A conversation with Maya Allison, chief curator of the NYUAD Art Gallery
Next November, a few months after the campus on Saadiyat Island opens its doors to the NYU Abu Dhabi community for the first time, a campus art gallery ...
Apr 5, 2014
Next November, a few months after the campus on Saadiyat Island opens its doors to the NYU Abu Dhabi community for the first time, a campus art gallery will begin presenting public exhibitions. The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery will hold exhibitions of museum-level quality for the university, adjacent to the main Welcome Center of the campus.
Maya Allison began developing the plan for an art gallery on the Saadiyat campus while working as exhibition director for the Downtown Campus in Spring 2012. As the gallery director and chief curator since Fall 2013, Allison now devotes much of her focus to the logistics of opening the new gallery.
The gallery will be one of two spaces on the Saadiyat campus devoted especially to displaying exhibitions, with the other being an Arts Center. While the Arts Center will be mostly devoted to short-term exhibitions of student and faculty work, the Art Gallery will primarily host museum-quality works, curated by Allison and her team of student interns.
“[The gallery] is directed towards a student and a university audience and a local audience. There will be student internships, so it’s a chance for students to get the experience of working in a professional museum, to get a taste of what it’s like,” said Allison.
Creating a gallery of museum quality has its own set of challenges, according to Allison.
“A lot of the issues ... have to do with logistical things, like really good climate control and really quality professional art-handling capacity and things like that,” she said. “So we first have to be equipped with a space that has the level of quality control so we can support shows of delicate, fragile work.”
The process has not been easy, given that Allison and her team will only have full access to the space on June 1.
“I’ve only seen the space while wearing a hardhat with scaffolding around, you know, and so we’re all working in this kind of imaginary place, where we have the description of the place and we have some sense of it, but actually working in the space is going to be a different matter,” she said.
The first exhibition of the gallery will be related to the question of site and location. According to Allison, the gallery will eventually hold a range of historical works and collections, however due to the uncertainties of a new space, the first year will be entirely contemporary art.
“In the first year, you can’t really risk unknowns,” said Allison. “One show I’m looking at is a collection of rare maps from Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and there’s no way that I’m going to put that in the gallery until its had a year, to make sure that the sprinklers don’t just accidentally go off.”
The stated mission of the gallery, according to a post on the Student Portal, is to “catalyze cross-disciplinary intellectual and creative activity within the university, to link NYUAD to the Abu Dhabi public and to serve as a regional arts hub for local and international communities.”
For Allison, who comes from the United States, this mission underlines the gallery’s aspiration to create more of an organic, grassroots arts hub for the UAE’s still-young arts scene.
“My hope is that we can actually create a physical site where a sense of community can grow,” she said.
In the first five years, exhibitions in the gallery will revolve around three main themes: “The Environment: Built and Natural,” “Arabic and Islamic Art and Culture,” and “Art in Global Dialogue.”
Allison said the chosen themes are intentionally broad so they can give an idea of how an exhibition program can be locally relevant without being restricted to only locally created work.
The gallery aspires to connect the university community and the public with broader, interdisciplinary works from around the world. Its advantage lies in it being neither a big museum nor a commercial gallery.
Allison said, “Because there are so few more-experimental nonprofit spaces, there’s a huge amount of ground we can have here in terms of shows that are either too scholarly or too small or too specific for a big museum, or shows of things that can’t be sold [in commercial galleries].”
“I believe that exhibitions should be questions as much as statements. Exhibitions are not illustrated essays. They are active engagements where the viewer walks through the space and develops their own story of what they’re seeing,” said Allison. “Our role is to put enough material there in a way that is well-researched and well-represented so the viewer can really live the narrative as it is developing in their mind and as they are walking around the exhibition.”
Alistair Blacklock is Editor-in-Chief. Email him at alistair@thegazelle.org.
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