August 5, 2024
European Fine art

McNay Art Museum | Dr. Matthew McLendon


A new Tim Burton exhibition, Dreamland, is open at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Dreamland celebrates the timeless appeal of the film, as models and characters from The Nightmare Before Christmas are placed in conversation with nearly 100 paintings, theatre designs, photographs, prints, sculptures and more from the McNay’s permanent collections featuring quirky characters and surreal worlds. Many of the works on display come from the McNay’s Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts. This is the most significant collection of performing arts ephemera in the United States.

Through the curatorial consideration of Tim Burton’s imaginative eye, artists featured in the presentation include Pablo Picasso, Käthe Kollwitz, Eugene Berman, Sandy Skoglund, Jim Dine, Katharina Fritsch, Carlos Mérida, Marilyn Lanfear, José Clemente Orozco Farías, Julie Speed and Diane Gamboa.

Dr. Matthew McLendon assumed leadership of the McNay Art Museum as director and CEO in February 2023, serving as the museum’s fourth director in its 68-year history. He speaks to blooloop about the museum and its mission, as well as this unique new temporary exhibition.

A multi-genre approach

After receiving Bachelor’s degrees in Art History and Music at Florida State University and his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, McLendon served for six years as the curator of modern and contemporary art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. In 2017 he became the director and chief curator of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.

Matthew McLendon McNay Art Museum

An influential leader, McLendon is renowned for his emphasis on community engagement and education, advocacy of cross-disciplinary programming and amplifying underrepresented and marginalised voices in the museum setting. He has spent a large part of his career as a curator.

“My background is perhaps a little non-traditional,” he says. “I spent the first half of my life in the performing arts.”

He originally studied, to be an opera singer. What drew him to opera was what Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’:

“You have not only the music, you have the text, you have the design, you have dance, you have all the arts coming together in service of creating this fantastical performance that tests human physiology in so many ways. I had a fascination with that cross or multi-genre approach that is opera. Once I moved into art history, fell in love with museums, and decided that that’s where I wanted to devote my life, that interest in conversations between or among the arts never left me.”

Supporting artists

The artists he was initially drawn to were those investigating multiple genres simultaneously.

“That’s the foundational part of my curatorial practice,” he comments. “Then, as I was more involved in museums, I became very aware of how important representation is, how important it is for people to see themselves when they walk through the door. There are museological studies, philosophy, and academic writing on this, of course. But it was so clear how, as we want people to feel invested in their museums, they need to see themselves – or something that they recognise – reflected. That became very important to me.”

Understanding he had a great deal of resources and a platform at his disposal, he thought intentionally about how best to leverage them:

“I work with living artists for the benefit of living artists. So, I thought about the artists in the art ecosystem who are having the most difficult time attracting scholarly attention and being brought to the public’s notice. I started to become interested in working with emerging early-career and then mid-career artists.”

Dr. Matthew McLendon and the McNay Art Museum

This was what initially attracted him to the McNay Art Museum.

“I have always known about the McNay’s collection, of course, particularly its founding collection, the bequest from Marion Koogler McNay. My original scholarly background is in early 20th-century European art. The collection has so many remarkable works of European modernist art. I don’t think it’s over the top to say Picasso’s 1912 collage Guitar and Wine Glass is one of the most important works on paper in the country.”

McNay Art Museum

“As I started to learn more about the museum through the search process to become the director, I realised that the McNay, from its beginning, and certainly in recent decades, has focused on the area of supporting living artists that I’ve been focused on in my curatorial and museum life.”

Another draw for McLendon was the McNay Art Museum’s Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts, a collection unique in America. This comprises around 12,000 works from the Renaissance onward, exploring theatre design and history, and including rare books on theatre history:

“I’ve been here about seven months now. Every day I feel like the proverbial kid going to the candy store: what fabulous new discovery am I going to make today? I came at a fortunate time, where we’ve had two major exhibitions back-to-back based on the permanent collection.”

Celebrating women artists

The first, Womanish: Audacious, Courageous, Willful Art, opened on 4 March and remained on view until 2 July as a special exhibition. This was envisioned as a second chapter to the 2010 exhibition, Neither Model nor Muse, which looked at the long history of collecting and supporting women artists at the McNay Art Museum.

“This was its second iteration, 12 years on, highlighting all of the work by women artists that had been brought into the McNay’s collection during that time. As a museum founded by a woman artist, it’s in the McNay’s DNA to support women artists, one of the most overlooked and underrepresented groups historically within the canon.”