Founded in 1893 as the Denver Artists' Club, the Denver Art Museum today is one of the largest art museums between Chicago and the West Coast. Their mission is to enrich the lives of present and future generations through the acquisition, presentation, and preservation of works of art, supported by exemplary scholarship and public programs related to both its permanent collections and to temporary exhibitions presented by the museum.

I sat down with JR Henneman, Director of Petrie Institute of Western Art, to learn more about her path to curation, her philosophy for collecting, and how she defines western art.

*Photo Credit: Steve Peterson, photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.*

Tell me about you. How did you get here (the esteemed Petrie Institute of Western American Art of the Denver Art Museum), where did your passion for art begin, and why Western art?

It's been a nonlinear journey. I grew up in a farming and ranching family in rural Montana and was always an art maker, as was my family. When I went to college, I studied fine art. I studied abroad in Southern France in Montpellier, and it was there that I started studying art history. I started to realize that art can serve as a window into the past.

Art history became an avenue to access other times and places. After graduating, I pursued a non-western art history master’s degree in London. After that, I went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum as an intern working in the registrar’s office and development department.

After that, I traveled quite a bit. I was in California for a while, then South Korea, and ended up going back to London to work. Eventually, I returned to the US to pursue a PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle on 19th Century British Art and culture. I studied female celebrities and how they harnessed tools of representation to create careers for themselves. One of the women who ended up being part of my dissertation was Annie Oakley, who performed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in London in 1887. Annie Oakley brought me into the realm of Western American art.

After completing my PhD in 2016, I was hired as an assistant curator at the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the DAM, and now I am the head of the department.

Curating is a great fit for me. I love public speaking; I enjoy engaging with diverse audiences, and I get to work with physical art objects and the art market. I get to think about the design of spaces: rhythm, light, distance, color, and sight lines. Thomas Smith was a wonderful mentor, and I owe much of my own philosophy and knowledge of curating to him. My roots in the farming and ranching community of rural America are helpful in understanding the material and the people I work with. At the same time, I have an international education and an international network which has given me a much different but complementary perspective on how the West fits into American Art and global art during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Denver Art Museum is unique in that it is the only global museum with a department and collection devoted to western American art. We tell the story of the West in a global context, and we tell the story of American art from a Western perspective.

Talk to me about your philosophy of curation.

My philosophy is learned from my predecessors, who set a standard for how we collect and what we collect. The Petrie Institute is just over 20 years old - founded in 2001 - meaning it’s still fairly new. Between 2001 and 2024 the collection has not substantially increased in number, but it has substantially increased in value. My predecessors and I have maintained a honed strategy of collection maintenance. We continuously improve the collection through thoughtful deaccessioning and acquisition.

*JR Henneman speaking to a group, photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.*

Leaders of the Petrie Institute have thought strategically about the long-term vision. We don't collect depth, but rather selectively acquire the best works an artist ever produced - if we can get them. The quality of the material that's in the permanent galleries needs to be the best we can obtain in order to most fully honor the artists and their accomplishments.

I do not believe in acquiring artworks just for them to languish in storage: any acquisition needs to have a clear and active role in the collection. This philosophy requires tight focus and expansive knowledge of any given artist's work and career. Collecting at this level requires networks with dealers auction houses and other important art world relationships.

I am also working to fill gaps in the collection, especially when it comes to artists of color and women. It’s important that we strive to represent and celebrate the West in all of its complexity, messiness, and diversity.

Can you explain what western American art means? How do you determine what fits in the collection?

Great question! Every collection and curator will define it a little bit differently. When most people hear the phrase “western American art” I believe the artists that come to mind are usually Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, who are the two great cowboy artists of the late 19th and early 20th century. They represented a specific kind of vision of the “Old West,” and they represented an important foundation. At the Petrie Institute, we take the broadest possible perspective on your question, and our intention isn’t necessarily to answer it. The West is a place with very fuzzy borders. It's often described as from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast, from Canada to Mexico, but we know that in the history of the United States, the West has been a constantly changing boundary both real and perceived.

