The Peabody Essex Museum recently hired Phillip Prodger as its first photo curator, and this week debuts Surfland: Photographs By Joni Sternbach, the first exhibit under his direction. I went down to Salem last night to check them both out and found both Prodger and the exhibit trying to straddle past and present. The museum, too.
The genial and well-credentialed Prodger grew up partly in New England and partly in Hong Kong and visited PEM as a boy. He says he's excited to be joining the museum at "a pivotal time in its history." It will be interesting to see just how it turns. Since the PEM built its new building and contemporized its approach a few years back, there's no doubt that exhibits like Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, which ends this weekend, have dramatically enhanced the museum's profile and done so with substance. They've (mostly) been spared the criticism that has followed the Museum of Fine Arts' crowdpleasers with sportscars and sailboats. But there's been grumbling locally about research and archival operations in areas like maritime history taking a backseat. This generally affects backstage departments that are invisible to the general public (and thus not likely to produce revenue).
Prodger said Thursday that his position was created in part to have someone specifically responsible "to make sense of and build on" PEM's "vast and wonderful collection of 850,000 photographs" dating back to the dawn of photography. What that means in the implementation, he said, is that the museum "will be engaging that collection in interesting and creative ways" in three or four exhibitions a year also featuring photography by contemporary artists. "We want to be sure we remain a dynamic and contemporary museum" showing the "best and brightest" of today's photographers, he said. Serving both the collection and those plans would seem to make for a tall order. (He offered to share plans for several upcoming exhibitions, apparently some not yet announced, and we'll be taking him up on that.)
In that context, Sternbach's pictures are an interesting choice.
