By Elin Spring
My first meeting with Nancy Kathryn Burns, Worcester Art Museum Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, was a happy accident. She was leading some visitors through an exhibit I had driven from Boston to see and I quietly latched onto the group. Before long, I couldn’t resist asking questions about the fantastic exhibit she curated, “Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period” which opened in January 2016. Not only did Nancy indulge my inquiries, but we ended up going back into her office for more discussion and our friendship was forged. Since then, the expansive knowledge, generosity and infectious energy of Nancy Kathryn Burns has enriched many more visits. With her latest exhibition, “Photo Revolution: Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman,” on view through February 16th, 2020, I thought this would be a great time to let everyone discover one of the Worcester Art Museum’s hidden treasures.
Nancy Kathryn Burns, Worcester Art Museum Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs (photo courtesy Worcester Art Museum).
Would you tell us a little about yourself? Are you from Worcester, and if not, what drew you to the area?
I’m actually a Midwesterner, a Great Lakes Midwesterner to be exact. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and moved to Buffalo, New York in 7th grade. I consider Buffalo my hometown and the (hopefully no longer) beleaguered Buffalo Bills will always be my home team.
I initially came to Worcester for college, briefly leaving to live in Seoul, Korea for about 9 to 10 months after I graduated. Then I came back to New England for grad school in Rhode Island. If you include my time in college, I’ve lived in New England for over two decades. That said, I’ll always be a Midwesterner at heart.
“Catie’s birthday in Bundong-gu, South Korea” (left to right: Nancy Burns, Angie, Mark, Catie Curran), c. 1996, photographer unknown.
“Proof that I shaved my head in grad school,” Nancy Burns with Ethan Adams, c.2000, Providence, Rhode Island, photographer unknown.
What do you like best about being a curator, particularly at the Worcester Art Museum (WAM)? What advice would you give someone who aspires to become a curator?
Unquestionably what I like best about being a curator is working directly with objects. The object is a critical touchstone for my approach to organizing exhibitions and thinking about art. At WAM, I oversee pan-Atlantic prints, drawings and photographs which constitute over half of the museum’s permanent holdings. We have an outstanding collection of prints, especially prints that demonstrate innovations in the history of color printmaking. WAM’s first curator of photographs, Stephen Jareckie, built a wonderful, encyclopedic collection that was augmented by my predecessor David Acton. We have fabulous examples of early and midcentury photography and I’ve been doing my best to enhance our holdings after 1970.
Nancy Burns (left) reviewing a print with Worcester Art Museum paper conservator Eliza Spaulding, 2019 (photograph by Steve Briggs).
As for my advice to aspiring curators, I would say it’s important to look at aspects of the museum profession that are underrepresented. For example, the majority of scholars of Western art focus on American or European paintings and far fewer focus their attention on works on paper. There’s a scarcity of print specialists so having a working knowledge of the history of printmaking and an ability to identify various print processes becomes a real feather in one’s cap when competing for jobs. Likewise, in photography, far more people focus on photography after World War II rather than early photography. But museums still need curators who can speak to photographs by Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge. Study what you love, but develop enough facility as a curator to work beyond trends, taste, and narrow personal interests.
Burns lecturing in the exhibition “Leisure, Pleasure, and the Debut of the Modern French Woman,” summer 2011 (photograph by Louie Despres).
What was your focus of study in Art History?
This is going to wholly invalidate my previous answer but I actually studied European painting before finding my way to prints and photographs. I would say my primary area of interest was French art from about 1750 through World War I. That same period best reflects my interest in prints as well.
Anna Atkins, Honey Locust Leaf and Pod (Gleditsia triacanthos), about 1854, cyanotype, Worcester Art Museum, Stoddard Acquisition Fund, 1989.9
How does being a curator of prints, drawings and photographs affect your approach to exhibiting and acquiring photography?
More than my love of French art, I would say it’s my interest in printmaking that has had the biggest influence on my engagement with photography. I say that because printmaking is laborious and all about process. If you love prints, you love process. That has definitely had an impact on the photography that I gravitate toward when I think about potential exhibitions and acquisitions. I am especially fascinated with photographs that use early processes, like salt prints, and experimental techniques like cameraless photography (Anna Atkins, above). That’s probably part of the reason I enjoyed working on WAM’s cyanotypes exhibition so much. I also think that’s why I’m especially fond of photographs made before World War I and after 1970.
