Museums please don’t stay still and keep on moving. So it is with Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection at the Tampa Museum of Art on view through January 6, 2019. This is the inaugural exhibition of a biennial series of commissioned contemporary art explorations which seeks to examine the synergy that might be wrought from their collections.
In many respects, it is a challenge for museums to avoid the ‘end-of-the-line’ sense of the collections that they hold and display. Broadly speaking, a ‘permanent collection’ for the purposes here, by definition, might be termed as a ‘set’ of related objects and the relationships between the objects define the notion of the collection. Specifically, one of the major curatorial charges is to communicate such a sense of collection…the bonding agent if you will. In particular, the notion that is over and above any individual constituent itself. Consequently, to continually engage a community and to cultivate new appreciations, it is important that museums challenge the stasis of their collections.
There are two roots to the word ‘education’ i) ‘educare’ which means to train or to mold and ii) ‘educere’ which denotes the drawing out of a meaning.
Perhaps, it is with this in mind that the Tampa Museum of Art has embarked on this program of special exhibitions. Specifically, in this case to ‘educere’ and extrude a new sense within which their significant Classical Antiquities collection can be re-seen and (re-)interpreted.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this collection is central to the Museum’s remit and as such, every schoolchild in Hillsborough County is invited to see the collection. I dare to say, that distinct from my day, today’s school children’s visits are more ‘educere’ than the ‘educare’ they were for me. I do hope so. It remains to say that, presently, there are interesting and important curatorial developments in ‘cajoling’ the traditional understanding of ‘collections’ into a contemporary practice.
Such a sense of intellectual vigor is very much evident in Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection. Cronin’s work is informed by her deep interest in the ancient world. Significantly, this exhibition is a strikingly productive crossover in which she combines advocacy, research, and knowledge with (her) considerable creative energy. In taking, as inspiration, the museum’s antiquities collection this exhibition is a very successful dialogue with contemporary art practices. Cronin’s particular methodology is apposite in ‘synergizing’ the idea with which we might previously have viewed the museum’s antiquity collection.
At Bay Art Files we have asked St. Petersburg-based Eleanor Eichenbaum to write about the exhibition and this will be published online soon. In bringing a sense of crafted space and tempo to her impressions and experience, the piece reads poetically and reflective in ways that a traditional review might not read. Just as the Museum’s biennial ‘synergy’ series reconsiders its holdings, so it is hoped that you might see this exhibition anew through Eichenbaum’s writing.