Gus Foster and Alexandra Benjamin

[00:02] GUS FOSTER: Hi, my name is Gus Foster. I'm 82 years old. Today is March 29, 2023. I'm in Taos, New Mexico. My interview partner is also my life partner, Alexander Benjamin. And here we are.

[00:20] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And my name is Alexandra Benjamin. My age is 70. Today's date is March 29, 2023. We are located in Taos, New Mexico. The name of my partner is interview partner is Gus Foster and he is my life partner. So we have these questions Gus created for us, but the first one was about. The first one we put down is why do you want to talk about the Harwood? I mean, what. Why is that the subject we've chosen?

[00:59] GUS FOSTER: Well, it's. It's a topic that I've been involved in for 33 years, which is almost literally a third of the museum's hundred year existence. And it's something I've been passionate about for, you know, ever since I got involved in it. I'm still involved in it and I've had lots of different roles. But, you know, that's the short answer.

[01:33] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Yes, and it is that it is a passion in a way. It's. And we've both been very involved, not as employees, but as volunteers and in many capacities. And I've been involved for, I think we said, 25 years or something like that. So it's an interesting story that actually in some ways brought us together. So how did you first get involved with Harwood?

[02:06] GUS FOSTER: Bob Ellis was the. Came to Taos in about maybe the late 80s. He'd been a professor of painting at the University of New Mexico. And he retired. His longtime dream was to retire and come to Taos to paint. And sometime, I don't know what interrupted that process, but they asked him to be the kind of interim director of the museum.

[02:37] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: I think the director of the museum had resigned or actually of the library because there really wasn't a museum at the Harwood at that time. It was just a room upstairs, two rooms upstairs, two rooms upstairs, and the library was the whole downstairs. And I think that that person had left and I don't remember who that was. I probably know the name, but I don't remember. It might have been Jim Levy, but it might have been a different director. But the director the Harwood had left. And Bob was asked to fill in as a temporary job.

[03:08] GUS FOSTER: But he was asked, but I don't know the circumstances around that. But he and I both served on the board of the Taos center of the Arts. Then it was called the Taos Art association. Back in the late 1980s. And what prompted this my involvement is a kind of a curious story. There had been a proposal to the University of New Mexico to divest itself of the Harwood and its collection. It had been. I mean it was primarily a library, but it also had several thousand works of art and it's very much a regional museum. You're not going to find a Rembrandt here or a Van Gogh or Robert Rauschenberg for that matter. But there was a. There's been a steady support by artists over the last hundred years giving things to the museum and it had a strong collection. But in the late 80s and right up to the time that I got involved in it, there were very few changing exhibitions. There were probably 40 paintings on the walls and they didn't change very much. It was always the same thing. Most people went. Didn't even know the Harwood, the art museum. Part of the Harwood was there. They came in to use the library and it was it. The town didn't have a library at the time. They kind of let the university fulfill that role. And so Bob, when this. Bob just inherited this proposal made by previous board members who had gotten involved in a discussion with UNM2. No, they didn't see a way out and Bob and I were both really upset about that possibility. So he'd asked that I get involved with him to try to save it. And the basic thing is if the university doesn't value this collection, what do we have to do to make it a museum, to make it a real museum? And that's where it all begins. I guess the reason he'd asked me previous existence I am trained as an art historian in my early life. I was the curator of a major museum in the Midwest for about a decade and I left. I retired from that position to try to start my own career as an artist. But I also had. And I'd also had. I'd also been to graduate school in architecture. So I came when Bob met me. I'd already been living here for 15 or 16 years and the. So I was. I was already a working artist. I had lots of friends in the community. I wasn't very active. I was not active at all in the Harwood's scene. I went there occasionally but again there was. There was so little change that it didn't. There wasn't a reason to go back there on a weekly basis or even more than once a year. So I didn't. I was just content to have my own studio practice and, you know, and make art here in town. But that's why I think that. That's the background of why Bob asked me to help with.

