In January, just weeks before he was set to retire from nearly four decades of work as the museum’s designer, Ken Pohlman sat down with Robert F. Reiff Curatorial Intern Annaliese Terlesky ’23.5 for some Q&A about his time at Middlebury.
What led you to museum design?
It was accidentally an accident. I have a degree in film from NYU and lived in Manhattan for seven and a half years. I moved up here and was doing carpentry, working on old houses and stuff, and all the contractors ate mostly at Steve’s Park Diner—they just tore it down recently, it’s right next to where the Town Hall Theater is. A guy in there who was an artist and contractor said they were looking for someone to hang shows at the college museum. And you know, I was single and spent all my day with carpenters, and was looking for some bigger sphere, and so I applied for the job and was hired as a part-time preparator.
As the job evolved, I went to Richard and said, “Well hey, I can change these wall configurations.” In [the original] Johnson [Gallery, in the Johnson Building], it used to just be these burlap wall units that turned a little bit, but you were limited by how much art you could put up. You couldn’t put a big painting on it. So I sheetrocked that whole room, and then I could paint it with different colors, etc.
So I had a degree in film, I had gone to Middlebury for two years, and did a lot of theater and theater sets. In New York, I renovated brownstones and apartments and worked with an interior designer. So there were little things that all added up somehow. Probably the one thing I was lacking in was graphic design and I learned that on the job. I started here in 1987—there were just the little Macs back then. We started doing some primitive design stuff there and eventually doing graphics and vinyl letters. You guys grew up knowing what a font was, but in the old days when you were designing something, you’d have to pick something and go with it. Now, I can choose from tons of fonts—that sort of changed the game in some ways.
How do you start the visualization process for an exhibition? What is the process like when confronted with decisions on how to best present works of art?
I maintain a template that outlines my exhibition design considerations. It has the curatorial narrative at the top. The introductory wall text is the visual representation of that narrative. Say you’re the curator, and you’re looking at the influence of time at a mental asylum for Van Gogh. From that, you make a checklist. You have the narrative, which is your idea, then you have the space that you’ll put it in, and then from there, you develop a checklist—which is usually a combination of works you can get and can’t get. Everything I do after that, I ask, “Does this reinforce the narrative?” A lot of it is practical.
Later on in the process, if I have a really small painting and a really big painting, I have to figure out how the little painting will get the same attention as the big painting. If I put the little painting at the end of the wall in a corner, it gets its own space and a little more attention.
Another thing I do, which I often teach to students, is to go with the big, crazy idea first. I reference the idea that you’re sitting on the end of a dock and you take a fishing line and you cast it as far out into the pond as you can—and that’s the wild and crazy, out-there idea. And then, you slowly reel it back into the dock, and by the time it gets there, it’s more subtle—it’s not competing with whatever the art is, it’s supporting it. To me, that’s a big key of what I do. In theory, when somebody comes into a gallery, I want my design to help them get into the art. My design is like opening the door so somebody can see what’s going on. What I don’t want people to do is go in and spend all the time looking at my door and not the art. So, it’s a fine line and different artists have different notions of how much a design influences what they’re doing.
The next thing I do with the checklist is I say, “Wow, that’s a really powerful work,” or, “These three things work together.” I look at the ways in which I might install the show to give more presence to it. At the beginning, you have the narrative, you have the space—that’s going to affect how many works you can have. From those two things, you develop a checklist, and that’s art either in your collection or that you’re planning to borrow—if you can get it, and sometimes you can’t. Then the show, depending on the nature of the narrative, is a structure, and by structure I mean chronological, or maybe random, areas of focus or subsections. Random is nice because you can just hang it decoratively. For example, the upcoming show An Invitation to Awe has a number of sections, we’re calling them labs. If it’s a show based on historical progression, chronological organization would be important. If it’s Abstract Expressionist American paintings that explore a particular subject, then it’s more of an opportunity to place things where they’d be seen in a powerful way.
One thing we do here because we have a relatively small collection, and a relatively steady audience—in other words, we’re not a big city, we don’t have people moving in and out, and instead, it’s the same people living here year to year—part of what I try to do is create a new space each time so when you come in, you think, “Wow, this isn’t the same gallery I was in before.” If we had a fancy collection with Impressionist paintings or a Mark Rothko—with him, you can just put a Rothko on the wall and leave it. It’s powerful, it’s spiritual.
