The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 5 with Nana Oforiatta-Ayim

re is never just one way of seeing. And Nana Oforiatta-Ayim—writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder—has spent her career proving exactly that.

For Oforiatta-Ayim, who founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s critically acclaimed first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, art is not sealed off in white cubes but alive, porous, and connective.

In this episode, she opens up about the journey from proving worth to claiming inherent value in conversation with host Charlotte Burns. She speaks about the victories and challenges of her groundbreaking projects, including the Mobile Museum—which brings art into kiosks on street corners and tours it through local communities—and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia, which reorders and re-presents knowledge, narratives, and representations from across the African continent, the first of which launches this year.

Fifty years after critic John Berger cracked open the canon of art history with Ways of Seeing, Oforiatta Ayim is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy of books. She speaks candidly about reimagining Berger’s radical gesture for our time, reckoning with the limits of Western paradigms, and building from indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself.

What if the future of art looked more like a festival than a shrine?

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com. 

Find out more about The Art World: What If…?! at schwartzmanand.com/the-art-world.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello, and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast that imagines new and different futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.

[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]

There is never just one way of seeing, and Nana Oforiatta-Ayim has spent her career proving exactly that.

A writer, filmmaker, cultural historian, and institution builder, she founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Ghana and curated the country’s first, critically-acclaimed pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. 

In this episode, she reflects on the triumphs and challenges of these and other ambitious projects, such as the Mobile Museum, which brings art into kiosks and through local communities, and the 54-volume Cultural Encyclopedia of Africa—the first of which is launching soon.

Fifty years after John Berger cracked open art history with Ways of Seeing, Nana is carrying the conversation forward with her own trilogy—building from Indigenous knowledge systems, oral storytelling, and the land itself.

This is a conversation about people and their power to drive culture and to create change, to reshape how we understand ourselves, our worlds, and one another. 

It also asks, what if the future of art looked more like a festival than a mausoleum?

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Nana, thank you so much for joining us today. It is such a pleasure to be here in conversation with you. I'm so glad we've made this happen.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Me too.

Charlotte Burns: So, Nana, you are an art historian, a filmmaker, a writer, a cultural historian, an institution builder, and a community weaver. Which of those roles feels most central to your identity and your work?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I guess first of all, writing, or storytelling, is the one that is foundational to everything else; building narratives, and everything else comes out of that, or spins out of that.

Charlotte Burns: And you're in Lisbon right now, writing a book, aren’t you?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yes.

Charlotte Burns: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: What can I give away at this point? 

ANO, my institution, is changing after about 20 years or so of being mostly focused on the arts. I've been thinking a lot more about legacy and what, if I were not to lead the institution, would happen, and how I might hand it on. And, in doing that, I've been thinking about what the thread of things is that I want to run through it. 

With some of our projects that we've been doing, especially the Mobile Museum, we've been doing a lot of interacting and exchanging with community. And out of that, we've been going deeper and deeper into Indigenous knowledge and its contemporary expressions. And so I'm doing, actually, a series of books about Indigenous knowledge in Ghana; expressing them, codifying them, seeing how they can be a foundation for institutions, narrative building, and handing on of knowledge.

Charlotte Burns: Oh, is this related to, in about 2022, you were in Sienna on a residency, and you said that you wanted to focus on writing a book that was inspired by John Berger's Ways of Seeing that asked how could the paradigms that had been developed for over thousands of years, that had been very useful models, serve again as more inclusive and democratic models than the ones that had been imported wholesale from the West?

I really love the idea. I mean, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is such a foundational text. 

Is that the same thing? Is that the same project?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, it is. 

Obviously, John Berger was such a prescient, impactful, beautiful voice. Especially when things were in turmoil—and he had such wisdom. So, I'm actually working on that right now.

Charlotte Burns: No, that's so interesting.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, yeah. And his book, obviously, is such an inspiration. It was a turning point. Art history, up to that point, had been very much a given that it was a patriarchal history of men, and painting, and all of these things. And I love the way he just broke that all open, and said, actually, there are different ways of seeing and different viewing points and different starting points, and put that all together.  

In a way, the series of books that I'm writing is a daughter to what he started. He's one of my literary godfathers.

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so yeah, very much this book is in a way taking on the baton of what he did. He was breaking open this idea that there is only one way of telling history or art history, and it's linear and it's male. And he opened that, so I'm taking on that baton and saying, “Well, this is one of the many ways of doing this.”

Charlotte Burns: That book was published more than 50 years ago, and that openness that Berger tried to bring has not always been embraced. There are periods of linearity and multiplicity that we've seen in the art world, and a kind of pushback as a throughline against that.

Where are you positioning your writing, and what's your audience? Because his audience was so big. It was people in the art world, but it was such a broad public, too. What is your audience, where are they, and what change do you hope to have?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: That's the kind of question my agent would ask me!

[Laughter] 

I'm like, “I don’t know, I’m just writing!” 

[Laughter] 

I think, I mean, similar to him, I would want it to be broader than just the art world. From the beginning of my working life, I've wanted to touch and reach people that are beyond the confines of the art world, especially the art world as we know it and as it's defined. 

