October 26, 2003

Art for the masses

Director Peter C. Marzio made Houston's art museum the hottest ticket in town. Now his innovations are imitated nationwide.

By Melanie D.G. Kaplan

Before Peter C. Marzio landed the job as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1982, many people in this muggy, sprawling city tended to think of art museums as austere places where the upper crust admire the works of dead European white men. But under Marzio, the museum has become a force -- not just in the community, but nationally.

One reason is its commitment to showing work that reflects the diversity and richness of the city, which is increasingly black, Latino and immigrant. An example is "Eye on Third Ward: Yates High School Photography," an exhibit on display through Dec. 29. The show is the culmination of a year-long project that encouraged students to document life in their neighborhood.

"My job," Marzio says, "is to get as many people as I can in front of as many great works of art as I can, in a way that stimulates reflection."

By all measures, Marzio has succeeded. When he took over the art museum, it was the nation's 30th largest in exhibition space, with spotty holdings; today it is the sixth largest, with more than 45,000 works, including one of the finest collections of African gold objects and 18 works by Jackson Pollock. He's brought in visitors with singles mixers, summer art camps and a road race that finishes at the museum's sculpture garden. Annual attendance has grown from 300,000 to 2.5 million.

Ned Rifkin, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., says any museum looking for a new director wants a Peter Marzio.

Already his impact can be felt across the country. "A Place for All People," Marzio's educational project that developed programs to interpret the MFAH's permanent collection, became a model for museums in the mid-'90s, and "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," a 2002 exhibit showcasing hand-sewn quilts dating back to the 1930s, is touring 10 other cities.

One of a museum director's most difficult jobs, Marzio says, is determining what art matters and predicting what art will succeed. "I've had exhibits I thought were truly great, and hardly attracted anyone, and I can't figure out why," he says. "We did a show on Czech modernism that is now seen as groundbreaking. We worked very hard on it, spent a lot of money, but no one cared."

At 60, Marzio has the body of a marathon runner, with eyes that squint almost shut when he smiles. He moves easily among artists, politicians, donors and museum visitors, some of whom he endearingly addresses as "kiddo." He doesn't ruminate on sociological meaning or symbolism when discussing art; he describes himself as a formalist and is interested in the "visceral reaction."

In his spare time, the native New Yorker is an insatiable reader and likes to travel, usually with his wife, Frances, a curator at MFAH. The couple tours museums all over the world. "The price of being a director," Marzio says, "is you tend to look as much at the lighting as you look at the art."

His model for MFAH is the Art Institute of Chicago, an encyclopedic museum and art school. A museum, he says, should be "as accessible as a shopping mall." Earlier this year, Marzio stopped a high school field trip to talk about painting with egg yolk, which was used as the base for color before artists discovered linseed oil. He led the group into the kitchen behind the museum café, where he cracked an egg and mixed it with paprika in a cup. It was a way of simulating the color of berries or crushed stones. One teenager dipped the eraser of his pencil into the cup and wrote his name with surprising difficulty on the back of a notepad.

Marzio wasn't always fascinated by antiquated painting techniques. Born into a blue-collar Italian family, he never thought he'd even graduate from high school (he was the first in his family to do so). Growing up, he worked as a gas station attendant. He hadn't entered a museum until college, when he was inspired by a painting in a textbook. He went on to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where his research focused on high art and the common man.

Marzio's first job in the art world was at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, as a research assistant and then a historian. In 1978, he became CEO of the city's Corcoran Gallery of Art. When he was offered the MFAH job, Marzio originally turned it down. But then he reconsidered, flying to Houston on his own dime. Once there, Marzio paused outside the museum. Carved into the facade was the phrase "Erected by the people for the use of the people." It echoed his own philosophy, that a museum should be a community center. And today, Marzio says, that original mission has been fulfilled.