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Williams Eyes Solutions to Museum Building's Deficiencies
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
08:07PM / Monday, December 14, 2015
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A sign points the way up the steep steps to the Williams College Art Museum. The college is looking to relocate WCMA because of issues with space, conditions, parking and instruction.

WMCA has been expanded and renovated five times since 1846 — it has no more room to grow.

The Object Lab at the Williams College Museum of Art is gallery space that has been given over to artwork requested by faculty from various disciplines at the college.

A storage room accessible from an exterior staircase holds WCMA's pedestals and display cases when not in use in the galleries.

Art objects are stored adjacent to water lines behind the scenes at the Williams College Museum of Art.


WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The building that houses the Williams College Museum of Art is bursting at the seams.
 
Making matters worse: There are too many seams to burst.
 
The college is looking at locations to build a new home for the museum and art department.
 
The current home Lawrence Hall, which was built in 1846 and expanded in 1890, 1915, 1926, 1938 and, most significantly, 1986, when the college finished a major renovation designed by architect Charles Moore.
 
All those expansions make it problematic to house and display valuable works of art within the Main Street museum.
 
"The museum does not have a continuous air barrier," WCMA Director Tina Olsen explained recently. "Museums have to maintain climate control. They have to. They are bound by the guidelines that govern museums. And that is the way by which you secure loans. If you can't maintain climate control, you cannot secure loans, and your reputation can't be maintained.
 
"We have a very, very hard time maintaining climate control in this building because our air barrier is not sealed. And that's because this building is, in fact, five different buildings that have been added to over years and years and years."
 
Lawrence Hall currently runs on five different mechanical systems, Olsen notes, and that inefficiency adds to the cost of operation. All those boilers have to run at a fairly high level to overcome the facility's structural deficiencies.
 
"Picture it like it's your own house and you have bad windows," she said. "You just have to pump a lot of hot air in at all times. So we maintain climate control, but we maintain it with a lot of effort."
 
This fall, word leaked out that the college's search for a new site for WCMA has turned to the intersection of Main and Southworth streets. And the news prompted an online petition objecting to intrusion on the residential neighborhood that, at last count, had 316 signatures.
 
In response, the college's Arts Facilities Committee has scheduled two listening sessions for Tuesday, Dec. 15, at Griffin Hall, from 4 to 5 p.m. and 7 to 8 p.m.
 
Last week, Olsen and Peter Low, the chairman of the college's Art History and Studio Art Department, sat down for separate interviews to talk about the issues each of their groups faces in the building that they share.
 
Olsen, who arrived on campus in 2012, said the issues are well documented and myriad.
 
"We completed an in-depth facilities assessment of the building 2014 by the firm Oudens Ello out of Boston that detailed at great length a lot of issues in Lawrence," Olsen said. "It was clear to me when I arrived that there were serious issues. And those were documented, and they were more egregious than any of us expected when we saw the report.
 
"But in addition to that, there are very serious issues around space. We simply don't have enough space in this building. And those are the two issues prompting the urgency of the museum having a new building."
 
Growing pains
 
Both WCMA and the art department have grown dramatically since the last expansion of Lawrence Hall in the mid '80s.
 
"I think we had something like six, maybe, art history faculty when this building opened," Low said. "We now have 13. We literally don't fit.
 
"We just carved out a space in our visual resources center here, just this summer, to put in two new offices, but they have no windows. Plus, we lose the visual resources space. And even then, we have art history staff who can't fit into this building and have to be elsewhere.
 
"One of the ways we've dealt with this for quite a few years was the chair's office was in the Spencer Studio building. But that was a problem because our art history faculty were consistently the chairs, and at the moment they were named chair, they were moved from their colleagues."
 
The art department's seminar room holds just more than a dozen people; 20 would be a more optimum size, Low said. The department's conference room is being used to hold excess furniture.
 
"It's like teaching in my basement," he said.
 
If anything, space is even more of a concern for WCMA, where two former galleries have been converted to teaching spaces as faculty demands on WCMA continue to grow.
 
"In 1980, the college had 178 faculty members," Olsen said. "It has 297 now. A lot of what we do here is teach with [art] objects. We have a classroom that's dedicated to that that began in 2004. In 2004, we converted a gallery to a classroom so that faculty could request things. They can say, 'I'm teaching the American Civil Rights movement. Bring a collection of objects that will help me teach that.' And we do that. It's a very, very important part of what we do.
 
"In 2002, we saw 31 classes. By 2007, it was 55. By 2014, last year it was 84. We can no longer meet the demand for classes that want to use the museum. That room is at capacity. We have to turn people away."
 
A second gallery was turned into WCMA's Object Lab, where works from the collection specifically requested by faculty are on display. They're still on view for the public as well, but it's not a true museum gallery.
 
"The faculty has grown and the desire and interest in teaching with objects has grown just because of changes with art and people's understanding of how interdisciplinary art is," Olsen said. "And we cannot meet that demand. And it's not like we can't meet it a little bit. We really can't meet it."
 
And what WCMA has done to try to meet that need has cut into its ability to fulfill its other mission: as a museum for the display of great works of art.
 
"People don't give you stuff so you can stick it in storage," Olsen said. "They give it to you so people can see it."
 