[07:28] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: He saw you as someone who could help him create a museum because he had. He had determined that the only way to save the collection was to create a proper museum with storage, with H Vac, with security, with all of the components of a real museum which were. None of those were in place.

[07:53] GUS FOSTER: Good lighting.

[07:54] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Right.

[07:55] GUS FOSTER: Parking. I mean, the parking issue is a whole story in itself that involved the town and the university, the state of New Mexico, and the Harwood itself, because there was really an abandoned building across the street from the museum that was. The town wanted to straighten the A road. So the state was involved in that. The old Harwood, when it was a library, there were four cars, four parking spots, four parking spaces. And of course, the staff took those up. So it was hard for, you know, how do you get people in to rent a book or read a book if there's no place for them to park? So the acquisition of a parking space was primary to making this transition to being a real museum. So you wouldn't normally. You wouldn't normally think about parking as being an integral part of creating what a museum needs, but that was.

[08:58] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Yeah.

[09:00] GUS FOSTER: And so that took a. You know, that took some time to get done.

[09:07] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: So describe your relationship to the Harwood.

[09:13] GUS FOSTER: Well, I've been. Since I've been involved in it for so long, I've had many roles. I first came in. I was the. At that time in the 1990s, the museum had an advisory board, and I was the president of that advisory board for 12 years. And then there was a transition in the early 2000s to get a permanent governing board of directors. And I served on that transition team. And then maybe intermittently on and off for another dozen years as a member of the board. And the first job that I really had with Bob was in developing this museum was to. We had to go through a feasibility study because the museum had never done anything like that. Then that involved surveys with the citizens of the community and citizens within the university community, etc. And then the long process began of hiring an architect. And the big deal, of course, is raising money. And so we had our first ever capital campaign. And that. I don't remember exactly when it started, but it was almost in relative terms. It was immediate. It concluded in 1996. But I ran that capital campaign with a woman named Juniper Manley, who was the first employee of the University of New Mexico foundation, which was the fundraising.

[11:14] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Arm to be serving Here at the Harwood.

[11:18] GUS FOSTER: She was serving at the Harwood as a development director.

[11:21] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Right.

[11:22] GUS FOSTER: So she was the paid professional, but.

[11:25] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: That was the first time someone was in that position.

[11:28] GUS FOSTER: And literally it was the first time she was anybody.

[11:31] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: The university received the Harwood from Mrs. Harwood in what year 38 or what year 35 was?

[11:41] GUS FOSTER: Well, that's when the university got it.

[11:43] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: But the university essentially then forgot that they owned it. I mean, essentially. Well, they did some things, but. But then eventually they just. It's so far away. Albuquerque. It's not nearby.

[11:54] GUS FOSTER: 138 miles away, so. And out of sight.

[11:58] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: It was just this sleepy little place up here. Yeah, it was a library. Yes. It had some art, but, you know, nothing went on. There weren't really. I mean, I think that there was a director of the library, but it really wasn't much. There wasn't much going on. It was really kept going by the generosity of volunteers, of people who were passionate about it. Mrs. Harwood had created it to. And she created it. She created the harwood foundation in 1923 when her husband had died in 22. They had moved here from France in 1917 or so and had this vision to build this thing. And he died in 22. It had to be both of their visions that they were going to create a library, a museum and an education center in this little village. They were. They had come to and they, you know, at that time, the Taos founders, these. This group of artists were here coming. I mean, it was a very primitive town. There wasn't probably running water. Nobody had electricity.

[13:07] GUS FOSTER: There was no electricity.

