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Variable West: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I’m really excited to learn more about the programming that you’re doing with the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment and the collaboration with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene.
Toby Jurovics, Barry Lopez Foundation Director: Absolutely. We’re not a specifically Western organization, but it was important for us to be able launch our exhibition program in Oregon, and particularly, so close to Barry’s home in Finn Rock. And Eugene is really where the idea for the foundation was born.
Barry and I were having lunch one day and he turned to me and asked, “How do you get people to visualize a global catastrophe?” I replied, “I know people who can do that!,” and pretty much sketched out the idea for the foundation on the back of an envelope. “Okay, here’s how to go about it.”
VW: I think that’s such an important pursuit. I immediately think about that Žižek quote, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine an end of capitalism.”
TJ: I’m laughing because that’s so true, and so heartbreaking.
VW: A big part of that, I think, is a lack of visual vocabulary. Thinking about how to visualize these crises, that is an even greater lack of visual resources for imagining what it all means.
How does it relate to me? What would it look like? I think involving artists is so important, because artists are the people who can take something abstract and turn it into something that’s contextualized, beautiful, and meaningful.
TJ: It’s interesting. As we were getting established, a colleague who has been in the museum world for four decades asked me, “How are you going to prove that the arts can stop climate change?” And the short answer is, they’re not. I mean, it would be presumptuous to suggest that they could, or to imagine that we’re in a position to do so. That’s not what the arts do –as many others have noted, the role of the arts is to point to something, and say, “this is what we need to be concerned about, this is what we need to think about.” And through this action, the arts — in every medium — can have real influence and leverage.
Another influential factor was that we launched in the middle of the pandemic. Prior to the foundation,I had been a museum curator for thirty years, and in a role like that you spend much of your time thinking about the dialogue between what you present in the galleries and how the public understands it.
How do you make something accessible? How do you put the artist’s best foot forward? And as you know, every museum scrambled to suddenly put all of their programming online. I think that everybody did a really good job reaching out and giving people alternatives at a time that was dispiriting and frightening.
The first online program we did, when I was still at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, was actually with Ron Jude and Owen Gump, who were both featured in our current exhibition when the museum closed. I think that we had four times as many people for the virtual audience than we would have if we’d done it in public. But by the end of 2020, everybody was exhausted. Nobody wanted any more time in front of a screen. What you realize is how important that encounter with artwork is, the opportunity that’s provided by the intensity of a one-on-one experience — that’s really what we’re trying to create with the foundation.
What we hope our exhibitions will offer is the same kind of emotional and intellectual and personal experience in the gallery that you have in the landscape itself. It can be a video, it can be a painting, it can be the photographs in Ron’s show, it can be a piece of music, but we really want to keep that dial turned all the way up and give people that physical experience with our programs.
VW: I remember seeing art for the first time after lockdown and feeling giddy to be in the same room as something again. Ron’s photographs look great online, but it’s a totally different experience engaging with them in a room, especially because of the way that they’re framed and hung. The velvety depths are just not going to come across on a screen.
TJ: Because of the pandemic, this was the first time I’ve organized and installed an exhibition without seeing the work in person. Ron and I put the exhibition together going back and forth on Zoom, and when you’re looking at that checklist on your monitor, it looks great, but I was unprepared for the experience of walking into the galleries for the first time, which is exactly the experience you are hoping for.
As familiar as I was with the work, there’s a real physical presence that can only be had face to face. And the other part of it, too, was Joshua Bonnetta’s soundtrack, which was created from seismic recordings made by members of the geology department — literally capturing the ground beneath your feet in western Oregon.
Again, how do you picture something that is invisible? We all understand plate tectonics, we all know it’s down there at work at something. But unless there’s an earthquake, we don’t really give it much thought. To be standing in the gallery, and suddenly have that soundtrack come up around you, it gives that real, physical presence of the earth systems that Ron is trying to capture in his images.
VW: Ron’s show at the JSMA was the inaugural presentation from the foundation, correct?
TJ: We launched our program with two exhibitions. One was Ron’s and the other was a video installation with Janet Biggs, Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape. Ron’s is the first that made it to the wall. The way that our programming is structured, every year we put new programs forward and anticipate that they’ll travel to four to six venues around the country.
