Read Colin Dabkowski's Sunday column on the appointment of Tony Bannon as museum director.
http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/columns/colin-dabkowski/article729331.ece
Bannon brings broad vision By Colin Dabkowski
Updated: February 12, 2012, 12:16 PM
There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the return of Anthony Bannon, who will leave his post at the head of Rochester’s George Eastman House this spring, to return to his old job as director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
The first one has to do with Bannon’s track record in running arts institutions. During his original tenure at the Burchfield Penney, from 1985 to 1996, Bannon transformed the institution from a modest art center with a relatively narrow focus into a prominent Western New York institution.
His most notable accomplishment was in greatly expanding the center’s collection by securing a series of gifts from his close friend, the smart and voracious Lockport art collector Charles Rand Penney. Here’s how Bannon described the lead-up to that momentous transaction:
“If you engage people in the act of creating good things, support will follow. You don’t have to ask,” he said. “I never asked Charlie Penney for anything. Honest to God. I never asked him for anything. It came because we talked about what was possible and then it just kept coming, one thing after another.”
Bannon’s move to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in 1996 made the kind of immaculate sense one sees too rarely in the museum world. This would not be a total transformation job, as his Burchfield Penney was, but an exercise in reputation-building.
In his 16 years at the Eastman House, Bannon deepened the institution’s ties to the Rochester community by fostering collaborative projects with many institutions while guiding it through extremely rough fiscal waters in the early 2000s. At the same time, he oversaw and sometimes curated exhibitions with an uncommonly broad popular appeal, from an exhibition of photographs from the golden age of burlesque in Buffalo to another that managed to make learning about the birth of pictorialism not just fun, but sexy. Bannon’s focus on broad accessibility is something that might surprise those who found the art reviews he published in The Buffalo News in the 1970s and ’80s impenetrable.
As a result of Bannon’s work at the Eastman House, the institution has never been more popular.
You would have a tough time arguing against Bannon’s resume as an institution builder, but what is really exciting, at least to me, is his refreshing take on what a museum like the Burchfield Penney is actually supposed to do.
If you didn’t know Bannon was an arts administrator, it would be easy enough to mistake him for a preacher. The soft cadence of his voice and his penchant for the poetic turn of phrase ( “In Burchfield’s name, we can do many things.”) have a definite ecclesiastical feel, which makes sense when you consider provocative statements like this one: “I’m about to make a quantifiably accurate statement. It is that museums are more trusted than churches.”
Whether you agree or not with that bold pronouncement, it tells you perhaps the most important thing about Bannon: That he is interested far less in running a museum for the art community than in exploiting its potential to serve the entire community with the opportunity to experience something transcendent. A place not unlike a church.
“Both museums and universities are places where propositions are turned around, in which we place ourselves in positions of vulnerability, in which we say, ‘I don’t know the answer, I want to learn,’ ” Bannon said. “I come to you because I wanted to be surprised. I want to be challenged. I want to be knocked off my feet. I want to be threatened by new ideas.”
For those of us who nursed a nagging worry over the last two directorless years that the Burchfield Penney might have reached a long plateau, this is music to our ears.