Someday again in September, Jill Medvedow gamely agreed to make a journey down reminiscence lane. We met on Boylston Avenue in entrance of a stately however worn brick constructing, a former police station that now homes the Boston Architectural School. From 1973 to 2006, it was dwelling to Boston’s Institute of Modern Artwork.
“It was constructed to maintain individuals out and be actually formidable,” stated Medvedow, who was employed because the ICA’s director practically three many years go. “And it actually did that the whole time the ICA was right here.”
This was the ICA that Medvedow encountered when she got here to Boston in 1986: revered however marginal, a distinct segment museum in a metropolis lower than enamored with up to date artwork. Medvedow, then in her 30s, had minimize her enamel in New York and Seattle’s different artwork scenes, and been in residence at an artist colony whereas she labored on a ebook. She already had a job and an residence lined up in New York. The journey to Boston, to see her boyfriend, was alleged to be only a go to. The town struck her as unbearably conservative.
“I used to be like, ‘What am I doing right here within the worst metropolis for up to date artwork within the nation?” Medvedow recalled. “Or so it appeared to me.”
Evidently, Medvedow stayed in Boston (and married the man she got here to see). In 1998, she was employed as director of the ICA; this month, she steps down at age 70 after 27 years on the job.
The ICA was based in 1936, an offshoot of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York, from which it will definitely parted methods. For many of its existence the ICA was small and itinerant, migrating between completely different places in Boston earlier than touchdown on the Boylston Avenue constructing the place Medvedow first encountered it. Matthew Teitelbaum, who labored on the ICA as a curator and is now the director of Boston’s Museum of High quality Arts, described the ICA of the ‘80s and ‘90s as “scrappy,” and primarily centered on launching new artists. “It was virtually like a startup,” he stated.
Medvedow led the ICA by a interval of extraordinary development, ushering the museum out of that Again Bay police station and right into a hanging new constructing within the Seaport. Below her management, the museum constructed a everlasting assortment, an endowment, and a big satellite tv for pc exhibition house in East Boston. It gained a nationwide award for its youth instructional program and helped ship the sculptor Simone Leigh to the Venice Biennale, making her the primary Black lady in historical past to characterize the U.S. there. These days, the once-scrappy ICA is a participant within the worldwide artwork scene, an establishment to rival the MFA or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. When Medvedow began as director, the ICA’s annual attendance was round 20,000. Now it’s 300,000.
“She’s not celebrated in the way in which that she needs to be for what she’s accomplished: totally remodeling a metropolis’s artwork scene,” stated Dia Artwork Basis director Jessica Morgan, who labored on the ICA as a younger curator. “I discover that very irritating, and I’m sorry, however gender performs an enormous function in that.”
As Medvedow prepares to step down from the museum, she could lastly be getting her due.
“You may have a bigger cohort of collectors. You may have a bigger cohort of supporters of various establishments throughout the town than existed, you already know, 30 years in the past,” Teitelbaum stated. “And I give Jill, and the ICA, a variety of credit score for that.”
The subsequent huge concept
If there’s a theme amongst Medvedow’s accomplishments, it’s a penchant for taking huge swings.
“It was actually clear that the ICA wanted greater than a tweak,” Medvedow recalled pondering when she began as director. “It wanted a extremely huge concept.”
Her first initiative when taking up the ICA, after stints at GBH and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, was to launch a public artwork collection. She had conceived the venture, “Vita Brevis,” earlier than taking the director publish. “Vita Brevis” was a riff on the Latin phrase “ars longa, vita brevis,” or “artwork is lengthy, life is brief.”
“ I used to be pissed off by the shortage of curiosity [and] embrace of up to date artwork in Boston, and I stored making an attempt to suppose what could be some methods to get that,” Medvedow defined. “It appeared to me that Bostonians cared about their historical past they usually cared about their place, their panorama.”
For the primary iteration of “Vita Brevis,” the museum commissioned new works alongside Boston’s Freedom Path. Medvedow nonetheless speaks proudly of the collection, particularly an set up by Krzysztof Wodiczko, which bore witness to an epidemic of younger males misplaced to violence in Charlestown. Movies projected onto the Bunker Hill Monument featured residents talking concerning the tragedies, their voices echoing somberly by the darkish night time sky. “ They have been the tallest individuals on the town for these three nights,” Medvedow stated.
However Medvedow’s subsequent huge concept could be the one which outlined her profession. In 1999, the ICA gained a citywide bid to develop a three-quarter acre parcel on the Seaport’s Fan Pier, a part of the town’s effort to develop the district.
Morgan, then the ICA’s chief curator, was impressed along with her boss’s capacity to win over metropolis officers. Medvedow’s father was a lifelong New Haven politician, and he or she appeared to know instinctively the way to promote individuals on her concepts.
“I used to be watching in awe as she managed to navigate her means by these halls of energy,” Morgan stated. “At that time, in Boston, it was a really explicit time as properly. Not essentially a pleasant administration, definitely not within the arts.”
In response to Medvedow, the ICA was merely one of the best match – though, “we did have a variety of spunk,” she admitted. “We had a extremely huge imaginative and prescient. There hadn’t been a brand new artwork museum in-built virtually a century, and we have been in a position to persuade lots of people that we may ship.”
To design the constructing, Medvedow selected Diller Scofidio + Renfro, because it’s now known as, a small agency that on the time had no prior expertise constructing public or cultural establishments. Actually, the well-regarded New York design studio had by no means constructed a constructing in any respect.