Meghann Riepenhoff, Littoral Drift #3 (Rodeo Beach, CA), 2013, variable cyanotype diptych, Worcester Art Museum, Funded by the Douglas Cox and Edward Osowski Fund for Photography in memory of Robert A. Royka (1933–1996) and in honor of Margaret Kent Royka, 2015.44
Early photography includes a wide variety of processes: albumens, tintypes, platinum prints, photogravure, among many others. It was a moment when photographers were still playing with the range of effects that could be achieved using different methods. I also enjoy looking at and thinking about photography after the 1970s because once again photographers began reconsidering the processes they used. It’s when color photography becomes a viable alternative to black-and-white photography and artists start reconsidering the effects that can be achieved using contemporary films and papers. Mid-twentieth-century photography rarely veers away from gelatin silver prints. That period in photography wasn’t as concerned with the process used as it was with the technical prowess of the image itself. Though I have worked on various exhibitions that focus on the pre- and post-World War II period, I’m more often drawn to the polar ends of photographic history. All that said, Robert Frank ranks among my all-time favorite photographers so everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt.
Clark University cyanotype seminar discussing model of exhibition layout, fall 2015. Left to right: Rachel Polinsky; Hannah Jaffe; Nancy Burns; Casey Shea; Hannah Millen; Gabrielle Belisle (photograph by Kristina Wilson).
While part of the larger New England art community, Worcester has its own unique photography ecosystem. Can you describe how your outreach and programming engage with the art community?
Worcester is a city with ten colleges and universities. It’s important to me that I reach out to my academic colleagues at those institutions and demonstrate how the museum is relevant to undergraduates in the city. I’ve worked on two significant photography exhibitions with students and academics at Clark University, Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period which opened in January 2016 and Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard, on view from October 2017 to February 2018. In both cases, the projects involved a seminar with 10 to 12 students requiring each student to do primary research on two objects that would be featured in each respective exhibition. Students also wrote extended essays that were published in the form of a traditional physical catalogue for Cyanotypes, while the Bullard students published their work on the website () which continues to be used by Clark students today.
“Portrait of Raymond Schuyler and his children, Ethel, Stephen, Beatrice and Dorothea, about 1904” by William Bullard (courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, E.132.16.75).
The Bullard exhibition proved especially unique. The photographs in that exhibition featured African Americans and Native Americans who lived in and around Worcester’s Beaver Brook neighborhood at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. Remarkably, the photographer left behind a ledger book with the names of the sitters in his glass negatives. This allowed Janette Greenwood, the co-curator and a history professor at Clark, and Frank Morrill, a historian and the owner of the original Bullard glass negatives, to focus much of their research on tracking down over a hundred living descendants of Bullard’s sitters. The students worked directly with the descendants when writing their essays and labels. The project ended up becoming a transformative experience for me in that Bullard’s portraits took on a life beyond the subjects of those photographs. It also had a profound emotional impact on the descendants, many of whom were seeing a part of their history for the first time. Everyone involved in that project wanted to do justice to Bullard, Bullard’s sitters, and the descendants for whom these photographs were especially precious. It was a wonderful way to connect to with our community and do significant scholarship at the same time.
Bullard Descendent Preview, October 13, 2017, photographer unknown, courtesy of Janette Greenwood.
“Beaver (Leave It to Beaver), Gelatin Silver Print, 20 x 24”, 2007” by Matthew Gamber (courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas).
I’ve also tried hard to represent photographers from the region in my exhibitions whenever possible. The cyanotypes project included over twenty vernacular photographs by local artists. And of course the Bullard exhibition was almost entirely dedicated to a Worcester photographer. I also served as the curator for a monographic exhibition dedicated to the photomontages and collages of Worcester artist John O’Reilly. Other exhibitions and projects, like the Central Massachusetts Artist Initiative (CMAI: https://www.worcesterart.org/exhibitions/cmai/), have afforded me the opportunity to show work by several local photographers, including Stephen DiRado, Frank Armstrong, Matthew Gamber (above, on view at WAM through March 29, 2020), and Tony King who passed away in 2017. Recently WAM acquired four photographs by another local artist, Louie Despres.
