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05/23/2018 07:00 AMJock Reynolds is the kind of guy best described as affable, unpretentious, deeply connected to his community and his family, an artist and an adoring supporter of other artists, a man of boundless energy and enthusiasm.
As the Henry J. Heinz II director of the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), Reynolds presided over a 14-year-long, $135 million renovation of the museum, connecting its three separate building and expanding the exhibition space by almost 25,000 square feet.
He has won two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists fellowships, a Fulbright fellowship, and multiple National Endowment for the Arts/Art in Public Places project awards.
After 20 years at the helm of YUAG—a tremendous period of growth and transformation for the gallery—Reynolds is stepping down at the end of June, handing the reins over to Stephanie Wiles, currently director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
I am careful to say “stepping down,” not “retiring,” because even if Reynolds is of legal retirement age, retirement is nowhere on his agenda or in his consciousness.
Before and after a recent press tour of four new spring exhibitions celebrating and highlighting Reynolds’s tenure at YUAG, we talked about art, life, teaching, learning, and raising chickens in an urban environment—oh, did I mention he does that, too?
“Its such a demanding job,” Reynolds says of the museum directorship, “I’m taking a break to catch up with life, figure out what’s next. It remains to be seen if I’ll teach, volunteer in the gallery. I don’t think anyone I know in the arts retires, they just do different things.”
His break includes a one-year sabbatical at Yale, during which he says he plans to finish a few creative projects and help outfit and install some special classrooms in the Wurtele Study Center on West Campus that houses more than 30,000 three-dimensional objects from the YUAG collection.
He is also looking forward to making more art with his wife, Suzanne Hellmuth. Frequent collaborators, their performances, installations, and photographs have been commissioned and exhibited in Japan, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and across the U.S., and is represented in both private and public collections that include the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center, and more.
Reynolds and Hellmuth plan to spend about half the year in California—Reynolds grew up in Northern California—where they have lots of family, including a son and daughter-in-law and two grandsons—and the other half here, in his beloved New Haven, also home to his youngest son and wife, and where he eagerly awaits the birth of their twins at the end of the summer.
‘I Never Planned to Become a Museum Director’
Reynolds earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Davis. From 1973 to 1983, he was an associate professor and director of the graduate program at the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art at California State University in San Francisco. From 1983 to 1989, he served as executive director of the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C.
In 1989 Reynolds became director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, a position he held until 1998, when he was appointed director of YUAG.
“It you told me in the early ’80s that I would become a museum director, I would have thought you were a little out of your mind,” Reynolds says. “I enjoyed teaching and had a sabbatical for one year at MIT to make art. I went to direct the Addison and within less than five months they asked me to stay on. I was then recruited by Yale and asked to come to the Yale Club—I didn’t even know what the Yale Club was—and that was 20 years ago.”
In addition to overseeing the enormous renovation of the physical museum that was completed in 2012, there are many other reasons that Reynolds found himself happily ensconced in his role directing YUAG.
He says creating a better balance of employment between students and professional staff at YUAG was a goal high on his list from the beginning of his tenure.
“I always felt it was certainly true in a lot of museums that the education department was not held in as high regard as the curatorial collections,” Reynolds says. “It really struck me that there was no reason not to give students more responsibilities and opportunities to engage with the museum. So in the early 1990s, we put the education mission in equal importance with the gallery, which included founding the undergraduate gallery guide program in my first year. Students are working as interns, doctoral fellows, [and] gallery teachers, and we have student-curated exhibitions. They’ve never let us down or did anything other than first-rate work. We now have 160 students employed within the full museum—and the same number of professional staff.”
Reynolds believes one of the most important jobs of a museum director is whom he or she hires.
“It’s such a joy to have hired so many fantastic people: curators, educators, directors of exhibitions and publications, guards, custodians—all aspects of a museum,” he says. “And to let them know what they contribute to this place is very important and valued.
“Resources, fundraising is also very important to make sure the people can do their jobs well, and to support a free membership program—we have never charged admission. Ask yourself how many families can afford to pay what it costs to go to a museum? That’s why it’s so important to get lasting, strong endowments. I love being able to raise the funds for this. The [YUAG] endowment has grown seven-fold since I came.”
Forging Relationships with Living Artists
Reynolds points out that of all the Ivy League universities and colleges, Yale is the only one with schools of art, music, and drama, in addition to having a school of architecture and an art history department.
“As a result, we have a relationship with living artists beyond most universities,” he says. “Support of living artists has been in the DNA of Yale for a long time and that’s something that’s been to me absolutely fascinating and unique to the way the collections have grown. People don’t realize how incredibly strong Yale’s collections are in general—and the modern and contemporary art is exceptionally strong.”
One relationship that is particularly close to his heart has been with the renowned abstract expressionist Sol LeWitt (who died in 2007) and his ongoing friendship with the artist’s wife Carol LeWitt, who continues to reside in the couple’s Chester home.
“I got to know Carol and Sol when I came to the Addison [Gallery] in 1989,” Reynolds recalls. “I’d seen one of his major wall drawings in 1975 and was amazed by how beautiful it was. Lo and behold, Sol sent me a wall drawing as a gift with a diagram and directions for [producing] it, which we did in the atrium of the gallery. I sent him photos and a few weeks later, a package arrived with six or seven gouaches—original works—for me to give as gifts to the students who executed the work.”
Reynolds says that Sol and Carol LeWitt both encouraged him to come to Yale and, beginning with nine wall drawings, plus a recent gift of 43 more, today the museum owns 66 LeWitt wall drawings. The recently inaugurated Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Study Center at Yale West Campus will house the archive of the groundbreaking artist and be an international nexus for research on his work.
Reynolds also gave me the scoop that Carol LeWitt will soon be the new chair of the governing board of YUAG, about which he is extremely pleased.
Excited for What the Future Holds
Reynolds is happy Stephanie Wiles is assuming the role as the next YUAG director, officially on July 1.
“I’ve known Stephanie for awhile. She’s extremely well-prepared for this job,” he says. “I’ve been getting her up to speed for the transition. She’s getting off to a great start and I’m certain she will continue to fully understand and build on the legacy of what we’ve done.”
Reynolds is also happy to be entering this new phase of life.
“I start every morning tending my chickens and we have delicious eggs for breakfast every day,” he says, explaining that you can have up to six hens (no roosters) as well as beehives in downtown New Haven.
“Suzanne and I never get bored,” Reynolds says. “A lot of that is staying engaged with students and artists and teaching museums. If we can bring some of the strong values and commitments we’ve made here to other museums—it’s better for museums at large.”