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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44 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.16 I t's early February, with 38 days to go until the J.B. Speed Art Museum's March 12 reopening, and director Ghislain d'Humières hasn't been sleeping much. He keeps a pad of paper by his bed to jot down ideas in the middle of the night. "Fundraising or design ideas or talking to the staf: 'Hey, what do you think about that for the opening?'" he says. "My job goes in every direction. I'm really, at the end, responsible for everything, so I need to make sure — detail, detail, detail." He glides through the Speed's dusty corridors, warns of walls still wet with paint, and greets every staf member he passes with a friendly, "Hello, how are you today?" He pauses at the top of a foating glass staircase, looks through the fritted windowpanes and says, "Really love that view. It's really cool. Because you really connect between the old building and the new building." Te old building: a Neoclassical-style limestone edifce built in 1927 when Hattie Bishop Speed founded the museum in honor of her late husband, businessman and art collector James Breckenridge Speed. Te new: a home for the museum's contemporary collection and special exhibitions, with a corrugated metal exterior that refects light, mimicking the limestone. (D'Humières calls the exterior color "champagne.") "Inside, of course, there's a major gap of diferent styles, but we are preserving the beautiful legacy of Mrs. Speed by getting it up to speed — sorry — with everything else," d'Humières says. Te Speed's roughly 14,000-piece collection spans from antiquity to contemporary art and 40 percent of what visitors will see upon its reopening is essentially new — either it's been given or commissioned in the last few years during the dormancy or it's been in storage for many years and recently restored. Chief curator Scott Erbes says that, before closing, about 500 to 600 objects were on view. Now about 900 to 1,000 will be. "People think we've just been sitting around for three years wondering what to do," he says. "I have to say this is the busiest I've been in my 25-year career since we closed." To avoid daytime construction, he'd often load trucks at 2 a.m. with works to be shipped to conservators across the country. Since Hattie Speed died in 1942, the building on the University of Louisville's campus has undergone four other renovations and expansions: in 1954, 1973, 1983 and 1996. For this three-and-a-half-year, $60-million project — $18 million of it from the late Owsley Brown II, who was chairman of the building committee and chairman of the capital campaign — Los Angeles-based/Tailand-born architect Kulapat Yantrasast has designed a 60,000-square-foot building to the north, doubling the museum's square footage, and one to the south with a 142-seat cinema. "Technically a society dies if we do not have creativity," d'Humières says. "When you go to a flm or basketball game or concert, you cannot talk. At home usually you have the TV blasting and you do not talk. Where do you really talk? When you do a walk in the park and when you come to a museum. Many people think the museum is a place where you cannot talk, you cannot touch — well, you cannot really touch, but you can talk." He says that part of the Speed's mission with the expansion is to bring in art from around the world "because close to 35 percent of the population will never travel outside of Louisville." Upcoming special exhibitions will showcase samurai culture and Native American artifacts. "It's our duty to make sure the younger generation has access to culture from around the world, for them to understand diferences," d'Humières says. "Tere are so many problems with the rest of the world because of a misunderstanding, an ignorance about other cultures." After a 10 a.m. ribbon cutting on March 12, the museum will remain open to the public for free for 30 continuous hours, with theatrical performances, dancing, yoga, a video-game competition, art-making and tours given by the museum's curators. (Entrance to the museum will be free every Sunday for at least the frst year.) Before coming to Louisville, d'Humières redeveloped museums in San Francisco and at the University of Oklahoma outside Oklahoma City. "I like building, but I'm much more interested in how you use a building in a community and how you make the building a better place through programming," he says. "Everything we do inside and outside — that's important. Te building, I love to do it, but it's how you use it, how you make it meaningful for a community." D'Humières is already thinking of the next big project. "Two years from now, we have this idea of doing, not really a satellite but a serious partnership in the west side of Louisville or another location in Kentucky," he says. "We will branch out later, but right now we have to move here, digest, make sure everything's working. Tis is the hub." — Mary Chellis Austin