Email
Print
del.icio.us
digg
FeedModernism's Maestro
By diane l. cormany
Photo by ERIC MOORE
Ryan, curator of design at the MIA, lights up as he recalls hunting down a Czech-made Tatra T87 sedan, built in 1948 from its original 1936 design. As he drove through horse country, dotted with Southern pines, to the Aiken, South Carolina home of the automobile’s owner, he rounded a corner and spied the sleek, silver Tatra.
“It was kind of surreal seeing it in this Southern setting,” he says. “I was taken by the car.”
MIA Accessions Committee members, some of whom had been initially cool to the acquisition, were also struck by the Tatra’s appearance. Happily the car fit in the museum’s modernism gallery, which had already been designed for the new Michael Graves wing.
The Tatra’s design lifts the spirits, Ryan says, striking that tenuous balance between beauty and function, adding,
“It sort of sets a standard for the rest of the design collection as well.”
Another of his recent finds, the circa-1926 Frankfurt kitchen, is more pragmatic. “It’s just nothing but function, function, function, rammed into your head,” Ryan says. Even its color was considered practical: German engineers thought blue warded off flies.
These displays are surrounded by more than a decade of Ryan’s modernist acquisitions, many of which he amassed for Norwest to display in its Minneapolis tower. When the company, now Wells Fargo, donated its 475-item collection to the MIA in 1998, Ryan volunteered to come along as adjunct curator of design. Then-MIA director Evan Maurer later made his status permanent by naming him the institute’s first curator of design.
Ryan has now come nearly full circle. He began his career as curatorial assistant at the Walker Art Center in 1965 and left for the MIA four years later. When the institute began its 1974 building project, Ryan set out for positions across the country, including five years at the National Endowment for the Arts. The Norwest position drew him back in 1987. Ryan wrote, Letter Perfect, an examination of modernist typography in 2001.
He has curated 19 consecutive modernism shows at the Wells Fargo Center, including the recently opened Streamlined Design, inspired by the Tatra. After four decades in the museum biz, he has no plans to retire, preferring to continue doing what he loves. “If you’re still excited about what you do,” he says, “that’s one of the things that energizes you.”
11 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
