Aldrich Museum Will Be Able To

Welcome Larger Crowds By Next Year

By Shannon Hicks

RIDGEFIELD — The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art officially launched a $9 million renovation and expansion project in April that will double the museum’s existing size. The new building, which will be an addition to the existing building at 258 Main Street, will increase the museum’s existing gallery space by 20 percent. When work is complete there will also be a fully dedicated education center, more space for the temporary storage of art, and workshop areas to work on conditioning reports, frames, and assembling sculpture.

The museum’s exterior will also be affected. Situated on a three-acre site, The Aldrich’s current two-acre sculpture garden will be relandscaped to form a series of outdoor viewing spaces for sculpture and installations that will be changed seasonally.

The time for the museum to grow so significantly has come in response to the museum’s continued growth. Over the last decade alone, annual attendance at The Aldrich has nearly doubled. In 1996 the museum registered 13,000 visitors; by 2002 that number had reached 25,000.

Planning for the expansion began in 1997, and according to an April 29, 2003, letter by Aldrich Museum Director Harry Philbrick, “The vision for the project was always in keeping with [Larry Aldrich’s] vision as founder: to showcase the work of contemporary artists on a ‘human scale,’ on a level accessible to our surrounding community.”

“This entire plan is really designed to accommodate what we do now, not necessarily increase the number of programs that we do,” Mr Philbrick recently emphasized.

The Aldrich Museum is housed in a building originally constructed in 1738, with an addition that dates to 1986. The museum has worked closely with local planning and zoning boards to ensure that its new building, while “forward-looking,” wrote Mr Philbrick, “is in keeping with our town’s history.”

The museum is on a very traditional looking Main Street filled with great big Colonial-era mansions, small shops, and restaurants. Next door and across the street from the museum are a pair of churches. The town’s community center, a circa 1896 former mansion, is just a few doors north of the museum, while Keeler Tavern Museum, with its original circa 1713 building, is a nearby neighbor to the museum’s south.

“We’ve got a real balancing act with the building and its historic district,” Mr Philbrick said recently. “This is a building that tries to hold the idea of a historic district and contemporary art together.

“We wanted to make a building that is centered on the art and the artists that we exhibit, and the experience of the viewer,” he continued.

The groundbreaking took place on April 29 with museum staff, friends of the museum, and other invited guests attending the ceremony.

Designed by Tappé Associates of Boston, the museum will measure 25,000 square feet in total, with 14,000 square feet of public space. “Old Hundred,” which is the name of the original 6,000-square-foot historic house at 258 Main Street constructed in 1783, will be rebuilt to its original character. An addition that had been put onto the museum in 1986 will be razed. A brand-new 19,000-square-foot building will be constructed to the east of Old Hundred, with the two buildings connected by an entrance plaza and a series of terraced steps.

The Aldrich hosted a competition in 1998, inviting architects to submit proposals for a new museum plan. It was the museum’s board and members that selected Tappé, according to Mr Philbrick. That plan was accepted, but then put on a shelf for a few years “as we digested the fundraising implications,” the museum director explained. Tappé Associates, with Charles Hay as the project’s design principal, and The Aldrich began looking seriously at their plans in December 2001. The past 18 months, says Mr Philbrick, has been a collaborative project between the museum and the architects.

The original Tappé plan called for a building that was attached to the existing building.

“When we revisited that plan we thought we would be better off to construct a separate building [for the galleries] and to allow the current building to service as office and administrative space,” Mr Philbrick said. Two additional reasons for a separate building, said Mr Philbrick, were cost and topography.

“In part, it’s easier to start fresh than to try to adapt an existing building to a new design,” Mr Philbrick said. “The other thing is, our site is on a slight slope from Main Street. For us to add on to the building, it would have meant a building with two or three stories in the front, and in back it would be a four- or five-story building.

“By building a separate building, we got rid of that problem,” Mr Philbrick said.

Old Hundred will be used as the museum’s administrative offices, while the new building will house the public galleries, education center, and workshops. The new front entrance of the gallery building will face the back of the Aldrich’s current building. Visitors will park in the lot and walk down a path similar to the current front entrance, and then turn left for the front entrance of the main building.

The first floor of the museum will house a lobby, information desk, bookstore, screening room, the new education center, and the Leir Gallery, a performance and exhibition space with seating for more than 100 people.

Even the lobby will add to the museum’s possible presentation space.

“The new entrance gallery is going to be such a nice place for art,” Mr Philbrick said. “There are going to be two great walls for exhibiting art, and also some sculpture. It’s really going to function as a gallery in addition to a lobby.”

“Back of the house” additions will include 5,000 square feet of updated art handling, storage, and conservation and mechanical spaces.

