A life’s work comes to fruition for Nasher curator
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Durham, NC -- It took her a little more than 20 years, but the wait was worth it for Nasher Museum of Art curator Sarah Schroth.
This month marks the end of the exhibit, “El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III,” a collection of treasures Schroth worked to showcase at Duke during her 12 years here. (The exhibit ends Nov. 9) The result was a critically acclaimed show that helped restore appreciation to a long-lost era of Spanish art between 1598 and 1621.
“This period has been really slighted and people just haven’t understood its importance,” said Schroth, who began her work on the exhibit during her doctoral dissertation at New York University in the late 1980s. “In order to change everybody’s minds, I knew I had to do an exhibition. It just took a long, long time for it to come to fruition.”
To bring the collection of more than 100 pieces to Duke, Schroth made annual trips to Europe over the past decade to persuade museum administrators and church leaders to lend their Spanish art. Schroth’s peers said that passion and dedication rubbed off on them.
“It’s a joy working with Sarah because her enthusiasm for the subject is so infectious,” said Juline Chevalier, Nasher’s curator of education. “Anytime you have a teacher who’s excited about the subject matter it makes it exciting for you to be around it.”
Schroth credited the support she received from Duke as a big reason why she was able to throw herself into her work to compile the $2 million exhibit.
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“There are few universities that would have supported this,” Schroth said. “I don’t think that if I worked at the Metropolitan Museum I would have had the opportunity to concentrate so hard on the scholarly component of the show. Duke is a very supportive place.”
In addition to the Nasher exhibit, Schroth teaches classes that focus on Spanish art and has been presenting on her work to numerous clubs and organizations in the Triangle area. She said she’s working on bringing an exhibit of works by Picasso to Duke.
When it comes to her most recent show, though, Schroth said she couldn’t have been more pleased with its reception, adding that she’s been able to change the way people think about Spanish art during the turn of the 17th century. The exhibition, she said, helped to shape a revision of history that people otherwise never would have known about.
“They’re all masterpieces that people just didn’t know anything about,” she said. “Even Harvard hasn’t done anything quite like this.”