Aldrich Museum Unveils New Galleries And

New Artwork While Holding On To Its Roots

By Shannon Hicks

RIDGEFIELD — For more than a year The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art has been using “look… look again” in marketing related materials, a hint at what the public could expect once the museum reopened its doors this month.

The museum reopened on June 13 after 14 months of major renovation and expansion. The museum is now home to 25,000 square feet of new and redesigned exhibition space including a screening room, a sound gallery, a 22-foot-high project space, a 100-seat performance space, a state-of-the-art education center, improved visitor amenities, and a redesigned two-acre outdoor exhibition space.

Although museum director Harry Philbrick told The Newtown Bee last year that “the entire plan is really designed to accommodate what we do now, not necessarily increase the number of programs that we do,” the expansion has already proven that the Aldrich will indeed be offering more to visitors.

“While the museum is remaining on a trimester schedule, with the old building we were able to present two to three major shows each year. Now we can offer eight new projects including sculpture,” Aldrich curator Jessia Hough pointed out recently. “This building allows us more flexibility in starting and stopping our exhibitions.

“Whenever a visitor comes in, the spaces will be different,” she said.

Charles Hay, the design principal and an architect from Tappé Associates, Inc, the firm that was hired to redesign the museum, took great care to create a space that will meet the growing needs of the museum staff and visitors, and continue to accommodate art within a very historic community. The museum is located within a building originally constructed in 1738 and is on a very traditional-looking Main Street filled with great big Colonial-era mansions, smalls shops, and restaurants.

“We’ve got a real balancing act with the building and its historic district,” Mr Philbrick said in April 2003. “This is a building that tries to hold the idea of a historic district and contemporary art together.”

Mr Hay and the team from Tappé Associates obviously listened to the museum board’s concerns before creating their designs.

“Charlie spent enormous amounts of time with the curatorial staff, and then more time with the education staff, so that we could get a building that will serve all of our needs,” Aldrich board of trustees chairman Kathleen O’Grady said. “They listened to what we had to say. This is really still about the art.

“With many new museums it’s all about the building,” Ms O’Grady continued. “We want to still be about the art, and it’s a real credit to Charlie and his team that they came up with exactly what we were trying to describe.”

The building’s design presents a solution to the conflicts that arose when a museum dedicated to exhibiting cutting-edge art is located within a historic district and needs to stretch its legs. Based on an abstraction of traditional New England architecture, the building now features a double-peaked, multilevel roof that slopes downward toward the back, from peaked to flat, moving the eye from the street-facing façade to the rear landscape while emphasizing the building’s context.

“Old Hundred,” which is the name of the original 6,000-square-foot historic house at 258 Main Street constructed in 1783, has been rebuilt to its original beautiful character. An addition that had been put onto the museum in 1986 has been razed and a brand-new, 19,000-square-foot building has been constructed to the east of Old Hundred, with the two buildings connected by an entrance plaza and a series of terraced steps.

Old Hundred will now 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 houses the main lobby, information desk, bookstore, screening room, the new education center and the Leir Gallery — the performance and exhibition space with seating for more than 100 people.

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

“The education center has the feel of an artist’s loft. It’s the only area with an exposed ceiling in the building,” pointed out Aldrich curator Jessica Hough.

Even the lobby has been turned into exhibition space, with the British artist Laura Ford presenting her “Headthinkers” series in the grand reception space and her most recent installation, “Wreckers” in the adjoining hallway.

Visitors to the Aldrich in years past had a number of options when it came to visiting its exhibitions. There was one gallery on the first floor, and stairs that led to second and third floors, and no specific pattern for visitation. Today the museum is set up so that visitors will follow a sequence, heading upstairs from the Leir Atrium (main lobby) and working clockwise around the galleries of the second floor before returning to the atrium/lobby.

One of the first things visitors will encounter is one of museum director Harry Philbrick’s favorite new amenities: a camera obscura.

Taken literally from New Latin to mean “dark chamber,” the throwback to the Renaissance era at the Aldrich is just off the top of the stairs leading up to the second floor galleries. A camera obscura is a darkened enclosure with an aperture usually provided with a lens through which light from external objects enters to form an inverted image of the objects on the opposite surface.

