The Secret life of… Lenore Metrick-Chen
By AndiSummers on February 18 2010
GIANT CHINESE VASE, one of the subjects of Metrick- Chen’s studies. Was made for and displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.
TRADE-CARD AD IMAGE, for Soapine soap, is part of Metrick-Chen’s studies.
With her beginnings as a Medical Student at the University of Illinois, who knew that Lenore Metrick-Chen would one day become an art history professor at Drake University?
“I thought I wanted to be a doctor—I was into biology,” Metrick-Chen said. “I was in a class, Cells and Organelles, and it trained me how to read what we saw on the microscopic slides.”
After taking a break from school and then transferring to the University of Chicago, in Chicago, Ill., she went into cultural studies. That is where she took the class that changed it all: Art and Revolution.
It was an art history class focusing on the art of the French Revolution, and that was the moment Metrick-Chen knew what she wanted to do.
Instead of exploring cells and organelles, she took the skills she learned from looking at microscopic slides by looking at what is there and why it is there, combined with her love of culture and delved into art history.
“I would be the best (student) I ever could be,” Metrick-Chen said. “I wanted to get straight As and be thorough from the start. I kept quitting other majors, but this was heartfelt.”
After finally locking down a major, Metrick-Chen received a joint Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought and the department of art history. Her dissertation was entitled “Collecting Objects/ Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and the American Art Discourse, 1879- 1900.”
“I find that the most fascinating is the art of our own time,” Metrick-Chen said.
It is at this time that she started looking in to contemporary art, and the search began to study why people want art to be moral.
After looking for the beginnings of what people have found to be moral in art, she traced it back to the Chinese Exclusion Acts. At that point in history, people from China were not allowed to enter the U.S. but that is the time when American art museums were collecting their art.
Metrick-Chen also likes overseeing art shows and worked at the Des Moines Art Center on Grand Avenue before working at Drake.
“A lot of people think art is one picture after another; when you curate it is like a journey of pictures creating a narrative, by how they are working together,” Metrick- Chen said. “It’s like opening a book. You have to put all the things together, with the connections you start to see.”
In the future, Metrick-Chen plans to curate a few shows, one being on contemporary Chinese art.
