Retiree will retain artistic license

Portland Art Museum has plans to keep its curator emeritus busy

By Paul Duchene

The Portland Tribune, Dec 30, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Curator Donald Jenkins surveys a 3-foot ceramic blade, greenish blue, like an iceberg. It curves like a samurai sword, the back of a game fish or a sound wave; museum lights glint on its knife-edge.

“Can you imagine any nick on this surface? It has to be perfect,” Jenkins says with remarkable enthusiasm for a man who has spent almost 50 years viewing such items.

“This color has a long tradition in Asian art,” he says. “Some of the earliest porcelains in this color date back to the 1200s. It’s often referred to as celadon, but I think that tends to be greener.”

Not a lot of people know that.

Jenkins is talking about “Over There,” created by Fukami Sueharu in 1986 and obtained by the Portland Art Museum two years later. He’s visiting a few of his favorite objects barely two weeks before he retires.

He’s not getting clean away, mind you. As of Jan. 1, the 72-year-old Jenkins will be curator emeritus instead of curator of Asian art, overall museum director, assistant curator and museum assistant, the title he held when he started in 1954.

“If he had his druthers, Donald would have retired before now,” says the museum’s executive director, John Buchanan, who took over the reins in 1994. “He was so critical to what I envisioned, I begged him not to go.

“Finally, I gave in six months ago, but only if he promised to do a few things: work on an exhibition of Chinese ceramics, a book of Japanese prints and serve as curator emeritus. I’m very happy for him but he’s not going to get far, he’s got a long ‘to do’ list.”

Jenkins is walking through the museum’s Asian artifacts, his area of expertise. There’ll be an Asian Art & Culture Day in his honor March 28, with gallery tours, traditional music in the sculpture garden and a lecture by Nicole Rousmaniere of the Salisbury Institute in England.

It’s been 49 years and three months since Jenkins first set foot in the museum after a year in Europe writing poetry.

“I got an incredible education,” Jenkins says. “The Pacific Northwest College of Art was part of the institution then, and it was the heyday of Mike Rousseau, Jack McLarty, Louis Bunce. When I started looking at art with someone like Louis Bunce, I realized what I’d been missing Ñ the actual substance of art, his feeling for brush strokes.”

And Portland was a much different place in 1954, Jenkins remembers.

“The tallest building in town was the Hilton Hotel. The whole area from Portland State up the hill around Goose Hollow was much more expansive. The freeway hadn’t cut through, and there were a lot of artists and students, old houses and cheap rents.”

Newly married in 1957 (and tempted by warmer weather), Jenkins taught in Puerto Rico for two years then returned to the museum in time for its Van Gogh exhibition.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit