Boston MFA to Open a Photo Gallery Named After Herb Ritts

Almost exactly 10 years ago, a landmark exhibition of photographs by Herb Ritts closed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The show, called “Work,” featured 182 pieces by Ritts and was the first exhibition by a single photographer in the museum’s history. The show opened in 1996, and by the time it ended a quarter of a million people had come to see it. It elevated the reputation of Ritts even as it dramatically popularized the image of the MFA.

Now, a little more than four years after Ritts’s death, the MFA is teaming up with him again. We have heard that the museum  will be creating its first dedicated photographic gallery, and that it will be called the Herb Ritts Gallery. The space is scheduled to open sometime in 2010.

In addition, the Herb Ritts Foundation will giving 250 Ritts prints to the MFA’s permanent collection, making the museum the world’s larger holder of Ritt’s work.

Looking back from the perspective of 2007, it’s hard to imagine the kind of impact the Ritt’s show had in the mid-1990s. “At that time, Herb was basically considered just a young commercial shooter by the art world,” says Mark McKenna, a longtime assistant of Ritts who now works for the foundation created after the photographer’s death from AIDS in 2002. (Go here to see how controversial the show was.)

Hanging celebrity photography in a museum like the MFA, an emblem of high culture in Boston, caused quite a stir. “A lot of people at the museum were against the show,” recalls McKenna. Malcolm Rogers, who became the museum’s director in 1994, made the decision to do the Ritts show.  “In the end,” says McKenna, “the numbers spoke for themselves. To this day, the show is still one of the top ten exhibitions at the MFA in terms of attendance.”

These days, Rogers is credited with rejuvenating the MFA. (Though critics still worry that his flirtation with popular culture has harmed the museum’s reputation. See the Boston Globe’s take on his tenure here.) What the MFA started with Ritts in 1997, mixing the ambitions of art and commerce, has by 2007 become the state of the art.
--David Schonauer