Jan van der Marck

 

Born in the Netherlands (1929), Dr. Jan van der Marck has lived for a number of years in the United States where he began his career as curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the early 1960s.

 

In 1967 van der Marck became founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He left this job in Chicago to help Jeanne Claude and Christo with the Valley Curtain project in which he became the Curtain project director, "I jumped at the occasion. I was the front man, dealt with the governor,” stated van der Marck. He became close to the artists when he had previously put his job at the MCA on the line by asking them to wrap (the couple's first big project) the old Chicago museum building in 10,000 square feet of canvas.

 

The first Valley Curtain attempt came in October 1971, about eight months after Van der Marck and Christo approached Colorado officials about the project. "It was an expansionary view of art, a mind blower," said van der Marck.

 

He soon after took a job teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle, but returned to Colorado during summer 1972 for the second try on Curtain. Van der Marck has kept in touch with the artists, and worked as founding director of the precursor to the Miami Art Museum when "Surrounded Islands" was installed in 1983.

 

Jan van der Marck also organized the first traveling exhibition that Beverly Pepper mounted in 1969. Van der Marck was the director of the Dartmouth Museum and Galleries at the time the College sought out Pepper. In the beginning of 1975, a committee in charge of commissioning a sculpture for the campus considered a number of different artists, finally selecting Pepper. The sculptor presented her ideas in February of 1976 and executed the sculpture in September of 1977.

 

In the late 1970s, Jan became the director of the then new Center for Fine Arts in Miami. One of his first projects was assembling the show ''In Quest of Excellence: Civic Pride, Patronage, and Connoisseurship.'' For this $500,000 extravaganza, 60 museums in 50 cities around the country lent 203 works - paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, photographs and examples of the decorative arts, more than a few of masterpiece quality - that range in time from 1,500 B.C. to the present, and across many cultures. In organizing ''Quest'' over a four-year period, van der Marck aimed at creating what he calls ''the museum of my dreams,'' an ideal gallery of works that would evoke the entire span of art history.

 

 

Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton (Mrs. Perez Morton)

 

Jan van der Marck came to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1986 as head of the twentieth century art department and subsequently was named chief curator of the museum. He was dismissed, absurdly, in 1995 for failing to fulfill the residency requirement for city employees. Many artists, especially in the metro-Detroit area, respect him. Gilda Snowden, a current professor a the College for Creative Studies has said, “Jan van der Marck is a wonderful person, great scholar, and exemplary curator. During his tenure at the DIA they put together the exhibition Interventions in 1995. This exhibit was notable because it was the first one to have a cd-rom as a catalog. Jan made it his business to get out into the community and see what was going on. Interventions was designed so that Michigan artists would see their works within the context of the museum collection at large."

 

     

Tornado: Red Wind by Gilda Snowden at the DIA

 

Jan van der Marck is a great lover of contemporary bookbinding and gives great importance to the original character of the graphic form in the 20th century book, a field created especially because a number of well known editors offered a new opportunity for experimentation to brilliant painters and remarkable printers. He is also a prominent author of art related books as well as a collector of many private press books that have been published over a period of a hundred years.