[13:09] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: It was, you know, they got electricity, they got the. Those things going. But it was a primitive little place. And so the artist would come in the summer because that was the period that you could live here. And the artists, when Mrs. Harwood had this idea of building this thing, of creating this thing out of her home, they were very keen for that because it was a place they could show and it created something here for them that was great. So I think the Harwood was built on generosity. The generosity of artists built the Harwood. And that is something you see all the way through. Every generation, every decade had its group of artists who carried the Harwood forward. And I see what Gus did as just an extension of that, like carrying this momentum forward. Because the university wasn't going to do it. It wasn't going to fulfill her vision because it was like send money up there. Why? But over the years, as they've seen it evolve, because it did take The Harwood raising its own funds and all that, they come up here, the new president will come up here and go, it's the jewel in our crown. And then you'll never see him again. But they appreciate how beautiful it is. But they've had very little to do with creating it.

[14:37] GUS FOSTER: Well, that was in the past.

[14:38] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Now they're, now they're engaged. Now we, well, kind of got their attention.

[14:45] GUS FOSTER: What's the phrase then? Carry a big stick and make a lot of noise?

[14:50] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Well, everything has evolved.

[14:52] GUS FOSTER: You get their attention after a while.

[14:54] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Everything has evolved. I mean the Harwood has evolved, the university has evolved. Taos is. Everything in all this time has evolved. And so, I mean the tca, the, all of the art museums and entities in Taos have evolved. We've seen it happening in the last 20 years. It's, it's just been phenomenal. What's happened.

[15:14] GUS FOSTER: I mean, you may not know, but there's town is still fewer than 6,000 people and there are five working museums here. That's, that's pretty amazing. You know, per capita that's almost, I'm certain, more than Washington.

[15:34] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: None of which have endowments. So they all require fundraising in order to get anywhere. And that was just impossible until more recent decades I'd say, to fundraise around here.

[15:45] GUS FOSTER: And that's, that's one of the things that I, one of my evolving roles has been from. I've been on the art committee for a long time. I was on the long range planning committee, strategic planning committees. But ultimately I wanted. I always had the 30,000 foot view of what does this place need to operate to function. It's still a regional museum because the focus of the collection is, is work by artists of Taos and the surrounding areas of northern New Mexico. But it's now a regional museum of national and international importance. That's changed because. And we have a solid exhibition program. We do six or seven exhibitions a year and they change every year. We bring in visitors from around the world and that's, you know, that's very satisfying and gratifying to me.

[16:49] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Well, that's the real evolution of the Harwood's which really happened, which would not have was. Well, you never know what would have happened if things hadn't happened the way they did. But without Bob coming and being there when this idea of divesting. Well, but then they found out in Mrs. Harwood's will that they were to keep this in perpetuity. They weren't allowed to get rid of the collection. So. But you know, the Documents. I mean even finding a document like her will, I mean who would even know where to look for it in the Harwood at that time?

[17:24] GUS FOSTER: So they were not stellar about record keeping.

[17:27] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: So they, so and Bob had this vision of creating a real museum. That was the way to save it. That was the way to be self sustaining. And so that required that the library move. What did that require to make it a museum?

[17:43] GUS FOSTER: Well, there were three really primarily there were three components. I've already mentioned the parking lot issue. And the second one was that the library was a. They were a tenant of the Harwood property. It belonged to the University of New Mexico. The town didn't have a library. And they were, they were there. They rented the whole place for I think about $300 a month, which is just astounding.

[18:16] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Essentially the whole ground floor, you know.

[18:19] GUS FOSTER: That was 7 or 8,000 square feet at the time. And.

[18:25] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: But it had also outgrown it. I mean if you look at the library here now, you see that they outgrew it.

[18:31] GUS FOSTER: Well, and, and again the original purpose was books and from Mrs. Harwood's collection and paintings from their collection. That was the genesis of the.

[18:45] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And Mabel Dodge, very supportive, was a.

[18:48] GUS FOSTER: Very early supporter and yeah and on and all the so called Taos founders gave work.

[18:57] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: But it was a fantastic library. I mean the collection of books that they had, original D.H. lawrence, they had incredible books. And it was a very sweet, very, very sweet, beautiful little library and a.

[19:10] GUS FOSTER: Wonderful reading room that was just art books and periodicals and so generations of kids. I can't tell you how many people I met from. Lived here in the old days that found us memories where kids were come over to the Harwood and sit in.

