The Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial is an unusual space for a gallery: it's round, it's not white, and it has no walls. Rachel Seligman, the gallery's director and curator, describes the advantages and challenges of “one of the most non-traditional gallery spaces you will ever find.”
Union College: Please tell us a little about the background of the Mandeville Gallery.
Rachel Seligman: When the Bicentennial renovation of the Nott Memorial was being planned, the College looked at the original function of the Nott. The first floor had served as a meeting place and an area for the exchange of ideas while the second floor was a gallery with plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statues spread evenly around the balcony. With the renovation, the first floor became Dyson Hall, a lecture and meeting space, thanks to a $5 million bequest from Margaret MacGregor Dyson. And the second floor became a gallery through a $1 million gift from David C. Mandeville '45 in honor of his father, William H. Mandeville, Class of 1915, and grandfather, Hubert C. Mandeville, Class of 1888. Mandeville, a lawyer in Elmira, N.Y., was a longtime promoter of the arts.
Union College: By the way, whatever happened to those plaster casts?
RS: When Andrew Carnegie gave money to turn the Nott Memorial into a library in 1904, the students took the casts out onto the green and played a game of baseball – students against the gods. The gods lost, as you might imagine, and the casts were essentially destroyed by that game.
Union College: When the gallery opened, what kind of exhibits were envisioned?
RS: The idea from the beginning was that the gallery would exhibit art primarily but would also focus on combining art with history and science. The hope was that the gallery could be a forum for interdisciplinary projects and exhibitions that unite the liberal arts with science and engineering. This is central to how I schedule and create exhibitions. We regularly present exhibitions devoted to history and science, like the Joseph Henry exhibition, An Enduring Legacy. I also try to include exhibitions that combine art and science, like the Into Focus: Art on Science show and the upcoming Erie Canal exhibition that will combine art, engineering, and science and technology.
Union College: So how does the gallery fit into the College's academic mission?
RS: I believe that it is important to try to make the gallery and its exhibitions a relevant part of the learning on campus – to make it a useful teaching tool and a resource for faculty and students. I am very mindful when choosing exhibitions of how that exhibition might be used by people who are teaching courses all over campus — from art to history to science or engineering.
But I'm also looking to see how the exhibition can be an important part of the Schenectady and greater Capital District art community. The Nott Memorial itself and the gallery are wonderful resources, and it is important for the community to get a chance to come onto campus and partake in that. People in the art world, no matter where they are located, struggle with how to get people interested in their museum or gallery and interested in art. We're no different here, but we have the advantage of being on a campus and having a built-in audience of students, faculty, and staff. Getting the larger audience involved is a challenge, but an important one, because the gallery is a place where the community and the College come together.
The Walter Hatke faculty exhibit is an excellent example of this. Walter is represented by galleries in New York City, Santa Fe, and San Francisco, but he doesn't show his work locally. To give Walter a show on campus gives everybody – his friends, his neighbors, his colleagues, his students — a chance to see his work. Shows like this are a great way to get everybody aware of the gallery, aware of the College, and aware of art, all at the same time.
Union College: What did you think of the Mandeville Gallery the first time you saw it?
RS: My first thought was that it was such a beautiful space, but how did it work as a gallery? I had just come from a traditional gallery — that is, a rectangular space with white, flat walls for exhibiting artwork. A traditional gallery is as unobtrusive as possible. But the Mandeville Gallery is round, doesn't have any walls, has a balcony and windows, and is full of color. It's as non-traditional a gallery space as you will ever find. The building itself is a work of art, both the interior and the exterior, and the space is very sculptural. In a way, the number one permanent installation of the Mandeville Gallery is its own building, the Nott Memorial.
Union College: How did you approach working with that non-traditional space?
RS: Initially, I thought that the major problem would be that the space itself would interfere with viewing the artwork. That has not happened. In fact, the space is remarkably flexible and seems to adapt to each exhibition. In a traditional gallery where space is clearly delimited, if you've got one painting on each of four walls, it is going to look empty. The space here is so fluid and so undefined that it allows for a few pieces of artwork or a huge mass of artwork — and either way seems to be right. The space never seems to overpower the work.
For instance, Professor Chris Duncan's faculty show in 1998 had about fifteen drawings and eight or ten sculptures. None of the work was very big, but it felt perfect and filled the space beautifully. Last year, for Marty Benjamin's faculty show, which was a retrospective, we had ninety-six photographs. Though the gallery was full, I don't think it felt unusually crowded or overwhelming at all.
Union College: How do you find the wall space in a gallery with no walls for a show that large?
RS: I use modular wall units placed throughout the gallery. That's another positive aspect to this space. Because this round floor flows around in a big circle, you can set up the movable walls in different units, which can expand and contract the amount of wall space available. When people ask me how much running wall we have, I always stumble around that question and explain that I don't actually have any at all, but I have these wall units that create up to 200 feet of wall space. It just depends on how I set up the gallery.
Union College: What are the gallery's other strengths?
