Brian Trimble, who’s been the Interim Director for the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach for the past few years is stepping down to make room for Kimberli Meyer to take up the position as the permanent UAM Director. She’s worked at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles for nearly 14 years, but is excited to be moving on and moving to Long Beach. She sat down with the Daily 49er to discuss her new role at CSULB.
Why are you leaving the MAK?
“I love the MAK center and I’ve been here for such a long time that it really feels like part of my DNA, but I’m excited about taking on a new context, a new challenge. I’m a person that works very much through response to the site and the MAK center has been an incredibly interesting site to work from, but I think that the UAM is similarly also really interesting. I’m interested in the museum itself, I’m interested in Cal State Long Beach as a university, and I’m interested in Long Beach. I think it’s a fascinating city, so I think there’s a lot I could mine in that context that is really just very very different from the MAK center.”
What were your primary focuses at the MAK?
“Being the director means you’re in charge of everything. So I’ve been in charge of setting the artistic direction for the organization, which means figuring out what kind of exhibitions and programs that we do here. One of the interesting things about the MAK that makes it kind of unique is that we are located in three historic modern buildings designed by Rudolph Schindler. Schindler was Austrian, he was a Viennese architect who came to California in the nineteen teens and became super influential in modernism and the MAK center is actually headquartered in his house and studio that he built in 1922. So, part of what our mission is is to expand the public consciousness about architecture – which, in Southern California, is incredibly important. There are many, many, many great examples of sort of groundbreaking architecture in Los Angeles, in LA county, and Long Beach is actually part of that. Part of what we’ve been trying to do here is to make people more aware of that.”
Why did you want to work at the University Art Museum at CSULB?
“Cal State Long Beach itself has the biggest art department on the whole west coast and in Los Angeles. We’re always aware of all the art schools around here and Long Beach is slightly under the radar, but in fact they produce incredible artists and have a lot of great artists in the faculty, so i’m interested in a place that already has such a strong set of resources in art. I think that’s already super interesting. I was aware of the museum studies department because one of my colleagues, Professor Nizan Shaked, has been teaching there for quite a while and she and I have collaborated on several projects over the years, so I’ve definitely been aware of the museum and the program there. For me, it’s interesting to work in a museum that has a good museum studies program because I think museums have become more and more important as time goes on, and to be able to train students and really involve ourselves intellectually in what a museum is, what it means in society it’s kind of crucial. If you’re in a museum that’s not at a university and just out in the city some place you don’t necessarily have that kind of dialogue, you don’t take three steps back and question, ‘What does a museum even mean? What’s it supposed to do? Who’s its audience? What is its message?’ I think that all those things, you taking that apart, you really have to deconstruct that in a museum studies department. So that’s another reason why I’m really interested in the UAM because it has that and they’re very joint, the two entities.”
Was your decision influenced by the recent $300,000 grant from the Getty Foundation for the implementation of the first-ever monographic exhibition in the United States of artworks by Argentine-born artist David Lamelas?
“I love David. David has been an artist that I’ve worked with in the past and I absolutely adore him, he’s a fantastic artist. It’s going to be a really great show and I really look forward to that as well. It’s part of this much larger initiative which the MAK center is also involved. The initiative is called LA/LA, which is Los Angeles/Latin America, and it’s actually going to be amazing. There’s like 60 venues across Southern California which are going to be showing exhibitions that somehow relate to latin america so it’s going to be amazing the Getty does this as part of Pacific Standard Time and they do this every few years and it’s always pretty incredible and they really put a lot of money behind it but I am really pleased with what the UAM is doing i think it’s going to be a fantastic show and definitely will bring in a lot of people and a lot of publicity.”
Do you have any plans already for exhibits you want to spearhead?
“I haven’t actually arrived yet – that happens in July. So, one of the things I have to learn about is what’s on the calendar already, because of course things that are already planned and up and running are going to continue to do so, and I’ll be interested in seeing what those projects are. I have a lot of ideas about exhibitions I would like to do and programs that I would like to bring in and sort of concepts I would like to implement. So, this is something that I’m probably going to be working on, doing a lot of planning within my first couple months, planning for the next year, two years, five years. I always love to have a five year plan, so I’ll be looking at that pretty carefully, but one of the things a university museum has the opportunity to really explore its community and I think a university, in many ways, is like a small city. It has all kinds of different people, it has people that are there every day, it has people that just visit people that come and go and have kind of a life cycle at the university. So I’m very interested in thinking of the university as a city in and of itself and thinking about ways to engage the citizens of the university so that’s a concept that I’m going to be developing right off the bat.”
What is your educational background?
“I Have a Bachelor of Architecture, which is a professional five-year degree in architecture. I got that in Chicago and I practiced architecture for quite a while and decided to go to art school then I came out to California – to California Institute of the Arts in the LA area and did my MFA there and have been here ever since. So, I really have both art and architecture in my background and both are very important to me. I’ll definitely also be bringing architecture projects at the UAM as well.”
What will you bring to the CSULB from your 14 years experience at the MAK center?
“One of the things that I would love to do which I’ve done at the MAK is provide a platform for artists and architects and curators and scholars and performers to sort of try new things and just experiment, and that’s the kind of place that the MAK was. It was a place where you can really try and fail if you wanted to and that’s something that I still very much believe in. I think that the university museum can also have that position. It’s about trying things, expanding ways of thinking about things and it’s about giving thinkers and creators a chance to try something that’s maybe a little bit out of their usual habit – and that’s absolutely what I intend to continue doing at the UAM.”
Meyer concluded her interview by stating: “I’m just really excited to try to engage the university community at Long Beach it’s going to be a very open door I want to try to make the museum a process and a program open and accessible for people m really interested in finding out more about the student body the faculty and the staff at the university so I look forward to meeting people and finding out more about what people are interested in.”