BY KAREN BOSSICK

The Sun Valley Museum has long hosted exhibition tours and lectures pertaining to the art on its walls.

But on Tuesday SVMoA will offer a new series that takes art lovers outside the walls of The Museum in Ketchum and into the galleries of art museums around the country.

SVMoA Curator Courtney Gilbert will host a livestream conversation with Stephanie D’Alessandro on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Man Ray: When Objects Dream” at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 13.

It is the first program in a new series called MUSEUM PASSPORT.

“This series will give a behind-the-scene look at exhibitions before those who live here get a chance to see them in person or maybe not have a chance to see them in person,” said Gilbert. “I saw this Man Ray exhibition in October, and it’s fantastic—a super interesting thoughtful look at an artist who’s pretty well known.”

Gilbert will speak with D’Alessandro, the Leonard A. Lauder curator of Modern Art at Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Zoom. D’Alessandro will discuss Man Ray’s participation in Dada and Surrealism, his experimental approach to photography and film and his collaborations with other artists, including photographer Lee Miller.

Art lovers can watch the presentation at The Museum in Ketchum on a drop-down screen in the exhibition space.

Man Ray was born in the United States but spent quite a bit of his career in Paris. He is best known for his work with photograms to produce surrealist images he called rayographs.

“He was placing everyday objects like cheese graters, keys, toys and cotton stuffing onto photosensitive paper and exposing it to light without using a camera,” said Gilbert. “He was questioning: What is art? How do you make art that draws on the world around you while  asking people to see things in new ways? Like many surrealists, he was seeking his own visual medium and landed almost accidentally on these rayographs.”

Art lovers can watch the free presentation at The Museum in Ketchum on a drop-down screen in the exhibition space by reserving a seat at https://ci.ovationtix.com/159/performance/11740476?performanceId=11740476. Or they can watch it on Zoom at home by going to https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xsfeWPaHSQObA2T49Cak7w#/registration

The next MUSEUM PASSPORT talks will include a look at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of modernist Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck, who got very little recognition in her own time. The exhibition is called “Seeing Silence,” examines her highly simplified, spare style that she developed while working in isolation.” The exhibition, which features 60 works, is the first exhibition to showcase her work in a major U.S. museum.

That will be followed by a look behind the scenes at a major new show about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo opening at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Future presentations might be in person featuring local art historians such as Elaine French who is an expert on early Italian Renaissance art and 19th and 20th century American Art and art historians in the region. Others might be virtual or hybrid, like Tuesday’s.

“We recently did a survey with all of our former adult class takers, Museum members and the general public about studio classes and what people are looking for. More than half who took the survey said they wanted more art history lectures,” said Gilbert. “We used to do those pretty regularly but moved away as we focused on our role as a contemporary art museum.”

It was Jennifer Wells Green, The Museum’s executive director, who came up with the idea of staging monthly art history lectures on exhibitions happening at museums in cities that people might be visiting. It plays write into the hands of Wells and Gilbert, who have an extensive network of colleagues they can take advantage of.

“My father is a retired professor and he tells me that people always want to learn, not just when they’re getting a Master’s or doctorate degree,” said Ava Scanlan, marketing director for The Museum. “And we’re a place for people to learn.”