In the Tossed exhibition, you had the idea to place a large curved wall in front of the piece by El Anatsui. In the upcoming Awe show, were there any decisions you made in terms of specific artworks shaping the space?
Awe is really complicated. You have this whole room that you walk into and it’s literally a black box and we’re going to have this video by Dario Robleto. Who can compete with that? The challenge is really how to have that coexist with the rest of the show. It’s the same way when you introduce something like virtual reality. We’re showing an early version, a stereoscope, which is a 19th century device that creates a sense of depth and three-dimensionality in what you’re looking at. And then you have this 21st century experience that totally takes you to another space.
In Tossed, I had this one really large work that’s the rockstar of the whole show and it physically needed a lot of room on the floor to install it, so there’s a practical reason that went into it. I counteracted the power of that piece with this curved wall. Curved walls always have a sweeping effect. I originally set it up so when you come in from the stairs, I was hoping people would walk to the left, where the Louise Nevelson was, and then you come around and get the “wow” experience of El Anatsui.
So, in the same way, in Awe, the design idea is this notion of the lab. They did an exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford. In their collection, they have Einstein’s blackboard, and they actually did an exhibition where they had that in it and they handed out nine more blackboards to people who excelled in their field and they got to do what they wanted to on the blackboard, and that was the exhibition. And that’s so cool. When I think of Awe—I mean awe is such a huge subject, and what can we bring to it that some place else couldn’t bring ten times better? For [Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture] Katy [Smith Abbott] and I, it’s this notion of experimentation and the work in process, so what you’re seeing on the wall, there’s some sense that there’s been experimentation with the notion of awe in a particular fashion. It’s a challenge. The work that’s tactile—these sensory invisible sculptures—how does that fit in? And then there are these two works that are by Susan Crile of burning oil fields, and a triptych of life jackets all piled—it’s so powerful.
I haven’t gotten down to specifics, but it’s just an awareness of what’s happening within the sections, and then how do the sections relate to one another. My idea at the moment is to provide a similar structure for each section so something is all the same and then you’re trying to make them each unique in their own way. Being all the same helps keep the overall structure together, but then having more variety in what is happening inside.
How did you decide on the categories of display in the museum?
It’s usually up to the curator. In the case of Tossed, I was the curator, so I got to decide. At its best, it’s a collaboration. One, I can be the person off the street who’s not the expert, saying, “Oh wow, that’s amazing,” and that’s useful because I’m not cluttered by a lot of heavy art history knowledge. We have conversations a lot. With Richard, he just leaves me alone—he comes up with a narrative and a checklist, and he just lets me loose. When Emmie Donadio was here, she was coming from an expert art historian place and I was coming from the man of the street and decorative place, and we battled. But in the end, coming at it from two completely different places actually created really good work.
The earlier I get engaged, the more I can say, “You really have a lot of works for this room.” With Tossed, it didn’t need a lot of work. But say I was designing up at Shelburne Museum, and I wanted to recreate a 19th century general store. Clutter would be my friend. If I had the Rothko, spareness is my friend. I help a lot with making suggestions for the checklist and stuff like that. With the women’s suffrage exhibition in 2019, we worked with Amy Morsman, who runs the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research. She had never done an exhibition before—she was a historian coming at it from that point of view. In that case, I would argue I co-curated the exhibition because I helped her create the idea, the structure, etc. So it varies. Right now, the Derrick Adams: Sanctuary exhibit that’s going up is based on the Green Book, which was this travel book for African Americans to travel safely—it gave you places to stay in, say, Arkansas. In that case, it’s one artist and a preconceived exhibition. All you’re really doing in a case with his work is you’re adapting it so it fits into your gallery.
If I’m lucky, for a lot of shows, the College will send me to some city to see the show and then I can absorb—not to copy what they did, but to ask, “What are the problems here?” and “What works?” so that when we bring it to Middlebury it works. We’ve had a lot of success translating traveling exhibitions to our space. We rely a lot on traveling exhibitions because we don’t have a collection like the Met or the LA County Museum.
Did you have a say in deciding the themes for the first floor’s galleries?
