KH: You were in the Cascades, in the plateau area that’s level for a long time. If you drive six hours more you will start to go up again and that’s the Rockies. Then you hit Spokane and you see a few more trees, and then you get into the western Rockies with Ponderosa pines. We lived seventy-five miles northeast of Spokane. The first museum I went to was the Seattle Art Museum.
TM: Was it a surprise to go to an art museum for the first time at that age?
KH: I didn’t know what to expect. The first painting that I remember was an El Greco. It must have been a special exhibition because the Laocoön was there from the National Gallery. It made its mark. I was blown away.
TM: Going to school in Washington D.C. I would imagine you had great opportunities to see masterpieces all the time?
KH: When I was in graduate school we went to the galleries often. I had a teacher who was big on drawing from other art, so I would say five or six times during the drawing course we would go to the museum and draw. That was a big deal for me. I had never done that before, where the drawing practice was not solitary. It really reinforced why you have a studio with other artists or why you have a community with other artists. There are other people so you are helped by the camaraderie of it. I went to the Hirshhorn, the National Gallery and the Phillips. I worked at the Phillips and ended up working at the National Gallery after graduate school. It made museums feel like they were for the taking. The museums in Washington D.C. are owned by the people.
TM: It is regrettable and verges on criminal that museums in New York and across the country have decided to turn visiting the museum into a luxury item, charging twenty dollars for admission.
KH: Yes, I know, I know.
TM: It changes the culture of a whole society. In London, where museums are largely free, people visit a painting on their lunch break.
KH: Yes, it is not an event.
TM: It should be that way. I like that about Washington D.C. It changes the entire museum experience. You walk in and go see a painting without going through a turnstile and admissions process.
KH: Yes, you bought the damn ticket. It was twenty dollars, and now you feel pressure to stay there and see everything, right?
TM: Right. It becomes a purchased experience instead of a cultural experience or an art experience that everyone in a civilized country should experience.
KH: I think the same thing. I appreciate the museum more because I had the experience of spending time freely getting closer to the art, closer to the artist, closer to the process. It’s a living resource for us.
TM: What was working in a museum like for you as an artist? I wondered what day to day contact would be like with great works. The Phillips has everything from a jewel-like Paul Klee to a room of Rothko’s paintings. Did you find at times you were moved by works unexpectedly passing by?
KH: My jobs in both places were very different from each other. My job at the Phillips Collection was part-time during graduate school. I worked as a guard.
TM: That is the kind of experience to which I was referring. You were seeing work all day long in a different way.
KH: Yes. It’s different. When you go through a museum as a visitor you largely read paintings one by one. When you are working as a guard you have a post. You may get close to two or three paintings, so it is more like living with work. You see the light change over the course of the day and works reveal themselves in a different way. The most striking thing is the changing light and how that changes the work. It is what people say all day long in school, but it does not really sink in until you see it happen firsthand. My job at the National Gallery was totally different. I worked in conservation. I saw work differently, from making x-rays of work and doing technical examinations to researching the provenance. You see all the history from the back.
TM: In Basel at the Beyeler Foundation I once saw a van Gogh painting out of the frame. I saw through a window this van Gogh lying on a table. The tacks were exposed on the side. I imagine it to be fundamentally a different experience to have that intimate relationship with a work. To have Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat on a table before you would be a very special moment.