Katie Pfohl

The first thing you notice about Katie Pfohl is her hair. It is a thick cascade of blonde curls and the feature that identified her to me from a block away as I walked up to Poor Boy Lloyd’s to meet her for lunch. Evidently, I’m not the only one to be struck to commenting about her impressive mane. An older woman taking orders at the counter—she’s been there forever, I should know her name—asked Katie when she walked up to the counter: “How long did it take you to grow your hair that long?”

The location for our lunchtime interview was a toss-up between Poor Boy Lloyd’s and Sammy’s, she told me. She likes Sammy’s for its boiled crawfish. (She’s heard, however, that it’s blasphemous to claim allegiance so overtly.) But Poor Boy Lloyd’s is one of her favorite spots in town and an interesting place, she thought, to talk travel and tourism, two of the big themes she is exploring these days at the LSU Museum of Art in her new position as curator, which she began in June.

Travel is a word that was uttered no less than thirty times in our interview: Katie is an inveterate explorer. She’s lived and traveled abroad in such exotic locales as Morocco and Syria, and her penchant for exploring hasn’t abated since moving to Louisiana.   

KP: Since I’ve been in Louisiana, there’s rarely been a weekend that my partner Neil and I have not gotten in the car to go somewhere. We’ve really been all over the place exploring small towns all over Louisiana, especially southern Louisiana. You know, I’m really working hard at the museum to develop new partnerships with different places, and there’s all of these incredible secret art collections all over the state that I think people don’t know about. But also just … there’s nothing we like better than to get in the car without any real destination in mind, going to some town, finding some diner to have lunch, and just exploring. 

Louisiana’s an amazing place for that because: A) It’s really hard to find a bad meal here and B) the people are so incredibly nice. There hasn’t been a time that there hasn’t been some great surprise—some unexpected restaurant or place or encounter with people or a festival that we randomly end up stopping at or a live alligator pit …

Katie had ordered an alligator poboy and fries. She confided that the Chimes has the best alligator poboy in town, but this one is good too. She’s also identified the best icebox pie (at Strawn’s Eat Shop in Shreveport) and a place that serves really “amazing, legitimate” tacos (Tacos N Sabor next to Hobby Lobby on Congress). This lady knows how to hunt down good food. 

KP: It’s funny, I have to say. I’ve mostly, in the past, lived in cities whose charms are sort of very on the surface. And there’s something I almost prefer about a place like Baton Rouge, where places are buried in strip [malls].

When she speaks, it is to effervesce—not in a high-pitched, school-girlish way, but in the highly intellectual conversational style that is honed in graduate school, hers being Harvard. Her enthusiasm was palpable when she described the silver tea set she wants to acquire for the museum’s collection. The tea set, which will be auctioned off by the Neal Auction Company between November 11 and 12, will be the first acquisition made by the museum in a long time (if she is successful). The set is also the first item she’s ever attempted to bid on at an auction, which doesn’t seem to faze her. 

KP: The LSU Museum of Art has arguably the best collection of Southern silver in public hands in the country. I mean, it’s really exemplary. And the one thing it’s missing is a kind of “crown jewel” of the collection. And there’s this amazing New Orleans silver tea set that’s up for auction. It’s done by one of the most important silversmiths in early Louisiana, which is great, but the other thing that’s amazing is that it has Chinese motifs on it. 

One of the things we are trying to do at the museum is to tell this much more global story about Louisiana art and culture, and art and culture of the South more generally. But a piece of that is acquiring objects that help contextualize and tell a new kind of story about the art of the South—for example, these kinds of silver works that show these influences of China and the Caribbean, works by African-American artists, works by female artists, [and] works that talk about the colonial history of Louisiana, which is incredibly storied and traverses all kinds of different roads that go to France and to Spain and to Britain and to the American West. I really, really want it.

The LSU MOA’s collection is actually a large part of what drew Katie to Baton Rouge. Composed of approximately 5,500 objects, it represents “one of the best university art collections in the South.” For the tenth anniversary in its home at the Shaw Center, the museum will be launching a reinstallation of the museum’s art collection in 2015. 

When Katie first arrived on the heels of completing her dissertation, she inherited the exhibitions and programming that had been set up by her predecessor, spending her first few months bringing them to successful fruition. Her curatorial philosophies made their way into those exhibitions, for instance in the placement of two nineteenth-century prints that she bought on eBay for the museum’s “Accalia and the Swamp Monster” exhibit and the display of the actual puppets that artist Kelli Scott Kelley made. These details were added to help flesh out what Katie considers an act of storytelling.

KP: People always ask me what a curator does. And I think part of the reason is that most people are pretty sure that what I mostly do is go to dinner parties! Up until twenty or thirty years ago, a curator was kind of someone who sat by themselves in a little room and collected and cared for objects of the past and acquired works and displayed them. I view being a curator as being a storyteller. The reason that I got interested in museum work and being a curator is because I’m fascinated by history and the stories that can be told by history.

What’s interesting about museums is the potential they have to flesh out a whole vision of that past. So when I’m putting together a show, I’m thinking about how can I incorporate not just a painting from the period that I’m examining but other kinds of things too, like newspapers, other kinds of objects from the culture—figuring out ways to tell a really robust story that recreates past lives for people.

So if you’re showing the work of a photographer, and you can show the actual camera they used and books from their library and other things like that, it really gives you a sense that great works of art are not just things that spring from nowhere and have no context, but they are things that are produced by people just like us who have this whole set of objects and relationships and histories that come together in these works of art. 

Katie told me that she doesn’t come from a family of museum-goers. While her family was creative and worldly, she didn’t grow up in the high art world that many of her Harvard classmates would have, a circumstance that left her feeling somewhat disadvantaged when she first embarked on her Ph.D. 

KP: I have to say it was very atypical for people in my Ph.D. program at Harvard to not come from this “New York City-my parent took me to museums for my entire life-I’m immersed in this high art culture” thing. So at first, I definitely had that experience myself where I was walking into my first class at my Ph.D. program at Harvard and thinking, God … I don’t know any of the things that I’m supposed to know. I don’t know anything that I’m supposed to know about art. How can I possibly say anything with merit? And then I just had to get over it. 

Now I feel I have both sides of it. I didn’t really come from that academic perspective; but now I have this Ph.D. from Harvard. So I do have all of those tools, and the great thing about having all those credentials and tools is that you don’t have to worry about it anymore. And so you can kind of be more experimental and loose.

There is a place in museums for theory; but in Katie’s estimation, her role at the LSU Museum of Art should also be to translate academic-speak into real-world relevance for the general public.

KP: Part of the reason I wanted to be a curator is that I feel like museums are a place where a lot of these inaccessible ways that people in universities and museums talk about art and history can come into the public and be part of a public dialogue. And that’s really what I want for our museum.