Accessible Art at MOBot

ACCESSIBLE ART AT MOBOT

By Maureen Brodsky

Nezka Pfiefer recently took the curatorial reins at the restored and reopened Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum at the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBot). Fresh from her responsibilities at the Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science, and Art in Scranton, PA, Pfiefer brings knowledge of a Victorian collection and experience with a herbarium to her current role. This will stand her in good stead as she brings some exciting ideas to the recently reopened museum here.

I had a brief chat with Pfiefer at the museum as she graciously showed me the current exhibits. Since she has only been in her new role for six months, these current exhibits don’t even hint at the projects she has planned. We started our interview discussing the challenges museums face as they try to engage the community and be relevant and impactful in areas of social change. Pfeifer notes that “It is a challenge to make (museums) accessible. What's happened is, with all of the social justice movements that have really come to a head in the last five years, museums want to play a bigger role as community catalysts. And so this is now an opportunity for them to effect social change and not just reflect it or illustrate it.”

We started our tour with a walk through the lower gallery, which is replete with portraits, botanical art and landscapes reflecting a hodgepodge of art interests at the Garden over the decades. It’s a nice collection. Pfiefer explained: “And so many people don't know that the Garden even has these [prints and paintings]. This was an opportunity to show some of that.”

We then moved on to the lavishly decorated original public gallery upstairs. This space is a Victorian jewel of interior design. It’s bright and although it’s small, it has a feeling of spaciousness and grandeur. The restored cabinets are gleaming but hardly full. The displays are objects from the ethnobotanical or biocultural collections of the William L. Brown Center, which collects and catalogs how people use plants around the world. The staff documents how specific cultures use plants and how climate change has had an impact on that usage. One case features Tibetan traditional objects but also includes a sample of wine. Climate change has reduced the snow cap and changed the valley climate. This change has allowed the growing of grapes and the production of wine. Dr. Peter Wyse Jackson, President of the Garden, is also an avid collector of ethnobotanical products and

specimen. In fact, if in your travels you acquire unusual examples of ethnobotany, you should contact the William L. Brown Center, as they are interested in donations that expand their collection.

We also toured the smaller southern room that probably was an entrance foyer at one time. This small space featured an exhibit on New Caledonia, the French-controlled island in the South Pacific that is a current biodiversity hot spot. The island is home to 3,500 native plant forms, making it an intense self-contained ecosystem. Seventy-five percent of these plants are endemic to that locale and consequently found nowhere else on the planet. The environment has the challenge of dealing with the invasive Rusa deer population that has ballooned to 300,000 in 150 years, surpassing the human population. Pfiefer explained that it is a prime hunting destination as scientists and government aim to control the species.

While these exhibits were interesting and informative, the exciting part of the conversation was hearing Pfiefer’s plans for the museum. As any artist has her canvas, a curator’s medium is their vision for organizing and realizing shows and exhibits. Pfiefer shared with me three exciting projects in the works.

First, in January 2019, there will be an exhibit of botanical art curated by the American Society of Botanical Artists, which is headquartered in the New York Botanical Garden. This show will bring beautiful contemporary art to St. Louis. Second, for the first anniversary of the museum’s reopening, a collaborative exhibition of science and art will explore the plant composition, history, and derivation of paper. Pfeifer explained that she is aware of paper artists in the area and hinted at their involvement in the project. Paper was chosen as the focus because it is the traditional gift for first anniversaries. Third, another project in the future is a still-to-be conceptualized collaboration involving the Garden’s waterlilies, historical documentation about them in the Garden’s collections and an exploration into the impact the plant has had as an inspiration to artists.

Further down the road, projects might include other plant forms or products like the potato or wine. Wine incidentally has a strong connection to George Engelman, one of Henry Shaw’s early advisors and horticulturists. “George Engelmann was actually doing research on phylloxera, the aphid that

destroyed the French vines in the late 19th century. And it's (American) Norton vines that were used as the rootstock in which the French vines were grafted to save those. So, there's a really interesting global story there too,” Pfeifer elaborated. The Norton grape is the official grape of Missouri and a cornerstone of the Missouri wine industry.

In Pfeifer’s own words: “It'll be interesting to see how visitors respond to what we do. And there are so many interesting stories about what the Garden does, whether it's the horticulture or the research or conservation projects. Those will all get woven together in exhibitions moving forward.” There is a palpable excitement at the prospect of revitalizing the museum as she engages the community and develops programs exploring social change and accessibility.

www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens_gardening/ our-garden/gardens_conservatories/victorian-districttower-grove-house/sachs_museum.aspx

ARTIST INTERVIEWS