Clark Art Institute reopens its ‘beating heart’, the Manton Research Center

The Manton Research Center, due to reopen this weekend on Saturday, 12 November, is “the beating heart” of the Clark Art Institute says Olivier Meslay, the director since last August. He “fell in love” with the Williamstown, Massachusetts museum 15 years ago as a fellow in its international research residency programme—housed in the centre.

Re-worked by Annabelle Seldorf as the final step of the Clark’s $145m expansion, the 1970s Brutalist building also includes work space for museum staff and graduate students at the Williams College art history programme (who work at the museum as part of their studies), the Clark’s 240,000-volume art history library and public spaces. A new study center and exhibition space for works on paper (the latter is named for the patron and collector Eugene V. Thaw) allows the museum’s to be “more nimble in a way about organising exhibitions”, Meslay says, since the collection of works on paper are now stored next to the gallery that will show them.

Francis Frith, The Pyramids of El-Geezeh from the South West, from Egypt, Sinai and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views, (around 1860), albumen print. (Image: Clark Art Institute)

The first exhibition in the Eugene V. Thaw gallery is Photography and Discovery (until 5 February 2017). “The Clark was one of the very first [museums] to have a practice acquisition policy in terms of photography,” Meslay says. The exhibition includes around 45 images from the 19th and very early 20th centuries by American and European photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Gertrude Käsebier and Gustave Le Gray. The works are divided into three themes by subject matter—people, place and things—to explore the uses of the new medium, from portraiture to empire building. The “place” section, for instance, includes the image Amerapoora. A Street in the City (1855), by the British army officer and official colonial photographer Linnaeus Tripe, taken in Burma (now Myanmar) as part of a commission to document local architecture, which nonetheless shows an artistic eye behind the camera.

The opening show was organised by the Clark curator Jay A. Clark, but Meslay says the new gallery is the “perfect size” for graduate students to organise future exhibitions.