The Luce Center staff can be a fairly competitive bunch: which of our scavenger hunts gets the most participants or which audio tour stops do visitors listen to most often. But lately, we’ve extended our competition to our ongoing Fill the Gap project where we ask you to help us fill the empty space in one of our cases when an artwork goes on exhibition, loan, or to our conservation center. With this latest version of Fill the Gap, we’ve begun making staff recommendations to help voters sift through the multitude of choices. Each staff person chooses an object she thinks will best fit in the case and then writes a short explanation for her reasoning. After a poor showing with my first attempt, I'm happy to announce that my latest pick for our Romaine Brooks case won in an incredibly tight race!
Our museum has 65 artworks by Romaine Brooks and it’s always a thrill when we have the opportunity to put another on view. Like many others, I am a huge fan of her work and of her as a person. Although American, Brooks spent most of her life in Europe painting portraits of her lovers and friends. Peter (A Young English Girl) is a portrait of the English artist Hannah Gluckstein, who attended the literary salons of Natalie Clifford Barney, Brooks’s longtime lover. Gluckstein (who painted under the name Gluck and was called Peter by friends) dressed in menswear, in a manner popular with many women of the upper and upper middle classes at this time, including Brooks. This trend not only allowed women to experiment with fashion, but also provided an outlet for lesbians, like Gluck and Brooks, to question and confront gender roles in the creation of a lesbian identity. This portrait is a wonderful example of Brooks’s work in both subject and style, and that’s why I suggested it for Fill the Gap.
Our current gap in need of a fill is in case 40b, which contains colorful, abstract pieces. This time, I’m throwing my hat in with Thomas Downing’s Red Span because the forms and colors the artist used will fit beautifully with the pieces already in this case. If you agree cast your vote for Downing. Not convinced? Check out the other options and the recommendations of other Luce Center staffers. When you vote (either in-gallery or online), feel free to leave your own comment—we love hearing what our citizen curators have to say!
American Art’s Fill the Gap project is mentioned in Arianna Huffington’s recent article, Museums 2.0: What Happens When Great Art Meets New Media?