[19:29] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: The well and you would come to the library. You said you used to read in Imhoff Room. It was a real place in the community that didn't have.

[19:40] GUS FOSTER: I mean there was no library.

[19:42] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: No, there was no library.

[19:43] GUS FOSTER: So the library left and ultimately created this structure. And that happened more or less between 1990 and I'm not sure when I think this building opened in 92, but it was about that time. And the third element was there's a very well known painter in Taos named Agnes Martin. And she and Bob Ellis were very good friends. We did an exhibition of seven of her paintings.

[20:19] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And she was so known that she would do her paintings here, send them to New York and no one in Taos ever saw them. Right. They would just sell in New York and they were gone. But Bob said, Agnes, you know, how about instead of Just sending them to New York. We show them at the Harwood this time before they go. And so she liked Octagons. I think she did.

[20:43] GUS FOSTER: There were seven paintings. And so we took one of the ups. One of the two upstairs galleries and put, put blocks or walls in the corners. So we made an eight sided room. The, the eighth side was the doorway to get into this gallery.

[21:01] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: But he said she liked. That's why. I mean, yeah, it makes sense but because it wasn't because he could have.

[21:06] GUS FOSTER: Had these straight walls. This group of seven paintings.

[21:09] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Yeah.

[21:09] GUS FOSTER: And we had a show and he.

[21:12] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And he also said she, she loved a rocking chair. She just loved to sit in a rocking chair. And so he had brought a rocking chair up to the gallery so she could watch the. And she. Oh my gosh. She said they don't let me do this at the Modern. You know, she just loved it. And so she loved her show. I mean she had lived here for many years and this was her home. So on that basis we had the exhibition.

[21:43] GUS FOSTER: Then they went to her dealer in New York City. And then while they were gone, Bob and Agnes continued to have conversations and he talked her into giving that group of seven paintings to the museum for its permanent collection. And furthermore, I mean this is quite a good job of salesmanship on his part. He talked her into not only giving the paintings, but solicited her help in building. While we were involved in making a museum, one of the things we desperately needed was storage and we needed another and we needed more gallery space. So we created the Agnes Martin Gallery as a permanent installation. Now the. Those paintings came to the museum in a space and they are permanent. They don't travel anymore. It's now an icon, a world known icon. People come from all over to see it. And it's just as it was when she designed it, designed it with us and then she helped us. She was the best known anonymous donor in the city. And now. And that was. That wasn't. Her benefaction was anonymous during her lifetime. But it is now known that she was a supporter and a critical support for the.

[23:24] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Instrumental in that development of turning the museum into the Harwood into a museum. Because on the, on the, on that gift, with that gift, with that ability to. You could fundraise off that gift, you know, just. But you also lost people because a lot of people looked at those paintings and said what's that? You know, that's not cowboys, you know. So there was a migration of some of our Harwood supporters elsewhere because they just felt like, well, it's going like to child's play, you know, it's just not.

[24:05] GUS FOSTER: It's just modern art.

[24:06] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Yeah. It's not right. It's not what we do here. So. But the major effect was that it was really underpinned this whole campaign to build a real museum.

[24:19] GUS FOSTER: So that's what we did. And that took up the time between 1990 and that first expansion opened in 1996. So we had remodeled all the downstairs space that had previously been occupied by the library, added new gallery, a new staircase to the second floor, a freight elevator. There had been nothing prior to that. All the artwork and when, well, in the original days was stored in closets behind the stage upstairs. So now we created a storage under real storage with H vac humidity and air conditioning and all that, which is a standard museum practice. None of that's very glamorous, but it's very expensive to provide. There had been, you know, the lighting in the museum was then 60 some years old and one gallery had one system and another gallery had another system and you couldn't. None of the fixtures were interchangeable and there wasn't enough electrical wiring in the place to handle any of it. So all that was redone. The museum had no security system at all. Literally none. And so that was a component. The parking space or the parking problem was solved. And that was the first iteration of the Harvard as a real museum. And almost on the day that that opened, Bob and I were planning the next phase of expansion because in the. What we'd done in the first place, we. We needed the space upstairs so much that we took out the auditorium stage. And it was a wonderful old space, but we.