RS: The gallery is also a wonderful place to exhibit sculpture and three-dimensional work. For those media, the fact that there is a lot of light in the gallery is an advantage. There are sixteen enormous windows, which let in a lot of direct sunlight, and the gallery is always filled with indirect light that floats up and down from the other floors. For three-dimensional work, this light can really work to the art's advantage. You get to see the work in changing light, which can show you a lot of different things about a piece of sculpture. And for glass or metal or ceramic, having a lot of light can really show off the work to its best advantage.
Union College: What are the special challenges of the space?
RS: The windows are great in some ways, a real challenge in others. Light is one of the most damaging things to artwork, and light damage cannot be reversed. As a result, I have to be very careful about what types of artwork can go into this space. Works on paper are very sensitive to light, so I have to do a balancing act between what I might ideally like to exhibit in the gallery and what I can realistically exhibit.
Another challenge is the fact that the gallery is round. During the first few exhibitions I hung in the Mandeville Gallery, I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out where the space began and where it ended. I had always hung exhibitions with a clear progression in mind, but I've come to accept that there is no clear beginning and no clear end to this space. So I always try to make sure that the exhibition will work moving in different directions or starting at different points.
Union College: How do you go about hanging and arranging a show?
RS: I always have a general idea of how I want to hang a show before I get started — but that idea may be as simple as putting the works in chronological order, which I did for the Martin Benjamin retrospective. Then I spend a day or two doing nothing but rearranging paintings, laying them against the walls on which they will hang. Nothing ever looks as good on the floor as it does on the wall, so if you have something you are even moderately satisfied with on the floor, you can be fairly sure that it will look much better on the wall.
This arranging process can take a long time. To hang Walter Hatke's show, an assistant and I spent an entire day just rearranging. This is part of the great fun of being a curator, but it's also a very important responsibility — to make sure that the paintings are arranged thoughtfully and with an eye to particularities of space, light, and size. It is really important to be careful about what types of relationships you create between paintings that are hung next to each other. I spend a lot of time thinking about some of the formal and content relationships that are created by juxtaposing work; I want to emphasize certain harmonies. A painting can be adversely or positively affected by what is around it, and my job is to make the paintings all look as good as possible.
Often I end up having to make compromises in the arrangement. For example, I really wanted to have Walter Hatke's painting Raiment on the south side of the gallery, where, if you were looking at it and glanced just a little to your right, you would look through the gap in the modular walls and see one of Walter's prints, which he reproduces in Raiment. I thought that that placement would provide this wonderful juxtaposition, but it didn't work out that way. Raiment had to go on the other side of the gallery to balance an arrangement on that side.
Union College: In your opinion, what have some of the most successful shows in Mandeville Gallery?
RS: There are different criteria by which to define an exhibition as “successful.” When I categorize an exhibition as one of the best shows that we have had, one thing I mean is that in my opinion the quality of the work was exceptional. But since quality of art is always a thorny issue, I also measure success by response of the audience. When I get a lot of good feedback, I see that as a successful show. When the show accomplishes my goals — and proves to be even better than my expectations — then that qualifies as a great show.
The recent Walter Hatke exhibition was very successful. One of the great pleasures of being a curator is working with the artist, and working with Walter was wonderful. He made it very easy to do my job, it was a lot of fun, and, of course, the work is wonderful.
Walter's show includes large paintings, which until recently we haven't had as much success hanging because of the limitations of the walls. But with our new walls we are able to build long areas to hang large paintings. This exhibition was one of the first in which we could do that, and it was a pleasure to have it work out so nicely.
One of the best shows I think we have done is the Terry Atkins Powre Above Powres installation paired with the Twelve Years a Slave exhibition, which we did last winter for Black History Month. That was actually two exhibitions in one: in the gallery proper we had this exhibition of sculpture created and installed specifically for the exhibition by artist Terry Atkins. In Dyson Hall, we had a historical show about the life of Solomon Northup, a free black in our region who was kidnapped and forced into slavery. The Adkins sculpture was a response to that story and transformed the gallery into an incredible sort of spiritual, mystical space. There is something otherworldly about the Nott Memorial sometimes — the way the light comes into it through the stained glass. Adkins created ten sites around the hub of the gallery, using lots of glass elements, beads, and buttons that were spectacular in the way they picked up the light.
That exhibition used the gallery to make connections between literature, music, economics, sociology, history, and art. The lectures and concerts that accompanied the show also tied together the divisions of the College. It was a really nice job of showing how history and art can be intertwined and illuminate each other.
The Into Focus: Art on Science show combined ideas about the state of science and scientific inquiry with contemporary art. This was a group show of contemporary artists, all of whom were dealing in one way or another with the message of science, scientific inquiry, or the results of science, impacts of science, or aesthetics of science. It was a mixed media show curated by Adreinne Klein, a contemporary artist who deals with science in her work, and the show was a combination of sculpture, paintings, prints, artists' books, and installation pieces. It took advantage of all the different strengths of the gallery.