Six exceptional AGO volunteers were recognized this spring for their service. This week we learn a bit more about Rheba Adolph, Prints & Drawings (15 year award).
What is your background? How did you get started at the AGO?
When I retired in 2000, my days were taken with volunteer endeavors having no focus on art: a mediator between victims and their offenders, HIV and bereavement organizations, and puppeteering. My retired social work colleague, a P&D volunteer, invited me to attend a Friday morning P&D talk. I was smitten with the Centre’s joyful atmosphere, the staff and volunteers’ dedication to exploring artists and their works, and the camaraderie between everyone involved with the Study Centre. In 2001 I asked to be a volunteer and was given an interview to determine if I would be appropriate.
How has your experience been as a volunteer at the AGO?
Other than being an art museum goer in museums around the world, I had no formal art education. My profession required analytical, not artistic sensibilities, but I survived an interview of tough grilling and so began my first year as a P&D volunteer. This was a year of listening to presentations on artists, discovering the Centre’s collection of many artists with varied works on paper, and reading the many materials on the shelves in the P&D Study Centre’s library.
At the end of my first year, I had a perfect insight: ‘Perfect knowledge of artists and their works is not possible.’ My presentations to Friday morning audiences could explore instead 1) the range of strategies artists use to transfer their vision to paper, 2) some techniques of overcoming obstacles in the transfer of the artist’s vision to paper, and 3) the artists’ choices of medium (e.g.,lithograph, camera, chalk, water colors, etc). Especially, the aim of my presentations would be to inspire in audience members the same delight in the art works as my own.
What is your favourite work in the gallery? What has been your favourite moment at the gallery?
In one of my exploratory adventures in the P&D vault, I opened the Solander storage case wherein rests Paul Gauguin’s works on paper. I didn’t know what I would find. Leaping out of the box came Tahitian Girl in Pink Pareu, a gouache and watercolour transfer on laid paper, the 1999 gift of Vincent Tovell in memory of his parents Harold and Ruth Tovell.
I was breathless. She was thrilling — seemingly un-moored to the paper, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, floating on the page, defying the law of gravity, a singular star in an infinite universe. For me, she is the P&D Study Centre’s treasure and a favorite work of art in the AGO collection. She tells me how artists discover wondrous possibilities of the human imagination and she urges me join in the discovery.
Congratulations Rheba! We’re inspired to join your journey of discovery!
