Summer2002
Beautiful Connections
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4 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.
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