Holly Keris has recently been promoted from Assistant Curator to Associate Curator at The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, where she has worked for three years. She started out as a history buff, but discovered an extreme passion for art and art history. Keris recently visited with the Daily Record’s Carrie Resch.
Prior to the Cummer
“Most recently I was Curator of Collections at The Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach. Before that, I worked for the City of Orlando’s Public Art Program, the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art, Orlando, and the Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park.” What does an Associate Curator do? “Basically, I think it’s the coolest job at the museum. In terms of the traveling exhibitions or temporary exhibitions that we have here, I go out and search for those. A lot of them come as travel show packages where someone else creates the exhibition and they send it on the road. I’m kind of the first stop in exhibition show process. We’ve done three shows in a row now that we’ve generated ourselves. The chief curator and I take turns every other time, where one of us is the curator in charge.
“With the ‘Reel to Reel’ exhibition, it was everything from developing the concept and determining the theme you wanted, what museums in the area and in the state had material which was useful to make the exhibition better, putting it all together, doing the research, writing all the labels, everything to deciding where things are going to hang in the gallery.
“In terms of permanent collection materials, it’s mostly a research and interpretation job, so I spend a lot of time researching the pieces in the permanent collection and then really bridging the gap between what we know and how we want to tell the public about it. That could be everything from writing the labels in the gallery, deciding which pieces should hang by each other, or writing articles for our magazine that we do here in house for the members.
“Just a little bit of everything. It’s a lot of research.”
Current exhibitions?
“I just finished doing ‘Reel to Reel.’ The one that I’m working on now is called ‘Picturing Jacksonville, 150 Years of the Art of Photography.’ That is going to be opening May 18. It’s our summer show.”
Favorite exhibitions?
“My favorite one that I’ve done and finished was ‘Reel to Reel.’ I was really surprised by the number of people who are Jacksonville natives who didn’t know about the city’s involvement in the silent film industry. I didn’t know it. I’m a Floridian, but when I started digging into things I thought everyone who grew up here should know this story and really not very many people did. It was like a big scavenger hunt to put together all these pieces of the puzzle and really make that story come alive and get people to pay attention to some of the history that we already have here.”
How did you get into art?
“I started off really interested in history. In college, I wanted to be a history major because I just thought that history was so fascinating, and I think it’s so important to know what happened before you in order to make sense of the world that you live in. Some of my history professors started using art in class. We were taking a strict history class, but they would show examples of Greek sculpture and Roman architecture. Through them I started thinking about art in terms of not only something that is pretty, but something that really conveys something about society. So I started taking art history classes and I realized that what cultures produce and what they leave behind tells you just as much, if not more than knowing who fought what battle in what year. It’s a more tangible thing that still in many cases survives today. You can look at it and have an immediate connection to and it will tell you something about the society and the culture that made it even if it’s 500 years old.
“It’s still history to me, but it’s just with a different focus. It’s so great to be constantly surrounded by beautiful things. It was either work for a museum or be an art history professor. This way you’re with art all the time here. If you’re a professor, you deal with it in books and slides. It’s much more fun when it’s in person.”
What do you like about working at the Cummer?
“I like everything. It is so amazing to be surrounded by such fabulous objects everyday. Really, 90 percent of my job is so tied to the objects themselves, so you really develop an intimate relationship with everything we have here. It’s a great sense of pride because part of the mission of the museum is to preserve the objects in perpetuity. It’s not just pass it on to the next generation, it’s pass it on forever and it’s such an immense responsibility and to even play a small role in that is really great. Just to be around all this fabulous stuff all the time is great.”
Projects coming up?
“We’re going to develop an audio tour for the American Collection that you can carry around, punch in a number, and listen to someone tell you more about the object you’re standing in front of. I think it will be a great resource for the public. That way, you can take a tour on your own time and not be dependent on a person to give you a tour. It will tell you about the artist, the technique, maybe listen to some music of the period to immerse yourself and know what was going on in history in that time to put this stuff into context. It will let the visitor learn as much or as little about the pieces as they want to.
“Also, the museum received a grant last year for the conservation of 12 paintings in the permanent collection. So our conservator was onsite here for a week in the middle of November and worked on some paintings here and took some back to Miami where she’s based, and as she finishes one painting and sends it back, we send her another one. I’m also still working on the ‘Picturing Jacksonville’ exhibition.”
Professional organizations
“The American Association of Museums; they have a sub-committee called the registrars committee and curatorial committee. I’m a member of the Florida Association of Museums, the Southeastern Museum Conference and the Southeastern Registrars Association.”
Hometown
Born in Pennsylvania,
but raised in Lake Mary,
near Orlando.
Resides
Southside
Education
Bachelor of Arts degrees in History and Humanities from Stetson University in DeLand and a Master of Arts in the History of Art from the University of Virginia.
Hobbies
Loves to read, cook and paint.
Favorites
Her favorite artists include Louis Comfort Tiffany. She loves lamps and stained glass windows, Michelangelo’s sculptures and early Christian and Byzantine icons. Her favorite museum elsewhere is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Favorite restaurants: the Wine Cellar and Mossfire Grill. She likes mysteries, history, biographies, and general fiction books. Her favorite movie is “Remember the Titans” because “it left you with a good feeling when it was over.” Her favorite pieces at the Cummer are Severin Roesen’s “Still Life with Flowers, Fruit and Bird’s Nest” and Joseph Rodefer DeCamp’s “The Red Kimono.”
–by Carrie Resch