A Father’s Day 
Art
Joan of Art
In just seven years Joan Davidow has made the Arlington Museum of Art a champion of the cutting edge. She’s Texas’ avant-gardian angel.
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Davidow’s grab bag of skills acquired in her previous life may have made her uniquely qualified to manage a bootstrap operation, but few observers—including the board that hired her—could have anticipated the fearlessness with which she became the champion of the latest and often most contentious Texas art. Only months after taking charge, Davidow brought in a traveling exhibit, “Texas Dialogues.” At the opening, new corporate sponsors stepped respectfully around a motorized blade embedded in the floor—a commentary on the mechanistic menace of modern dwellings—while watching Houston-based art provocateurs the Art Guys celebrate Arlington’s signature industry by ceremonially burning a baseball bat and ball.
Neither the sponsors nor the spectators ran for the exits. “They continue to come and they continue to learn,” Davidow says. That’s largely because Davidow sees her principal role as educator rather than agitator. “My job is to teach,” she says. “That’s why I do what I do. I have to pull together concepts that make sense to my audience but that also accurately reflect the art that’s being done in Texas.” Davidow has struck that balance with a series of ingeniously crafted theme shows, a format traditionally dismissed as lightweight by most museum professionals, who prefer the kind of rigorous parsing of artists and movements that ensures a reputation for painstaking if often impenetrable scholarship.
Starting with the basic Texas theme, Davidow’s 1991 exhibit “The Land” placed familiar icons alongside modernist conundrums, allowing the uninitiated to explore the common ground between a superrealist painting of a Big Bend landscape and the rocks-covered-with-sod conceptual sculpture lying on the floor nearby. Subsequent shows have focused on subjects as disparate as how contemporary artists recycle everyday objects, artists’ takes on suburbia, and how Asian American photographers portray their own communities. “Traditionally, museums have isolated themselves from the real world,” Davidow says. “I want to show how much we are a part of the real world.”
While the theme shows have allowed neophytes to get comfortable with contemporary art, they have also provided surprises even for insiders. Scouting in artists’ studios, Davidow often runs across trends tangentially related to the theme at hand, providing the material for intriguing sequels. This fall’s “Women’s Work,” a look at how young female artists are ironically revisiting such traditional women’s activities as quilting and dressmaking, will be followed in the spring by “Boys’ Toys” (opening May 23), an equally provocative examination of how young male artists are addressing such stereotypical interests as war, tools, toys, and power. Local critics who roasted “Women’s Work” for turning back the clock on gender equality missed the timeliness of Davidow’s theme in a decidedly post-feminist cultural climate.
As hard as she works to keep up with artists in their studios, Davidow is at equal pains to help her public deal with the shock of the new. Pieces inappropriate for younger viewers often end up in discrete alcoves with warning labels; to defuse the impact of a realism show featuring several naked figures, Davidow hosted a public give-and-take session about issues of censorship and nudity in art. At exhibition openings, the former radio personality wanders the floor with a cordless microphone, doing radio-style interviews with participating artists, bridging the gulf between makers of contemporary art and their often-puzzled and not infrequently intimidated audience. Visitors on any given day are likely to receive similar attention. “If I’m around, I’m going to talk to everyone on the floor—‘Glad you came. Do you have any questions?’”—Davidow says. “Once people get comfortable coming in here, they’ll come back. The problem is how to get them to cross that line.”
While Davidow is keenly aware that contemporary art will always remain a relatively rarefied taste, she hopes that her ambitious education program will get kids across the line well before they have left elementary school. In addition to a popular summer art camp, the AMA hosts a free Saturday afternoon family art encounter during the run of each show. Here, kids are guided through the exhibit with interactive workbooks and given a chance to experiment with the same techniques the artists use. And an assortment of AMA youth programs were cited in a recent national award from the Bravo cable channel, among them an annual exhibition of work by Arlington schoolchildren and a pilot program called Night Shelter, which allowed homeless children to draw and later publish a calendar on their ideas of home, with the proceeds going to their shelter. “Art has been so enriching in my life that I believe it can enrich everybody’s life,” Davidow says. “Good art is about thinking. It’s not about pretty pictures. It can be pretty pictures. But it’s got to be about thinking.”
Success has now brought Davidow and the AMA to a watershed. In November the museum put on display (through January 3) a model and drawings for a museum renovation and expansion by Fort Worth—born, Harvard-educated, and Los Angeles—based architect Neil Denari, whose career has suddenly begun to take off internationally. Denari’s design subtly updates the building’s old-fashioned modernism—the only major structural change is the addition of a four-story glass elevator to bring light down into the gallery and basement classrooms—and promises to add architectural distinction to the AMA’s existing kudos.
But a minimum of $2 million is needed for construction and an operating endowment, and even the intrepid Davidow admits to qualms about raising it. “It’s scary,” she says. “It isn’t easy for me to raise what I need to operate now. I don’t know if I have it in me.” Scarier, Davidow is asked, than running a home and raising two children? The woman who had her children at the tail end of the baby boom and has now transformed herself into the patron saint of Texas’ Generation X artists—many of them younger than her own sons—reflects for a moment before answering. “Are you kidding?” she says. “Being a mother and homemaker is a really scary job.”
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