Derek Dwight Anderson
Derek Dwight Anderson is an independent high school history teacher and librarian with 35 years of teaching experience. He is also a dedicated world traveler who loves museums, large and small. Improbable Voices is Anderson's first book and represents the cumulative integration of his professional and personal interests.
Derek holds a B.A. from Bates College and a Master of Library and Information Science from San José State University. He also studied at the University of Edinburgh. Currently a senior full time faculty member at Marin Academy in San Rafael, California, Anderson lives with his partner in Sausalito. He is currently teaching an interdisciplinary world history course that integrates history, art history, and studio art.
Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?
That’s easy! Vanilla ice cream. I have a bowl every night while watching TV. It soothes and satisfies like nothing else.
Is there a work of art you love? Why? Have you ever visited in person?
I want to pick one, but can’t. What I will say instead is that my favorite interactions with art have come unexpectedly. I remember stumbling across a major exhibition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Arles, France, which featured works like “The Turkish Bath” and “Jupiter and Thetis.” I didn’t know the exhibition was in town until I arrived in Provence and encountering these works serendipitously made them appeal all the more. Similarly, during a visit to the Vatican, I found an exhibition in the old Petrine Museum that had multiple Caravaggios, including “Crucifixion of Saint Peter,” “John the Baptist” and “The Calling of Saint Matthew.” I couldn’t believe my luck at being able to see them together in one place. That’s the power of museum curation.
Do you collect anything? If so, what, why and for how long?
Even as a boy, I was interested in airlines. I was fascinated by their logos and their route maps: their ability to take people to what for me were magical places and to distinguish themselves from one another by what we would today call branding. In 2000, I began collecting airline memorabilia with a focus on baggage labels and baggage tags. The labels are works of art, evoking the temptation of place from the Swiss Alps to the Serengeti, from Rio to Sydney. My favorites are from KNILM, an airline in the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s, and from Deruluft, a joint German-Soviet airline in the 1920s. The tags remind me of my first years of airline travel, when an airline might have a red tag for SFO, a green one for MSP, and a purple one for HKG. DCA was often striped red and white. Overall, it’s a collection that celebrates advertising and graphic design, history and travel.
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would the theme be?
In 2018, San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum held an exhibition entitled “Casanova.” The famous dandy was not an artist, but the curators used his life and his extensive travels to bring together a collection of paintings and furnishings that illuminated Casanova’s world. It was an exhibition that impressed in an unexpected ways. I would love to assemble such an exhibit for the twenty six individuals I feature in Improbable Voices. I imagine Ethiopian icons and Brazilian musical instruments, Japanese scrolls and British tea sets, anarchist posters and Indian miniatures. And it would certainly feature some of the paintings I describe in detail in the book: “Still Life with Parrots” by Jan Davidsz de Heem, Album of Genre Paintings by Kim Hong-do, and “Major-General Robert Monckton at the Taking of Martinique, 1762” by Benjamin West. What I hope would emerge is a new perspective on the world’s past 550 years.
What brings you great joy?
I think the happiest I have ever been is standing on a glacier in Alaska. Two trips to Greenland and one to Svalbard come in as a close second and third. I know that there are many who are called by the desert or the sea, but for me it is the ice that compels, from its depth of color to its endless patterns, from its forbidden quality to its raw power. Being surrounded by ice in all of its forms brings me delightful fulfillment.
