Curators at large art museums have two main jobs: collecting and connecting.
They serve as the institution’s shoppers, scouting new works that strengthen and expand existing holdings. Sometimes they purchase older pieces that fill holes in the museum’s collection of a certain category of art, perhaps old European masters or Korean ceramics. Other times, they buy objects from living painters or sculptors that reflect and preserve the best art-making of the present moment.
But curators are also responsible for putting on exhibitions that bring the museum’s possessions before the public. They organize all these little pieces into shows, built around specific themes or ideas, that are meant to get people in the door, provide an afternoon of entertainment and maybe teach a little art history.
The local community knows about the shows, they are often heavily promoted and well-attended. But they usually have no idea what their hometown museum is buying. Most new works go into storage and are rarely seen again. Museums only have so much wall space and rarely put more than three to five percent of their holdings on display at any given time.
That makes a modest exhibition like the Denver Art Museum’s new “What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape” something to pay special attention to. The exhibit fills just a few rooms and many of the works are small in size or parts of the same series. Tucked deep into the sixth floor of DAM’s Martin Building, it is an easy attraction to miss.
But the display is built around works the museum has acquired over the past 17 years and never shown publicly before. In this case, the exhibition is by the photography department, which was established in 2008.
It is not the museum’s most prestigious branch — it’s still young, and it remains formative and ambitious — though curators have worked hard with limited resources to make it deeper and unique in its own way.
And this show is full of evidence uncovering where their tastes lie, and more broadly, what is considered a museum-worthy photo today. The exhibit also shows how museums, through acquisitions, reflect different ideas of what their role should be in the community.
There are some traditional landscapes, the sort of nature scenes that people think of when they imagine the work of a photographic art world legend, like Ansel Adams, who captured the more dramatic aspects of the great outdoors.
Some of those are older, historic images that freeze moments of the landscape with a traditional photo process and a creative eye, such as Marion Post Wolcott’s descriptively titled “Drift fence and farm lands from Sugar Hill, near Franconia, New Hampshire,” taken in 1940. Or a rural image of “Milburn, Utah,” captured way back in 1891, by the well-known William Henry Jackson.
That vast category of landscape also includes more recent works that experiment with process and create something closer to abstraction. One of those is by Abelardo Morell, a contemporary artist known for developing a “tent camera” system that updates camera obscura techniques for the more adventurous era we live in today. DAM commissioned his 2023 “View of Mt. Sopris, Snowmass, Colorado,” and the piece is one of the show’s highlights.
Other photos are more on the documentary side, pointing to the increasing presence of humankind and its technology in formerly pristine landscapes. That theme might sound a bit depressing, but it leads to amazing images that record the timeline of development, especially in the West.
That type of photo includes Steve Fitch’s “Between Trujillo and Las Vegas, New Mexico, September 9, 2006,” which depicts a radio tower shooting high out of a flat desert terrain. The tower’s glimmering red lights mix with an orange-and-pink sunset in the background to create an image that feels both moody and instantly nostalgic.
“What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape” also shows the evolution of “museum-quality” art as social commentary and as a chronicler of the darker sides of history.
Sometimes that turbulence is caused by natural disasters or climate change. One example here is John Ganis’ 2013 toppled “Beach Houses after Hurricane Sandy, 959 East Avenue, Mantoloking, New Jersey,” from his series “America’s Endangered Coasts.”
Other times, the trouble was caused by humans, or to put it better, inhumanity. Photos in this show reference topics like slavery and the displacement of Indigenous people.
Among the more notable works in this category is Christina Fernandez’s 2023 “Hideo (Heart Mountain),” whose series “View from Here” is shot through doors or windows of historically significant buildings in the West. This particular photo was taken looking outward through a wooden window at the Heart Mountain concentration camp near Cody, Wyoming, where thousands of Japanese people were held during World War II.
There is a debate raging in this cultural moment over the role of museums in presenting American history. Should they emphasize the nation’s majesty or should they put the spotlight on our mistakes and turn art exhibits into teaching opportunities? Both of those options have their appeal and their dangers.
This exhibit, because the material covers many decades, does a little bit of both. There is raw beauty on display, and there is ample trauma to take in.
In that way, it accomplishes a lot.
It lets locals in on, as the title says, what the museums it supports with millions of dollars in tax revenues has been up to. But it also sheds light on the wider state of museums and art collecting across the entire country.
Ideas of attractiveness and relevance evolve constantly, and so do the personal and social politics of the people and committees that decide what a museum will deem important and actually buy. Sometimes those changes are a gentle evolution, other times they cause culture wars.
Museums have to navigate that shifting terrain with care, and they have to keep up with current trends. This small show is a solid example of how one institution, in the middle of America, has tried to do that.
If you go
“What We’ve Been Up To: Landscape” continues through Dec. 7 at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Ave. Info: 720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org.
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