Curator Chat

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

Exterior view of the Gibbes Museum of Art

H. Alexander Rich
President and CEO
Gibbes Museum of Art
135 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401 www.gibbesmuseum.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
As a native New Yorker, I still feel like I can just go around the corner to see exhibitions at any one of my favorite New York City museums. However, life and present geography (i.e., now living in Charleston) sometimes get in the way of that…One recent case is Sargent and Paris, a Met exhibition featuring the work of John Singer Sargent. While I would have loved to have seen the show in Manhattan, that it continues in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay under a slightly different title, Sargent. The Parisian Years (1874-1884), through January 2026, gives me incentive for a trip across the Atlantic.

What are you reading?
I am digging back into books I have and have not read before on celebrated American artists who were also celebrated art instructors at the turn of the 20th century. For instance, Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, published in 1923, is a usual art book specimen in that it reads wonderfully (if not datedly) as a self-help book or almanac of insights and advice for up-and-coming artists. Also beckoning to me on my bookshelf is Willam Merritt Chase: A Genteel Bohemian, published in 1991.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
As close to home as it gets, the Gibbes Museum of Art’s exceptional summer exhibition Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid is inspired by Dr. Edda Fields-Black’s book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. The exhibition offers what the best exhibitions do: a fresh, exciting, illuminating and often-revelatory exploration of history through art. I am especially taken with the older objects in the show, including late 19th-century photographs and early 20th-century considerations of Tubman already as an icon.

What are you researching at the moment?
The so-called Ashcan School of artists has held especial fascination for me as long as I can remember, and is a subject I keep returning to or circling around. I continue to look at ways to examine their work in greater art historical context, to discover how they wittingly or unwittingly reflect canonical subject matter (like the nude bather) through a distinctly urban American lens (a twist like sunbathing on a city rooftop).

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
In addition to curating a large-scale exhibition stemming from my long-term study on the seminal New York School of Art, which was founded in 1896 as the Chase School of Art and graduated artists like Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois, I dream of one day curating—or co-curating—an exhibition focused on self-portraiture by American women artists from across time and media. I am especially intrigued by how fascinating the experience would be to examine side-by-side, the manners by which female artists decades and even centuries apart have used their own self-representation, both forthrightly and subversively, to assert their voices into the story of American creativity. —