In our galleries, we try to nod to the complexity of these questions - what is the West? Where is the West? Who is the West? - by acknowledging that there isn't only one West. Over time, there have been many different Wests, and even today the West is not only a place (a place that is, for many of us, home), but it's also an idea, a legend, and a myth, whose extraordinary stories have transcended borders thanks to film and popular media. It is an existing place full of diversity and diverse stories. The Petrie Institute tries to embrace that. The artworks in our collection have to have something to do with these ideas or themes of the West, but we do not strictly define a western aesthetic, nor do we strictly define the requirements for an artist and his, or her, or life story to be a part of the collection. If an artist produced something in, about, or of the West in some way that supports this narrative of the bigger, more expansive West, then that artist's work conceivably qualifies to be in our collection.

Talk to me about an exhibition that meant a lot to you, or that you really enjoyed putting together and still think about today.

The biggest most important show I've done to date was Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism. It was a beautiful and challenging show. It was about colonial representations and their legacies into the present, specifically the French and their colonization of North Africa, and the colonization of what we now call the American West by the United States government. Any of the American artists depicting the West at this time (the late 19th or early 20th century) had trained in France and were influenced by French Orientalism or representations of the greater Mediterranean Basin by French artists. This exhibition put French and American artworks into conversation to reveal their shared roots in orientalizing imagery. It celebrated artistic achievement while considering the legacies of such representations into the present.

*Near East to Far West Exhibition photo, courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.*

*JR Henneman speaking at the opening reception for Near East to Far West, photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. Photo Credit: Andy Colwell.*

This was the largest project I've done in scope, breadth and depth of scholarship. The artworks were beautiful, and my team and I learned so much from working with different community focus groups in developing the exhibition. Near East to far West in many ways sums up who I am as a scholar, someone who is rooted in the West but who thinks about it in a global perspective.

What does your job as a curator look like?

I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and looking at artworks.

It’s a very relational job, and I maintain a network of scholars, academics, and art market contacts. I think the critical part of being a good curator is always looking, training your eye to see. A curator also needs to understand how art can help tell stories.

*JR Henneman left with Thomas and Jane Petrie, photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.*

How long a major show can take to bring to fruition?

Near East to Far West took five years from its original inception to seeing it on the wall. Five years is not a crazy amount of time to plan a large exhibition, especially when it's one that requires community engagement, nuanced levels of interpretation, and has a big publication attached to it.

What’s your next big project?

I'm really excited about a show we're opening in late July called The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama. It will feature about 40 artworks by Tokio Ueyama, who was born in Japan but came to the US and made his home in Los Angeles. He and his wife Suye, and over 120,000 other Japanese Americans, were forcibly removed from the West Coast during World War II and incarcerated in American concentration camps. One of these is the Amache National Historic Site in Southeast Colorado, where the Ueyamas were incarcerated for over two years. Tokio taught adult art recreation classes and continued his painting practice, and this exhibition is composed of his work before Amache and during Amache. Afterward, he and Suye moved back to Los Angeles and started the company Bunkado, which still thrives in Little Tokyo.

It’s going to be a beautiful exhibition, and it’s important to tell the story of Amache. It’s a history that we need to know about, and I'm grateful and honored to have a chance to do some of that work here at the Denver Art Museum. It's a very meaningful project. I also think the exhibition will challenge people to reconsider their expectations about what western American art can look like.

What do you want your legacy to be? What’s the mark you hope to leave on this world with the work you do?

I am still figuring that out. Big picture, I want to do good, thoughtful work that has a positive impact on the field of American Art. I want to celebrate who we are and what we do here at the DAM.

Why does art matter?

The arts are critical for well-being, for all of us. I personally believe that the health of a culture or a society can in part be assessed by the degree to which it embraces the arts. I think being in a culture like ours - one that embraces the arts and provides extraordinary venues for connection, creativity, and interaction like the DAM - is a good sign, one that signals we value the role the arts play in keeping us all healthy, well, connected, and whole.

Curating the West with JR Henneman | Denver Art Museum