The nearly 85-year history of the Indiana University Eskenazi Museum of Art, as it is now called, can be told in large measure through the impact of just four highly distinguished directors of outstanding vision, artistic taste, and professional integrity—Henry Hope, Tom Solley, Heidi Gealt, and David Brenneman. I had the great honor of meeting the legendary Tom Solley; Heidi Gealt—and her husband Barry—are close friends of Laurie’s and mine; and I had the great good fortune, with Lauren Robel, of being able to appoint David Brenneman as the Wilma E. Kelley Director of the Eskenazi Museum of Art and to welcome him and Ruth to Bloomington in 2015.
The search that took place for this position in 2014 upon Heidi’s retirement was a difficult one. Difficult because the reputation and luminosity of the museum had become so renowned over 70 years under the leadership of its three previous directors, that it was a highly coveted position nationally. It attracted a very large field of candidates of the highest quality.
Choosing proved to be a formidable task. However, we had an excellent search committee with a chair of unique experience—my good friend the late Bruce Cole—former IU distinguished professor, longest-serving chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, former IU Trustee, and one of the world’s foremost scholars of Renaissance art. I am not violating any confidences, after 10 years, to say that the final short list that Bruce presented to Lauren and me was, in terms of qualifications, background, and experience, one of the strongest I saw for any of the major searches that took place during my administration.
But in this formidable field David shone out. The reasons were manifold: extensive experience and great success in the core mission of art museums—the acquisition, exhibition, curation, and preservation of great art; the creative use of works of art to educate and teach in multiple disciplines; an understanding of the most effective ways to use technology in art museums; a deep commitment to the democratization of art as accessible to all and not as an arcane and esoteric secular religion; and, what became most important of all, substantial previous experience with extensive renovation at the High Museum in Atlanta. There with great diplomatic and leadership skill, he dealt with all the complexities and delicacies involved in the renovation and repurposing of major portions of structures designed by two architects of comparable rarified standing to I.M Pei—Richard Meier and Renzo Piano.
Lauren and I knew then that it was likely we would soon be able, here at IU, to carry out a comprehensive and transformative renovation of this magnificent creation of I.M. Pei in which we gather this afternoon, and to expand and enhance it in ways of which Pei ultimately approved, to enable more of the museum’s magnificent collection to be displayed and studied, and to stage exhibitions of the work of the most distinguished and emerging artists. This became a reality due to a wonderfully generous gift from Sidney and Lois Eskenazi, whose philanthropic support for the arts at Indiana university has been without peer. And many other donors, some here this afternoon, gave generous gifts that also helped make this vision possible.
This became a vast project that involved the truly massive task of moving the museum’s huge collection of more than 40,000 items, many of almost incalculable value, to temporary storage for a number of years—the first time it had all been moved since 1982—and then planning for moving it back into a superb, much-expanded exhibition, research, study, and preservation space. It was a project David led and which the staff of the Eskenazi carried out with superlative skill.
A tribute must be paid here to the architect responsible for the renovation, Susan Rodriguez. She is responsible for two other magnificent additions to the campus—the Global and International Studies Building and the Carillon. And she proved once and for all that even the design of an architect of genius like I.M Pei can be improved upon.
David and his staff worked tirelessly with Suzie and the other architects on the immensely complex details involved in developing the plans for the renovation of the museum, while also moving the collection to temporary storage.
On November 7, 2019, we saw the culmination of all these Herculean efforts as the Eskenazi Museum of Art was re-opened to the public. Visitors swarmed in on that day to marvel at Indiana University’s comprehensive collection of the great arts of human civilization that were once again displayed in all their magnificence, but now in greatly enhanced and more functional surroundings. It represented a tribute to the labors and vision of the three previous directors; to generations of staff at the museum; to former presidents and campus leaders who recognized that something special was being built of enormous value to the scholarly enterprise of the whole campus and beyond, and not just to one school or department, and that it must be supported and sustained. It is a tribute to the generosity of the Eskenazis and hundreds of other donors across many decades, to all the architects, designers, and builders involved, but above all it is a tribute to David who took all that had been bequeathed to him in the previous 80 years and fashioned out of it something truly superb.
The greatest art critic of our age, Robert Hughes, once mused on the purpose of art, and by extension we can surmise the duty of those who lead great art galleries like the Eskenazi.
“The basic project of art,” Hughes said, “is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person meditating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”1
This is the legacy that David leaves us. A legacy of the highest standards, a legacy of total professional integrity, and a legacy of a vision of how art—well housed and explained—can give a vision of the sublime. For this legacy David, as with the legacies of Hope, of Solly, and of Gealt, Indiana University will be forever in your debt.
Congratulations and farewell to you and to Ruth as you leave IU to assume your new position as Director of the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.
1. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New, episode 8, “The Future That Was.” David Lewis Richardson and Lorna Pegram, dir. Aired November 9, 1980, on BBC.