Louie Despres, 8-9-18, Rome, NY, 2018, color inkjet print, Worcester Art Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2019.47.3 ©Louie Despres
Entrance to “Photo Revolution: Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman,” 2019, photograph by Nancy Burns.
Both your 2016 exhibit “Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period” and 2017 show “Rediscovering an American Community of Color: Photographs of William Bullard” were distinctive in their depth of inquiry into the past and in the ways you made them relevant to today’s audience. Can you describe how your current exhibit, “Photo Revolution: Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman” offers viewers a window into both the past and present?
Everyone is carrying a cell phone with a camera these days. When you start paying attention, you realize that a significant number of news reports feature videos captured by amateurs, not the news outlets themselves. We now have hundreds of thousands of inadvertent eyewitnesses using their phones and home security cameras to record police violence, plane crashes, and porch pirates. I would say these people are our Abraham Zapruders (Zapruder was a bystander who witnessed and filmed the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963).
Andy Warhol, Mao Tse-Tung, 1972, color screenprint, National Endowment for the Arts Museum Purchase Plan, 1977.91. © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
It’s my hope that visitors to Photo Revolution recognize that artists today are still responding to the same concerns as artists who were working two generations ago. Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Tom Wesslemann were focused on the impact of modern media like magazine ads, television and video. Today, artists, notably videographers and photographers, continue to explore the impact of new technology platforms like the Internet, especially using social media and mapping sites like Google Street View. Early video artists from the ‘70s like John Baldessari and Andrzej Paruzel explored intersections between photography, television, and film. These same concerns remain relevant in the current work of someone like Owen Kydd who explores the fragile boundary between photography and film. On a related note, the line that separates vernacular visual production and “fine art” grows more and more unclear. I think that ambiguity is at the heart of nearly all the work that Warhol produced over the course of his lifetime and it’s why he remains so relevant today.
Andrzej Paruzel, (Polish, b. 1953) “Supplement, 1978” Five gelatin silver prints (each sheet 13.5 x 11.5 cm), Sarah C. Garver Fund, 2018.65.
Perhaps a more obvious way Photo Revolution connects past and present is found in the works of ‘60s, ‘70’s and ‘80s artists like Martha Rosler, Leon Golub, and Lorraine O’Grady, who examined issues like ethnocentrism, capitalism, the patriarchy, and race. These same concerns are seen in the work of several major figures in the contemporary art world like Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Banksy, and Ai Weiwei. In that way, Photo Revolution can certainly be experienced as an entrée to the artistic concerns of the 21st century.
Lorraine O’Grady (American, b. 1934), “Young Queens (L: Nefertiti, age 24; R: Devonia age 24) from Miscegenated Family Album,” 1980/1994, Two Cibachrome prints (each image 32 x 48 cm), Stoddard Acquisition Fund, 2010.24.
What current trends in photography do you find most inspiring?
This may be an unpopular opinion to many of your readers, but I think that the advent of digital photography is the best thing that has happened to the medium in the last 50 years. It has forced a new generation of photographers to think hard about what processes they use, what it means to manipulate photography, and photography’s objecthood, given that photographs have been liberated from paper and reside primarily on screens these days (at least that’s how the average person engages with photographs).
Mike Mandel (American, b. 1950), Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975/1982: Harry Callahan, Ansel Adams, Eva Rubenstein, Duane Michals, Imogen Cunningham, Cornell Capa, Bunny Yeager, Bill Eggleston, Elliot Erwitt, 2013.5:1-135.
I’m excited to see where photography goes in the post-paper world. I know there’s tremendous nostalgia for darkrooms and the act of printing, which I do share – especially being a curator of prints – but photography-after-paper is such a fascinating shift for practitioners and curators. Will people who call themselves photographers even bother with printing photographs in a hundred years? How will the definition of the photograph change? What will 22nd century photography storage look like? Will it just be archival boxes filled with flash drives (or some updated version of them)? Will contemporary photography exhibitions all be a series of screens or digital tablets? I wish I could live long enough to see how it plays out.
American, Untitled (Floor of Basketball Court), about 1980, Polaroid instant print, Worcester Art Museum, Gift of Peter J. Cohen, 2018.46.33
Feature Image: Nancy Kathryn Burns giving a tour in “Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful,” (at right: Greer Muldowney), 2013, photograph by Stephen DiRado.
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