Robin Held is on a mission to invigorate the Frye Art Museum

Since Robin Held took over as curator at the Frye Art Museum in October, she has been revved up to put the "stodgy old Frye" on a fast track to the 21st century.

When she's talking about her new job — as she did with me last week — Held gets going faster and faster, her ideas bubbling out one on top of another. One thing that was certain by the end of our conversation: Anybody who ventures into the Frye later this year is going to encounter big changes.

Held says it all hinges on a new mission statement that broadens the museum's approach to showing representational art — a stipulation of Charles and Emma Frye's bequest that has long shaped an image of the museum as fusty and out-of-sync. The reworked statement says the Frye will engage audiences, challenge perceptions, and encourage dialogue about representational art "in all its complexities, past and present."

"What I love about that ... is it opens it up so we can talk about representational art in its vagaries," Held says. "It gives us a way to broaden the way representation has been shown at the Frye and treat it as a question not an answer."

Held formerly worked as a curator at the Henry Art Gallery and is a former director of the Center on Contemporary Art, both geared to the kind of experimental new art that has been considered verboten at the Frye since it first opened in 1952. Now Held sees herself in a unique position to shake things up. "I want to put the Frye at the center of a discourse on representational art, rather than the sidelines. It's such a good time to do that." The time is right, Held says, because as a contemporary-art curator she is seeing more artists attracted to representational subject matter — but using it in startling new ways. "Starting in April," she says, "we're doing a series of exhibitions on the subject of the 'R' word."

And what, exactly, will that mean?

Curator profile

"There'll be an entirely different installation of the permanent collection, regular rotations, and better integration between the temporary installations and the collection," said Held. "I want to deepen appreciation of the collection, rather than having it ghettoized in the center. If it's not invigorated and used well it starts to look like some stuff left by dead people."

Beginning in June, as one of the upcoming changes, Held will initiate a three-part show involving a major rotation of the collection in conjunction with traveling exhibitions. The whole series will be called "Spectatorship and Desire."

Held says the first installation — called "Lust" — will look at the beginnings of the Charles and Emma Frye collection and explore the question, "What is it that prompts avid spectators of art to take the leap to becoming passionate collectors?" Part 2, "Loss," will turn our thoughts to old favorites in the collection, including such popular pictures as Alexander Koester's "Ducks." Held has an unexpected plan for the pictures.

"I'm going to pluck them out," she said. "And I want people to miss them." Museum visitors will see the blank spots in the galleries and be invited to write their recollections of those special paintings. Two traveling exhibits about loss will round out Part 2: "Forgetmenots," an installation of symbolically-charged Victorian objects, and the photography survey "Candida Hoffer: Architecture of Absence." Then, the final installment of the show will bring back the Frye favorites and center on the public's written response to them in an installation called, appropriately, "Love."

Other upcoming exhibitions include "The RetroFuturistick Universe of NSK," showing the work of the art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovene Art) based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The group, in existence since 1984, challenges notions about art and power and has been championed by Seattle artist Charlie Krafft and promoter Larry Reid. That show opens in April. In August, look for "William Cumming: The Image of Consequence," guest curated by Matthew Kangas.

That's just a taste of what Held has on the schedule, but it is sure to get people talking — especially Frye regulars, and there are lots of them.

Held describes herself as "an infrequent visitor" to the Frye before she started working there. She's hoping that people like herself, who weren't turned on by the Frye's programming as it was, will start flocking in. And it's a safe bet that old timers will let her know how they feel about all the changes.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com