2/23/2014

Contemporary art museum to be one of Pace's legacies - San Antonio Express-News

ContemporaryartmuseumtobeoneofPace'slegacies
BYSTEVEBENNETT:FEBRUARY21,2014

Linda Pace's favorite color was red her 2003 book was titled Dreaming Red, Creating Artpace.

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Photo By Courtesy Linda Pace Foundation

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One of Maura Reilly's first acquisitions for the Linda Pace Foundation is Andrea Bowers' 2013 work Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut.

One of Pace's crimson-hued dreams was a museum to house her art collection. Maura Reilly, the dynamic new executive director of the Linda Pace Foundation, is working to realize that dream. After spending a couple of hours with Reilly, a visitor realizes that her dominant personality traits selfconfidence, practicality, loyalty, vision push the needle toward the hot end of the spectrum.

I'm very driven, said the 45-year-old Boston native, an internationally acclaimed art critic, curator, teacher and administrator, who took the Pace job last year after a few years teaching art theory at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in Australia. I feel very much like life is too short, and there's so much to do. ... I really do believe, as Neil Young says, that it's better to burn out than to fade away. Reilly has checked off the first item on her agenda making a complete study of the 500-object Pace collection, which includes works by international art stars such as Teresita Fernandez, Jenny Holzer and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to local artists who have joined their ranks like Alejandro Daz, Franco Mondini-Ruiz and Jesse Amado . She now has turned her attention to broadening the foundation's base locally it already has a stellar reputation in the global contemporary art community by increasing its visibility. (Although the Linda Pace Foundation supports Artpace the downtown art laboratory that was another of Pace's dreams the organizations are separate entities with different missions. Artpace's is creative; the foundation's is commissioning and collecting art.) The Pace Foundation is in the process of converting the small staff office building on its Camp Street campus off South Flores Street into a 2,000square-foot gallery space. An exhibition of the foundation's gems will open April 17, followed by a career-spanning survey of Daz's work in October. The foundation's small staff has moved to a portion of Linda Pace's crisp, white, sixth-floor apartment in the Camp Street building across the street, where exhibitions used to be held, albeit with fairly limited access. So it's a good trade-off. One of the first things I wanted to do was make us more public, Reilly said during a recent interview in her spacious, airy office overlooking Southtown. It's all leading up to the long-on-the-drawing-board, much-talked-about Pace museum to permanently house and showcase the collection, designed by British starchitect David Adjaye, whom Linda Pace identified and met with before her death in July 2007. The 20,000-square-foot, foundation-funded facility in red, of course will become a reality in 2017 on a Camp Street site with water access to San Pedro Creek, Reilly said. Rick Moore, president of the Pace foundation's board, said cost estimates are between $10 million and $15 million. When I got here, one of my first thoughts was, 'How can we start a lead-up buzz to a permanent museum?' Reilly said. As far as I'm concerned,

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2/23/2014

Contemporary art museum to be one of Pace's legacies - San Antonio Express-News

it's a great opportunity to brand ourselves. That's what Linda wanted; she wanted a museum. It was her dying wish. She's a legend in the contemporary art world. So few people support contemporary art today or at least not in the way that she did establishing a world-renowned residency program, commissioning works by some of today's most brilliant artists, purchasing many of those works. And so, since I've dedicated much of my career to supporting the work of women artists, this position seemed like the perfect fit for me. It really is my dream job. I didn't even bat an eye when I got the opportunity to realize Linda Pace's dream. In the international art world, Reilly is, in the words of Mondini-Ruiz, also a pretty big deal. She's world-class, he said. Maura is big-city, and she comes to San Antonio with the presumption that it is a major city. She has strong opinions and a clear vision. The Alejandro show she is planning speaks volumes about what she thinks of artists. Daz, for his part, also is working on a proposal for a small traveling-exhibition space on the grounds of CHRISpark, the park memorial to Pace's son. Reilly describes the Daz project as a Bauhaus casita, while the artist likens it to a Philip Johnson glass house. She dreams big, Daz said of Reilly. She knows what she wants and figures out a way to make things happen in a big way. And she is extremely loyal and devoted to artists she works with. For her, it's not about the marketplace, but about the content of an artist's work. She's especially interested in human equality. Before taking the job in Sydney four years ago, Reilly held several important curatorial posts, including senior curator positions at the American Federation of Art and Location One, both in New York City. From 2003 to 2008, Reilly was the founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, the first exhibition space in a major U.S. museum devoted exclusively to feminist art. So she has experience with opening a new museum space. Brooklyn was redesigning a wing, she said. This is demolition to ribbon-cutting. In Brooklyn, Reilly organized several groundbreaking exhibitions, including Global Feminisms, a 2007 show featuring feminist works by 80 women artists from 1990 on. The permanent reinstallation of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party led to Burning Down the House, a show that challenged the notion of the museum as master's house, the historical domain of male artists. More recent projects include exhibitions by Brooklyn artist Nayland Blake and 1999 Artpace residency participant Carolee Schneeman. Reilly, who earned her master's degree and doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, is also a prolific writer, having contributed art criticism to Art in America for a dozen years and written books on Indian artist Ghada Amer and Australian artist Richard Bell. She hopes to get more national exposure for Pace foundation exhibitions. She's very brainy, Daz said, a great writer. Moore praised Reilly's broad experience and supple mind. Maura comes to the foundation with critical acclaim associated with her prior exhibitions and writings, and this is certainly one of her professional strengths. She is very driven, speaks frankly, and is open to multiple ideas and approaches shared by the board of trustees. Reilly, who says Texans are a lot like Aussies in personality, senses a charge and excitement in San Antonio, notably in the visual arts scene. She claims she's in it for the long haul. I'm going to stay as long as they let me, she said. If you are involved in a (museum) building project of this magnitude, you want to give it your all. You want to see it thrive, see it shine. And shine it will. The two-story building, she said, is going to be sparkly red, constructed of a pre-cast concrete dyed red and infused with shards of glass so it sparkles. It's going to be a really interesting building. sbennett@express-news.net

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