Jeffrey Abt

Artist’s Statement and Biographical Sketch

“Double Portrait” is part of an ongoing series investigating the poetics of display. It includes a close examination of conventional objects, like framed pictures, but treats the subjects as though unfamiliar, much like an archaeological study of a previously unknown object. This series is part of a larger project exploring museum culture with particular interest in exhibitions, especially the presentation of permanent collections, and the activities circulating around them including lecture tours, sketch classes, and less structured encounters. All in all, the resulting images constitute a visual anthropology of museums. This particular image is from the back of a pair of metal picture frames hinged together so they can stand, like an open book, rather than be hung. The original frames are designed to present portrait photographs. Though “Double Portrait” appears at first glance to represent an interest in a kind of post-Minimalist formalism, the series of which it is a part was intended instead to document the presence of absence—the proximity of images we believe to be on the other sides of the frames—as well as the heightened sense of expectation, curiosity, and mystery that surrounds this experience.

Jeffrey Abt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit. He received his BFA degree from Drake University, studied at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, and later completed an MFA degree at Drake. He then went into curatorial and exhibitions work, first at the Wichita Art Museum, then in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago, and finally at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, before coming to Wayne State. Throughout this period he has remained an active artist and exhibited his work widely throughout the United States. His works are in the permanent collections of several museums including the Des Moines Art Center, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, as well as several corporate collections including Dow Automotive and Polk Technologies, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (Detroit branch). Abt is also a writer and he has published two exhibition catalogues and nearly two dozen articles, most recently focusing on museum history and criticism. His book, A Museum on the Verge: A Socioeconomic History of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1882-2000, received the 2002 Award of Merit from the Historical Society of Michigan. Abt’s research has been supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Logan Foundation, and the Kaufman Memorial Trust. His most recent essay, “The Origins of the Public Museum,” just appeared in the Companion to Museum Studies, published by Blackwell in the United Kingdom. Abt’s next book, tentatively titled: Entrepreneurial Egyptologist: James Henry Breasted and His Oriental Institute is to be published by the University of Chicago Press with a projected due date of 2008.

Visit his website and learn more about his work at http://www.jeffreyabt.net/