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Fall 2005

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Wye's World
At MoMA, Deborah Wye ’66 has found her place

—Faye Wolfe




	Surrounded by the most comprehensive collection of modern prints in the world, Deborah Wye ’66 has found her place.

IN HER OFFICE AT THE Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), - http://www.moma.org/ -Deborah Wye ’66, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, sits at right angles to a wall of glass revealing a quintessential Manhattan view: A row of Beaux Arts townhouses in the foreground, midtown office buildings looming behind. On the wall opposite hang a trio of small but not diminutive prints; beautiful and unsettling (one features a spider with two faces), they’re by noted sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whom Wye cheerfully describes as “a member of the family.” Pinned on the bulletin board across from Wye’s desk is a black-and-white photograph of Wye and a friend standing with Andy Warhol, circa 1965. Wye recalls that she borrowed the dress—an A-line, with three-quarter sleeves—for the trip because she thought nothing in her own wardrobe was stylish enough.

Today, in her black suit and lipstick-pink shirt, Wye looks every bit the part of a chief curator for one of the world’s premier art institutions. And though she feels obliged to apologize for the state of the department’s offices, newly regained after MoMA’s $425 million renovation (plastic sheeting still drapes a passageway and empty walls await art), she has nothing to apologize about when it comes to the print galleries. Strategically placed off the light-filled, 110-foot-tall atrium, they’re an alluring, intimate set of rooms filled with treasures, prints drawn from MoMA’s collection of more than 50,000 works by artists from Jean Arp to Edouard Vuillard. Wye had the gallery walls painted gray instead of the usual white, she says, “so the prints with their white margins pop off the wall.”

Wye has her own kind of pop, a presence that comes from being tall and dynamic looking, while the enthusiasm and warmth she evinces in conversation makes her very approachable. Chief curator since 1996, Wye oversees the administration and exhibition of what is considered to be the most comprehensive collection of modern prints in the world, as well as acquisitions, and loans of work to other institutions. Erudite, intelligent, and talented, Wye is also modest. To hear her tell it, a series of charmed moments got her to where she is now.

“It was a matter of luck, a fluke,” Wye says, that she took a course her sophomore year at UMass Amherst with the charismatic Carl Belz. “A friend told me about it, and we’d become friends because she happened to be across the corridor from me in the dorm freshman year.” Belz was “tall and very dashing,” she recalls, “only seven or eight years older than we were.” Female students crowded into the front rows; having been a collegiate basketball star, Belz also gained a following among the male athletes. It was the early sixties, and Belz made Pop Art his syllabus. His classes were “provocative, exciting, way oversold—they had to move them to bigger rooms,” says Wye. Previously unschooled in the subject of art, she was hooked. During his relatively brief time at UMass Amherst (he went on to be the director of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum for many years), Belz gave his students an extraordinary gift, says Wye: “He awakened many of us as scholars, to intellectual life, not just to art history.”
Belz took them to galleries and art studios in New York, and that’s how Wye ended up in a snapshot with the artist who made the Campbell’s soup can a cultural icon. “I think Warhol responded to who we were: Shiny-faced girls in knee socks,” she says smiling. “He was interested in American culture, and we represented that for him.”

Sharing her newfound passion for art at UMass Amherst were “close friends, best friends,” remembers Wye. “We went to the galleries on our own and came to New York the minute we graduated. We wanted to be around where the art was happening.” But when it came to finding work, she remembers, it seemed all “the women who worked in the galleries wore big earrings and silver dresses,” and she wasn’t sure she was equal to it. Instead, she became a gallery assistant in the shop of Lucien and Marguerite Goldschmidt, a European émigré couple who sold rare books and Old Master prints and drawings. “It was very scholarly, very formal,” she says. “I was always addressed as ‘Miss Wye.’”

Wye earned a master’s of arts from Hunter College, went to the drawings department of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and in 1979, from the Fogg to MoMA. A “freaky” turn of events, as she puts it, brought her to the Modern; just a week after she’d gone there seeking work, written introduction in hand, someone left the Prints Department unexpectedly. She became assistant curator.

Prints were not especially meaningful to her at first. “A year and a half after I started working here, I totally got the print—how a lithograph could do something that nothing else could do.” Raised in Dorchester and Quincy, the daughter of a chemical engineer and a homemaker, Wye also felt a connection to the “democratic aspect of prints; unlike a painting, many people could afford to own a print.”

The first major MoMA exhibition that Wye organized was of sculpture, not prints. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Wye had been researching the work of Louise Bourgeois and had amassed a wealth of information on her—to the point that Bourgeois referred inquiries about herself to Wye—which Wye offered the MoMA. Another surprise: “I never expected them to have me curate the show.”

Since that dazzling 1982 show, which brought long overdue acclaim to the 71-year-old artist, Wye has organized other MoMA exhibitions, including “Thinking Print: Books to Billboards,” and “Antoni Tàpies in Print,” and “Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art.” Noting that “a big part of the job is writing,” Wye says, “I love telling people about a subject, convincing them to give it a chance. It’s a way to enrich lives. When I’m writing, I ask myself, ‘How would I tell my parents about this?’ The writing can be a bridge between esoteric language [of the professional art history world] and the visitor—not intimidating but challenging.” Wye’s name is on numerous catalogs; the one she wrote for the Tàpies show received an award from the American Association of Museums.

“I’m so happy to be here. I love being part of something important, the ‘we’ feeling,” says Wye. “Working in a museum, teamwork is very important. You’re dependent on the people who spackle the holes in the wall, the librarian, the public relations staff, the people who plan special events. . . ” And she’s happy to be in Prints, which a New York Times profile of Wye termed a “Cinderella art.” “The department is a little more bookish, a little less under the strobe lights,” says Wye. “We have a wonderful group of print curators—collectors, too. It’s an art world within the art world.

“The richest part of the job is learning new things; I’ve been learning from Day One,” she adds. “It’s great to be paid to go to galleries, to read art magazines and auction catalogs…it’s like being in school.”

If there’s a drawback to her job, it’s that gallery-hopping has had to make way for more pressing responsibilities. Reviving a custom from her early years in the department, Wye says, “Recently, I have been making an effort to get out to galleries once a week. A colleague and I go together. I hope to get back to being in the language of art that way.”

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