[26:27] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And it had a tradition of theater and concerts and all. I mean, that was a piece of the Harwood that, you know, wanted to be retained. But the. But that stage had to go.

[26:38] GUS FOSTER: So you opened the doors of brand new space in 1996 and already the two of us are, how do we keep going? And what's the next thing? So the next phase of the museum doesn't open until 2010. So there's 14 years. That's a daily conversation. We didn't need to do a strategic study of the feasibility study anymore because we knew that we had a much better working relationship with the University of New Mexico. We now had something to show for what we'd done. But we wanted to have a stage in the new auditorium again to bring back the public programming, the example of which last night was the StoryCorps. And you know, there's A resident chamber music group that performs. I think they're now in there. I'm not sure what year. It's more. They've been there 20, at least 25 years and maybe, maybe more. But they perform every season and they're in house. But we do jazz concerts and we do films. And once upon a time we brought the opera in from not the Met because that was at another place in town, but we brought in another opera series and their public lectures and community events going on all the time. But it took 14 years. Again, get the concept, get the money, get involved. Both Bob and me going to the university again and rounding around the donors. Agnes Martin was no longer living at that by the time that. By that time that edition came, so we didn't have that support. But I did a second capital campaign, not with Juniper had left. She was here for seven or eight years in that early time. And she's now come back. She's the director now. But there was another. The position of development director continued and there were several other people that were involved that we worked with and in the second capital campaign and hired an architect and did a whole thing. And then at this point in the story, Alexander becomes very involved with the institution because she was the executive director of the Mandelman Reebok Foundation. They were two painters that had come here in the 1940s and. And Bob was very friendly with Louis Reebok had died in the 70s, but Bob was also very good friends with Bea Mandelman.

[29:52] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Bea Mandelman was a modernist artist here and she had been very prolific in her life and lived right up the street, lived right up the street from the Harwood. And I was working for her. And she left her. She had an estate that she created a foundation. And Bob knew that that was happening, so he immediately turned towards the foundation with the idea of having a collection of Mandelman Ribak art.

[30:32] GUS FOSTER: Louis.

[30:33] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And so we funded. Eventually we funded the. The Mandelman Reback Gallery, which is the big new gallery in the Harwood, and the Bob Ellis since the price tag kept going up. So then we funded another gallery which we named the Bob Ellis Caroline Lee Gallery. And I was drawn in because I was part of the fundraising campaign as well.

[31:04] GUS FOSTER: And that culminated that second expansion, opened in 2010. And that was 11,000 square feet. So it was bigger than the initial museum by factor of almost 50%, including we'd already filled up the original storage space and we've now filled up the second space, which was three times the size of the first one, the museum now has something like 6,600 works. So from, you know, back when I started, it was about 2000 somewhere, 2200. So that took up, you know, again, it takes, it doesn't happen overnight. And the, and getting the permissions and getting the architect and the approval of the regents of the university and fundraising. And we really launched that campaign about it in 2004 and it took six years to get the approval and the permission slips and the support of the government and Everybody. But that second expansion opened in 2010 and just like Bob had retired by that time. There was Susan Longhenry who was one of the Long chain, good quality directors that the museum had her first day on the job was when we broke ground on that edition and, and it opened to the public in 2010. And just like the first time, I hired the architect privately to work on a conceptual drawing for the third expansion. So that was 13 years ago and we're just now beginning to realize we acquired another parking space across the street from the museum for the, you know, because a. The property became available. But we were planning and we knew we couldn't expand without more parking because that's tied into the state regulations and we've been cultivating donors. And just recently, in honor of the museum centennial, the new development director, a woman named Sonia Davis, and I chaired an endowment campaign. And our goal was to raise $6 million by the time of the centennial year. And we just, I think we've just gone. We're approaching 7 million that we have in hand. But that's for endowment. As soon as we get a new strategic plan, the work will begin in earnest to build a third and probably the final expansion. We have the property promised that we built on. We have the room for the parking space, but we have to go through again the ongoing negotiations with the university and soliciting the government for help. And, and that is really, I think one of the questions that was sent is what do we hope for in the future? And I would say that my biggest goal is to get this third thing off the ground. Now, I'm elderly. I'm not sure I'll be around for the come for the completion of the project, but I certainly want to get it launched. And I hope that the architect that we were talking to 13 years ago is still willing to work with us, but I think, I think we will and I'm not sure what else to. We had a few more questions, but I don't know if you.

