
But their support further endorses the fact that Pyle deserves a place in art history books. “We really do think he’s an American master, and we really do think that he needs to be rediscovered,” Rice concluded.
Centennial Celebration
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