From the backs of the racks: Piche picks out hidden gems for Daum's 10-year retrospective

Before he became director of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art four years ago, Tom Piche had worked in art galleries nestled in beautiful old buildings in his native New York. But, although he appreciated the history of those buildings, he’ll take the 10-year-old Daum Museum over those any day.

He described one of his previous haunts as having “bad paint, broken linoleum and no sense of standalone. We were ensconced in a building with absolutely no physical presence. The door was just a plain glass thing you could walk by easily.”

Piche also worked in a building designed by legendary architect I.M. Pei.

“Pei’s architecture has to do with arching theory, which isn’t always kind to the people who work there,” Piche said with a laugh.

The Daum, designed by Gunn & Smith Architects, of St. Louis, may not be as famous as Pei’s work, but it is decidedly more layout-friendly, and Piche had a fun time not only selecting the 125 pieces for “10! The First Decade,” but also arranging them in thematic groups across the nine Daum display areas.

Piche’s predecessor, Sedalia artist Douglass Freed (who has a painting in the exhibit), marveled during the reception on Saturday that Piche finds new ways to position the movable walls every time.

Piche chose the pieces from a collection that now numbers more than 1,000.

“I actually did do a permanent collection show the summer after I came here, and I had done smaller-scale exhibitions of the permanent collection, so I didn’t want to repeat what I had already done,” Piche said. “I wanted to keep it fresh. There are certain pieces you have to have out there from well-known artists. But I also went to the end of the racks and the bottom of the drawers to pull out things that haven’t been seen.”

While the romantic image of dusty, dark shelves full of fascinating old art nestled in nooks and crannies might fit when talking about vintage East Coast galleries, that’s certainly not the case in the Daum’s basement storage area, which Piche promises is clean, well-lit and well-organized.

“You can start on the computer and look at the overview of the collection, but there’s nothing like being in storage with a pad and pencil and making notes and seeing things,” Piche said. “One of the rooms in the lower level of the museum contains objects it wouldn’t have occurred to me to pair together based on a list on a computer. Looking at some pieces randomly paired together, some ideas started to jump out at me.”

Piche came up with thematic groups for each gallery of the museum. Some of them will be easy for casual art viewers to discern, such as the narrative flow in the Cooney Gallery and the photography in the Ditzfeld Gallery.

Photography is one medium that was underrepresented when the museum opened a decade ago with about 200 works donated by Dr. Harold Daum. But that issue has been rectified and then some.
 
“The Ditzfeld Gallery has 30 examples of photographs from the slightly more than 400 in the collection now,” Piche said. “The majority of those are the gift of Tony and Ruz Racela (of Kansas City) and their family. They’ve come in over the past eight years. Within that group are fabulous examples of contemporary American and (international) photographs.”

Piche said the photography room was the most fun for him to design, because he learned a lot.

“I haven’t done a lot of work with the photography collection here, just a cursory examination,” he said. “This was a good chance to hone up on photography history and figure out who the significant photographers were in our collection, and that was really eye-opening and fun. It’s good for the brain.”

The thematic thread of the work in the Freed Gallery (the big one) isn’t as obvious, but Piche explained it in a nutshell: “One of the main trends of contemporary art is the mix of low culture and high culture, something that began in the mid-1950s and artists have been dealing with ever since — bringing elements from pop culture and the everyday environment and combining them with high art ideas and theories and coming up with a new hybrid.”

“10! The First Decade” will be on display through May 27. Then, following the summer exhibit, the Daum will kick off its second decade in style with a fall show that Piche is already excited about.

“We’ll be hosting an exhibition from the International Center of Collage in Pennsylvania,” he said. “It’s a survey of collage masters from the past 50 or 60 years. It’s an area I have some background in, and I think it’s going to surprise people when they see the forms and variety of collage work being done now.”