By Anne W. Semmes
Mary-Kate O’Hare is the 54-years young and enthusiastic new executive director and CEO of the Bruce Museum. Her aspirations would resonate with Bruce’s founders for “a natural history, historical, and art museum.” With both science and art featured under her roof she sees the Bruce as “distinctive to be able to find ways to truly integrate the arts and the sciences.” With our “complicated” world, she says, we “humans are trying to understand it as well as scientists and artists. The artists might use imagination and analysis as part of their tool, but scientists also use those tools, and they experiment.”
So, one of O’Hare’s initiatives is to launch a program to bring together contemporary art, science, and technology featuring artists “who are really working at that intersection. You have artists who are going to CERN in Geneva and working with nuclear physicists and studying in these scientific research facilities…The opportunity is there for scientists to interact with the artists. So, I want to develop that because the Bruce brings that together.”
But O’Hare is art educated, having had 25 years of curatorial experience, both with Citi Private Bank Art Advisory, “advising clients on art acquisitions and sales, museum loans and gifts…” and serving as curator of American art at the Newark Museum. As a youngster living in London, she was spellbound encountering her first docent at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. “Docents are so important for unlocking the mysteries of the art.” Living later in Alexandria, VA she was able to visit all those Washington D.C. “museums on the mall and the National Gallery.” Her art interest would cause her to “skip school” one high school day to see a Gauguin exhibit. In college, majoring in art history, her dissertation would be on John Singer Sargent.
O’Hare is impressed to have arrived in an “incredible community of art collectors” including the now late William “Bill” Richter, donor of the new Bruce art wing as well as notable art works. “He visited the museum about three weeks before he passed,” she tells. “Bill was a model for philanthropic support. He so believed in the Bruce and our mission…It’s rare you find somebody as deeply connected as he was to the art and what joy it gave him.”
O’Hare shares that Richter had visited the current “Jeremy Frey: Woven” baskets exhibition in those last days. “He loved it, and you could see he was so passionate about art.”
She leads the way to that “Jeremy Frey: Woven” exhibit. “It has been extremely popular,” she tells and is now extended to October 24. She cites indigenous basket weaver Frey, as located in Maine, having “re-energized the tradition of basket making, which is a native art. He learned it from his mom, and you have to get up close.” The baskets are made from the black ash tree – “becoming extinct because of the beetles that have been attacking the ash trees. So, he takes the trees down himself and prepares the ash. It’s a very complex process. He makes these incredible exacting baskets pulling from the tradition of Native American basketry, but he also inserts his own vision.”
She next introduces an exhibit inspired by her Curator of Science, Dr. Daniel Ksepka, with its spotlight on climate change. On a trip to Alaska with his family, Ksepka was struck by a “drunken forest” of trees tilting due to the warmer temperatures having thawed the permafrost in the soil beneath the trees. Before us is a model of that ‘drunken forest’ created by the Bruce’s exhibition artist, Sean Murtha. “That’s what captured Daniel’s fascination,” tells O’Hare, “with what is happening to the Earth in essence and really got him thinking how what happens in Alaska definitely impacts us in Connecticut.”
The conversation returns to this new director’s vision for the Bruce. “We really are looking at the whole range of programming from the littlest ones to the adults.” She takes pride having observed children so engaged in the Bruce Beginnings program in the science galleries with their docent, Nancy Duffy introducing them to fossils. “It was this great moment where you see community – the moms and the caretakers there and they had community with each other, and it was keeping the kids engaged and they were excited… So, that’s part of the vision. I want our galleries to be filled constantly with people enjoying and appreciating. And I want them to feel like this is their museum. This is for you. This is for everyone. Not just little kids. It’s also for the serious art collector… and a great place for a first date. There are all these great things that you can do here at the Bruce.”
“Historically,” she continues, “we’ve thought of museums as a place to safely keep objects, but that whole concept of the museum has evolved over the years. It’s perhaps more fitting to think about a museum as a town center, or sometimes it’s described as the village green. It’s a place where the community can come together, they can see fantastic art, but they can also engage in some new ideas with a speaker. They can get a snack. They are happy, they feel comfortable and welcome. And it’s a place where they can meet each other.”
All in all, O’Hare is “excited to be here to help launch the Bruce in its next chapter – a very exciting chapter.” She has “high aspirations for it, with great art and science together, bringing our science programming well into the 21st century. We are going to be doing incredible things. We’re going to put the Bruce on the national map. So, it’s an exciting time and I want everybody to join us.”
