Every museum curator knows about art: What’s hot, what’s over, what’s next. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson’s gift is to know it before everybody else.
She has an eye for artists, plucking painters and installationists from obscure parts of the globe and presenting their first U.S. exhibits at her Aspen Art Museum, then watching them go on to fame.
She has an eye for architects, selecting not-so-famous Shigeru Ban to design the museum’s new building eight years ago and declaring that he would win the Pritzker Prize for the job. She was half-right; Ban won his profession’s highest honor for other projects this spring, a good bit of timing that turns the $45 million Aspen Art Museum’s grand opening this weekend into an international event.
And in a sense, she had an eye for Aspen’s own potential, knowing that she could transform its tiny, community museum into a world-class gallery — if she could change the city’s perception of itself.
“When I came here, people said, ‘Don’t expect anyone to give you money,’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ And they said, ‘This is people’s second or third or fourth home, and they won’t give here,’ ” Zuckerman Jacobson recollected over lunch last week.
She believed she could win them over, using the gallery’s walls as a weapon.
“I said, ‘Well, actually, if what we are doing is interesting — or more interesting — than where-ever else they live — then they will give money.’ And so, that was what we set out to do.”
Zuckerman Jacobson’s tenure hasn’t been without tumultuous bumps. The museum project has been controversial from the start, dividing the town’s old guard from its nouveau riche, sometimes painfully.
But her success can be quantified. Before she took over as CEO and chief curator in 2005, the largest donation in the museum’s history was $75,000. She has since raised more than $103 million for the cause — a historic achievement for a female director at a non-collecting art museum. Twenty-seven individuals handed over $1 million or more each.
Her progress also shows in the museum she built. Ban’s design is sleek and cutting-edge, a giant, three-story box that is wrapped, sidewalk to ceiling, in a basket of woven wood strips. It is large and awkward for its corner in Aspen’s downtown, but it is also unique and respectful to the architecture around it. Ban sheathed his building in wood to honor the timber materials traditional to mountain structures and opened the rooftop to a fresh-air park, free of charge to the public, that captures one of the best views around.
The building also respects Zuckerman Jacobson’s primary concern, which is showcasing art. The galleries are large, light-filled and efficient with 14-foot ceilings, a sharp contrast to the museum’s former headquarters in a converted hydroelectric plant on the edge of the commercial district.
Zuckerman Jacobson is famous for not compromising when it comes to what she shows. She chooses difficult, often-hard-to-get topics, and held onto that habit throughout her long fundraising period, a time when other museum directors might have leaned toward populist exhibits to win goodwill.
“Heidi is a powerhouse at the very heart of the contemporary art field,” said Adam Lerner, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, who himself has a national reputation for innovation.
“Under her leadership, the Aspen Art Museum has consistently brought to light the next and the next and the next horizon of contemporary artists.”
There was more than art going on at the Aspen Museum, though, and the curator’s strategy for winning support is textbook for the way museums build their base these days. Her first step was to expand her board, winning over a few local philanthropists, then having them recruit a few philanthropic friends and turning the museum into a social club of sorts.
“I started to figure out who people were interested in being the room with and being at the table with and starting to engage those people in the idea of the museum and ask for their support. Then it kind of went from there,” she said.
Board meetings were expanded into informal gatherings and converted into international road trips. Give at a certain level and you get to go on vacation with your wealthy pals. Zuckerman Jacobson cashed in favors from the many artists she discovered, and the trips became exclusive. Artist Vic Muniz flew to Brazil to greet the Aspen team when they traveled to his country. Ernesto Neto did the same.
Then there was Art Crush, the museum’s annual fundraising party. Zuckerman Jacobson, a stickler for details, turned the fête into a luxe bash, with the best food and cocktails in town. She asked her artist connections to donate works for auction — dog photographer William Wegman donates, so does Chinese superstar Ai Weiwei — and that drew the well-heeled local crowds. Twenty-two of the “Top 200” art collectors listed by the prestigious “Art in America” magazine have homes in Aspen, and they know a deal when they see one.
That brought on mega-sponsors like Sotheby’s auction house and Dom Pérignon, which became the house drink. The party is now the social event of the season in Aspen. Last week’s night of revelry, a clothes-conscious affair with artists and paparazzi in attendance, brought in a whopping $3 million for the museum.
With its ambitious director leading the charge, the museum has become so fashionable an association that fundraising for the new building had to be adjusted up again and again. The original goal was $30 million, then $40 million, then $50 million. So far, the giving has totaled $72 million, with $27 million going into an endowment.
Something gained, lost
The conversion of the museum into a playground for high-minded art aficionados and the part-time wealthy families who come and go hasn’t sat well with all of Aspen. Locals like to point out that the museum used to be a place people went for student art exhibits or to see regional artists show off their wares; when the big fundraiser was a community party held on a ranch and people wore jeans.
That’s a far cry from what the museum is known for now, like presenting the first important exhibitions of deeply cerebral German artists like Nicole Wermers or Friedrich Kunath or showcasing Brooklyn artist Lorna Simpson’s creative commentary on race relations.
“It was really very much a center of town for many years,” said Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, who has covered the social scene for the Aspen Times for four decades.
“I have to say, the last six or seven years, it’s become a very elite place for rich people.”
The transformation has turned the museum into a symbol of the identity crisis Aspen has suffered for years, as the one-time mountain hamlet has evolved into a ski getaway for movie stars and a vacation destination for outsiders who build enormous homes in the hills and live in them just a few weeks of the year.
Locals have fought the relocation since the idea came up, worried that the building would be out of character next to the city’s Victorian homes and red-brick businesses. In 2009, voters overwhelmingly turned down a ballot measure that would have sold a parcel of public land near the old site to the museum for its relocation.
It’s been ugly, to say the least, and the insults have flown, many in the direction of Zuckerman Jacobson, who lobbied hard personally for the ballot measure, showing off Ban’s design and promising to deliver a gift to the community.
“Heidi was in absolute tears the night it was turned down, absolute tears,” said Nancy Magoon, a board member who has donated more than $2 million to the museum. “We had to reconfigure and start all over again.”
A new beginningThe museum regrouped, identifying a lot on the corner of Spring Street and Hyman Avenue. The land was private, so no voter approval was necessary, and Zuckerman Jacobson moved forward quickly.
“The harder something is, the more I like it, and that’s an Aspen criterion, too,” she said. “How hard can you push yourself? How many times a week can you go to yoga? How many times a day can you go up and down Ajax? That kind of competitiveness is who we are.”
That drive has defined her career, during her five-year stint as a curator at The Jewish Museum in New York, then more than six years at the Art Museum at the University of California in Berkeley.
Aspen has come with its own set of challenges, including, she says adamantly, fundraising. People who have been successful in business need to be convinced that their donations will be used productively, and she’s had to justify every penny she’s asked for.
“People think it must be easy, but we’ve been successful because it’s been hard,” she said. “Who likes to do stuff that’s easy anyway?”
All those donations up the responsibility to do the job better, to produce the “perfect museum” as she believes she has done in Aspen, and to maintain a program where “the curatorial ambitions are huge.”
Zuckerman Jacobson, who sees things before everybody else, predicts a bright future for the museum, and she knows she has to deliver the goods for years to come if all those promises she made to donors, artists and architects and to the town are to be fulfilled.
“As a cultural worker, all I have is my integrity,” she said. “I’m not an accountant or a lawyer with a trained set of skills. All I have is my integrity.”
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
