Whenever I visit the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs — which, to be honest, isn't often enough — I'm reminded of something most art museums tell us less about: art as an outcome of actual artists' lives.
Two other museums in the Bay area take a similarly biographical approach: the Dalí, that monument to the Spanish Surrealist, and the Florida Holocaust Museum, where work by genocide survivors is placed explicitly in contexts of lived experience. But visit most art museums, and you won't get much sense of the lives of artists whose work is on the walls.
Not so at the Leepa-Rattner, where since opening in 2002 the museum has exhibited the art of three artists — Abraham Rattner (1893-1978), Esther Gentle (1899-1991) and Allen Leepa (1919-2009) — very much in the context of their lives. Founded by Leepa to commemorate the work of stepfather Rattner, the museum focuses on the latter's career as an American painter who lived in Paris between the wars and counted as friends such artists as Fernand Léger and Henry Miller. (Correspondence between Rattner and the novelist is housed in the museum's archive.)
This uniquely personal perspective has long made the Leepa-Rattner one of the area's hidden gems. But as the museum approaches its 10th anniversary, it's ready to transform itself into something a little less… hidden.
"We don't want to be a secret," says Victoria Cooke.
In February, Cooke — a red-headed 40-something with Louisiana roots — stepped into the role of director at the museum. Formerly curator of painting at the New Orleans Museum of Art and assistant director at LSU's art museum, she brings both experience (20 years) and youthful energy to the job. Chances are she'll need both as she oversees a slate of new developments.
Some of the changes, such as an ambitious application for accreditation by the American Association of Museums, began under her predecessor, founding director Lynn Whitelaw, who remains at the museum as curator. Other projected projects — a printmaking festival featuring screen printers and digital artists (tentatively scheduled for spring) and wi-fi — have emerged since her arrival.
The biggest change stems from the Leepa-Rattner's inheritance of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art collection of contemporary art by Southeastern artists. The collection, which includes more than 400 works, has been owned by St. Petersburg College since 2009, when the GCMA permanently closed its doors in Largo following several years of financial difficulty. That same year, an exhibition of collection highlights at Florida International Museum, which like the Leepa-Rattner is part of SPC, provided a reminder of the powerful role a museum with even a modest budget can play in nourishing a living community.
A handful of the GCMA pieces — like Akiko Sugiyama's breathtaking folded paper robe, which resembles a kimono made of blue feathers — are already on display at the Leepa-Rattner in the museum's education gallery. Between now and November, its permanent collection galleries will be completely re-hung so that the contemporary works of the GCMA collection share the space with the original Leepa-Rattner collection. Rather than shutting down the museum during the transition, staff will tackle one gallery at a time, giving visitors a chance to see the museum's installation as a work-in-progress evolving through the fall.
The new layout will still hit the high points of the Rattner-Gentle-Leepa story, Cooke says. But the museum's new challenge will be to "build a bridge" between 20th century art and the art of today.
One of the Leepa-Rattner's current temporary exhibitions provides a good example of how that might be done. (Despite other changes, two galleries in the museum remain devoted to temporary and traveling exhibitions, overseen by Whitelaw.) Twenty-two of Bassmi Ibrahim's large-scale abstract paintings make up Bassmi: The Isness of Being, which finds its roots in Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and '60s but is equally the product of the artist's spiritual and life journey — his birth in Cairo, a young adulthood spent in New York City, and nearly four decades as a Bay area resident.
It was in the 1960s when Ibrahim, then in his 20s, saw Mark Rothko in a cafe in Greenwich Village and stopped to talk to him. "He said, 'You can imbue paint with spirit,'" Ibrahim recalls.
That chance encounter helped lead the artist to his current practice: quickly capturing, in acrylic paint on canvas, the forms that appear to him while in a meditative state, then embellishing those fluid abstractions with richly pigmented oil paint. The results are big canvases crisscrossed with ribbons and plumes of color that Ibrahim hopes speak to viewers about the nature of existence.
"If you have a very strong emotion when you are working, the paint takes on a life of its own," Ibrahim says.
Maybe that idea — that there's life in paint and paint in life — is as good a nutshell as any of the philosophy in the air at the Leepa-Rattner. Perhaps the museum has never been truer to founder Allen Leepa's devotion to art.
"Allen was a bohemian beatnik from the '50s, and he never changed," Whitelaw says. "I love that he kept that spirit with him through his entire life."
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2011.