October 14, 2004 – May 2, 2005
Chicago Architecture Foundation
Racine Art Museum Staff: Bruce Pepich, executive director and curator of collections; Lisa Englander, museum store manager.
Photographed on Main Street, Racine
Racine Art Museum Staff
Bruce Pepich has spent the past three decades leading the transformation of the Charles A. Wustum Museum into the Racine Art Museum. He works closely with wife Lisa Englander, who has run the museum store for 22 years. A major gift of over 200 pieces from patron Karen Johnson Boyd helped Pepich establish the museum's curatorial focus on contemporary American craft. Pepich also defined the program of the museum building, while granting the architect the artistic freedom over the design.
Museum directors impose conflicting requests on architects. We push architects to create art objects and then complain after we move into them about how they don't work for us. It is challenging to design a building that gives you a “wow factor” and at the same time is respectful of the work. People do walk into this building and say, “Wow!”
A particular problem for us is that many of our objects are small. Craft tends to be hand-made, hand-held, and either the individual pieces are small or the components are small. When I saw Perimeter Gallery, I felt that Brad had a refined sensitivity for dealing with both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional objects, with a sense of light and space that is intriguing and yet not overwhelming of the work.
RAM is a Zen temple in comparison to the Wustum, because even though we are showing over 200 pieces at a time, you don't feel overwhelmed. There is enough room for the pieces to dialogue with each other and to talk to you privately. We have picked up on that in that we don't have lots of elevating cubes and little risers. Things are on the floor. It is more Japanese—the object is directly in contact with the building. It is about getting the public to feel that this art can be a part of their life. There is kind of an earthiness about it that we are trying to communicate subliminally.—Bruce Pepich