Her hour-and-a-half long interviews with artists, which are funded by the Mellon Foundation, are “open-form conversations.”

“We don’t know what the important questions are going to be in the future,” she explains. “I let them talk about what they thought was important.”

Her model for interviews was adopted by the International Committee of Museums.

“It is a first, and conservators are really excited about it,” she says.

Growing Pains

Although Harvard’s modern art collections total thousands of objects, very few are visible to the public at the Fogg due to space limitations.

“There isn’t enough gallery space, because modern art is often big!” Mancusi-Ungaro exclaims.

The Fogg’s modern collection is limited to a few rooms of the works owned by Harvard, whose permanent collection, according to Cooper, encompasses over 1,000 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts created since 1900—not even including the modern prints and drawings.

“Of those 1,000 there are about 200 objects of real importance that I, as a curator, would be happy to have displayed on the walls,” Cooper says.

Mancusi-Ungaro says she believes that public displays of modern art are critical to sociological examination of the modern era.

Recently, Harvard has been seeking to build a new art museum—designed by famed architect Renzo Piano and dedicated to modern work—but the plan has been way-laid by concerns of Riverside residents who live near the proposed site.

But Mancusi-Ungaro—who consulted on the museum’s design—says that such a museum would be a “wonderful and beautiful addition” for the community.

“It really must happen if we’re going to be serious about studying the culture of our time,” she says. “If the museum doesn’t happen, it’s going to be difficult to have this [collection] grow.”

She points to past exhibitions done by the University Art Museums—including a study of artist Piet Mondrian that brought in a large sampling of his work as part of an international exhibition.

“If we tried to do the same for an artist with bigger works, we couldn’t,” she complains.