At the Aldrich, the camera obscura is an entire room into which visitors must enter and then wait approximately two minutes for their eyes to adjust. The lens is on the west-facing wall of the room, and visitors are rewarded with an image of the exterior objects on the wall to the right of the doorway from which they have entered. As their eyes adjust more, the movements of passing cars and even pedestrians can be picked up.

“This is a neat way to tie our new architecture into the old building,” Mr Philbrick said during a recent preview tour of the museum.

“It’s also a really good way to get people to slow down once they’ve entered the building. You can’t poke your head into this room and expect to see something immediately,” he continued.

“We’ve had people walk through the building saying ‘It’s not working,’” Ms Hough said. “We’re just not used to taking time for something.”

If visitors look to their left before entering the camera obscura room (or to their right as they exit), they will take in another work of art: Mary Lum’s “Interchange.” Ms Lum worked with students in the most recent course of Art Lab, a high school art program, to create an installation that has been mounted on the east side of Old Hundred.

Art Lab students created collages and drawings that reflected their experiences with the architecture of the museum. The collages were then combined and, using a color palette inspired by vintage French comic books, Ms Lum created an overlay combining the old and new museum floor plans.

The result is “Interchange,” which is meant to focus on the site of the museum as a place of old and new experiences.

Through September 1, the Aldrich is presenting “Into My World: Recent British Sculpture,” which is spread through much of the museum. The collection offers work by nine emerging and midcareer British artists: Laura Ford, Matt Franks, Roger Hiorns, James Ireland, Jim Lambie, Mike Nelson, Mariele Neudecker, David Thorpe, and Saskia Olde Wolbers.

All of the works in “Recent British Sculpture” date from the last five years and many are on view for the first time.

Ann Lislegaard’s “Passing By,” a new sound project, is inaugurating the museum’s new dedicated sound gallery, a space specifically constructed to accommodate the demands of today’s sound art.

On the main floor, the Leir Gallery is hosting “The Drawn Page,” new works on paper by 26 artists. The drawings had initially been commissioned to run in eight regional newspapers while the museum was closed for renovation. The exhibition at the museum now pulls the original works together, offering a look at very contemporary drawing including realism, abstraction, text, digital, and process-based work.

Also on the main floor, Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing #1123, Planes with broken bands of color” inaugurates the museum’s new two-story Project Gallery. The work covers the 1,800 square feet of the space’s south, west, and north walls, leaving the east wall empty and establishing a specific vantage point for viewing the entire work.

The three-acre site now includes the two-acre Cornish Family Sculpture Garden, a gently sloping space that will be used for changing exhibitions of sculpture. The site continues to integrate the new museum building into the landscape, emphasizing again the Aldrich’s unique position of offering contemporary art in a pastoral setting.

Current outdoor projects include Jon Conner’s “Self-Sufficient Barnyard,” a collection of 42 carved Styrofoam animals that is on the museum’s front lawn; Jason Middlebrook’s “The Beginning of the End,” a work selected specifically for the opening of the museum that is based on Robert Indiana’s iconic “Love” series; and the return of Nina Levy’s “Big Baby,” a seven-foot-tall sculpture that had been on the front lawn during the museum’s renovations and is now situated at the terrace entrance between the exhibition building and Old Hundred.

Finally, the museum is now fully handicapped accessible.

“We finally have an elevator,” said Harry Philbrick, “and we’re really pleased to finally be up to date” in keeping handicapped visitorscomfortable and having all of the museum’s galleries and amenities accessible.

When it opened four decades ago The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art was one of the first museums in the country devoted solely to the exhibition of contemporary art. The dream of the late Larry Aldrich, who founded the museum in 1964, remains the focus of today’s staff: The museum’s mission has always been to serve as a national leader in the exhibition of contemporary art and to be an innovator in museum education.

The Aldrich continues to be a noncollecting museum; it is more concerned with temporary presentations of the latest art than building a permanent collection. Such a collection would only move from being contemporary to classic in the fast-moving world of modern art.

The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, at 258 Main Street in Ridgefield, can be reached by calling 203-438-4519.