Wallace Halladay National Museum of Women in the Arts

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, 91, founder of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, is seen within the museum. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Mail service )

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay used to work at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the museum she founded 27 years agone, near every solar day. Now, she'south here just a couple of times a week, though she also works most days from home.

The culture wars have quieted for at present, and Holladay, 91, is focused on the long term.

The NMWA has a $l million endowment, a historic domicile a few blocks from the White Firm and had 91,139 visitors last year. It is a Washington institution and Holladay's goal is no longer legitimacy. That fight was fierce, and she won it long ago. Now she is looking to legacy.

On this March afternoon, in her intimate office, sprinkled with art and awards and honorary degrees, Holladay speaks with clear pride of the museum'southward balanced budgets, its all-women board of trustees she'd stack "against any lath, of any arrangement." Of their upcoming exhibition on the image of the Virgin Mary opening simply before Christmas. And she speaks with clear please of her late husband who collected with her, planned with her, unwaveringly supported her ambitious goal to create a museum that "directly addresses the gender imbalance in the presentation of art in the U.S. and abroad," every bit NMWA's Web site puts it.

In her shrewd, but gracious, k-dame way, she has been selling this museum e'er since she founded information technology, simply as the nation was having pitched battles about the roles, and places, for female artists and their work. She nonetheless thinks she can sell the museum'southward mission, her passion. If donors believe in "what nosotros're doing, we never lose them," she says. It'due south the indicate that continues to drive her, even after all these years.

A controversial commencement

She starts out the interview past telling how she'd fretted over what to wear that morning and finally decided on a long Missoni skirt her husband, Wallace F. Holladay, bought for her 30 years agone in Rome.

The late architect and businessman had an artist'southward middle and loved to dress his wife and muse as they traveled the world collecting beautiful things. "All I tin say is that no one e'er had a amend spousal relationship," Holladay says, and her face still lights upward in the telling.

A native of Elmira, N.Y., she met her hubby in Washington in the mid-1940s when she worked equally social secretary for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and he was a Navy officer. He became a successful existent estate developer, and when the couple began collecting art in the 1960s, close friend and collector Richard Brown Bakery suggested they come up up with a focus. A collector "must get in at a virtual personal involvement — a line of acquisition that really sends him," he wrote to Holladay.

The Holladays became intrigued by a Flemish artist they discovered on a trip to Europe. After returning to the United States, they were unable to notice information on Clara Peeters — or on any other female artist, for that matter — in art history textbooks. Female artists had been largely neglected, and proficient paintings past them were even so affordable.

"Wherever we went, we would get to the top commercial gallery and say, 'What do yous have by a woman?' "

Their collection grew to about 500 pieces and, throughout the 1970s, Nancy Hanks, chairperson of the National Endowment of the Arts, encouraged Holladay to establish a museum. The NMWA was incorporated in 1981, and in 6 years Holladay raised more $xx meg. She added to her collection, and opened her Georgetown home for public tours.

In 1983, she demurred at the idea of purchasing the old masonic building on New York Avenue. "It was a slum," Holladay says. "My husband, who had great imagination, said, 'This is going to exist fabulous, wait at the high ceilings, right close to the White House.' There was a porno shop next door, simply he said, 'That'due south just another kind of art. Calm down.' He thought information technology had good bones." The building purchase and renovations toll $xv.v meg, of which just $seven.six meg was borrowed.

The museum idea gained traction — and detractors. Holladay had been on the board of the Corcoran Gallery, worked at the National Gallery of Fine art and studied fine art history in graduate schoolhouse. "I was all wrapped up in fine art. Information technology just didn't occur to me anybody would be against this," Holladay says. Just anybody, it seemed, had an objection. "The old dowagers said this is feminist. The feminists said this is some white-gloved establishment thing" and that they wanted to exist in the museum with men. The disharmonism of world views became part of the museum'south founding story.

When the NMWA opened in 1987, famed feminist artist Judy Chicago loaned them a painting. That stilled some of the criticism.

In a Time magazine article that year, critic Robert Hughes dismissed the museum as ghettoizing female artists. He called it "fatuous to talk as though women in 1987 formed an oppressed aesthetic form." The NMWA, Hughes wrote, was "a grimly sentimental waste of coin, an thought whose time is gone."

Merely by this fourth dimension, thanks to a direct mail service marketing campaign, the museum had more than than l,000 members.

There were "some people who were quite supportive, and a whole lot of others who were not," says Susan Fisher Sterling, who began as an associate curator in 1988 and became director in 2008. "When you put frontwards an idea that upsets the status quo, people become all crazy."

The collection now includes more than 4,500 pieces from the 16th century to the present. It features well-known works: Elisabeth Louise Vigee-LeBrun'due south "Portrait of Princess Belozersky," Mary Cassatt'due south "The Bathroom," and Frida Kahlo'south "Self-Portrait Defended to Leon Trotsky." There are sculptures by Sarah Bernhardt and Chakaia Booker, photos by Gertrude Kasebier and Louise Dahl-Wolfe.

Information technology has an annual budget of $8.7 million and employs 41 full-fourth dimension staff members along with 100 function-fourth dimension workers and volunteers. In 1993, the museum purchased and renovated 5,300 square feet of adjacent property, which houses a comprehensive library and enquiry eye, for $iii.05 million. In improver to private donations and some public funding through grants, it earns income through admissions, museum rentals (it is a favored site for weddings) and shops. Its success has been a convergence of smart choices and civic mindedness, Sterling says. "The real truth of it is, every year the museum ends in the black."

A visionary

At her office, Holladay toggles between personal history and museum history, which she takes personally.

She recalls how her close friend, the storied New York health activist and philanthropist Mary Lasker, showtime told her to get incorporated. She recalls how Climis and Carol Lascaris designed the museum'south Great Hall with its marble balustrades and crystal chandeliers that take helped it to become one of the city's most august rental facilities.

The museum has always been premised on women helping women. Men accept been wonderful too, Holladay says, "and I don't want to belittle that." I never "telephone call myself a feminist, just once I got into this I realized information technology wasn't just in fine art — how many women music directors are there? How many women anything back then? I automatically did a lot of thinking until I became a feminist."

With thousands of supporters, "we accept been able to substantially secure the museum," Holladay says. "And information technology's wonderful knowing that it's here to stay."

She has not allow her age cease her from continuing to contribute. She is still a major fundraiser and still presents as elegant and sharp. "I piece of work at beingness preserved,"she confides. "Non with face lifts or anything. I swim every twenty-four hours."

Wallace F. Holladay, who died in 2012, had called information technology a legacy. Holladay'south daughter-in-police, Winton Holladay, is president of the board and her granddaughter, Jessica H. Sterchi, is on the board equally well. "I'thou delighted the family is involved," but family unit involvement is secondary to the museum'southward legacy, Holladay says.

Sterling, the manager, remembers how Holladay "took it on the chin" in the early on days, even though today many people phone call her a visionary. "For all the slings and arrows early on, all the things she hoped would happen slowly, slowly take come to exist and make the museum strong. That must be wonderful for her."

Holladay talked about an upcoming speech she had to make to the American Medical Women's Association. She is feeling a picayune tired but agreed to do the speech anyway. "At that place are 1,000-plus women doctors throughout this state coming from every corner and now they know about our museum. When information technology comes to outreach like that, boy, I'll brand the effort, no matter what I have to do."

cummingsanonton.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/holladay-founded-national-museum-of-women-in-the-arts-now-shes-working-on-its-legacy/2014/04/17/0b98f322-c4b5-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html

Share this post