Monroe Price | Celebrating Claudia Gould

It was thrilling, last Tuesday evening, to join a crowd at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art — thrilling because it was celebrating Claudia Gould, ICA’s long-time director; her extraordinary inventiveness; her productivity and the idiosyncratic playfulness that has characterized her tenure. The occasion was a farewell party. She is decamping from Philadelphia after a 12-year run to become the head of New York’s Jewish Museum.

For me, the reception was an opportunity to recall the myriad exhibitions, artist visits, conversations and explorations that Gould helped bring to Penn. The ICA is a treasure that causes happy surprises across campus and that is an enriching place for the whole community. Gould made those surprises happen. It was and is the responsibility of the rest of us to take advantage of its gifts.

I’ve been at Penn for about half of Gould’s tenure, and each year has had an ICA punctuation. In 2009, the exhibition “Dirt on Delight” took place — an exuberant survey of ceramic vessels and sculptures that occasioned a laudatory review in The New York Times: “On a surprisingly regular basis, the tiny Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania here mounts exhibitions that make the contemporary-art adventures of many larger museums look blinkered, timid and hidebound.” At the farewell reception, the Provost quoted that morsel of the Times’ somewhat patronizing cosmopolitanism. It will do as an epitaph.

Who could forget the 2008 exhibit, “Puppet Show,” chock-full of surprises, seeking to enrich a sense of what is contemporary art, filling the ICA space with live, videoed and filmed puppetry. There was humor, scatological puppetry, boundary-pushing and historic installations by Dennis Oppenheim.

Anyone who drops in to see what’s going on at the ICA will have many more associations. During her reign here at Penn, Gould — along with the fabulous senior curator, Ingrid Schaffner, an assortment of guest curators and an imaginative staff — moved walls, reinvented space and created amazing aesthetic connections.

But at the same time, Gould wrestled — one could see it in the evolving agenda — with the contradictions and complexities of running a University contemporary gallery, and the special opportunities and challenges of doing so at Penn. One could see her wrestling with how to use the gallery to advance contemporary art in Philadelphia and see Philadelphia artists as a meaningful constituency, how to engage undergraduates (even those not interested in art) in the opportunities that the ICA offered, how to make the ICA a teaching institution and supplement the work of other parts of the University and how to be a prominent contributor, on a national level, to the redefinition of contemporary art and society.

Gould’s tenure is chock-full of interesting answers to all these questions, playful experiments, intellectual leaps and theatrical gestures. Reading an interview with Gould in the Penn Current in 2010, I was taken by her response to questions about how she saw her and the ICA’s role at the University: “We can take larger risks because the mandate of a university is really freedom of speech and learning.”

The current exhibits at the ICA are a fitting tribute to the generosity of spirit and scope of Gould’s direction. There’s a first-time museum survey of the German artist Charline von Heyl (guest curated by Jenelle Porter), the haunting and exciting installation work “Bill Walton’s Studio” — an homage, physical memoir and space for contemplation — (curated by Ingrid Schaffner) and a typically rambunctious and feisty exhibit emphasizing originality, “Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder,” (guest curated by Doron Robina).

If that’s not enough, there’s also Excursus, a cerebral platform for more intimate programming with an invited online artist-in-residence, as well as a series of Wednesday evening “conversations.”

It’s never possible to decide absolutely who is responsible for what at a time when creativity manifests itself. But it is easy here to see how fortunate Penn has been to have Gould at the helm for these defining years in the institution’s history.

Monroe Price is the director of the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication. His email address is mprice@asc.upenn.edu.

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