Q&A with Medford and Loraine Johnston
For this exhibition, the museum’s curatorial and interpretation teams engaged Medford and Loraine Johnston in a discussion to gain insights into their collecting practices and their passion for postwar American art. The following questions and answers are excerpts from that conversation.
Stanley Whitney (American, born 1946) Untitled (detail), 2020, gouache on paper, The Johnston Collection © Stanley Whitney. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Q: What drew you to collecting American abstraction from the 1960s and 1970s?
A: As an art student [Medford] had almost zero interest in reproduction, so nothing representational was of great interest [. . .] abstraction had arrived in the international conversation, so the decision was almost made for [Medford] because of [his] age and the times in art development.
Q: When you are looking to acquire a work of art, what are some of the qualities you are looking for?
A: We enjoy originality and singularity. Style probably resonates early on; then the personal emerges and either engages or doesn’t. Knowing something of the artist’s background often clues us in. Knowing zip about the artist sets up a chase to become informed.
Q: Did you have a sense of the story you wanted the collection as a whole to tell?
A: We decided quite early on what we wanted to document through the collection. It was something of a shared life experience . . . people of identical ages to our own, a conversation of the times we were all alive.
Q: What are the qualities of minimalism that you are most interested in or intrigued by?
A: Minimalism was a term tossed about with a variety of understood and misunderstood identities during our formative years. For Loraine it seemed more obvious than for Medford. She studied math at Emory—straight lines, lovely equations, probabilities, and sometimes dead ends. But also the mathematicians were headed into space. The world was shifting into a multifaceted and perhaps freeing categorization. There was a clear demarcation of those pulled towards illustrating and reporting on life about them and others who were more loosely grasping at straws and possible identities. Minimalism led in a direction not so common to every person. [. . .] We were all looking at less and finding more—or difference.
Q: How do you both collaborate as collectors? Are there different areas of the collection each of you are more drawn to?
A: Collaboration. Our collection is a shared experience, and since we are not identical persons, we bring different interests, different questions, different responses, and are curious in differing ways. What we share is a willingness to give each other a voice about an artist or a work of art. It does not always end in an addition to the collection, but usually something has been learned from the discussions that took place. We don’t actually take turns about buying something; it’s always a shared position that has been arrived at.
Q: Why was it important for you to support such a diverse range of artists at different stages of their careers?
A: This is more a monetary issue than anything else. We never knew when we would purchase the next work, and even though there were early groups of artists that we found of interest, it was not always a plan but [was] more if we could find a piece by an artist we liked and if the prices had not risen to a prohibitive position. We bought as many artists as we could in the earlier part of their careers; then they got better known, and often we were no longer able to purchase the artist, as with [Brice] Marden and [Ed] Ruscha whose careers happened quickly and the prices rose rapidly. Also, art became much more costly after the first decade of our collecting. So, we had to slow down in order to get choice works at increased pricing.
Q: Why was it important to collect the more intimate works of artists who were recognized for large-scale murals, projects, installations?
A: Size of work has had little impact on our purchases; rather, we bought what we really liked, and if the artist made huge sculptures or large paintings, we really had no way to house them. And in many cases, the personal and intimate works were more to our interest anyway. Sometimes that is really where the magic is in art—a scrap of paper, a nearly used up pencil or crayon, a casual assault to the page, and connections get made. Paper was/is a surface of great interest to most of the artists we have gathered. And paper was paramount in [Medford’s] own career.