by Dan Cameron
Marcia Tucker was a brilliant, courageous, and visionary curator who devoted her earliest, most rigorous years to the Whitney, a museum that rewarded her curatorial successes by shoving her unceremoniously out the door after eight loyal years. In response to this indignity, she went on to found a completely new kind of art institution, one more in keeping with her own philosophy of art's direct relationship to life. The New Museum, which turns thirty in 2007, was her invention. Marcia was at best a reluctant museum director, but she was far too savvy to overlook the fact that nobody was better suited to communicate the New Museum's aims than the person whose brainchild it was. And so she shouldered the responsibility, carrying the museum forward for almost twenty-two years.
I first stumbled into the New Museum a year after its founding, while I was still an undergraduate at Bennington College. I came to see the exhibition "Bad Painting," and then the Alfred Jensen survey, and when I moved to New York a year or so later the New Museum was by far the most interesting art place to hang out. So I did, as an all-purpose volunteer: typing envelopes, photographing installations, and even researching a John Baldessari bibliography. Besides Marcia, there was a total staff of five, yet artists, sensing the revolutionary potential of a museum devoted exclusively to them, swarmed to the openings and events by the hundreds. In 1982, when Marcia commissioned me to organize "Extended Sensibilities," my first museum group show and one that dealt with gay and lesbian sensibilites in new art, the New Museum could do no wrong in many people's eyes. But by 1995, when Marcia hired me as senior curator, the dynamic was very different, and it had been made clear to me during the interview that a new curatorial direction was needed, in part to pave the way for her retirement. As difficult as certain aspects of that change were for us both, Marcia was always gracious and kind to me. I loved that she showed no fear of confrontation and that she was perpetually one cue away from cracking a very funny joke.
Marcia set a high ethical standard for herself and challenged the art world to follow suit. She always championed the underdog, struggled to articulate art's power to change people's lives, openly deplored the growing commercialization of the New York art community, wholeheartedly rejected the current trend of running museums like corporations, and believed fervently that museum curators should maintain a healthy distance from big-name art dealers. Even if Marcia's principles are no longer pragmatic for running a museum in the twenty-first century, they may yet survive as the perfect blueprint for launching one.
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