There, I was working with [former Chief Curator] Jason Vrooman. We made a total change, transitioning away from a Western-centric installation, which began with the Greeks and the Romans and then moved into Renaissance and Western Europe, America, into contemporary art. What we did—and a lot of museums did this starting in 2020 after the Black Lives Matter movement—is to decide what what we had been doing was making it uninviting—there was a sense that everything un-Western is outside art. What we’re trying to do instead is to express how art from different cultures is similar—through themes like devotion. In the last gallery, we have a Power Figure, a Bangladeshi stone altar, a 16th-century Italian devotional painting—we have the three of those together so it’s less about the history of a certain work of art and more about what all these objects have in common, and how are they different. In that case, it was mostly Jason and I. And Jason also has a really strong anchor in terms of DEI stuff, and I’m more of a visual guy. We also wanted flexibility in those galleries, so that’s why those four-foot panels are there. The idea is that after twelve weeks, you have to take a work on paper down and put up another work on paper. This time, you could just paint the square and not the whole gallery.
I created those center kiosks. I didn’t write the words—I rarely am the guy writing the words, that’s usually the curator. But I’m the one who takes those words and puts them together with some images. Again, because we’re a small museum, any one of us would be a good person to bounce something off of. If Richard writes something, he’ll have someone else read it. I’m educated enough to be able to say, “If I don’t know what that word means, then you probably should define it.” It means there are a lot of people who will be confused or they’ll immediately feel left out. Again, it’s important to not slam the doors shut before people get in and try to experience the show.
The other thing is, I don’t have to like the art at all to do a good job. My job is to absorb that art or the intention of the art—to absorb the narrative. Really, what I do is translate words and ideas into three-dimensional, physical space that people move through. That’s how I would define exhibition design.
We want to keep figuring out a way to have museums be as good as the internet. I can take an image from Sotheby’s—it can be a tiny locket, and I can blow it up huge and know every little detail of it. But actually seeing that object in reality is a different experience. In the first gallery here, we have this tiny religious ivory diptych—it’s a quarter of an inch thick, and yet when you look at the people in it, there’s three layers of people in it, the way they’ve carved it. It blows me away. They created all this depth of field. I figure whoever created it had to be in prison.
What will you miss most about working here? What are you most excited about moving forward?
My colleagues, of course. I think also being hands-on with the art. For the past thirty-seven years, I’ve seen a lot of art. You get to see how it’s made, you get behind the scenes. You can really see the skill. To me, the object is key. It can be with an idea and complement an idea, but getting to see something up close is impactful. We have an oil sketch by an Italian impressionist artist of a woman and her son watching a horse race, and she’s leaning on the rail. It’s painted on the back of a cigar box lid, so you get all the wood grain, and it’s very sketchy. In some ways, I love sketches and preparatory stuff more than the finished product.
It’s been a creative outlet, that’s great. I’ll go home and try to do some of my own art. I do some cartooning. I don’t know what I’ll do, but if I don’t find something creative, my wife and I raise sheep. The joke is that I’m retiring but I’m not really retiring. We have all these outbuildings that need to be painted. We also have a one-and-a-half year old granddaughter—she lives in Colorado but she’s coming in about three weeks for a week. My wife and I, when we’re not working on the farm, we like going canoeing and getting outside. I live in Vermont, and I get to enjoy the weather, but I don’t necessarily get the outdoors as much. I’m outdoors on the farm but not just having fun—so hopefully, I’ll be doing more of that. I’ll probably come back and help at least for the next year, with the Awe show and with the Bread and Puppet show this summer. I live up in Lincoln in a beautiful part of the state, and its nice up there. On Fridays, I’ll come down to civilization. I’d love to be involved in the design process of the new museum.
What advice would you give to young people interested in museum and/or exhibition design?
I think what I brought to the job was a lot of different skills. It’s the same thing with being an architect. I think the best architects spend time pounding nails, so they know the quality of a piece of paneling or plywood. They know it, not just on the paper, but physically. It’s a similar thing with exhibit design. Get familiar with how art is made. A lot of time, preparators—which is what I started out as here—have to be willing to paint the pedestal sometimes and not just design the pedestal. Particularly, at small museums we wear a lot of different hats. I think that’s better, personally. At the Met or some bigger museum, if you’re a lighting preparator, all you’ll do is change lightbulbs. Now, you can get a master’s degree in museum studies or museum design. In today’s world, maybe that’s a good way to go. On the other hand, going to a place like a small historical society in Vermont is great because you learn about the conservation of the objects. They have collections that include everything from table doilies to original photographs to axe handles. All of them have vulnerable materials. On the other side, from the art historical society of a particular place, there are a lot of elderly. People are overwhelmed by computers, and I say, “Do you have a nephew? Your nephew can do that in ten minutes.” These places give you a chance to do all the jobs.
