Presenting a State of Mind (and Then Some)

“That looks enormous, way out of proportion. It dwarfs everything else in the gallery.”

Stephanie Barron is gazing unhappily at a mannequin in a zoot suit standing on a central platform in a room of 1940s artworks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It’s a month before the exhibition “Made in California” will open, but the countdown is on for the museum’s senior curator of modern and contemporary art and vice president of education and public programs.

Slightly shifting the position of the dramatically costumed figure doesn’t help, but when Barron asks an assistant to move it next to a soaring side wall, to her eye the zoot suiter suddenly assumes its rightful place as one of many essential characters in a story told by hundreds of objects.

With that settled, Barron and two of her colleagues, exhibition associate Sheri Bernstein and curator Carol Eliel, proceed through gallery after gallery. Along the way, they check sight lines, rearrange artworks and indulge in a little self-congratulation for landing juicy bits of ephemera, such as a 1945 magazine ad for a yellow two-piece Cole of California “Swoon-glo” bathing suit, along with the real thing, which adorns another mannequin in the show.

This is business as usual for a head curator--except that “Made in California” is anything but a traditional art show. The biggest exhibition ever produced or presented at the museum, it’s a huge collaborative venture that examines California’s changing image over the past century. Working with a team of curators, designers and consultants, Barron has masterminded the display of more than 800 artworks and about 400 related objects--from orange-crate labels to postcards, freeway murals to Hollywood beefcake photos. True to the form of her trademark projects, the show presents art not as an isolated phenomenon but as the heart of a cultural, social and historical milieu.

Beginning with “The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives,” the 1980 exhibition that she organized with then-senior LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman, and continuing with shows of German Expressionist art in 1983 and 1988, followed by “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” in 1991 and “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler” in 1997, Barron has made a reputation not just as a highly accomplished curator, but a remarkably enterprising one--a curator who goes to unprecedented lengths to look at art in a very big picture.

“She has transformed our awareness of how exhibitions and art can be perceived within the social forces they represent,” says Patterson Sims, deputy director for education and research at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“What we have in Stephanie is someone who cares about art as art and then has the breadth to think about its conceptual context. That’s very rare,” says Steven Lavine, president of CalArts. “We’ve learned to take for granted her pushing of the limit, but her shows--which combine art and non-art and archival things and environments--are really quite radical museum practice.”

For Barron, it’s all about a passion to communicate.

“Exhibitions can be very powerful tools for people to get information, not only a beautiful experience, and I really like it when those two things come together,” she says. “I wouldn’t be interested in a show that didn’t contain beautiful, powerful, important works of art. It has to have that, but I want to build that with something else to tell a meaningful story.”

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Sitting behind her desk in her glass-front office, where shelves are crammed with art books and counters are filled with neat stacks of paper, Barron, 49, can cite a number of key people and moments that made her the kind of curator she is today.

She starts with her schools and teachers. As a student at Barnard College, Columbia University and the City University of New York, she studied with an array of influential art historians, Modernist Meyer Schapiro, American art scholar Barbara Novak, Dutch specialist Julius Held and French Impressionist authority John Rewald.

She took their teaching to heart--and then some. In the summer of 1972--while enjoying a college graduation gift, a cooking course at the Cordon Bleu in Paris--Barron took a side trip inspired by a class with Novak, her advisor at Barnard. Carrying a copy of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, Barron boarded a train to Pontoise, then walked along the Oise River to Auvers, where the artist spent his final days. She visited his house, walked to the wheat field where he fatally shot himself and went to the cemetery where he is buried.

A few years later, after she had moved to Los Angeles, Barron accepted an invitation to visit Rewald at his home in Provence. With his former student at the wheel of a rental car, the scholar pointed out sites painted by Paul Cezanne, walked with her on Mont Sainte Victoire and accompanied her to the artist’s studio.

“Those were formative experiences that bear on what I want to bring to an audience in terms of the power that art can have,” Barron says. “Even then, I was trying to understand the context of how art was created.”

Those two journeys explain a great deal about her interest in tracking art to its source and the elevated company she keeps. But when asked about truly defining moments of her career, the first story Barron tells concerns an anonymous man who brought her down to earth in 1973, when she was doing an internship in museum education at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

About two weeks into the internship, she gave a talk that ended in the galleries of Modern art. “I remember standing in front of a Hans Hofmann painting of two squares, and giving all of my good Columbia/Barnard-speak art history about the push-pull theory of his work,” she says, referring to the artist’s explanation of the visual tension in his Abstract Expressionist compositions.

“This guy in the group raised his hand and said, ‘I don’t get it. Why is it art?’ As a graduate student, one isn’t normally confronted with questions like that. I remember feeling a cold sweat as I realized that this is what working in a museum is about. The thrill is to take the passion that you have learned in school and that you bring to the art, and explain it to someone who doesn’t have a clue.”

She rose to the occasion by throwing out academic vocabulary and theory, and explaining why the picture moved her. “People are really looking to you for an answer,” she says. “If you can’t do it, or if you can only do it when you go back to write a paper about it, then you should stay in academia. That was a very powerful lesson.”

