1708 Gallery's first curator, Park Myers (Photo courtesy 1708 Gallery)
Enter Park Christopher Myers, from New York City by way of Steamboat Springs, Colorado; Brussels, Belgium; and Houston, Texas. He is the Royall Family Curator at 1708 Gallery, the new position supported by Pam and Bill Royall, with foundational assistance from CultureWorks.
Pam Klecker Royall says, “1708 Gallery’s strategic plan calls for a number of bold moves in the gallery's 40th year. Hiring our first dedicated curator is top of the list.” In her view, Myers brings a sophisticated skill set to the position and “is already contributing to the gallery and our larger arts community in significant ways.”
Having a dedicated curator allows a small staff to concentrate on matters from basic administration to the never-ending task of fundraising. A curator, through planning the shows of a season, provides a focused vision for an arts organization.
Myers studied film and video at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and as he neared his senior year he became more interested in how work is physically situated and best presented. In his undergraduate days, understanding what a curator is or does wasn’t in the scope of his studies.
“I was doing a lot of art history on my own, not necessarily part of the curriculum provided for me,” he says, “and in that sense I was starting to think about exhibitions, coordinating them, how to put work in a context, how to write about them. Slowly but surely I began to be more interested in that.” That ultimately led him to earning a master's degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
He took a position at the longstanding small nonprofit Steamboat Springs Arts Council in Colorado, which houses visual and performance arts in a circa 1908 train depot. The group also turned 40 during Myers’ tenure, “and at that point they were looking for someone to be the art and programs director,” he recalls. “I’d oversee the visual arts programming, summer festivals, and be the interlocutor for the other institutions and organizations in Steamboat Springs. I delved much deeper into the role of what a curator is.” And eventually the title came to fit his job, the curator of visual arts.
What he learned in Colorado, he improved and practiced in places throughout the country and in Europe.
His position, in part, is about exhibition design and creating the optimal experience of art in any given situation. He’s more interested in action, and less the title. “I see myself as facilitator, a liaison; often I’m coordinating and working with artists.”
Myers, through artist friends, knew of 1708, but hadn’t ever been to Richmond. He arrived just under a month ago, with much to consider.
“As I’ve gotten to know the different organizations, the [Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU] the [Visual Arts Center of Richmond], the [Virginia Museum of Fine Arts] — it’s quite a fabric. A lot of interweaving that’s not housed in one institution. We must go work with artists and practitioners and in all different categories. This is wonderful for Richmond.”
Myers is delving into the 1708 archive, too, in order get a long-form impression of its life as a gallery and the choices made in its four decades. "Ideas come back around through the years, but in different forms," he says. "It's of great importance that I know where we've come from. This is a huge, rich history, and I'm eager to get into it."
He’s always been interested in places outside the designated cultural epicenters where the opportunity to take risks is still possible.
Myers says, “New York is saturated with contemporary art. The circles can run into closed-down cliques.” He’s also found an eagerness in Richmond to engage with art, and the makers. At the most recent First Friday, some 500 people came to 1708 and experienced the creations of the gallery's artist-in-residence, Los Angeles-based Kristin Cammermeyer.
They viewed her struggle with the nature and notion of refuse, called “In Constant Circulation,” of transforming the byproducts of commercialism set adrift in seas of garbage. It’s a multimedia exhibition, with sculptural and installation aspects, using found objects and videos utilizing and animating found stuff that resembles flowers and animals and arranged like tapestries that collect and vanish.
Cammermeyer described in an artist’s talk how the numbers of visitors surprised her. “They weren’t just looking,” she said, “but they wanted to talk about my practice.”
That doesn’t happen everywhere.
“This is a space for new art,” Myers says. Whatever shape it takes, however many disciplines it may straddle, or the questions that are raised, is part of his approach. “I’m more interested in problem posing. This creates uncertainties, and out of uncertainties we learn either new positive paths or a way not to go.”
