Bonnie Clearwater

NSU Art Museum’s uncompromising director continues to honor the past while nurturing the next generation

Written by JOHN THOMASON

There has never been a time when Bonnie Clearwater wasn’t involved in the arts. “There are photographs of me painting in diapers,” she recalls. She came from a family of musicians and designers, and her father ran an arts council in her native New York.

Though an artist of distinction by age 8, Clearwater had begun gravitating toward the cultivation side of the art world when, at 15, she launched a teen arts program—a harbinger of a career in visual-arts scholarship, discovery and curation that continues in her present post, as director of Fort Lauderdale’s NSU Art Museum.

Clearwater brought an impressive resumé to the position. She has been Leonard Lauder’s private curator, has curated the Mark Rothko Foundation in New York, and formed a successful art book publishing company. Cognizant of the emerging art scene here, she moved to South Florida in 1990 and would spend 16 years at the helm of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in North Miami.

She joined the NSU Art Museum in 2013, where she has exhibited solo or paired exhibitions of Frank Stella, Keith Haring, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol; wide-ranging showcases of African sculpture and Latin American surrealism; and “Lux et Veritas,” a deep dive into the celebrated artists of color who have attended Yale School of Art. Some of Clearwater’s shows have inspired lines around the block, but, she says,“in the selection of a show, it’s never with this idea that it’s going to be a blockbuster. In fact, I’ve looked at this throughout my history, and realized that many times, when an institution thinks they’re going to be doing a show because it’s a blockbuster, it backfires.”

When you moved to South Florida, what did you see here in terms of potential for the visual arts?

[In 1990], I came to visit Miami; my father was living here, and I had lunch with Craig Robbins, who by that time was developing South Beach. He said,“why don’t you and your husband move your compa- ny here?” … I knew there was something really interesting to tap into ... A generation of young artists were coming up, new people were coming in. Everybody just sort of clicked, and things were happening.

What are some of the shows you’re most proud of at NSU Art Museum?

I’m proud of every single one of them... Everything comes out of things I’ve done before. One of the first shows I did was on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism. It was about access. My first boss was Bob Littman, and he was the head of the Gelman Collection, which had all the Riveras and Kahlos. I had shown the whole collection at MoCA in 1998. So when I came here, Bob said, right away, “do you want to show the collection again?” I said, “I’ll take the Riveras and the Kahlos, but we have our own Mexican Modernism collection, and we’ll use it to bring attention and new scholarship to our art collection.”

Then there was the “Happy” show, which wasn’t about happiness. It was actually about death! If I’d called the show “Death,” no one would’ve come to see it.

Does your partnership with Nova Southeastern affect what you do curatorially?

We find ways of connecting … I have lunch with board members of the university. They love the museum. But it is all laissez-faire with programming.

Are there commercial considerations in the shows you program?

Do you crunch the attendance numbers? No, I’m dead set against doing that kind of quantifying, because that’s where a lot of museums got into trouble. If we go that route in the museum and look at how many people are coming for this show or that show, you’re not going to do the shows that have to be done.

What are the trends you’ve been seeing in contemporary art?

I’m seeing a very strong emergence of new work. In July, [Curator] Ariella [Wolens] and I are doing seven solo exhibitions of South Florida artists for whom this will be their first solo museum show. They’re a little bit beyond what I would call truly emerging; some of them have commercial galleries already, and have national exposure and have won prestigious awards. But it’s also about creating community among them. We have artists in Broward and Miami that don’t know each other. Part of it is to have all of them at one time, simultaneously, so that we form this community.

If You Go

WHAT: NSU ART MUSEUM

WHERE: 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tues.Sat., noon to 5 p.m. Sun.

CONTACT: 954/525-5500, nsuartmuseum.org