Visual Art

A Morning with Derrick Cartwright

Meet SAM's New Director

by Jen Graves

Elvis was snarling. "Not so smiling—more like Elvis," local photojournalist legend Alan Berner, shooting for the Seattle Times, told the incoming Seattle Art Museum director Derrick Cartwright, who responded by attempting—and failing—to give an unpleasant expression. Cartwright's face seems to have a mind of its own, and that mind's chief preoccupation is smiling.

Somehow, despite this, Cartwright comes across on first meeting as a very pleasant person—or at least as a person who bothers to know his audience and to adapt to it. I think he sensed my allergy, as a critic, to this smiling, and I thought I detected it starting to wane. This may be a fairly good indication of who Cartwright will be as a director: not a chameleon (he exudes more spine than that), but a listener. He is soft-spoken and sits forward attentively when he talks with you. Less thrash-you-around Tom Krens, more take-'em-by-surprise Glenn Lowry?

He is almost loath to describe himself or his style—to talk about himself. But he responds when I ask about museum directors he admires.

"I wouldn't want to imitate Max [Anderson, Indianapolis Museum of Art], but I think he sets the bar pretty high for leading the field in a pretty bold direction that isn't about Max," Cartwright says.

Cartwright will start work at SAM in the fall (exactly when isn't set yet). He comes off of five years heading the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), which isn't exactly a thrilling institution. I agree with Regina Hackett on this one; I've been there several times, but it's never a must-go when I'm visiting family in San Diego, and to me it's a dull and, worse, fairly conservative museum that doesn't do any one thing well—meaning it has similar problems to SAM, but worse. (Some of those are not under the control of the director, it must be said.)

Before that he ran the museum at Dartmouth for three years and the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny in France for two years. He got his PhD at the University of Michigan in art history in 1994; his dissertation was on "the Muzak of the 19th century," he calls it: the public murals of Sargent, Whistler, and Cassatt.

Personally, he's moved by the paintings of Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell, and the photographs of Robert Frank, Cathy Opie, and John Thomson. He first fell in love with art history as a student at UC Berkeley (he's a native of San Francisco). He intended to be an artist, but a class in 20th-century sculpture—stuff like Dada and the Orgien Mysterien Theater (Theater of Orgies and Mysteries) of Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch in the '50s—convinced him that thinking about it, writing about it, and teaching it would be more fun.

The three best shows he saw in the last year are William Kentridge: Five Themes at SFMOMA; Take your time: Olafur Eliasson at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and El Greco to Velázquez at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

He is married to a lawyer and has three kids, ages 8 to 14. He speaks Russian and French, and his use of English only occasionally slips into bland museum-director pabulum.

"I was trained as an art historian, and so I thought I would spend my life teaching small groups of really bright people," he says. "But doing things for people you will probably never meet or know feels like a real privilege, and I like that. The museum has a high responsibility to be accessible, to be challenging."

San Diego and Seattle are similar in that both are "big cities facing Asia on a border," he says. The SDMA still needs to assert itself as a major player beyond its region, Cartwright says, and Seattle is further along in the process, with its larger size and three sites (Asian museum, downtown museum, sculpture park).

But "this is a place that could take a few creative risks—not that it hasn't already," he says, "but that's what interests me in the work I'm going to do ahead."

We all can hold him to that.

Cartwright was selected from a pool of "sub-20" candidates of interest, and then six who came to the museum to be interviewed over the last nine months. In a meeting this morning in an upper-floor museum conference room, selection-committee chair Charlie Wright (a lawyer, longtime trustee at Dia, and son of Seattle's heavyweight modern collectors) and collector and longtime trustee Jon Shirley described their decision. They called Cartwright "extremely well-rounded," "passionate about art," "articulate," and somebody "who understands people really well."

When asked about the sleepiness of San Diego's museum, Wright responded.

"The fact that he excites us is probably predictive of his ability to excite others, is probably all we can say. If San Diego's reputation is not where it should be, that's not so much our problem. We feel like we've hired someone who can fulfill Seattle's best destiny.

"We think we've got a star, and we'll prove it."

Meanwhile, downstairs in the galleries, photojournalist Berner continued shuffling around his affable subject in order to get the best angle for his Times picture. He set Cartwright in front of a video by Kentridge, where a procession of animals and people marched right across his face in shadow. He was, it seemed, happy to be in the shadow of the art.