Best Friend To The Local Arts
Joanne Stuhr
curator of the Tucson Museum of ArtYOU MIGHT NOT want to go so far as to call her Joanne of Art, restorer of the Tucson Museum of Art, but you have to admit that Joanne Stuhr has helped make TMA livelier than it has been in years.
When Stuhr joined the staff four and a half years ago as "exhibition coordinator," the moribund museum was awash in dull shows and a sea of red ink. Along with Robert Yassin, who had the foresight to hire her when he was the new director, Stuhr helped turn the place around. One of her first jobs was to re-install the pre-Columbian collection, a fine grouping of statuary that until then had languished under incorrect labels and poor presentation.
Promoted to "curator of exhibitions," Stuhr has since been responsible for some of the museum's most memorable shows over the past couple of years. The big, wonderful show of paintings by the Mexican artist Roberto Marquéz, put up in Spring 1994, was her baby. So was the Fall 1993 exhibition by University of Arizona professor Harmony Hammond, who fashioned scraps of linoleum, metal troughs and farm tools into gigantic constructions that spoke out poignantly for the farmers of the land. And let us not forget the traveling Guerrilla Girls show that Stuhr landed, an in-your-face collection of feminist posters that would never have seen the light of day under TMA's ancient régime.
But as far as local artists are concerned, Stuhr's biggest victory has been starting up regular exhibitions of work by Tucsonans. Her "Directions" series has so far sponsored solo shows by six local artists (DeAnn Melton, Cristina Cardenas, Alfred Quiroz, Barbara Penn, Will Saunders and Joyan Saunders). "I just wanted to give more exposure to Tucson area artists," she says modestly. "There aren't enough opportunities to show."
The hardworking Stuhr can often be found in the galleries on her hands and knees, dressed in blue jeans, hammer in hand, doing the nitty-gritty work of getting art on the walls. She's a ceramist by training, with a BFA in ceramics and sculpture from Stevens College ("I was a working ceramics artist," she laments. "This job has been so consuming.") She did graduate studies in library science before zeroing in on the museum world. Stuhr had an earlier stint at TMA as assistant registrar in the late '70s, and she later worked as an installer at the San Diego Museum of Art and as a freelance curator.
Stuhr hopes to keep putting together shows in contemporary and Latin American art, and art of the Southwest. "There's always more I would like to see happen," she says. If she could get anything she wanted in the museum, she'd double the size of the galleries. And oh, yes: Hire an assistant.
--Margaret Regan
