Louisville Magazine

DEC 2015

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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A BIT CLOSER Photo by Aaron Kingsbury The Speed Art Museum's chief curator, Scott Erbes, recently found himself considering a three- eighths-inch piece of glass to be used as a shelf in a case that will hold 19th-century American glass alcohol fasks, shiny and in shades of green. "I was obsessing over how we should fnish this shelf: frosted, polished, square, rounded. What will draw attention to the art?" Erbes says. "Is the visitor going to say, 'Oh, look at that edge of glass'? Probably not. But I'm a great believer that our job is to make a space feel right when you walk into it, even if you may not know why." As the Speed completes a $50-million expansion and prepares for a reopening next March (1,000 of the collection's some 13,000 pieces will be on display, compared with 600 pre-construction), the 49-year-old has been diving into details: the "color temperature" of LED light bulbs, wall colors (mink violet, shortbread, "a white that really isn't white"), how color temperature affects wall color. "Most curators — honestly, most people who work in museums — are perfectionists to their core," says Erbes, who started at the Speed in 1999 as curator of decorative arts and design. Has he ever curated something he was 100 percent happy with? "No. No, that's impossible," he says. "You're always going back and saying, 'Maybe I should have done it this way.' And once you change one thing, it's a domino effect." — Josh Moss Erika Holmquist-Wall European and American painting and sculpture "She takes art that ranges from Gothic through 1950 and thinks creatively about how you can combine parts of that in new ways," Erbes says. Kim Spence prints, drawings and photographs "She has an encyclopedic knowledge of print and print- making techniques. Here's someone whose training was in European art history but who's also essentially our curator of Native American art, so she's self-taught in a very different feld. She also deals with our ancient art collection and our African art collection and…" Erbes says. Speed-y Recovery

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