In preparation for our third annual Members’ Meeting, I have been reviewing the key events of the past year. One of our goals as a museum has been to expand the Frye’s reputation in the national and international art world as well as locally, and this goal has been realized in many important ways.

The appointment of Robin Held as a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership for 2009 is certainly an honor for her and a recognition of the Frye’s growing presence in the museum world.

Other significant recognitions: the second edition of Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection contains several illustrations of the 2007 Frye installation of that exhibition; Dreaming the Emerald City: The Collections of Charles and Emma Frye and Horace C. Henry was a feature in the September edition of Fine Art Connoisseur; Art in America covered Victoria Haven’s commissioned response to Franz von Stuck’s painting Sin; the Frye was represented in the Dario Robleto catalogue Alloy of Love; and most recently, an essay about the Frye Collection was included in the German/English catalogue accompanying Museum Villa Stuck’s exhibition Secession 1892–1914, which opened last May in Munich.

In March, we will launch with the University of Washington Press the publication Looking Together: Writers on Art, coedited by Manager of Adult Programs and Publications Mary Jane Knecht, with writer Rebecca Brown. The book, consisting of poetry and prose in response to works of art exhibited at the Frye, represents our ongoing commitment to publications.

In another milestone, the Museum and the State Attorney General’s office agreed to entrust the Frye Foundation as corporate trustee of the Frye estate with the “authority and flexibility to present the Founding Collection in the most meaningful context and to utilize the space in the Frye Art Museum in a manner that best serves the Trust’s purpose of providing a free public art museum in the City of Seattle.”

This agreement enabled us to create our current exhibition, The Munich Secession and America, showing paintings from the Founding Collection alongside major works from museums in Germany, Italy, and the United States, all with the intent of providing a greater appreciation and understanding of the collection that Charles and Emma Frye assembled at the time the Munich Secession was laying the foundation for Modernism. With this exhibition and others in the future, we look forward to expanding and enhancing the Founding Collection.

Midge Bowman
Executive Director

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2009 edition of the FRYE members’ magazine.

Napoleon expert and exhibition lender J. David Markham with Midge Bowman. Photo: Mark Sullo