Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

Francesca Wilmott
Associate Curator
Crocker Art Museum
216 O Street, Sacramento, CA 95814
www.crockerart.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I can’t wait to see Sadie Barnette: Family Business, jointly organized by the San Jose Museum of Art and Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz. I had the privilege of working with Sadie on a 2017 exhibition and have enjoyed following her impressive career since then. Sadie’s unexpected combination of powdered graphite, spray paint, glitter and rhinestones disrupt the history of state-sanctioned racism. In this exhibition, she presents the living room as a space of activism and liberation. The SJMA presentation includes a recent acquisition from the Crocker’s collection.

What are you reading?
Having just finished reading and re-reading my Ph.D. dissertation, I am excited to read again for pleasure! I recently picked up Jenny Odell’s new book, Saving Time. Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, and her first book, How to Do Nothing, helped me through the early days of the pandemic. Saving Time examines the modern construction of time and its intersections with Western culture, labor practices and climate change. It would be interesting to engage Odell in a program that reconsiders how 19th-century artists thought about temporality in Gold Rush-era California.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
We’ve recently acquired an important early painting by Mike Henderson called Crazy Dreams, circa 1966-67, and I cannot wait to install it in our galleries. Henderson is an influential painter, filmmaker, blues musician and professor who was overlooked for far too long. His work is currently the focus of a retrospective at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art and was the subject of a chapter in my Ph.D. dissertation. Crazy Dreams is one of Henderson’s powerful “protest paintings” that he made shortly after he moved to California from Missouri in the mid-1960s in search of greater cultural and political freedom.

What are you researching at the moment?
Next year the Crocker will host Black Artists in America: From Civil Rights to the Bicentennial, curated by Professor Earnestine Jenkins and organized by the Dixon Gallery & Gardens. The exhibition will include the work of luminaries like Romare Bearden, Marie Johnson Calloway, David Hammons, Betye Saar and Charles White. Black Artists in America has inspired my research into early exhibitions of African American art at the Crocker. One particularly fascinating show I’m researching is called West Coast ’74: The Black Image, curated by Dr. Allan Gordon, which included works by many of the same artists.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I would love to see an exhibition on the photographer Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990). Wolcott was employed by Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s and 1940s. Her photographs documenting the hardships of women and children during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl were especially sympathetic. Since the 1970s, the Crocker has acquired 50 works by the artist, who spent the last years of her life in California. Despite her importance, Wolcott has received little scholarly attention. It has been several decades since she was the subject of a retrospective, and I believe Wolcott’s powerful photographs would resonate with audiences today.