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Appearances to the contrary, Barron wasn’t born to the job of museum curator. Her father, Manuel Barron, owns Barron’s Educational Series, which publishes college guides and many other books. Her mother, Gloria Barron, who died when Stephanie was 18, trained as a lawyer but worked in the family publishing business.

Still, she had the privileges of being part of a cultured family. A native of New York who grew up in Long Island, she attended public schools and traveled to Europe every summer with her parents and younger brother Robert. “We talked all year about where we were going to go next,” she says. “It was a phenomenal experience that made me curious and open to different cultures and new experiences and languages. And looking at the art rubbed off.”

Although her parents weren’t involved in art, she began taking Saturday classes at the Museum of Modern Art when she was in second grade and continued through 11th grade. “I wasn’t terribly good at the making of art, but the freedom of expression really appealed to me and we were encouraged to go into the galleries. I think it had a lot to do with my feeling comfortable in museums and with who I’ve become,” she says.

When it came time for college, she chose Barnard, where she could live in Manhattan and immerse herself in the art scene while pursuing her education. “I loved the fact that it is a women’s college but part of a big university so that you have both special nurturing and a great faculty,” she says. “If you could find your way through the course guides and get there to sign up and had the right prerequisites, you could take just about anything.”

Barron intended to major in English, but she had “an ah-ha moment” when she took a class in art history. “I had a good memory for images, which was important in those days. But what really turned the corner for me were seminars on ‘The Literature of Art’ with Barbara Novak. I began to understand that it wasn’t just memorization and identification of style; there was a great underpinning. In my sophomore and junior years, I took all the art history classes I could possibly take.”

After her junior year, she did a summer internship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and ended up working in the office of director Thomas Messer, whom she had met at Barnard. It was her first museum job and it led to other part-time work at the Guggenheim during her senior year.

Graduate school at Columbia was a natural continuation of her work at Barnard, but after her year in Toledo she switched to the City University of New York. “It was a very practical program, and that appealed to me,” she says. “There were critics on the faculty and a lot of the students worked.” One of her professors was Rewald, who taught her a great deal about connoisseurship and research and took her on his visits to private collections. “It was an amazing entree,” she says.

During that same period, in 1975-76, she also coordinated an exhibition at the Jewish Museum and worked as a research assistant to art historian Ann Sutherland Harris on a survey exhibition of women artists’ work, which coincidentally followed Barron to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 1976, Barron received an offer of employment as associate curator of Modern art at LACMA and decided it made more sense to accept than to finish her doctoral degree and then hope to get a job. She knew nothing of California, but the museum’s director, Kenneth Donahue, and curator Maurice Tuchman said she would have unusual opportunities. She flew to Los Angeles for an official county interview and liked L.A.’s “sort of frontier pride.” She returned a few weeks later and went to work the following day.

“I haven’t regretted it,” she says. “I’ve always said that LACMA is different from other museums, and that’s part of what makes it an interesting place to work. It’s not 150 years old and it doesn’t pretend to be. The opportunity to try things freshly is something I’ve always treasured about this institution. Maurice gave me remarkable opportunities from the minute I walked in the door and really treated me like a full-fledged colleague. Very shortly after I got here, we decided to do the Russian avant-garde show.”

Seen in retrospect, the exhibition was a breakthrough, but she didn’t conceive it as the beginning of a new curatorial approach.

“It grew in terms of its multidisciplinary-ness because the Russian avant-garde artists were incapable of only doing one thing; that was part of the exuberance of the movement,” she says. “Neither Maurice nor I had studied the Russian avant-garde, but we were very excited about the fertileness of the artists’ imaginations and felt that an exhibition had to reflect the grace with which they moved from making paintings to the theater, to costumes, to agitprop, to really believing that they could change the world.”

About three years in the works, the show required a lot of sleuthing to find Russian works that could be borrowed from American and European collections because obtaining loans from the Soviet Union was nearly impossible. Uncovering all those angles appealed to Barron’s zeal for deep original research. “The good work is in the details,” is the way she puts it.

“The words ‘ferret’ and ‘bloodhound’ come to mind, and that has served her very well,” says independent curator Lisa Lyons, who went to Columbia and Toledo with her.

From start to finish, the project was an adventure, Barron says. Architect Frank Gehry designed the installation and the museum collaborated with CalArts to re-create the 1913 Futurist opera “Victory Over the Sun.”

The show astonished skeptical critics who had doubted that Tuchman and Barron could find enough material to stage a major exhibition, much less revive the long-forgotten opera. But it was only the beginning of a series of landmark projects that involved even more research and spearheaded a trend to put fine art in a broad context.

“Her exhibitions have been incredibly ahead of their time,” Sims says, noting that Barron’s style of contextualization has become more common in major museums but still isn’t exactly mainstream.

Barron’s efforts have gained considerable critical and professional acclaim as well. “Degenerate Art,” probably her best-known project, won the International Art Critics Assn.’s award for the best American exhibition of 1991, and the catalog was named the best publication of the year by both the College Art Assn. and the Art Librarians Assn. She also has won prestigious awards for her scholarship in Germany and Switzerland.

