Wandering through the Fowler Museum, the visitor is immersed in a cultural milieu unlike any she has ever experienced. Within the galleries, arrayed around a serene garden courtyard, have been re-created the treasure-filled burial chambers of Peru’s ancient Moche royalty. There have been haunting ritual altars of Haitian vodou, laid out for the imminent arrival of a high priest. Museum-goers have been thrust into the disparate worlds of the Mexican balladeers, creators of the corrido tradition, and of the women embroiderers of Suzhou, China, precision artisans of translucent silk thread and needle. They’ve traveled the art “galleries” along L.A.’s mean streets to glimpse the muffler men, whimsical nuts-and-bolts sculptures turned out from discarded auto parts.
To enter these worlds, Museum Director Marla Berns ’73, M.A. ’76, Ph.D. ’86 knows, visiting adventurers make a visceral connection with the artifacts on display, whether they are pieces of woven cloth, artfully decorated gourds, photographs, tribal headdresses or, as in the latest exhibition through July 28, intricately quilted garments from a fishing village on a small Japanese island. Senses aroused, these travelers feel compelled to know more about who made this, why and what stories these objects can tell about the makers’ social universe. Thus, the journey begins and deepens as visitors take in the accompanying text, listen to music or recorded sounds, react to the visuals, absorbing as much — or as little — as they wish of what the museum provides.
As a UCLA graduate student in art history, Berns made this fundamental connection herself one day while sitting in a class on Oceanic art history taught by the late Arnold Rubin. In the darkness of Dickson Auditorium, immense images of masked figures from a Papua New Guinea festival flashed on the projection screen. “It was like an epiphany for me,” she recalls. “The prospect of actually studying who made this art, of discovering why this art exists and how it fits into a cultural framework — I realized that this was so much more exciting to me than just memorizing the titles and dates of artworks and the names of those who made them.”
Berns, the daughter of a Los Angeles–area artist, immediately switched the focus of her graduate studies and began her own journey into the heart of northeastern Nigeria, where she lived for more than two and a half years among 25 different ethnic groups to identify the linkages between their art — their pottery, their decorated gourds, their homes, even their body art or scarification — and their histories.
Today, some 22 years later — a time period during which she worked stints running a small departmental gallery at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul and as director of the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara — Berns has come full circle. On the campus where she interned as a student curator, she now leads the Fowler, with hopes of strengthening its ties to the campus and the Los Angeles community.
Her experiences in St. Paul and Santa Barbara laid a strong foundation for Berns to meet the challenges she would find at the helm of UCLA’s Fowler Museum. The St. Paul gallery was a showcase for the department’s extensive collection of historical fashions, textiles and decorative arts. There she capitalized on the gallery’s uniqueness and the mission of university museums to intellectually stimulate visitors, often with unusual subject matter (she once mounted a show focusing on the evolution of women’s underwear), a task that larger, metropolitan museums sometimes shy away from as too high-risk or off-beat.
At UC Santa Barbara, she faced a very different set of challenges. Over the years, the museum, which was run by the university’s art department, had become isolated and nearly invisible to the rest of the campus and surrounding community.
“People in the art and art history departments knew about the University Art Museum, but no one else on campus seemed to,” Berns says. This, in spite of the fact that every show was reviewed in the local and student newspapers. “How could they not know?” In her quest to make the museum a dynamic part of the campus, Berns started to create partnerships with other academic departments, involving herself in faculty groups and meetings.
“I spent a lot of time talking to people directly. You can’t just send people written materials,” she says. “You have to add that personal touch, talk about who you are and what you’re doing.”
Berns did more than just talk. Last year, under her watch, a $2.3-million renovation of the museum’s exhibition space was completed. Today, it benefits from a new entrance, six new galleries and an adjoining 20,000-square-foot plaza. She also curated two nationally touring exhibitions and recently finished a retrospective exhibition and monograph on Santa Barbara designer Paul Tuttle, internationally known for his furniture and architectural designs.
With her arrival at UCLA in the fall, the Fowler and its staff are already embarking on new adventures and new academic and community partnerships. A major traveling exhibition that was developed jointly by the Fowler and UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum has just opened, giving the public a first-time look at 22 rare embroidered coats originally worn by fishermen living on Awaji Island in Japan’s Inland Sea.
“These are elaborately quilted kimono-shaped coats,” Berns says. “They give us a very focused look at one local tradition that has been superseded by modernization. But what they allow us to do is tell the story of how these rare artifacts were once used by people in daily life and how important it was for Awaji women to lovingly make these beautiful coats for their husbands to wear.”
In May, a major exhibition of more than 130 works of art, from large-scale masks and water-spirit headdresses to ritual dress and puppets, was launched to tell the story of a unique environment, the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria where different cultures share social, spiritual and practical connections to the water. “The Niger River, one of the longest in the world, empties out into the ocean,” Berns explains. “Because the river system brought trade, the area has historically been the point of access for the outside world into Africa. We look not only at how the region’s art and cultural practices have developed in response to the environment and economy, but how the outside world has influenced them.”
And next year, visitors to the Fowler will get a glimpse of the inner workings of a Sufi mystical sect in Senegal.
Berns’ background, her broad geographic reach from Africa to Japan and eclectic interests make her well-suited to head what is one of the nation’s premier cultural museums, says Doran Ross, her predecessor at the Fowler, who has known her since her student days.
“The Fowler is a museum that deals with the whole world, from past to present,” says Ross. “Marla’s interests have virtually covered the globe. Her background, from dealing with African gourds to doing a retrospective exhibition on furniture to working with contemporary installation artists — these are the kinds of broad skills the Fowler depends on. She’s going to carry on its tradition of innovative scholarship, of mounting ambitious traveling exhibitions and building on what’s been achieved in the past.”
Promises Berns: “We will pick subjects that will challenge visitors, but we’ll also provide them with all the information and the tools they need to understand them — especially if they’re willing to make the commitment.”
