Art museum curator is a Victorian at heart
BY BOB SYLVA Sacramento Bee

Photo by Michael Allen Jones/ The Sacramento Bee Scott Shields, in his 1930s Cape Cod home, says he was a curator before he knew what the word meant. As a child, he enjoyed organizing his collection of Matchbox cars.

Scott Shields lives inconspicuously, if not elegantly, on a quiet, tree-lined street in Sacramento, Calif. Petals from an old camellia bush are splattered on his front steps. Outside his retreat, there are automobiles, leaf blowers, electric street lamps, cable-TV lines and friendly neighbors, their lives furnished by the clutter and discord of current events.

That's outside. A vague, faint neon hum.

Inside, it's another story. No, inside, it's another time, another world -- preserved in an amber glow.

Shields is chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum, which does not take its claim as the oldest museum in the West lightly. A private person on stage in a beloved public landmark, he is much more comfortable arranging Chinese snuffboxes than being on exhibit himself.

Shields lives in a two-story, three-bedroom house whose architectural style he identifies generally as being Cape Cod, circa 1930. In his dreams, he would be living in a mansion designed by Greene and Greene, Bernard Maybeck or Julia Morgan, a shingled treasure from the Arts and Crafts movement, where the handiwork is inspired, the fluid forms art nouveau.

Photo by Michael Allen Jones/The Sacramento Bee Although Scott Shields loves the art of the period 1890-1910, many details in his 1930s Cape Cod-style house reveal more modern origins.

"Turn of the century -- everything!" he says of his absolute passion for an ethos, an era, 1890-1910, which he labels "the last gasp of Victorianism."

He has done an admirable job in approximating that period here: carpets, linens, tulip lamps, oak furniture, glassware, ceramics, walls heavy with somber, nearly impenetrable landscapes in gilded frames. Shields looks around and sheepishly laughs, "I'm sort of living in a museum."

Implicit in the decor is the unspoken edict -- don't touch, don't get too comfortable, please dust.

Throughout the house, a precaution, an insulation, the shades are kept closed. The light, suitable for a migraine, is even, subdued, archival. The world outside rarely intrudes; time itself is pleasantly paused.

Shields walks into the dining room. The table is a Duncan Phyfe facsimile. The table, like much of the art and antiques, he bought while in graduate school. He removes a huge vase of hydrangeas. Last summer, they must have been spectacular. Now the array of blooms is withered, brittle, lushly morbid.

Sylvia, a luxurious Siamese- Manx, curls in the kitchen and emits a muted yowl. She is 18 years old.

"She can't jump on things anymore," he says. "One day, while walking across the kitchen, she just fell over. She looked up at me as if to say, 'Why did you knock me down?'"

He regards her with fondness and pity.

"Now she's an antique, too," he says.

Shields cannot stand bright colors. Or effulgent scenery. He is tall, slim, pale, faultlessly polite, with blue eyes, sandy features and a soft, gentle voice that seems fingered in white cotton curatorial gloves.

Of his splendid collection, his obsession for an era, he admits, "I'm living in the wrong time."

It is both a lament and a profession of faith.

Shields, 40, grew up in central Nebraska, in a small town called Doniphan with 180-plus population. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father raised corn and cattle. Though born on a farm, he was not, in any conventional sense of the term, a farm boy.

"When I was 7 years old," he says, "I had this revelation. I told my parents that I wouldn't do (farm) chores anymore. But that I would do small jobs."

The miracle is how he cultivated a love of art. He had no gift of drawing. There were no paintings in the parlor. There were no galleries in the town. He was scared to take a class in art in high school, worried that something so subjective might imperil his sterling GPA and his goal of being named class valedictorian (which, out of a class of 27, he accomplished). In fact, it wasn't until Shields went away to college that he visited a real museum for the first time. But, boy, did he collect things -- rocks, stamps, coins. Even Matchbox cars. Here his true, acquisitive nature revealed itself. "I always wanted to keep things clean and pristine," he says of his bedroom displays. "So, I think I was made to be a curator. Though at the time, I did not know what a curator was."

At the University of Nebraska, he majored in art. Then graduate school at the University of Kansas. In 1995, he did an internship at the M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, and his life and vision changed forever.

He saw a show called "Facing Eden: 100 Years of Bay Area Landscape" and was spellbound. For the next seven years, for his doctoral thesis, he researched California coastal art painted between 1875 and 1910.

In 2000, after a stint at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, Shields was hired as a curator at the Crocker Art Museum. Four years later, he was named chief curator.

"I put exhibitions together," he says. "I help decide what shows we select from outside. And I spend a lot of time with donors, in adding works to the collection."

In eight years, Shields has curated dozens of popular shows. Perhaps none was as calmly spectacular or as personally meaningful as 2006's "Artists at Continent's End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907," which gathered 75 works by 30 artists. The exhibit, and its catalog written by Shields, represents a benchmark in a still-young curatorial career.

Shields has come to love the Crocker -- the shows, the collection, the atmosphere, the creaky Victorian mansion.

"I love walking through the galleries after dark during the wintertime," he says of an experience that sounds slightly spooky. "You feel like what it must have been like to live there."

Shields bought his Cape Cod two years ago. And has been slaving on it virtually nonstop, trying to restore and scrape away the ample sins of modernity.

The hardwood floors have been refinished. He put in a period bathroom downstairs. All the walls have been painted an exacting shade of sea foam (you can almost catch a scent of brine). And since the chicken-wire tile he bought from Home Depot wasn't exactly to his pattern specifications, Shields, one by one, inserted literally hundreds of triangular maroon accents.

Shields is something of a fussbudget.

The home is really a backdrop for his expertly curated collection of art, which includes ceramics, antiques and paintings. The paintings are mostly pastoral landscapes from the turn of the 20th century. Shields likes works that are dark, brooding, moody, somber.

"Quiet, meditative, semimysterious," he continues, reciting his litany of endearing qualities. "I think these paintings reveal themselves more slowly. You never quite get to the bottom of them. They are more difficult works. When things are revealed too quickly, I think they get older faster."

One prized painting is an unnamed landscape by a somewhat obscure Monterey painter, Charles Dickman (1863-1943). Shields turns on an amber desk lamp to provide the canvas a flicker of light. The painting, which depicts a cypress against a dying sunset, is popularly titled "Witch Tree Cypress" because it resembles a witch shaking a broomstick.

"What I like about it," says Shields, "is that the tree doesn't have long to live. There's just this clump of foliage left. Clinging to its granite perch, it has been beaten and shaped by the winds and ocean for the past 150 years. It represents the eternal struggle against the elements."

Walking through Shields' private space, the rooms hushed, the daylight a whisper, viewing his tasteful collection of art and furniture, one is struck by the fact that there is very little separation or respite from his public life at the Crocker. He seems to be a happy inmate in a never-ending 19th century.

"That's OK," he smiles. "I really don't want any relief. I like it there (the Crocker). It is an island I am happy to be on." At an exultant loss, he laughs, "I really don't know where my job ends and my life begins. Even on vacations, I go to museums."

Thinking more of his life, his personal and professional pursuit of scholarship and beauty, he declares, in a peeved tone rare for him, "What I don't understand are people who don't have art in their lives. Art for me is nourishment for the soul.

"I think people are intimidated by art. They are more confident in spending $1,000 on a garage-door opener. People need to trust their instincts. And it (art) isn't all about spending money. I'm living proof of that."

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.