Atkinson Gallery Names John Connelly as New Director

The Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College has taken on a new director, John C. Connelly. An art aficionado since birth, Connelly hails from the metro NYC area where he received his MA in Art History at Hunter College and began his career as an art curator and director for the Andrea Rosen Gallery in the NYC Chelsea neighborhood for eight years and was a founding member of the New Art Dealers Association (NADA). After Rosen, he was the director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation (Rosen represents the Gonzalez-Torres estate), and taught part-time at the NYC Fashion Institute of Technology through 2014, when he moved to our town. Here is our interview with the details:

Q. Tell me a bit about your background in the art world, and your inspiration to represent it.

A. I took my first art history class my freshman year in college in New York City and fell in love with the subject. As a full-time undergraduate student, I was also fortunate enough to find a part-time job working at one of the bookstores inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On my short 15-minute breaks I would explore the institution bits at a time, which was the perfect way to discover and digest its encyclopedic holdings. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art history from Purchase College in New York and began working in art galleries at the front-desk working as a receptionist, archivist, administrative assistant, and then graduated to artist liaison and director. In 1995, I co-curated my first exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery where I also met and worked with then-emerging contemporary artists like John Currin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sean Landers, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Andrea Zittel. I started my own nomadic curatorial project under the name John Connelly Presents with the goal of introducing artists without New York representation to new audiences. The project evolved into a more traditional gallery model after I began to share a small permanent exhibition/studio space on the 10th floor of a building on 26th Street in West Chelsea in 2000. The gallery expanded twice over the course of ten years and was located on the ground floor of 27th Street when I closed it in summer of 2010 and accepted a position as director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. I worked at the Foundation for four years until relocating to Santa Barbara in 2014. Since then, I have worked as a private art consultant and independent curator.

What genre and period of art are you most attracted to?

I love many different genres of art but have always gravitated towards photography. After I discovered Modern and Contemporary Art in school I quickly became interested in finding and discovering new and emerging artists who are challenging previous conventions and forging new territories. Artists who can make reference to art historical precedents while saying something new are interesting to me.

How did the Atkinson Gallery catch your interest?

I saw my first exhibition at the Atkinson gallery in 2015. I was impressed with the beauty and proportions of the space and was really taken by its stunning outdoor terrace that overlooks downtown and the Santa Ynez mountains. I came back to campus to give a guest lecture and visited other shows including the incredible site-specific adobe installation For You and the Sky by Rafa Esparza. When I saw the job description for the director I read it with enthusiastic interest since the position embodied many of the things I love to do, curating, working with both artists and students and educating and advocating about the value and power of the arts.

What are your main goals for the gallery?

I want the space to function as a resource that inspires both our students and our larger community. Increased attendance and more awareness of the space is a goal. I want the programming to contextualize the annual presentations of our student’s work with an examination of historical works by established artists, especially from early or seminal points in an artist’s career. I also want to prioritize new projects by emerging artists that are site specific like our current solo project by Jane Mulfinger or that strive to transform the space the way that Rafa Esparza’s project did.

How many and what type of exhibits are you planning?

A mixture of five to six solo and group exhibitions and projects each year by both established and emerging artists. Ongoing projects include: The Essentials,a new video program that features important art films and a new series of exhibitions inspired by the question, “What is America?” The firstexhibition in the America series will include the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres who is an artist I have a long and deep connection with.  Other shows will include artists who are relatively new to me like our upcoming winter group exhibition, Eleven Figures in Two Parts, thatwill include Santa Barbara based photographer Manjari Sharma and the Los Angeles painter Zoe Walsh. Eleven Figures focuses on artists who live and/or work in Southern California. Our program’s breadth is regional, national, and international.

How do you keep up on the arts?

I visit galleries, museums, and artists’ studios regularly. I try to get down to L.A. and other major arts destinations as often as possible. I look online for much of my arts news and Hyperallergic.com is by far my favorite online arts magazine.

411: Eleven Figures in Two Parts opens Friday, January 17, 2020

The Atkinson Gallery, gallery.sbcc.edu