Monet, Picasso and Georgia O’Keefe draw visitors to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H.
So do two houses, owned by the museum that Frank Lloyd Wright, the pre-eminent 20th-century American architect, designed.
And the Mississippi Museum of Art hopes to join the small number of art museums across the country such as the Currier Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. that own buildings designed by Wright.
That will be possible provided the museum is successful in its negotiation to purchase Fountainhead, a residence in Woodland Hills that Wright designed.
Jordana Pomeroy, Ph.D., director and chief executive officer of the Currier Museum, applauds the efforts of the Mississippi Museum of Art.
“It’s ambitious,” she said. “It says a lot about the museum…These are not easy undertakings. You have one facility to manage and now you’re taking on a satellite facility.
“It’s neat that the Jackson community says, ‘We care and want to pursue this.”’
During a career that spanned seven decades, Wright designed 1,114 buildings and 532 of them were built, including the well known Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City and Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Estimates are than 400 homes are still standing, some of which are preserved by site-specific preservation organizations.
The Currier Museum owns two houses about a block apart that Wright designed for two local doctors in Manchester. The Zimmerman House was bequeathed to the museum in 1988, while the Kalil House was purchased by the museum in 2019. Both houses represent “a new progressive way of living,” Pomeroy said.
Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, founded by Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, moved the Bachman-Wilson House that Wright designed to the museum grounds in 2015.
Earlier this year, Sotheby’s International Real Estate listed Fountainhead, the residence at 306 Glenway Drive for $2.5 million. Robert Parker Adams, a Jackson architect known for assisting in the preservation of some of the state’s most historic buildings, had owned the home since 1979. He died in July.
Betsy Bradley, the Laurie Hearin McRee Director of the Mississippi Museum of Art, confirmed the museum is interested in buying the residence, which is the only structure in the state Wright designed, and opening it for tours.
The Jackson Planning and Zoning Board voted in October to recommend the Jackson City Council approve a zoning variance for the home, a step required for the museum to make the purchase, she said.
“There are a few more hoops to jump through before we will be able to buy it, however,” Bradley wrote in an email, “and I don’t want to get ahead of the process and make any presumptions until those steps have occurred.”
Preserving and protecting the residence and furnishings designed by Wright and opening it for visitors should elevate the national prestige of the Mississippi Museum of Art, said Alex Nyerges, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art from 1985 until 1992.
“It’s a brilliant move on Betsy’s part and the museum,” said Nyerges, currently the director and chief executive officer at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The purchase of the house would expand the museum’s collection, preserve a significant piece of history and provide a unique space where visitors could learn more about Wright, architecture and the owners.
“It gives the museum another tool to attract visitors,” he said. “There’s a huge following for Frank Lloyd Wright. If you asked someone to name an American architect, he would be the one most likely named.”
Nyerges said when he learned of the plans, he “immediately sent an email to Betsy and congratulated her on what is a fabulous move and told her, ‘Anything you need we’re here to help.’”
The permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts includes a desk, a dining table and several chairs and stained-glass windows that Wright designed for specific installations.
Nyerges recalled how Adams, whom friends called “Bob,” restored the home with an eye for detail.
“Bob was a museum board member and one of my favorite people,” he said. “He was a great ally of the museum.”
Fountainhead was more than 30 years old when Bob and Mary Adams purchased the former J. Willis Hughes residence. The house is made of concrete, copper and red cypress and nestles in a glen. Its long copper roofline, slab chimneys and harmony with the natural landscape are Wright trademarks, as is the stream that cascades from a fountain into the swimming pool.
A member of the Millsaps College Class of 1959 who earned his degree in architecture from Auburn University, Adams provided information about Fountainhead in an article in the Fall-Winter 2010 issue of the Millsaps College Magazine. He described the five-year restoration as “long and expensive.”
The house had not been maintained for years, and Adams related in the article that his first thought after his first look at the interior was that Fountainhead was like Elizabeth Taylor. “It had been through a lot, but there were good bones under there,” he stated.
Wright designed Fountainhead in 1948, and the house took more than five years to finish, interrupted at least once by Hughes’ fluctuating success as an oil wildcatter.
The house is built in Wright’s Usonian style, a cost-conscious one-story construction method characterized by a carport instead of a garage, no basement or attic and sparse ornamentation. The house has radiant heating in the floor, and its interior rooms take the form of parallelograms.
“It’s subliminal,” Adams said in the magazine article, “but there are no 90-degree angles.
Nyerges expects Fountainhead to become “a magnet” for visitors.
The Currier Museum of Art has more than 40,000 museum visitors per year and more than 5,000 Frank Lloyd Wright house visitors per year, Pomeroy said. The Kalil House and Zimmerman House are open for tours from April through December and closed during the winter months.
Visitors must take a van from the Currier Museum to the two homes, which are marked by discreet signs that note the museum’s ownership.
“No tour buses,” said Pomeroy, who has spoken with Bradley. “We’re respectful of the neighbors and their privacy.”
The tours, led by well-trained guides, sell out during the season, she said.
“The houses attract people who just want to know more about Frank Lloyd Wright and experts,” she said.
The Currier Museum has an exhibit that tells the story of the families who owned the houses and that drives visitors there who otherwise just visit the two houses, Pomeroy said.
Both houses have their own endowments for maintenance and upkeep, she said, admitting “they’re like money pits,” due to due to flat roofs that leak and other factors.
The Currier Museum derives some revenue from events at the houses, she said, which are limited in size and allow food and beverage only in outdoor areas.
It’s a point of pride for the museum that it owns the two houses, one that appears in its marketing, she said. It’s also a point of pride for residents who live on the same street as the houses, she said.
Jassen Callendar, the F.L. Crane Professor and interim director of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University, met Adams when he gave MSU architecture students a tour of the Old Capitol, which was being renovated after it was damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
“It is fitting that he should own the most important house in Jackson,” he said. “He was a great preservation architect who also restored the old Greyhound bus station in downtown Jackson where he had his office. He was interested in history and the unique pieces of architecture that define Mississippi culture.”
Art and architecture go together, and that’s a good reason for an art museum to own a Wright-designed home, Callendar said.
“I think Wright would have said that art and architecture are one in the same,” he said. “For him architecture is the art that we live in. I think he would have been happy to consider his houses as works of art.”
Living in a house like Fountainhead would be like living in a museum, Callender said, but the house merits more.
“The house deserves to be treated like a museum piece,” he said.
