Lincoln Center Expands Into the Visual Arts

Donald Marron, the noted art collector, Museum of Modern Art trustee, and chief executive of Lightyear Capital, has a new mandate these days: designing a visual arts program for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.Named in March as the chairman of Lincoln Center’s reconstituted visual arts committee, Mr. Marron is recruiting major collectors and arts leaders to serve on the committee, while formulating his own vision for how visual arts can be integrated into Lincoln Center’s programming in a way that will attract new audiences.At this point, Mr. Marron’s plans include using Lincoln Center’s 16-acre campus as a venue for sculpture and new media and adding a visual arts component to the Lincoln Center Festival, the international festival of music, drama, and dance that takes place each July.The 10 other members of the committee will be announced this summer and will then begin meeting three or four times a year, Lincoln Center’s president, Reynold Levy, said. The goal is to have an active visual arts program for the 2009–2010 season, which will be Lincoln Center’s 50th anniversary.Mr. Marron already has a number of ideas. “The plaza is obviously a great venue for sculpture,” he said in a recent interview. He explained that he hopes institutions with interesting sculpture collections but limited space to show them will want to do joint projects with Lincoln Center. “I’ve already gotten letters from a few places,” he said.He envisions transforming the tent that Lincoln Center uses for catered events into a site for new media works. “You can see how excited an artist would be to have that space,” he said.Mr. Levy said he liked the idea of using the tent for either single-artist exhibitions or shows by small museums with contemporary art programs. “It’s very exciting,” Mr. Levy said, “because it opens up the possibility of hundreds of thousands of people experiencing this work over a period of a few weeks.”In a way, the role of the visual arts committee will be a complement to that of the architect Elizabeth Diller, who with her colleagues at Diller Scofidio + Renfro created the plan for Lincoln Center’s redevelopment. While Ms. Diller is using architecture to create a lively and inviting atmosphere, Mr. Marron is hoping to do the same with visual art — to bring a new energy to the campus and encourage people to spend time there outside of its theaters and concert halls.Lincoln Center historically had a visual arts committee, which oversaw the acquisition of major works in the 1960s and 1970s. But the committee and the acquisitions program have been dormant for many years. Mr. Levy predicted that the new committee will comprise “some leading art collectors from our own board, who are also on the boards of Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, MoMA,” as well as leaders from other major art institutions, including some from outside New York.Mr. Levy said some of the money for visual arts programming would come from a fund established by David and Peggy Rockefeller for art acquisition at Lincoln Center, but most would come from new fundraising. Asked if the members of the committee would be expected to contribute financially, he said, “We’re asking for their advice and engagement. But we suspect that they’ll want to help us, [too].”Mr. Levy’s first, indirect encounter with Mr. Marron was through visits to the PaineWebber Gallery. Mr. Marron was the chief executive of PaineWebber between 1980 and 2000, during which time he used its gallery to showcase the collections of smaller institutions like the Drawing Center, the Museum of the City of New York, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the American Folk Art Museum, and the International Center of Photography.Mr. Levy said his wife, Elizabeth Cooke, used to take him to the exhibitions. “Being an active person in the philanthropic and nonprofit world, I said, ‘Who’s behind this? This is a fabulous idea,'” Mr. Levy said. Then last year, when he brought up Mr. Marron’s name to several members of his board, “They all had enormous respect for his taste in art, for his energy, for his enthusiasm. That’s what led to our asking him.”Mr. Levy said that, while the visual arts committee would address the question of whether Lincoln Center should have an active acquisitions policy, “we have no pretension of becoming the Lincoln Center Museum, or of competing” with the major museums in the city. Instead, he said, the question is: “Given the fact that we have this wonderful performing arts program, and this campus that we’re redeveloping, what can we do? What should our special role be?”Lincoln Center has done several visual arts projects in recent years. In collaboration with the Public Art Fund, Lincoln Center enlivened the plaza in the summer of 2004 with colorful sculptures by Franz West, and, last July, with a large sculpture by Nancy Rubins — an arch made of boats, canoes, kayaks, and other vessels, called “Big Pleasure Point.” This season, Lincoln Center co-commissioned “The Tristan Project” — a production of “Tristan und Isolde” with video by the artist Bill Viola — with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Paris National Opera.

Lincoln Center Expands Into the Visual Arts

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