 |
 |
| |
Bobbi and Tim Hamill at the Hamill Gallery of African Art. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
| |
|
Boston artist and art dealer Tim Hamill (CFA’65, ’68) received a distinctive wedding gift last year. His new father-in-law, Harvey Picker, endowed the Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Lectureship at the College of Fine Arts. At press time, the first lecture was scheduled for October 14 at Boston University, with former poet laureate of the United States and arts writer Mark Strand as speaker.
Dean emeritus of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, Picker is a former business executive and government advisor who heads the Branta Foundation. Philanthropy is a strong Picker family tradition, says his daughter and Hamill’s wife Bobbi, who herself runs a foundation. With a catholic range of interests, including the arts, Picker wants his $100,000 gift to support the Hamills’ vision for the lectureship: to broaden CFA’s Visual Arts students’ views through exposure to serious artists and art professionals with cross-disciplinary interests. In Picker’s words, “The most interesting, fertile, and useful developments in almost any area, be it physical sciences, social sciences, or the humanities, are those that have evolved from a cross-disciplinary approach.” Hamill says lecturers might include “museum people, writers, artists, and historians, who will explore all the different parts of the visual arts world. One purpose of the lectureship is to engage students in the question, ‘What does it mean to say that you are an artist in the twenty-first century?’”
Hamill’s career bespeaks his own openness to new influences. Earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in visual arts at CFA, he was chosen Senior Painter of the Year in 1965 and Graduate Painter of the Year in 1967. He also studied in Paris and Munich in the sixties, soaking up art in European museums. He taught at BU and elsewhere, and ran galleries. Framing his own paintings, which are “super realistic—flowers and objects painted realistically on a very large scale,” led to opening his own framing business. His early years as an artist included many one-man and group exhibits in Boston’s major galleries and beyond. His paintings and silk screens hang in museums throughout the northeast, from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Along the way, he became an admirer of African tribal art, picking up occasional pieces—masks, figures, textiles, jewelry, tools, weapons, currency, and other artifacts from major tribes of western and central Africa. “African art was more unlike my work than anything else,” says Hamill. “I responded to it visually and viscerally. I like to this day that there are mysteries about it that I don’t understand.” As he acquired more, “The collection quickly got out of hand.” So he began selling, and in 1990 opened the Hamill Gallery of African Art near Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.
Today the three-floor gallery houses and displays what is arguably the largest private collection of African art in the country, with 31,000 art objects, many made for function rather than as art. Hamill has chosen and studied them all. The Hamills run the gallery full-time, changing exhibits quarterly and conducting much of their business on the Internet. The gallery also offers an education program for elementary and high school students.
Hamill finds collecting and showing African art deeply fulfilling and fun but so all-consuming that he hasn’t painted in years. He thinks about creating his own art all the time and says his next artistic endeavor would likely be making sculpture with “some magic, simplicity, and a hint of meaning”—some of the characteristics he admires in African tribal art.
—Jean Hennelly Keith |