Ron and Janet’s shows are running through 2024. We’ve got another exhibition opening with the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2023, featuring a collection of work by fifty photographers that was donated in Barry’s honor. And we’re developing a show, Ten Thousand Birds, about bird migration in the Anthropocene, that was inspired by a very real, very visceral moment.
When I first moved to New Mexico, I was renting a house in this little canyon, and a few times a week, I would go for a hike. One fall afternoon, there was a dead songbird in the middle of the trail. I’m terrible at bird identification but I’m going to say it was a warbler. And as I kept hiking, the trail was littered with the carcasses of these birds, one after the other. I just knew that something wasn’t right, and over the next week or so, information started to come forward that there had been a die-off along the migratory flyway between Texas and Nebraska. The theory is that there’d been a cold snap and because these birds were already undernourished because of drought, once they ran into this additional stress they were literally falling from the sky.
The composer John Luther Adams, who has been a good friend of the foundation, had a piece called Ten Thousand Birds, and he agreed to record it for us to use in the installation. We’re also working with a group of photographers and printmakers and video artists. But again, you know, how do you take on an event that is nothing but a tragedy? I don’t necessarily want to spin it into something positive, because ultimately you’re faced with making a decision — this is what’s happening as a result of our actions, what do we want to do about it? I think it’s impossible not to feel empathetic in a situation like that, so we’re still playing with the checklist on this one.
VW: I think that’s one of the great opportunities for collaborating with artists. If somebody just tells you that story, or you read it on the news, it’s only sad. People are avoiding that type of information because all it does is make you feel bad. But artists — good artists — have a way of taking urgent, sad, terrible information and presenting it within an art context that shows the nuance of the situation. It’s an ability pretty unique to artists.
TJ: That was interesting to see in the online conversation the Schnitzer sponsored with Ron and the museum staff and Alan Rempel from the Geological Sciences Department at the University of Oregon. Rempel made a very matter of fact statement about climate change and what we need to do — and then acknowledged that at this point, it’s all political. This is a political discourse, he maintained, or should be, not necessarily a scientific one, because the science is settled. And one thing about museums is that they, in many ways, have been largely apolitical.
Every curator has an opinion, an agenda, whether you are working in contemporary art, or the Italian Renaissance, or whatever it may be, we all have a point we’re trying to get across. Nothing is completely neutral. But a museum’s role has traditionally been to be largely apolitical. It’s a venue that you hope encourages conversation rather than confrontations. Perhaps, though, we need to rethink that model, about how we engage pressing issues — I think this is happening in institutions across the country.
VW: That’s a great segue into one of my questions, I’d love to have you talk a bit about your financial structure. The foundation is footing the bill for the majority of these exhibitions. That seems like a pretty new model to me. I wonder where the idea for that came from, and is that an answer for facilitating conversations that are difficult and therefore might be harder to fund? Is filling this void an impetus?
TJ: You hit several nails on the head right there. I spent thirty years as a curator. I love working in museums and didn’t start this from any sense of dissatisfaction with the museum world, it was exactly the opposite. I wanted to be able to engage climate issues on a full-time basis, but I wanted to do it in a way that could be helpful to the museum community. Our exhibitions are not huge, our target space is one or two galleries, keyed towards college and university museums and smaller regional institutions.
Everybody is running on a pretty thin margin. So we wanted to be of service to, or to be a resource, for museums and to be able to get this sort of message out more fluidly.
What we aspire to do is to put exhibitions out that have no loan fee, and we ask institutions that they just cover the costs for transportation. Larger projects sometimes have a small fee, but we do everything to keep it as minimal as possible. Part of it, too, is that it gives places the opportunity to put more resources towards programming — I would rather have you put your budget towards developing public events or hosting a lecture or conversation than put limited resources into a loan fee. And, most importantly, I think it aligns with Barry’s desire “to help” — it’s one small thing we can do.
Ron Jude: 12 Hz
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
December 11, 2021 to March 13, 2022
View the virtual exhibition tour
After closing at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Ron Jude: 12 Hz was seen at the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith; the Frist Museum of Art; and The Hyde Collection. For more information about the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment: www.barrylopezfoundation.org
Sponsored by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Each Sponsored Connection is a pairing of two interviews. Read the interview with Jeff Kelley on Hung Liu here.