PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 24, No. 13, Jan. 20, 2005

New KAM director plans to work more closely with other FAA departments

By Melissa Mitchell, Staff Writer
217-333-5491; melissa@illinois.edu

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Kwame Ross New connections Kathleen Harleman, director of Krannert Art Museum, oversees installation of the exhibit “OVER + OVER: PASSION FOR PROCESS,” which opens Jan. 29. Harleman, who joined the campus community last August, said she plans to forge new connections among museum staff members and art and design faculty members and students by redesigning galleries and spaces within the museum to better accommodate their needs.

When a new director moves into the corner office, everyone – from staff insiders to outside observers – expects the status quo to be stirred, if not shaken, to some degree.

And that’s what the new occupant of the Krannert Art Museum’s corner office, Kathleen Harleman, has been doing since her arrival on campus last August: in effect, quietly adding new colors to the mix and slowly rotating the stir stick in the paint can.

Because of the nature of a museum’s exhibition schedule – which is often planned months, if not years, in advance, changes unfolding at the museum to date haven’t been all that noticeable to the public. But that’s about to change as the slow drum roll ends and Harleman’s true colors are boldly applied with the opening of “OVER + OVER: PASSION FOR PROCESS” on Jan. 29.

“This is the first big show here that I’m putting my stamp on,” said Harleman, who organized the exhibition with guest curators Judith Hoos Fox and Ginger Gregg Duggan. Harleman said the show originally was conceived by Duggan, with whom Harleman worked at the Seattle area’s Bellevue Art Museum.

Before coming to the UI, Harleman worked as a consultant to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Prior appointments have included serving as director of BAM; director and chief executive officer of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; director, associate director and director of cultural and academic programs at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum and Cultural Center; and lecturer in Wellesley’s department of art. She also worked in various capacities as a museum professional at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, and at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa.

“What I like about working in smaller places is that I can have multiple roles – curator, manager and fund-raiser,” Harleman said. “The greatest joy, however, is working on exhibitions.”

So naturally, that is where she plans to focus much of her energy at the UI. And Harleman has made no secret of her plans to pump up the volume a bit when it comes to organizing exhibitions featuring work by contemporary artists.

“When I interviewed here, I made it clear that even though my training is in Renaissance and modern art – my passion is contemporary art. So what people will be seeing during my tenure is more of an emphasis on contemporary art.

“I’m also very interested in exhibition design – that is, how to translate artwork into the three-dimensional realm of the museum space,” she said. “We have used exhibition-design expertise in the recent Traylor-Edmondson show and “OVER + OVER.” That will continue.”

Other changes in the queue include working more closely with David Weightman, director of the School of Art and Design, who also joined the UI community last year, to reshape and reinvigorate relationships between the museum staff and art and design faculty members and students. Ideas for fresh connections include the establishment of an “Intermedialab,” which Harleman said will be focused on “exploring new ways to bring teaching and exhibiting into the 21st century.”

“There’s a whole world out there of technology-based design, Web-based art … projecting digitalized media, and different ways of working with design and negotiating the realm between computers and human needs,” she said.

In order to create opportunities for faculty members, students and exhibiting artists in these media, Harleman plans to renovate spaces within the museum to better accommodate their needs. For example, she said, the museum and art and design school faculty are working with Hank Kaczmarski, director of the Beckman Institute’s Integrated Systems Lab, on a project to create a CAVE environment at the museum, which can be used for experimentation with technology-based art.

Harleman also hopes to more aggressively involve art and design faculty members and students – particularly those in art history – in “rethinking how our collections will be installed.” Noting that a similar, successful redesign of the African art gallery was undertaken before she came to the museum, Harleman said one of her first goals in this area is to involve anthropology professor Helaine Silverman and Silverman’s graduate and undergraduate students in a redesign of the museum’s Ancient Americas gallery.

Yet another concrete example of newly forged connections between the museum and the art and design school is the four-day Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition scheduled to take place in the museum galleries May 12-15. While graduating MFA students have traditionally been given the opportunity to exhibit their work at the museum, Harleman said she believes this is a first for graduating undergrads.

Other longer-term plans in the works at the museum include “making more public spaces where people can work and relax.” That includes looking carefully at the Link Gallery – the space that joins the art museum and the art and design school – to determine if the space can be used more innovatively by both units.

For a closer look at what will be happening at the museum this semester, visit the KAM Web site.

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