[35:32] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Well, hopes for the future and you've Basically, you know, more gallery, more storage.

[35:40] GUS FOSTER: Another freight elevator.

[35:42] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Yes. There's. There's. There's all sorts of parts that would just make it really work that just.

[35:47] GUS FOSTER: Aren'T in place, work even better. And of course, the, the curious thing about this whole conversation and most of this, there's nothing, there's nothing private or hidden about this, but it's a part of the. It's the nuts and bolts of building a great facility. And it doesn't.

[36:14] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Well, I think about.

[36:15] GUS FOSTER: Seems to take forever.

[36:18] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Well, it's taken you 33 years so far. Right. But I love that theme of the Harwood and this community that it's, you know, that you can say that the Harwood is built on generosity, you know, and that the generosity of artists. Artists like. And one of the questions was favorite works in the Harwood. Like favorite paintings. And we realized, oh, we basically like the same ones. There's the Ken Price shrine, the death shrine, which is another. There's three of those in this country, in the world. In the world that he made. And the Harwood has one. The first one, and he was a resident of Taos and a good friend of. I worked for him and Gus was a very good friend of his, but an internationally acclaimed artist. So you have this other magnetic thing like the Agnes Martin, you have the Ken Price shrine. But some of the paintings, like Rebecca James comes right to the top of mind for both of us. But she was one of the ones. She lived here and she's always working at the Harwood. She was always giving, giving, giving. And that was true of all of them. The Victor Higgins painting that's not now, but is normally over the fireplace in the Brandenburg Gallery. He came one day and hung it on the wall of the library.

[37:47] GUS FOSTER: This is where it belongs.

[37:48] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: And that is one of the top paintings of its era in the United States. I mean, it is a phenomenal painting. And he just decided it had to hang there. And it's always hung there until recent times when the gallery is now different. And sometimes something else gets put there. But it has its place of honor there at the. And it's just an amazing painting. And all the paintings, you know, there's this rich history of involvement with artists and the artists stories are, you know, sort of held in those paintings.

[38:20] GUS FOSTER: But I can say that they're probably 95% of the museum's permanent collection has come by either gift or bequest. Traditionally there were very few purchase funds available.

[38:33] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: The Harvard didn't ever have money. Still doesn't have money to buy art.

[38:37] GUS FOSTER: But that was one of the things we solved with this endowment program. We raised more than a million dollars for, you know, you won't spend that money, but the. But the interest from it. So there's a. In the future, there will be a perpetual fund for the acquisition of works of art, for the exhibition of works of art, for education and for, I think also for general, you know, for salaries and staff.

[39:11] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Another piece that grew in the Harwood is Education center, which was funded by Stephanie Bennett Smith. And that was a whole component that was envisioned by Mrs. Harwood, but never really created until Stephanie Bennett Smith gave the funding to create that. And now that program and, you know, with COVID and different things and, you know, it seems like there's always been staff missing. You know, there's. But right now the Harvard has such a great staff and like, the Education Department, like, everything is fully staffed and really functional and inspiring. So that's the outlook we like.

[39:53] GUS FOSTER: Well, thank you, Alex, for.

[39:56] ALEXANDRA BENJAMIN: Thank you.