“That was an enormous danger,” Medvedow stated. “That was an enormous leap.”
The danger paid off. The brand new ICA was accomplished in 2006, and was ecstatically reviewed within the New York Instances. With gorgeous views of the harbor and a public efficiency house tucked into the folds of its exterior, the museum was praised for the way in which it merged artwork with civic life. (It was a pivotal second as properly for Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which went on to design New York Metropolis’s Excessive Line and the MoMA enlargement.)
“It was actually a spot about gathering, about group, about bringing individuals collectively, and sharing,” stated Charles Renfro, the architect who designed the ICA. “And I believe that is actually, in essence, what Jill is.”
After Renfro bought the task, he offered Medvedow with 4 ideas. However he was fairly positive he knew which one she would select: a daring design that they nicknamed “the tray,” as a result of it had a high ground gallery that jutted out impossibly far over the Harborwalk towards the water.
“She knew it instantly,” he recalled with amusing. “It wasn’t like, ‘Properly, I like a bit of of this one, I do not like a bit of of this one.’ It was like, ‘It is the tray. When’s our subsequent assembly?’”
Folks typically comment on Medvedow’s decisiveness, in addition to her unrelenting power and focus. (In the previous couple of years, on high of her duties as director, she enrolled in a fellowship on the Harvard Divinity College and self-published a youngsters’s ebook.) Renfro, who now counts Medvedow as a pal, remembers being intimidated by her all these years in the past.
“She’s very – and I imply this in one of the best of how – in your face,” he stated. “She challenges, and he or she encourages. And I believe, at first, that depth of the discuss made me a bit of frightened of her as an individual. However then I got here to comprehend that that depth was actually supposed to attract one of the best out of everybody, and draw one of the best out of each dialog. Why ought to we spend power on something except we’ll get one of the best final result from it?”
Constructing affection, and every little thing else
I encountered this aspect of Medvedow after I visited the ICA in February for a follow-up interview. I needed to know the way she considered the problem of attracting massive audiences to the museum when, it appeared to me, many individuals have been more likely to discover up to date artwork alienating. I ended up asking a mealy-mouthed query about how Medvedow balanced the ICA’s acknowledged mission to increase a “radical welcome” with up to date artwork’s mission to make individuals uncomfortable. Earlier than I may end, she was already formulating a rebuttal.
“I do not suppose its mission is to make individuals uncomfortable,” she countered. “I do not suppose up to date artwork has a mission. Particular person artists make work from many, many various locations.”
Medvedow did, nevertheless, provide a solution to how she views the ICA’s mission. “Lots of people, they arrive right here as a result of they need to take part in our household artwork making workshops or … take dance courses, and that will get them into the museum,” she stated. “After which they wander as much as the galleries.”
The lesson was this: Meet individuals the place they’re. Make the ICA a spot that they will love, it doesn’t matter what they consider up to date artwork.
It was a theme that got here up many instances in my conversations with Medvedow. She spoke typically of eager to “construct affection” for the ICA. That was the purpose with “Vita Brevis,” and to some extent, the motivation for the teenager instructional program – what higher option to recruit future museum supporters than to start out them younger? And it was the rationale Medvedow determined to start out a everlasting assortment on the ICA, regardless of the growing value of sustaining it and the concern that the museum would lose its nimble edge. She noticed how audiences returned to the MFA and the Gardner to see beloved works, and he or she needed them to do the identical for the ICA. The danger and the trouble, Medvedow determined, could be value it.
On the time of my go to to the ICA, the museum was on the brink of open “Believers: Artists and the Shakers.” Medvedow led me by the exhibit, which is a sequel to a present that she delivered to the ICA initially of her tenure. That exhibition, known as “The Quiet within the Land,” was the results of an uncommon collaboration between 10 artists and the Shakers, a cloistered Christian sect well-known for its members’ vow of celibacy and talent at making furnishings. Much less well-known is the group’s perception within the equality of the sexes and its utopian life-style.
“ I used to be smitten,” Medvedow recalled of seeing “The Quiet within the Land” in a storefront exhibition in Maine within the mid-Nineties. “I fell laborious for it. It was lovely. It was surprising and stirring and shifting.”
To supply the work that appeared in “The Quiet within the Land,” a gaggle of artists lived and labored within the final energetic Shaker group, in Maine, through the summer season of 1996. Nari Ward, who was a kind of artists, recalled how his understanding of the Shaker furnishings custom modified throughout his residency with the group. “I really feel it was actually concerning the making, it wasn’t concerning the made,” he stated – that’s, it was concerning the means of creation, not concerning the remaining product, a market commodity.
Ward acknowledged one thing comparable in Medvedow. “The grind of creating one thing, and convincing different those who it is worthy, is what she’s so good at,” he stated.
For instance his level, he recounted a narrative. Some years in the past, Medvedow invited Ward to take a look at a derelict industrial constructing that she needed to remodel right into a gallery. That constructing is now the ICA’s Watershed, an enormous summer season exhibition house throughout the harbor from the museum in East Boston. On the boat journey over, Ward stated, Medvedow was giddy with pleasure.
“She was alive,” Ward remembered. “ Her power and her depth and pleasure was about constructing. Constructing the factor.”
Once I relayed this to Medvedow, she smiled. “Yeah,” she stated. “I do wish to make issues occur.”
