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NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART
Discover Our Digital Museum!
As New Mexico Museum of Art staff weather the coronavirus pandemic at home, their work on future exhibitions and educational programming continues.
Staff are also devising current and creative ways to reach museum-goers digitally, ensuring that you stay close to the museum while staying home.
These online offerings include the twice-weekly Instagram feature Isolation Inspiration, where local artists share what is inspiring them during this time of social isolation through video and photography submissions. Museum curators are also presenting a series of online exhibitions.
Visit these resources and stay connected today!
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Visit museumfoundation.org/ virtual-visit for links to all online resources.
New Mexico Museum of Art
A Natural Home The Beaumont Newhall Library
Most artistic collections have a traceable lineage, often bestowed upon institutions that enjoyed a close relationship with the artist. In the case of the Beaumont Newhall Library, its new home at the New Mexico Museum of Art falls perfectly in line with the collection’s heritage.
The Newhall Library photographic research archive is a trove of 3,500 books and catalogs collected by the man many still consider to have written the seminal book on photography. (That would be The History of Photography, published in 1937, just before Newhall became the first curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department.) The collection also includes additional archival material.
Newhall was a beloved longtime Santa Fe resident who taught photography at the University of New Mexico after his retirement from his museum career. Former Museum of Art curator of photography Steve Yates was a Newhall student and exhibition collaborator. Santa Fe artist and photo dealer David Scheinbaum also knew Newhall. He provided the Museum of Art with several Newhall prints and portraits of Newhall with photographers Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke.
David Scheinbaum, Beaumont Newhall, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1982. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum in memory of Beaumont Newhall, 1993 (1993.27.1). © David Scheinbaum.
Museum of Art photography curator Katherine Ware says these interconnections make the museum a natural home for the Newhall Library.
“Newhall’s teaching and publications have been tremendously influential,” Ware says. “His history is an active part of the current conversation about photography. His deep well of curiosity and spirit of inquiry are a legacy we’d like to continue to foster at the museum.”
The Museum of Art is in the midst of making the Newhall Library available to researchers and the public. The library was transferred to the City of Santa Fe in 2017 from the now-shuttered Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s Marion Center of Photography. Under a longterm loan agreement with the city, the Museum of Art has 18 months to make the Newhall Library accessible.
The timeline involves six to eight months of renovations that will expand the museum library’s physical footprint in the 1917 building. That period of construction will be followed by another six to eight months of unpacking and organizing the Newhall Library.
Ware says that all the schlepping and construction dust are worth the opportunity to steward the holdings and bring greater focus to the museum as a resource for learning about photography.
“This is a moment when the museum is really able to expand some of its functions and become more accessible to the public,” she says. “Making the Newhall Library available is part of that, and the timing is good in that regard, so that we can really give it its due.”
In addition, Newhall wished for his library to remain in his adopted hometown.
“For us to be able to preserve and share this resource in Santa Fe is a wonderful way to acknowledge Newhall’s many accomplishments and use them as a springboard for the next wave of scholars,” Ware continues. “It’s great to put it in the context of our international photography collection and the richness of the photography community in New Mexico. I hope Newhall would be pleased to have it here.”
Immediate plans for drawing on the museum’s collection resources include exhibitions exploring the history of the photographic canon, which Newhall had a strong hand in creating. For her part, Ware is just as
David Scheinbaum, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke and Beaumont Newhall at Weston Beach, Point Lobos, California, on the occasion of Beaumont Newhall’s 75 th Birthday, 1983. Gelatin silver print. Museum purchase with funds from Rosina Smith, 1995 (1995.34.4). © David Scheinbaum.
interested in the artists who were in Newhall’s books as those who were not.
“I want to take the opportunity to evaluate his intellectual undertaking,” she says. “How do you tell the history of photography? How do you put together a narrative like that, and who gets included and who doesn’t?”
Down the line, the museum wants to explore opportunities to raise funds for an annual Newhall lecture series.
“Most of us are still in conversation with his books because they were so foundational,” Ware says. “Yet this is a time of such pluralism and revisionism. It would be exciting to celebrate Newhall by bringing in people who are revisiting his work.”
Plans for future exhibitions, though current as of April 30 press time, are subject to change.
