Calder Gardens, the coming Philadelphia cultural project in a city that has seen few new major arts institutions recently, gets closer to being a reality this week with the announcement of its opening, set for September, and a central hire.
Juana Berrío, currently the curatorial and sustainability adviser at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, has been named the senior director of programs for the $58 million exhibition space and gardens; separately, Calder Gardens has a planned $30 million endowment.
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was a Philadelphia native who became one of the 20th century’s premier sculptors, known for his bent wire works, gently turning mobiles and sturdy stabiles.
Berrío — who is from Bogotá, Colombia, and moved to the United States in 2006 — has also worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
She said it was the founders’ conception of the institution as something other than a museum that attracted her to the role.
“I’m very interested in experimentation,” Berrío said in an interview. “Guiding my thinking is, What are our needs today — our lives are more distracted than ever, with technology playing a big role, so this project will help foster introspection and contemplation.”
Berrío added that Calder’s kinetic mobiles, which can move with the breeze, raise “the notion of impermanence.”
Calder Gardens, on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, will have 18,000 square feet of exhibition space in a building designed by Jacques Herzog, a founder of the Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, and extensive gardens by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, known for his work on the High Line.
Though an independent institution, Calder Gardens will receive administrative, operational and educational programming support from the neighboring Barnes Foundation.
Alexander S.C. Rower, the president of the Calder Foundation and a grandson of the artist, said in an interview that many applicants for Berrío’s position “were lackluster and thought it was going to be a museum.” (Among its non-museum characteristics will be a lack of wall labels.)
Rower added that Berrío’s experience working with contemporary artists was relevant because of the prescient dynamism of Calder’s work — the artist even had his own version of performance art.
In his Paris studio in the 1920s, Rower said, his grandfather would perform a miniature multi-act circus, “Cirque Calder,” manipulating his sculptures.
Rower, who is also the chair of the Calder Gardens curatorial committee, said that the institution would focus on showing Calder’s works, both from the foundation’s vast holdings of them as well as loans from other sources. But he added that there may be “invited interventions” of works by other artists in future, and that Berrío would have a role in curating them.
First, the building has to be completed.
“All the heavy construction is done,” Rower said. “We want to take our time on the installation, and experience the building without art first.”
