A Viewing Room for Discovery and Delight

When design work on the new Museum began, one of the things we asked for were spaces that might remind visitors of some of the more intimate yet accessible rooms in the old building, including the so-called Atrium, which featured comfortable midcentury-modern seating and lovely views of Prospect House gardens. Among the answers to this mandate were three so-called viewing rooms, shaped in scale, volume, and materiality to offer moments of reinvigoration and rest from the density and even intensity of the viewing experience in the collections galleries. The concept was that they would provide viewing opportunities of different kinds, framing vistas onto campus and thus anchoring visitors more clearly in the Museum’s location at the heart of the University while also providing experiences of one work or a cluster of works of art. Each viewing room is materialized in wood, specifically the Vermont white oak used to clad walls, floors, seating, and even ceilings—a very different tonality to that of the adjacent galleries, in which painted surfaces and rich colors prevail. 

The only viewing room to contain multiple works of art is named for alumni John Cecil and Celia Felsher, both members of the Class of 1976. As leadership volunteers, John and Celia were among the early contributors to the building project and elected this viewing room that now bears their names as the space in which their philanthropy would be recognized. As an annex of sorts to the galleries of European art that span the late medieval period to the early twentieth century, the space shares the eighteen-foot-high ceilings of those galleries but in a more intimate, wood-lined environment. The one other design feature that was predetermined for the space was the built-in bench seating, shaping a view onto the Entrance Court, now dominated by Nick Cave’s extraordinary mosaic in glass tile, wood, and metal. 

Curating this viewing room thus demanded both a light touch and a clear intentionality—selecting works that would be in dialogue with each other, with the space, and with the views into and out from the room itself. It seemed a special opportunity to do something different from the core strategies reflected in the nearby galleries, including fully breaking with the idea of chronology. The result, with only three works of art—four if we count Cave’s mosaics visible through the south window—is one of my favorite moments in the new building.

As I recall it, curation of the room began by identifying the possibility of including our extraordinary nineteenth-century stained-glass window by the great English Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones—a tantalizing prospect because of the way the work would need to be backlit and thus could be made visible to passersby through the north-facing window after dusk. Because a custom-made environment would be necessary for Burne-Jones’s work, selecting this piece was a key—and largely irrevocable—decision. From there, the choice of companions came easily as we considered visual affinities. The scale, volume, and acoustics of the room meant that it could be a lovely space for small-scale musical performance, and from this came the idea to install the recently gifted nineteenth-century Erard grand piano. The Burne-Jones window depicts Saint Cecilia with her handheld keyboard instrument, and immediately this suggested a theme—one that is richly amplified by the floral inlays of the piano’s marquetry. 

The facing wall provoked the need for a large wall-hung object, and immediately a remarkable painting on paper by Kehinde Wiley, currently on long-term loan to the Museum, came to mind. Executed in 2009, the work reimagines Saint Cecilia (ca. 1600) by Stefano Maderno, with Wiley transforming the famous sculpture of the martyred saint to explore what he sees as the senseless violence against Black men by referencing the persecution and discrimination at the heart of the legend of Cecilia. Wiley’s painting maintains the through line of pattern, with its floral motifs that suggest fabric or wallpaper and mirror the pattern found on the glass of the Burne-Jones window and then are picked up again on the Erard piano.

That wonderful piano—now one of two in use in the new building—was gifted to the Museum and the Department of Music a few years ago and is now fully restored. Put to use for the first time during the twenty-four-hour celebration with which we opened the new Museum, it immediately validated for me both the design of the space and its curation—a moment of cross-collection, transhistorical uplift in one of the most beautiful spaces in the new Museum.