Storage wars
 
When Lawrence Hall was last expanded, WCMA had about 6,000 objects in its collection. Currently, it has 14,000 objects, and in addition to sheer number of artworks, the type of art in the collection has changed.
 
"Thomas Krens was the director in the 1980s, and then Linda Shearer was the director," Olsen said. "They grew the collection around things that we didn't have before. So the collection became much stronger in African art and sculpture. The Prendergast Collection came to the museum throughout the '80s. Larger contemporary paintings and sculpture became a real priority in ways it never had before. Installation art, works by Robert Morris. And in the early '90s, large format photography became something people were really interested in and the collection grew. Last year, we received this gift of works from the Norton Foundation, 68 works of art from the '80s and '90s, and a lot of big things.
 
"This museum was never built with that kind of work in mind."
 
So instead of keeping its collection on site, WCMA currently uses a commercial storage facility in Connecticut, about 2 1/2 hours from Williamstown, Olsen said.
 
"If you're a curator or a faculty member who wants to see something — and that's our mission, learning and teaching — it's really, really hard for us to meet that mission because a lot of the work, especially the larger work, isn't here," she said.
 
What works WCMA can store on campus are crammed into every available, space, making retrieval difficult. And even when the art work is held in place, much of it is stored beneath pipes carrying hot water. And none of it is held in areas with proper fire suppression systems.
 
And when artwork is transported to and from the off-site facility in Connecticut — or when WCMA receives art loaned for special exhibitions — the objects go through an exposed loading dock.
 
"A lot of times, we have trouble borrowing art because this space is not climate controlled," explains Hideyo Okamura, WCMA's manager of exhibition design and planning, as he shows a visitor the dock. "Items go from a climate-controlled environment [at their home] to a climate controlled truck to ... here."
 
Okamura's job is further complicated by WCMA's extremely tight storeroom for pedestals and displays that he has to utilize whenever changing exhibitions in the gallery. It is one of many back-of-house issues with which museum staff must cope.
 
Location, location, location
 
Lawrence Hall is wedged between a residence hall to the east and the multipurpose Goodrich Hall to the west. On the north side of the building is Lawrence Hall Drive, which has 10 to 15 parking spots, many of which are filled by staff on any given day.
 
Visitors who want to see exhibits at the museum have another, far less desirable option.
 
"In the winter, if you're a visitor and you want to park, you have to park down the hill and climb this cliff, basically," Olsen said, referring to the parking lot at the college's athletic facilities. "For a lot of people, that's really hard to do."
 
Geography is an even greater impediment to the art department, which is disconnected from the rest of the college's faculty. Low said that wasn't a problem in the 1980s, when college departments were "developing a sense of each discipline."
 
But in today's academic world, the watchword is collaboration.
 
"The curricular, intellectual move toward collaboration and interdisciplinary has a material manifestation in terms of bringing everyone together physically," Low said. "That has simply increased our isolation so we have been alone in this respect. And this has been a real problem because our biggest goal in any kind of imagined renovation is to re-energize our connections to the rest of campus, to the other disciplines, especially the humanities and social sciences."
 
Low, who sits on the Arts Facilities Committee, foresees that Lawrence Hall will continue to be part of the college's arts program. Some of the recaptured space will be used for new studio activity and the creation of classrooms to allow video and film production.
 
"We'll be able to make stronger connections with theater and with dance and music," Low said. "We're excited about it for all kinds of reasons that are absolutely, at their core, intellectual and curricular."
 
Another thing to keep in mind about Lawrence Hall's location: it does not allow for yet another expansion.
 
That cliff to the south of the property does not allow for much more in the way of new construction. And if it were to expand to the north, it would eliminate what little parking the museum currently has at entrance level, including handicapped spots.
 
"You can see by looking at the site, there's almost nowhere to go," Olsen said. "You go forward and you can gain some space, but then you entomb the rotunda, which everyone is so fond of. It disappears from public view."
 
And even if another major renovation could correct Lawrence Hall's flaws, the Williams College Museum of Art, unlike the Clark Art Institute, cannot close its doors for a lengthy construction period. It is a teaching institution interwoven with the fabric of a major liberal arts college.
 
'A successful relationship'
 
It always is conceivable that either the art department or the museum could be relocated to a smaller building while the other entity stays in Lawrence Hall.
 
The art department's Low said that would be no solution at all.
 
"I do think that the WCMA-art department relationship has been the most successful such relationship in the history of liberal arts colleges in America," he said.
 
Part of that relationship includes the art classes that are held in the museum's gallery, including a course next semester being taught by a professor who is curating a show at the museum and teaching a class in conjunction with it.
 
But the interaction between museum and instruction in the art department goes beyond such formal arrangements.
 
"The importance of having our offices near the art objects is huge because we often will be sitting with a study and trying to puzzle through some particular issue," Low said. "And we can just say, 'Let's go up and have this discussion in front of that work of art.' And that has been absolutely core to our teaching success over the years. We want that to continue. I think it's intellectually important.
 
"I think [the museum and art department] are both eager, while continuing that relationship, to develop other relationships. Both the position of the museum has changed over the last 20 to 30 years and the discipline of art history has changed. And both of them are about engaging more fully with other academic, other intellectual spheres across campus and with the community as a whole.
 
"So it's a combination of ambitions that are driven by maintaining the success of both the museum and the art department, both the campus and the community."
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