Dereck Stafford Mangus, a beloved Baltimore-based artist, author, and cultural employee, handed away on Sunday, July 7 on the age of 46. His loss of life was confirmed by his brother-in-law Peter Melish.
I met Dereck Mangus near a decade in the past on the Baltimore Museum of Artwork (BMA), the place he labored as a museum guard and the place I attended numerous press occasions as an arts journalist. I knew that he was a printed artwork critic and, at any time when doable, we might focus on the present exhibition and commerce museum gossip. It was solely inside the previous yr that we started working collectively recurrently as editor and author, when he pitched BmoreArt a story about an experimental efficiency he attended that was so confounding and odd, it saved him up all evening, writing. After that, his story pitches got here in quick and livid, and our workforce of editors did its greatest to maintain up with him.
Mangus was a real polymath, a person with seemingly boundless curiosity and the flexibility to synthesize prodigious analysis into myriad types. As a visible artist, he delighted in exploring city buildings, utilizing digicam and collage methods to higher comprehend historical past, human conduct, and the constructed surroundings.
Mangus labored as a museum guard in addition to a prolific, award-winning author. He leaves behind an unlimited assortment of essays and opinions at Hyperallergic, Artblog, the Maryland Institute Faculty of Artwork’s (MICA) Full Bleed, BmoreArt, and Frieze, the place he was the 2018 winner of the Frieze Author’s Prize. In all of his pursuits, Mangus was capable of mix his lived expertise and consummate analysis into compelling narratives. Whether or not he was writing about up to date artwork or the development of unionization efforts, curiosity and moral conviction shaped the middle of his thesis.
He was born in 1978 in Hudson, Massachusetts, a small, working-class city positioned between Boston and Worcester. He cited his older sister, Jenni, because the central affect in his growth as an artist, opening his thoughts to music, politics, and the bigger world. After his first yr at MICA in 1996, he left school and joined his sister on a piece visa in the UK, touring and dealing in a resort within the Scottish Highlands. Mangus returned to Boston in 1998 and spent the following decade attending nice artwork courses on the College of Massachusetts (UMass) and dealing as a guard, together with on the Harvard Artwork Museums and Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. He earned a level in Studio Artwork and Environmental Research at UMass in 2005 and an MLA in Visible Arts from Harvard College in 2013.
Mangus then moved to Baltimore to broaden his writing and analysis skills, incomes an MA in Essential Research at MICA in 2016 with a thesis titled Overview: On Aerial Pictures, the Readymade, and Trendy Warfare. In a 2022 interview with Suzy Kopf for BmoreArt, Mangus defined that he thought-about himself “an artist before everything. I’ll all the time make artwork. Why not attempt to improve my analysis and writing abilities?”
In Baltimore, Mangus discovered work on the BMA as a museum officer in 2016 after which, concurrently as a conservation technician in 2020. “I by no means wished to be a guard essentially, by no means thoughts do it for the final 20 years,” he informed Kopf. “But it surely has helped my artwork and has knowledgeable me as an artist to see how a museum works from the bottom degree.” Since he had already skilled a profitable staff union on the Harvard Artwork Museums, Mangus was capable of assist information the trouble towards unionization on the BMA in 2022.
When the chance arose in 2020 to take part in Guarding the Artwork on the BMA, Mangus was one in every of 17 museum guards to function visitor curator. They labored with curator and artwork historian Lowery Stokes Sims to current an exhibition that garnered nationwide press and later traveled to the Phoenix Artwork Museum. “To most of the better-paid museum employees, guards are, at greatest, “the assistance,” and at worst, ne’er-do-wells, unlucky afterthoughts whose presence disturbs the purity of in any other case completely curated exhibitions,” Mangus wrote in a Hyperallergic Opinion piece on the exhibition. “This place is untenable.”
Along with his curiosity in city construction, each formally and conceptually, Mangus was additionally an avid bike owner who beloved exploring Baltimore on two wheels, a viewpoint that enhanced his images and art-making. Mangus usually drew connections between all of his ongoing practices, from working as a museum guard and conservator to his life as a biker, artist, and author.
“Simply as using a bicycle is the easiest way for exploring it, images is the most effective means for me to speak my concepts in regards to the ever-changing metropolis,” Mangus as soon as noticed in an essay. His Constructions sequence (2001–2019) consists of patchwork composites of photographs of buildings throughout the early phases of their building. The same sequence, Ruins (2019–2020), paperwork their demise, whereas The Sq. Mission includes photographs of sq. plaques, indicators, road artwork, and different shapes round Boston organized right into a three-by-three format, recalling the gridiron road layouts wherein they have been discovered.
Family and friends have shared tributes to Mangus on-line, together with the BMA. The establishment shared an announcement with Hyperallergic, saying that “his considerate contributions to the Guarding the Artwork exhibition and significant conversations within the galleries shall be remembered by many.” Rob Kempton, one in every of Mangus’s shut mates and a fellow BMA guard, informed Hyperallergic, “Dereck Mangus had turn into a staple within the Baltimore artwork scene, flitting forwards and backwards from artwork openings and shutting receptions, and when he wasn’t displaying his personal work, he wrote about rising and established artists across the area usually out of curiosity.”
In his endless drive to deconstruct and reveal hidden connections inside complicated buildings, Dereck Mangus was an uncommon and particular individual. He impressed others to see the world as a spot of marvel and potential, the place perception will be its personal reward. He was a stalwart advocate for museum unionization, a valued group member, an avid bike owner, a critical reader and author, an beginner guitar participant, and a loyal good friend to those that beloved him.