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As a curator and an administrator, Barron’s job is a nonstop juggling act. But it isn’t just that she has a lot of balls in the air. It’s that she’s in charge of balls from so many different areas. On the same day that she tweaks her way through the “Made in California” galleries, she also conducts a staff meeting on a host of auxiliary programs planned in conjunction with the exhibition, covering everything from the lineup of participants in panel discussions to special “Made in California” bottles of mineral water, to be dispensed during the show.

Next comes a session with Paul Holdengraber, director of the Institute for Art and Cultures, on a performance by Russian expatriate artists Komar and Melamid, which required bringing a live elephant to the museum grounds.

Soon it is time for a “way finding” meeting with a team of designers, to review signs that will guide visitors from one section to another of “Made in California.” It is only as that session winds down that Barron eyes Bernstein, says, “OK, let’s hit the trail,” and heads for the galleries.

The scope of the juggling act was set when she accepted the title of vice president for education and public programs, in 1996, about a year and a half after Tuchman left and she took on his role as senior curator.

As Lyons sees it, Barron’s most unusual quality is that “she’s a great classical curator” who is also “very savvy about where museums are headed in terms of educational initiatives.” To Barron, her added duties are just a logical outgrowth of her interest in exhibitions that have a strong educational component, and she has taken on the challenge with gusto. Adding to the museum’s traditional education program, she initiated LACMALab, a new children’s space, and the Institute for Art and Cultures and recruited its leaders. She is also actively involved in a move to develop new museum publications.

But Barron insists that she remains a curator at heart.

“The way I’ve assumed more administrative responsibilities,” she says, “and still maintained the core of what makes me happy is to just do more.”

Through it all, Barron keeps up a fast pace, appearing intense and focused but not rushed. She demands a lot of everyone she works with--a quality that isn’t always endearing--but she gets high marks from Andrea Rich, president and director of the museum.

“She has a breadth that isn’t all that common in people who have very specialized training,” Rich says. “And she is just indefatigable.”

She can’t quite do it all, however. In the case of “Made in California,” Barron was “an intellectual facilitator,” as California state librarian Kevin Starr puts it, recalling an early brainstorming session in which she built a consensus among “30 egomaniacs” invited to help shape the exhibition theme. She didn’t do the research or choose the objects in the show.

“My role was to bring the overarching ideas and threads of the exhibition together and work with my colleagues to make that happen. I have made peace with the fact that I can’t do the same kind of detailed, archival research that I did in the ‘Degenerate Art’ show, which absolutely consumed me for five years,” she says.

Barron copes with the pressures of her professional life by saying ‘no’ frequently and scheduling no meetings on Thursdays, to retain one day each week with a bit of flexibility and time to concentrate. And she reserves a lot of time to spend with her 11-year-old son, Max, the child of her former marriage to Los Angeles attorney and art collector Robert Gore Rifkind .

“We tend to repeat the pleasurable experiences of our youth, and I love taking Max on trips,” she says. “He is studying Hebrew, so two years ago we went to Israel with our synagogue. It was a way to reinforce what he was doing and help him understand what it really meant. I guess I try to contextualize things for him too.”

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Barron has witnessed much change and growth at LACMA, but some things remain the same, she says. “When I arrived, this was a museum with a young collection, but it had ambition. And that ambition is still with us.”

She also contends that the pride she sensed upon her arrival in Los Angeles is back. “We went through some rocky periods and it wasn’t a happy experience,” she says, referring to the period from 1992 to ‘95, when longtime director Earl A. Powell left to direct the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Michael Shapiro took over for 11 turbulent months and the museum went without a director for nearly two years. Barron served as coordinator of curatorial affairs while the trustees searched for a director. Rich, a former vice chancellor at UCLA, was appointed president of the museum in 1995; Graham W.J. Beal became artistic director in 1996. He departed in 1999 and Rich assumed his title.

Rich has come under fire because she has no training in art, but Barron says the museum “hasn’t been at a better place in all the years that I have been here than I see it now. Internally, systems are working and the direction we are headed is very thoroughly grounded. I get up excited to come to the museum every day.” Barron says she had considered offers to work elsewhere but has no desire to leave now because Rich has brought “a new atmosphere for creative work.”

In her jampacked office, she has set up separate “in” boxes for different projects, one of her many techniques for coping with all her beloved details. The latest addition seems to back up her contention that LACMA is a great place for creativity, especially her kind of creativity. It’s labeled “Looted Art Exhibition.”

“I took a detour out of Middle Europe to ‘Made in California,’ but I may be headed back,” she says. “After my last show, ‘Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler,’ which was about the people, I became very interested in exploring what happened to the art that was the target of the Nazis--not what they called degenerate art, but the work taken by the Nazis from collections in France, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe and from German private collectors. I’d like to find out what kind of art was taken, why was it taken, where it went and where it is now. It’s a topic that’s been in the news a lot, but I’d like to come back to its source.”

At this point, the show is only in early talking stages. Barron knows she couldn’t do it alone, but she has already approached possible collaborators. “The good news and the bad news is that I have another idea,” she says.

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“Made in California,” L.A. County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. First four parts, today-March 18. Part V: Nov. 12-Feb. 25. (323) 857-6000.