Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture names Rachel C. Allen arts curator, a role that hasn’t been filled there for 13 years

You wouldn’t know it while taking in the exhibits at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, but something has been missing from the museum since 2011.

For the last 13 years, the MAC has been without an art curator on staff. The position was originally part of the museum’s team but was eliminated due to budget cuts. The position stayed vacant during the pandemic.

But thanks to a grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a nonprofit based in Vancouver, Washington, that curator-shaped hole in the museum has recently been filled.

Rachel C. Allen (Nimiipuu/Nez Perce) started as the MAC’s curator of modern and contemporary art on Nov. 1. Though new to the role, Allen is not new to the MAC, having co-curated the museum’s exhibition “Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky,” which closes Jan. 5, with heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation), the director of curatorial affairs at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City.

MAC Executive Director Wes Jessup has wanted to bring the curator role back to the MAC since he started at the museum in 2017. He was working on filling the position when COVID struck.

“I did not feel comfortable bringing that position back without a real stable funding source,” he said. “I didn’t want another recession to come and knock that position out.”

Jessup and the board of directors, considering the long-term sustainability of the MAC, applied for and received a grant from the Murdock Trust, which provides three years of salary for the curator position. Over those three years, Jessup said the museum will work on raising an endowment that would permanently support the curator position.

After seeing her work on “Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky” and considering her professional experience, Jessup knew Allen was the right person for the job.

“She’s at a really great point in her career where she has wonderful accomplishments but she also has a long future ahead of her,” Jessup said. “She brings the right level of youthful innovation and creativity that’s balanced with experience that is diverse and critical.”

A creator since childhood, Allen didn’t initially see herself becoming a curator. She was focused more on art, even attending the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan her senior year of high school.

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in printmaking from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2010, after the recession, times were tough for the art community. Allen worked in the service industry and in theater but still managed to carve out Friday mornings to volunteer at a local museum.

Allen then decided to earn her master’s in studio art from Michigan State University. Finding few teaching positions, but having also earned a certificate in collections care from the since-closed International Preservation Studies Center, Allen decided to go all in on museums and stayed at Michigan State to pursue a master’s in arts and cultural management and museum studies.

While in the program, Allen took a class from Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe), assistant professor of media and information, writing, rhetoric and American cultures. One day, LaPensée told Allen “Rachel, I found this opportunity and you have to apply because I’m sending in your recommendation.”

That opportunity ended up being a curatorial fellowship in the Native American Fellowship Program at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. That was the first step of many on Allen’s curatorial track.

“I didn’t think I was smart enough to do art history,” she said. “I didn’t think I could be a curator. I didn’t think that was something I could do but she saw it and my mentor, who’s still my mentor, Karen Kramer at the museum in Salem, Massachusetts, saw it and really nurtured and helped me and taught me.”

Allen did another fellowship before being hired as an assistant curator at the Peabody Essex, where she would spend a little more than three years. Before long, Allen started thinking about returning to school for her doctorate so she would have no curatorial limitations moving forward. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware.

She has also worked in various roles at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and the Missoula Art Museum.

Now settled in Spokane, Allen is excited to get to work at the MAC. The role of a curator, she said, ranges depending on the institution, but at the MAC, she will be in charge of the conceptual care of the art collection.

Allen will do a lot of research in the collection to see what items might work well for exhibitions and what art objects the museum might be interested in adding to the collection.

“Really looking at who we are as an institution, who we are in our region and what the collection already has,” she said. “That’s one of my big projects coming up this year is really diving into the collection. I’m so excited for it, to go and look at everything, see what information’s already there, do some more research, talk to artists, go visit studios, see what’s going on and then see ‘OK, this is what we have, how do we want to build on this collection going forward? What’s important to us?’ ”

The other part of Allen’s job is programming, looking at how the MAC can add to conversations happening in the art world and make innovative exhibitions that are of interest to those in the Inland Northwest but are also relevant on a national stage.

The art curator role comes with big shoes to fill, but Allen is ready to lace them up and get to work, looking forward to building relationships with members of the community and weaving the work she does at the MAC into the social and cultural lives of the people in the Inland Northwest.

“It’s a really exciting time to be at the MAC and what really interesting things we can do because of who we are,” she said. “That’s really special. The relationships we’ve been building and rebuilding over time and being in Spokane, being the largest city on the plateau, being the largest museum in the region, that’s a lot of responsibility but also a lot of opportunity.”