A Morning with Derrick Cartwright

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.