Bob Barzan: I made up the ‘Modesto Art Museum;’ now it’s real

The reception for the Modesto Art Museum’s 2014 architecture movie night was well underway, and about 200 people were mingling in the lobby of Modesto’s art deco State Theatre. Everyone was sampling Mediterranean foods, sipping wine and chatting away as if these were the only reasons they came to the event.

That was actually the point.

An art museum is about more than just the art – it’s also about building relationships. As executive director of the Modesto Art Museum, I wanted this movie screening to build relationships among people interested in architecture and to improve the quality of life in our city.

A city without an art museum is like a city without paved streets, an airport, running water or schools. I believe a museum helps to make a city.

The Modesto Art Museum began as an exercise in imagination. In 2003, I hosted a mail art event to exhibit paintings, sculptures, collages and drawings that I sent out through the post and received in return. The purpose was to celebrate the centennial of the American surrealist Joseph Cornell’s birth. I listed the sponsors as the fictitious “Joseph Cornell Centennial Committee” and the “Modesto Art Museum.” Over the four weeks of the exhibition, so many people expressed a desire for an art museum that I decided to take on the task of getting a real museum started.

Our art museum is different from most because we have chosen not to have a building; instead we bring art into the community or raise awareness that art is already around them. I think of the museum as a performance piece involving the people of Modesto, artists and their work in a kind of dance over time and space.

We stage exhibitions, performances, talks, tours and movies in every possible setting, including City Hall, the Great Valley Museum of Natural History at Modesto Junior College, churches, the Modesto City Schools district office, cafes and online. We don’t have a formal membership, but we consider any city resident a member.

Our goal is to infect the city with art and to foster an artistic response, blurring the distinction between visitor, curator and artist. We want Modesto residents to see the possibility for beauty, elegance and meaning in their everyday surroundings. Our motto is: “The city is our collection, the neighborhoods are our galleries.”

One in-the-street exhibition was 2011’s Meet Your Neighbor: 125 black-and-white, poster-sized portrait photographs by Jessica Gomula-Kruzic of people who live in, work in or visit downtown Modesto. The posters were hung in the windows of shops, restaurants, cafes, galleries and vacant downtown buildings for six weeks. Tens of thousands of people saw this exhibit because it was in the heart of the city and available 24 hours a day.

In early 2014, the Modesto Design exhibit featured the patent drawings of more than 100 objects invented by Modesto residents. The exhibit included an automatic voting machine designed in 1894 and an automobile designed in 1902. A common response: “I never knew Modesto had such a design heritage.”

We have designated two neighborhoods as official Modesto Art Museum galleries and created tours: the Graceada Park area for its bungalow, storybook and other early 20th-century styles, and the Modesto Design District, a 12-block area filled with furniture and antique stores, galleries, theaters and clothing stores. The Design District also has several mid-20th-century government, commercial and apartment buildings in the Central Valley Modernism style – boxy steel-and-glass structures with features to provide shade for our hot summers and shelter for our wet winters. (The Heckendorf House north of downtown is the most important example in Modesto.)

In 2007, the museum’s community-building role kicked in when Modesto was ranked the least livable of the nation’s 373 largest cities in Cities: Ranked and Rated. Instead of disputing the ranking, we asked: What can we do, as an art museum, to improve the quality of life in Modesto? In 2008, we launched “Building a Better Modesto,” an ongoing program using art, architecture, landscape and urban design to create a more livable city. As part of the program, we drafted the city’s first public art policy, and we have recently installed three artist-designed bike racks downtown.

In September, we co-hosted our seventh architecture festival with the American Institute of Architects’ Sierra Valley Chapter. More than 5,000 attended and more than a dozen organizations participated in 130 free events. This year’s most popular was an architecture workshop for families in which 600 kids and their parents built Lego houses, engineered pipe-cleaner projects, created paper tube chairs and filled in coloring books depicting Modesto buildings.

This work is much more difficult than I expected. I’ve encountered many people who are afraid our work will cost them money and our efforts to designate special districts will create more government red tape.

So I’ve learned to invite people into our process and to emphasize they don’t have to pay for anything. We’ve created relationships with the Downtown Improvement District, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and many local businesses and organizations. We’ve learned to work with the city’s long timelines and look for funding outside Modesto – such as Artplace America, a national project connecting arts to community planning.

Recently, the city invited the museum to help in the redesign of 10th Street as part of a larger effort to attract people to the downtown through restoring historic buildings and changing parking regulations and traffic flow. The Modesto Art Museum’s role is to help create an attractive city by designing “parklets” (green spaces that extend from the sidewalk into parking spaces) lighting, and benches, among other things. We are trying to improve Modesto’s quality of life one planter – and one movie night – at a time.

This story was originally published November 15, 2014 at 4:01 PM with the headline "Bob Barzan: I made up the ‘Modesto Art Museum;’ now it’s real."