Marcia Reed understands that collecting is part of the creative process.
“I have almost never seen an artist who wasn’t also a collector,” she says. “Artists collect to gather ideas.”
The act of collecting is itself creative, adds Reed, who retired last year as chief curator at the Getty Research Institute (GRI). “As a curator, I collect because I am always thinking about connecting single works and collections in meaningful ways.” This drive to think about how things speak to one another helped her build out the Special Collections division of one of the largest art libraries in the world.
Yet Reed wasn’t interested in filling the shelves with objects just so they could gather dust; she believed that the contents of archives were as worthy of exhibition as traditional artworks. As she puts it: “It’s important for libraries to be as lively and interesting as museums. I want to make collections accessible so they can be shared with others.”
Credit that sentiment to her background as a librarian. When Reed was the art, archaeology, and music librarian at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she saw in the library’s collections a trove of untapped material for display. Yet chances to exhibit books were few. “It bothered me that the library cases were sitting empty while the building was full of interesting objects,” Reed says. “So I asked and received permission to do several exhibitions and catalogues on shoestring budgets.”
When Reed was hired at Getty in 1983 as a reader services librarian for the new Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (now the GRI), the situation wasn’t much better; the library was small, and there wasn’t a push to promote its collections. Nevertheless, Reed and a colleague redeployed some empty vitrines languishing in the Getty Villa’s basement and put together their own small exhibitions, just for staff, of newly acquired collections—including rare books.
That’s how Reed found her calling. “I thought, you know, this is something I could actually do, since my library training focused on rare books. I just never thought there would be rare book collections in an art library.”
Since then, Reed has made a career advocating for how books fit into our understanding of visual culture, expanding the notion of what kinds of media should be part of art history.
To honor her enduring imprint on the GRI’s collections, the GRI Council, which provides philanthropic support to advance the study of the arts, recently acquired four works in her honor. An illustrated book by Pierre de Bretagne (1723) and a Christofle & Cie album of photographs (1872) relate to the art of festivals and gastronomy—an initial, important collecting area for the GRI and the basis of Reed’s 2015 exhibition The Edible Monument, which focused on artworks made of food for early modern European festivals and royal courts.
A third acquisition, an 18th-century volume with drawings of William Hamilton’s collection of ancient Greek vases, marries Reed’s love of the history of art history, illustrated books on art, and the history of collecting. Finally, a large pop-up book by Tauba Auerbach signifies the importance of artists’ books to the GRI’s holdings. Reed helped develop this collecting area through her acquisition of the Jean Brown archive, which contains about 4,000 artists’ books.
So, the next time you’re poring over a magnificently illustrated volume on display in the GRI galleries, thank Reed and her creative, innovative collecting.
