THE ANNEX

April 10th, 2013

Behind the Scenes with UMMA Lead Security Officer Xu Yong

Interview by Cameron Bothner.

If you’ve spent any time in UMMA’s galleries, you’ve probably felt the welcoming presence of Xu (pronounced “Shoo”) Yong, UMMA’s Lead Security Officer, doing his rounds. I spent a while walking around with him recently and tried to better get to know him. We had a lovely chat: I hope you find it interesting!

Can you please briefly describe your job here at the museum?

We have in total seven security officers on the museum staff. As Lead Security Officer I perform all the security duties and services to our visitors as the other officers, plus some administrative duties assisting the facility manager.

How long have you been employed at UMMA?

I think I started in 1988, or maybe early 1989, first as a temporary employee, and then I became a member of the regular staff a couple years later.

What do you enjoy most about working at UMMA?

Mostly I enjoy, of course, our art collections. I really enjoy being able to look at the works every time I pass by. And also, the people: both the staff here—-it’s really a great group of people to work with—-and our visitors. I really enjoy seeing them, talking to them, and sometimes in a small way helping them out.

How did you decide you wanted to work at an art museum?

That was a no-brainer! When I came to this country in 1987, I was basically looking for any job I could find. I graduated with an art degree, so it was natural for me to start by looking for anything art related. So that’s how I wound up here.

Do you have a favorite work of art in the museum?

Up until recently, my favorite work has been a painting up in the Modern/Contemporary gallery by the German expressionist artist Max Beckmann called Begin the Beguine. I really like that painting probably because when I was in art school I had an interest in German expressionism: the very strong color, and interesting structure—-I actually experimented with it myself—-so when I came to the museum, that moved me tremendously.

However, this year we received a new acquisition, The Music Lesson by the Dutch artist Caspar Netscher (ed. pictured behind Xu in his portrait) that I really love. I don’t know if it’s because now I’m getting older, but I really like the settling, very quiet, and small scale but mighty scene. For me, it’s just so lovely. You can look at it so many times, and it will always touch you. So now this has become my new favorite.

Can you tell me a bit about your life outside of UMMA?

I am married, and I have one son who’s going to be going to college this fall, and very fortunately my wife works here at the museum with me—-she’s the Asian Art Conservator—-and we love it. Besides work, I really enjoy reading books and watching movies. And I like collecting art: going to antique stores, always looking for treasure. I have a small collection of my own.

What is the most common thing you have to tell someone to stop doing?

Please do not touch! That’s the most frequent thing. Also, photography is something we frequently have to remind people not to do. But they’re all natural reactions: I must confess that sometimes I want to touch! You see a marble sculpture and the smooth surface, or even on an oil painting you see the texture and it’s just so inviting. But they are fragile, and we want to keep them safe as long as we can, so therefore we have to restrain ourselves.

And photography is also natural: people want to keep their memory of the visit. But sometimes they don’t understand that a camera flash can hurt the artifacts, and then of course there are complicated copyright issues.

Do you have any stories of preventing art theft or vandalism?

Fortunately, no. I’ve been working here over 20 years, and I cannot think of any. Nothing has been stolen, thank God, but there have been a couple of incidents that weren’t intentionally vandalism but accidents. When we had a wood exhibit, some kids accidentally cracked a beautiful wood-turned vase. That’s why the museum needs us—-to prevent that kind of thing.

There is another interesting story that I don’t know how to categorize. I remember a year or two ago I was walking by and suddenly saw a small picture was on the wall near the museum store in the new wing where nothing had been hanging before. I said “that’s strange!” Someone had glued it to the wall. We found the student who put it there, who was basically just putting his own work in the museum gallery!

People say he was trying to propose to his girlfriend or something. It was innocent, but we need to stay vigilant for such things that are not supposed to happen.

I’m told you’re an artist; what kind of art do you make?

I graduated from a Chinese university art school with a degree in Chinese painting. I do mostly works on paper; ink washes, and drawings.

How is your work in the museum informed by your background as an artist?

I think my unique background - both in my knowledge of art and art history, and also being Chinese - has been well utilized. I can explain to visitors about art techniques or styles, and I can translate to Chinese as well. Several years ago, I was invited by UMMA’fs Education Department to demonstrate calligraphy techniques as part of a teacher workshop, and then did similar demonstrations in later years for museum visitors. (Visit UMMA’s DialogTable to find Xu doing calligraphy in a video about the 1961 Untitled abstract painting by Franz Kline in UMMA’s collection.)