“This is where much of the mechanical stuff will be,” Mr Philbrick said. “This will be where we will have temporary storage for art, workshops for conditioning reports, and areas for framing and assembling sculpture –– work that has until now been done within our galleries.”

A fully dedicated education center will allow the museum to host more hands-on programs and workshops. Featuring classroom and studio spaces, the new facility will be accessible to indoor and outdoor exhibition areas as well as the main lobby.

“The new space will give me the opportunity to think in new ways about the programs we offer,” Aldrich education curator Nina Carlson says. “Each educator will have more freedom to expand on the types of learning that take place during our programs, allowing programs to be more experiential and multidisciplinary.

“The education department will face new challenges in staffing, marketing, and fundraising as we reach out to new audiences and expand our public resources,” she added. “On a practical level, I am most looking forward to simply having the space available –– avoiding the current scheduling conflict we face between gallery hours, school groups, and public programs.

“But the potential impact the education center will have on the types of programs we are able to offer and the new ways we will be able to interact with our audiences is what is truly exciting.

“We will be able to take advantage of working with living artists more than we were ever able to by involving them in hands-on programs. … The education center will allow us to extend and deepen the learning that takes place in our galleries and will allow students to experience the arts in more ways.”

Four full galleries and a camera obscura will be on the second floor. The camera obscura will be just one area where visitors can see the museum’s purposeful combination of indoors and out. Italian for a dark room, the camera obscura will be projecting onto its walls whatever is outside the museum.

Other locations within the museum will be designed for optimum observation of sculpture from within the museum.

“We really are very consciously trying to combine indoors and out,” said Mr Philbrick.

The outdoor viewing areas, which are expected to become a major feature of the property, are being landscaped by Richard Burke Associates of Somerville, Mass.

When the renovations are complete, the museum will also be fully handicapped accessible.

The issue of being handicapped accessible, admits Mr Philbrick, is “long overdue.”

“We’ll finally have an elevator,” he said, “and we’re really pleased to finally be up to date” in the area of keeping handicapped visitors more comfortable and having all of the museum’s galleries and amenities accessible.

 

The Immediate Future

The Aldrich opened its current exhibitions on June 1. “A River Half Empty: Artists Engage Connecticut’s Environment” is a collaborative exhibition between the museum, The Connecticut Fund for the Environment, Weir Farm Trust, and The National Park Service at Weir Farm Historic Site, with works on view and public programs being hosted by the museum and the historic site, which straddles the nearby Ridgefield-Wilton border. “Elizabeth Demaray: 2003 Emerging Artist Award Recipient” is a collection of sculpted heads on view in the museum’s Leir Gallery,

Both exhibitions will remain on view until August 31. The museum will close in September and expects to be able to reopen in spring 2004, just in time to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The exhibitions for next spring have already been announced: “Erotic Drawing”; “Into My World: Recent British Sculpture,” with work by eight to ten emerging British artists; and “Main Street Sculpture Project: Self-Sufficient Barnyard (The annual amount of livestock needed to feed a family of four,” an installation by Jon Connor.

While the museum is closed, the Aldrich will present two off-site exhibitions, off-site performances and educational programs, and will host a film series at area independent theaters, including nearby Bethel Cinema.

The first off-site exhibition, “The Drawn Page,” will actually be drawings commissioned by the museum that will appear in seven Hersam-Acorn newspapers and other publications. A reproduction of each new drawing will be published each week for 20 weeks, while the museum is closed.

The second exhibition, “The Aldrich Contemporary At The Movies,” represents a collaboration between video artists, the museum, and area independent movie theaters. The works, originally conceived to be viewed within a gallery or museum, will be screened prior to movies. The museum hopes the videos will ease “the boundaries between high and low culture, promoting this artwork in a different way.”

The Aldrich Museum was founded by the late Larry Aldrich in 1964 with the mission “to serve as a national leader in the exhibition of contemporary art and an innovator in museum education.” It is a noncollecting museum; it is more concerned with temporary presentations of the latest art than building a permanent collection that will eventually move from contemporary to classic in the fast-moving world of modern art. When it opened, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art was one of the first museums in the country devoted solely to the exhibition of contemporary art.

To date the museum has raised just over half of the funds needed for the $9 million capital campaign. The cost of the designs, the new building’s construction, and the renovations to Old Hundred are $7.5 million, while another $1.5 million is being raised for endowment, for educational programming, and operating the enlarged facility.

“We’re feeling very good about the funds we’ve already raised,” Mr Philbrick said. “Fundraising is continuing, of course, and we feel very confident now that construction is underway.”

A model of the museum’s new design will be on view at The Aldrich until the fall, when the museum closes to the public for its final construction stages.