Dante Fumagalli: Coast to Coast
Dante Fumagalli is an English major and Art History minor going into his senior year at Southern Oregon University. He has been working at the Schneider Museum of Art since his freshman year. During the Summer of 2016, he completed an internship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After graduating this spring, he hopes to move back to New York City and further pursue a career in museum education.
How accessible were the NYC galleries and museums? Were they affordable, did they have a long wait time, etc.?
It depends. MoMA is pretty expensive, and there were long lines, but they did many events for many people of disabilities, which of course were all free. Granted, you can only do those during those days. One thing that I thought was cool, while I was at the MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Met, is they had programs where when you participated in them you would get a family pass at allows up to five people and you to get in for free at a later date, so that was definitely helpful. Most of them did charge. The Met has a voluntary fee, so anyone could visit if they could deal with the ridiculous line there. The Bronx museum was free, but it was smaller and in a location where there weren’t a lot of tourists.
In Ashland, there are many galleries that focus on sellable, for-profit, local work. In New York, did you see the same kind of galleries, or was their focus on something different?
What’s interesting about that question is that many of those types of works weren’t being sold in galleries, but on the streets by vendors or people who would legitimately do the work in front of you so they could show the craft behind it. Whereas the galleries themselves, at least the ones I visited, had pretty big names, like Richard Serra and Judy Pfaff. It’s definitely a different world, a little bit more elitist.
With a much larger art scene in New York, do you think artwork was valued more or less?
I think, as a whole, art is valued more, but different types of art were valued less, like, the art being made on the street. Whereas in Ashland, there’s an artistic community that’s built around that type of work, in New York, it’s kind of relegated to that outside experience, you can’t get into the galleries doing work like that. It might be said that is because there are more people voicing opinions on the art, and that’s why only certain pieces get into the galleries. In the end, it’s just kind of two different types of art.
Did you see many young adult, non-big-name, or pop-up galleries?
I didn’t see that many [young artist shows]. I think I saw some at the New Museum, because it is dedicated solely to young contemporary artists, but for the most part, the museums and galleries were only showing big names, blue-chip people. Even the big galleries, like the MoMA were showing mostly older artists who are doing work today. One of their contemporary works is from the 80s, which I thought was kind of funny. Granted, I didn’t go out of my way to go where they would’ve shown more young contemporary people, just because of work schedules. It was hard to get down there.
Were there any trends in art styles or making that you saw?
I saw more paintings in the contemporary galleries than I thought I would. It seems like a lot of things are more about installations, site-specific work. So I thought that was interesting. There was one artist, Nicole Eisenman, at the New Museum that was doing these strange representational paintings that had a lot of references to art history. I didn’t really expect to see that in that setting. I also saw some interesting work dealing with text. I went to an opening in Chinatown called Present Futures, featuring the artists Pamela Council, James T. Green, Ivan Forde, Tiona McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, J. Soto, and Diamond Stingily. It was organized in part by a friend I met at MoMA named Henry Murphy, along with Lynette Miranda and Teal Baskerville. The works all touched on violence and oppression and many of them made use of text and language.
Did your time at the MoMA affect your perspective on Art?
I think it definitely taught me how to be a bit more open to talking about art, and then specifically being in education, because MoMA uses inquiry-based education. So, you don’t really give a lot of education, but rather you spark a discussion and ask a lot of open-ended questions, so I think that shows that you can get a lot more out of it when you talk about art.
Any artists or people back in New York you want to give a shout out to?
I’d like to give a shout-out to Rachel Chaldu, Djavan Nascimento, Eri King, and Daniel Greer. All four of them helped me get acclimated while I was there. They were all very welcoming and helped me out. Rachel and Djavan were some of the first people I met there, and on my last full day in the city, I actually briefly helped them move into a new studio, which was fun. I just happened to meet Eri and Daniel one day for M.K. Guth’s gallery opening. Eri had worked with M.K. before and so had I, so she introduced us. Both Eri and Daniel were very warm and inviting, which is always helpful when you feel a little disconnected in the city.
via Grace Prechtel, a 22 year old artist and student at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, OR.