I also volunteered one time to give a tour to a group of Chinese senior citizens. I prepared a tour all in Chinese, and they came, and the group of elderly Asians were as a matter of fact Korean! I still gave their tour, but of course I had to switch to English.

This is one of the questions we usually ask, but it’s wonderfully ironic because you’re a Security Officer: if you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your home, what would it be?

Oh, I’d definitely steal the Mona Lisa! Even though I haven’t seen it in person, it’s just a great painting: timeless, very settled, and beautiful. If I had to choose a second, I’d pick a Vermeer for the same reason. I’ve really been enjoying the quiet, deep, meditative works of art. And also they’re both small!

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Lots of people ask me if I’m ever tired of working here, and my answer really is no. Of course, when I was young, I had a different vision. I did not ever think I wanted to be a security guard at a museum, but you know, life happens. I’m happy to still be involved with art and with people in their discovery of it.

Just the other day I was thinking about this: people think about museums as something old, something past. But I’ve been working here over 20 years, and I see so many kids coming through, who grow up, who go off to college, and then I see those kids come back to visit. I think the museum has so much life in it. Kids come when they’re just starting to walk, and they grow up, and they keep coming back. The museum is part of this human story, and it’s touching. I’m satisfied!

UMMA SPAC thanks Xu Yong for his time and for this interview, and invites you to come visit the museum, find Xu in the galleries and chat with him for a while yourself.

February 8th, 2013

Behind the Scenes at UMMA

Interview by Elisabeth Wilson

Name: Amee Spondike
Title: Associate Director of Development, Individual and Corporate Giving

Can you please briefly describe your job here at the Museum?

I collaborate with the museum staff and various university departments to facilitate individual and corporate giving, which supports exhibitions, programs and the endowment. Essentially, we do a lot of interpersonal communication in development, mixed with some strategic social engineering.

How long have you been employed at UMMA?

I started working at UMMA four years ago, just before we re-opened after the addition and building renovation.

What do you enjoy most about working at UMMA?

I really enjoy working with a variety of people. I love hearing about donor’s connections to the museum and art, as well as working with people throughout the university. I especially enjoying visiting people in their homes and seeing how they live with their art.

How did you get into museum development?

Like most development professionals, it is not a career that I trained for or even expected to find myself in. I went to art school in NY and studied photography. During and after graduate school I worked for a runway photographer and from there was swept up into the world of fashion. I worked for several Italian designers, and really enjoyed it, but found that it lacked substance. During that time I was also volunteering for my local community garden in Brooklyn and started to volunteer for the Trust for Public Land to help write grants for other local gardens while I went back to school to study landscape design and architecture. Writing those grants, but mostly talking to the gardeners, proved to be really enjoyable and meaningful. It all came together after that. I was able to use my skills to support the art I love.

What advice would you give to students who want to pursue a career in museum development?

Seek out internships and pursue other opportunities in which they can enhance their communication, project management, and networking skills.

Do you have a favorite work of art in the museum?
The Helen Frankenthaler painting that hangs in UMMA’s Vertical Gallery. I love the physical scale and fluidity of her work, how it feminizes abstract expressionism.

What’s coming up at UMMA that you’re especially excited about?

There will be some big changes to a few of our gallery spaces soon that will enhance the way we look at our collection. I also love parties, so I’m looking forward to the next UMMA After Hours, coming up on March 14.

If you weren’t working here at the UMMA, what would you be doing instead?
I’d be a boutique florist with loads of free time to do Pilates and visit art museums.

What is something surprising about you that most people might not know?

Most people do not know that I was born in Iceland.

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Fun! Thanks for the interview Amee!!

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Behind the Scenes at UMMA is a monthly series of interviews conducted by members of UMMA’s Student Programming and Advisory Council (SPAC) with UMMA staff members. The goal of these interviews is to provide a “Behind the Scenes” look at who works at UMMA and what they do. Stay tuned for the next installment of this series next month!

January 11th, 2013

Behind the Scenes at UMMA

David Choberka received his PhD from the U-M Department of Germanic Languages and Literature in addition to a Graduate Certificate from the Museum Studies Program with a focus on the history and theory of museums and art museum practice. He previously served as both a researcher and interpretive content developer at UMMA prior to the reinstallation of the collections when the Museum re-opened in 2009, and was recently re-hired by UMMA with the task of developing and implementing programs that sustain and deepen the Museum’s engagement with University teaching and research, creating campus collaborations that result in significant exhibitions and other scholarly projects. — So what does all that mean?

