Fiske Kimball and the Arensbergs
One of the questions most frequently asked of me and my co-authors is: “Why Philadelphia?" This is shorthand for a variety of similarly-themed inquiries about how it came to pass that Louise and Walter Arensberg gave their collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, rather than to one of the numerous other institutions competing to acquire it. Often this question is tinged with a sense of loss, because the collection did not stay in California where it had lived for nearly thirty years. We tell this story briefly in Hollywood Arensberg but, thankfully, an even richer answer can now be found in John Vick's wonderful talk, “Architectural Imagination: Fiske Kimball's Modern Museum."
Mr. Vick, Collections Project Manager at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, presented this lecture at the symposium “Fiske and Marie Kimball: Shaping our Experience of Buildings and Objects" on March 20, 2021. Speakers at the conference—organized by Marie Frank for the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello—track the myriad ways in which the Kimballs put an indelible imprint on art history and modern museology. There is no unique URL for Mr. Vick's lecture, but it can be found here (where it is number 5/11).
If you have time, check out the other presentations by Marie Frank (author of the forthcoming biography of Kimball), Susan Stein, Richard Guy Wilson, Danielle Willkens, Carl Lounsbury, John H. Sprinkle, Jr., Gardiner Hallock, Susan Kern, and Ann Lucas, which provide an even fuller picture of the Kimballs' legacy.
— Mark Nelson
About the speaker: John Vick is the Collections Project Manager at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Over the last decade he has curated and contributed to more than twenty exhibitions and publications, including most recently: Represent: 200 Years of African American Art (2015), Creative Africa (2016), The Essential Duchamp (2018), and Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South (2019). He is currently managing the creation of new permanent collection galleries of early American art, which will open to the public in 2021 as part of the museum's Core Project renovation by Frank Gehry. John holds a B.A. in Art History from Boston College and a M.A. in Art History and certificate in Arts and Culture Strategy from the University of Pennsylvania.