Interview by: Nina Levin

Name: David Choberka

Title: Mellon Academic Coordinator

Time employed at UMMA: 6 months

What exactly do you do at UMMA?

I am the Mellon Academic Coordinator. The “Mellon” part of my title comes from the grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that supports my position. My job is to manage partnerships and projects with other collecting institutions and with academic departments on campus. One way I do this is through outreach to instructors; by talking to them about ways they can utilize the Museum’s collections for teaching their classes and helping with curriculum development. I also manage collaborations with the University’s other collecting institutions – such as the Kelsey or Clements – that result in exhibitions and other scholarly projects.

What are some of the more surprising departments that you’ve worked with?

I worked with someone in the Kinesiology department who teaches bone and muscle anatomy. I helped her find a collection of works, mostly in the mannerist style. She was interested in these pieces because the representation of the human figure in them is very realistic. But at the same time, the artist generally exaggerates something about the anatomy to give a particular body part greater strength. She is planning to have her students come look at the artworks and identify what is real and what is exaggerated in the representation of the musculature.

I’ve also worked with the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies department – I did some research and discovered there are actually some 380 items in UMMA’s collections that come from different Latin American countries, which is a modest number in comparison to our whole collection but includes many excellent pieces for their program. The same is true of the Judaic Studies program, for which I helped identify a good number of works by Jewish artists about which their faculty was previously unaware.

You have a background in Germanic languages and literature. Does that influence your preferences in visual art?

A lot of the foundational texts in art history, cultural theory, and visual culture come from Germany, and that was one focus of my graduate studies. So, in a way, my background influences the way I look at all art, because I have this broad theoretical backdrop related to visual culture that influences how I think about everything.

But your training was not specifically in visual art?

The PhD program in the German Department at U of M is very interdisciplinary. Each individual has a theme or period that they focus on. I focused on the cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century and wrote my dissertation on the WWI era. The coursework and my research considered most every kind of medium: literature, social and political theory, art, architecture, film, dance, fashion, music; really any type of cultural expression you can think of.

What made you choose to do museum work, specifically at UMMA?

In 2002, when I was doing my graduate studies, UMMA was preparing for a show of Expressionist works on paper, and they were looking for someone in the German Department to do some research and writing for this show, so I applied and got that job. I’d never even thought about working in museums before, but the work just sounded interesting. It was a really great experience to take all this specialized information I had learned by doing research in my field in grad school, but then write in a completely different genre, to convey that knowledge to a general audience through labels, which as you know are very short texts.

So you write the labels beside the art? I’ve always wondered who does that!

Some of them… The ones that are in the museum right now that I’ve written are in the Joan and Bob Tisch Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Those are from the second time I worked in the Museum. In 2007-2008 when UMMA was preparing to reopen following the building expansion, I worked on the reinstallation of the Museum’s Modern and Contemporary collections and wrote a lot of labels during that time.

Writing the labels is a really collaborative process though. Each one goes through many stages of editing because it is important for the museum to have one distinct voice. It’s a very different kind of work than independent, academic work. It’s much more integrated and collaborative.

What are some of the most striking, memorable exhibitions you’ve seen?

When I travel I like to go to regional museums that feature work by local artists that are not internationally known, that way I always see amazing stuff that I’d never heard of before. For example, of course there is an amazing Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, but they also have the Museo de Bellas Artes (Museum of Fine Arts) in Bilbao, which focuses on the art from that region, which was incredible.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam once had an exhibit that explored frames and their relationships to paintings. They presented the history of particular framed artworks and investigated the effect of those frames on the artwork. This show really stuck with me because it was so original—It’s funny, but I’ve been much more conscious of frames ever since.

There was also an Anselm Kiefer retrospective at The Met in the late 90’s. I really like his work. His paintings are monumental, and really powerful when you see them in person.

What upcoming exhibition do you think students will be most excited about?

We have an exhibition opening on January 19 in the Stenn Gallery (aka. the “glass” gallery that faces State Street) of the Argentina-born, Los Angeles-based architect and designer Florencia Pita. She makes these cool, whimsical, conceptual, digital designs that are really interesting because of how she plays with scale—her flowery, colorful treelike structures could be anything from buildings to vases, furniture, jewelry or tableware. She makes these large-scale wall hanging appliqués based on children’s stories—one is inspired by Alice in Wonderland. The exhibition will feature a couple of her installation pieces, as well as models and digital representations of her work. She is also developing an original piece for this exhibition, which will be exciting. She has won a ton of awards and been featured in exhibitions all over the world. Her work really blurs the boundaries between visual art, architecture, and design, and is definitely worth checking out.

September 28th, 2012

Behind the Scenes at UMMA

Recently I had the good fortune to speak with UMMA’s Associate Curator of Asian Art, Natsu Oyobe. She just finished the installation of an exhibition by the contemporary Seoul-based art collaborative, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) in the Museum’s Stenn Gallery as well as an overhaul of the Shirley Chang Gallery of Chinese Art on UMMA’s Mezzanine. I was able to speak with her while she caught her breath.

Interview by Katharine Allen

Name: Natsu Oyobe

Title: Associate Curator of Asian Art

Years Employed at UMMA: Five

What do you do at the Museum?

My main job here is to work with UMMA’s collections, so I do lots of research on Asian objects and oversee the installation, presentation, and interpretation of the Museum’s five permanent Asian collection galleries: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, South and Southeast Asia as well as Buddhist art. The other big part of my work is curating and managing special exhibitions.

I also work closely with collectors and donors, and spend time interacting with students and professors on campus.

What sort of education prepared you for this job?

I got a BA in history while I was in Japan, and I worked as an assistant curator for a museum there for about four or five years. Then I came here to U of M and got a Ph.D. in art history. In the area of Asian art, you really have to get a Ph.D. to be a curator. It’s a really time consuming and hard process. Honestly, when I was a graduate student here, at least once a week I thought that I should give up, but I’m really glad that I didn’t!

How did you come to work at UMMA?

I started working for UMMA as a graduate student intern when I was studying here. At that time there was a Senior Curator of Asian Art here, and I was her intern. She has since moved on and I was hired into my position.

What do you enjoy most about working at UMMA?

I always enjoy meeting different types of people: people with different interests and backgrounds… and particularly for UMMA I like working with students. I always work with interns and I love their energy and enthusiasm.

Do you have a favorite work of art in the museum?

Oh, that’s a good question! It’s very difficult, there are so many works I love here, but one that stands out is a painting by Kitagawa Utamaro…probably one of the most famous printmakers in Japan’s middle period. He didn’t do many paintings, but in this rare case he created a beautiful portrait of a courtesan. He’s famous for very colorful prints but this painting is monochromatic. The mounting of this piece is very lavish, and it is said that this mounting was made from a cloak from this courtesan. It has a very delicate pattern of flowers. It’s just so beautiful, the combination of muted colors with this beautiful mounting.

Is it displayed right now? Can we find it?

Unfortunately no, because works on paper, especially Asian paintings, are very fragile so we have to rotate them. Each time we present a work like this in the gallery, we have to wait the next two years to present it again. We showed that work back in 2009, so maybe next year.

What’s your favorite piece you’ve ever handled? You know, one that you’re just like, “I can’t believe this is in my hands?”

Just one object? I think maybe some of the historic ceramics from China. The Chinese are very famous for their superb techniques in clay forming, decorating, and glazing, and they’re just perfect and beautiful and smooth. Some of them are paper thin yet have incredibly intricate decorations…it’s really rewarding to experience, to touch these objects, and only if you work for a museum you can do that!

What’s one thing coming up at UMMA that you’re especially excited about?

It’s already up – a new exhibition I curated of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES in the Stenn Gallery… I’m very excited about this show because it is my first exhibition in that space, and it’s also my first exhibition of contemporary art. I encourage everyone, especially students, to see the exhibition because YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (YHCHI) do extremely interesting work, and this installation was commissioned by UMMA, so when they were trying to conceive the concept they were thinking about students at U of M.

By the way, YHCHI is going to talk about their work at Michigan Theater on October 11 as part of the Penny Stamps Speaker Series. They are very engaging, funny people, so I want as many students as possible to get to know the artists themselves!

Any advice for future curators?

I highly recommend grabbing any chance that you can be an intern – and there are lots of opportunities out there!

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Visit the Shirley Chang Gallery of Chinese Art on the Mezzanine level and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES in the Stenn Gallery to see some of Natsu’s recent contributions to UMMA.

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Behind the Scenes at UMMA is a new monthly series of interviews conducted by members of UMMA’s Student Programming and Advisory Council (SPAC) with UMMA staff members. The goal of these interviews is to provide a “Behind the Scenes” look at who works at UMMA and what they do. Stay tuned for the next installment of this series next month!

THE ANNEX

Behind the Scenes with UMMA Lead Security Officer Xu Yong

Behind the Scenes at UMMA

Behind the Scenes at UMMA

Behind the Scenes at UMMA

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