That's why I've done things like the Mobile Museum, which travels around towns and villages in Ghana that are really not part of the art world at all, and is inclusive of people that are everything from market women to fishermen, to literally every kind of person that you can think of. And so, ideally, what I'm writing would be similarly open to the public.  

Obviously, I'm grappling with quite complex ideas and thinking of how to break them down. That's where, also, the storytelling comes in as well. A lot of the ways that we passed on knowledge traditionally was through storytelling, or through proverbs, or things like drum poetry, even things woven into cloth. And so there was a way of passing on knowledge and wisdom that wasn't necessarily just an academic tone, written in a way that only speaks to other thinkers and academics.

Charlotte Burns: I can't wait to read it. How far are you along? You say it's a series of books. How many books are in the series and what's the overarching structure that you can tell me about? Because I know it's not all revealed yet.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: As of now, I can say that it's going to be a trilogy. From all the research that we've been doing at ANO over the last decades, I've found that there are three principles within our Indigenous knowledge systems, the Akan—which are Ayan, Afahye, and Adae—and how I'm using them as foundational principles are ways of institution building, like how do we create institutions that are of this time? 

Because obviously the museums as we know them, a lot of them, especially the encyclopedic museums, were imperialistic. They were so-called universal, but they were more or less from one point of view and not universal viewpoints. So, how do we create institutions of our time, and especially as I'm based in Ghana, for our context. 

And then knowledge, how do we pass on knowledge, in ways that are, again, more open and pluralistic, and that come out of this grounding of the Indigenous knowledge that we've been researching.

And then the third is narrative. 

Charlotte Burns: Hmm. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: How they pass on narratives. 

I mean, I guess if you are looking at it from the academic point of view, it would be ontology, epistemology, institution building. I think that would be how you would describe it in the more Western traditional sense. But it's really looking at how do we build these new foundations backed up by research and not just saying we need new models, but don't quite know what those new models look like.

Charlotte Burns: Another guest on our podcast this season is Kemi Ilesanmi, who was talking about institution building on the Continent and those new models and what is happening and the urgency around that.  

You founded ANO, which is the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, in 2002. You said, when you founded it, that, “Ever since I started ANO, the aim was to create a space that I, and people like me, could exist in freely and exchange and interact. I almost can't believe this is what's happened; that from the beginning, I've been surrounded by [this family] and that I get to work alongside these smart, thoughtful, paradigm-shifting people.”

And you spoke recently about the ways in which the vision for it had shifted—or maybe more the practical applications of it—that when you first set it up, you said, “We didn't just have to be the creatives, we [had to be] the creators of our own narratives. [And] now, 20 years later, it's [even] bigger than that. It's not just that we have to be the creators of our own narratives; we also have to be the creators of our own structures and our own infrastructures. And then, not just of our own infrastructures, but of our own resources, too.” 

And I wanted to ask you a little bit about that evolution for you, of those 20 years of creating a space where people could be and interact freely, to understanding that it was so much bigger than that. It was about building the entire ecosystem. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Mmm. 

Charlotte Burns: And now to where you are, which sounds an even step further, which is thinking of the sustainability and the legacy of those spaces. 

Can you talk us through that kind of evolution? And, I'm sure, the conflicts between how exciting that is and how possibly overwhelming that may feel at points? 

[Laughter]

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, I think the overwhelming comes first! Before the excitement. 

[Laughter] 

Woo. The evolution of that. 

I think when I started this 20-odd years ago, I really didn't know what I was letting myself in for at all. I was very young, and it's strange to me now, looking back at young Nana, that I had the foresight to do the first exhibition that I ever curated under this umbrella of ANO. I never curated under “Nana”. I look back at young Nana and how ambitious she was in terms of, “This is gonna be a space, it's not just gonna be Nana curating this, but this will be some kind of collective space or space for us.” And not knowing how that was going to evolve and then, living in London and doing it internationally, and then moving back to Ghana—from the beginning, knowing that I wanted to create something that was of our context and really observing how there was quite a few spaces that were mimicking the white cube space of the West.

We had an art scene, which was very small at the time when I went back. It would be the same 100 or so people at each exhibition. I really wanted to break out of that idea of art or culture just being for a select few of people who are already erudite and cosmopolitan and knew about art. Especially because I'm from the rainforest area in Ghana and we have these [...] festivals. And there's thousands and thousands of all kinds of people that attend. People come back to their hometowns from the capitals. People fly in for them. There's so much art and culture there at hand, and everyone participates.

And so I'd already seen a model, at close hand within my context, which spoke to art and culture, and which was open, and which spoke to everybody and touched everybody and invited everyone in. So, I knew the model existed and I knew I didn't have to go very far to find it. 

And somehow, something had got lost in translation between what we had established over thousands and thousands of years and what we were doing now in the contemporary, in the aftermath of the colonial encounter, in the aftermath of thinking what we needed to create in a contemporary sense needed to, in some way, mirror what was happening in the West. 

Charlotte Burns: Mm. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so my question was how do I bridge that gap? How do I create something that, obviously is of now, is of the contemporary—I'm not engaged in a kind of nostalgic, how do we get back to the past. So, it's bridging that gap somehow of what was historically ours and what is contemporarily ours as well.

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And how do I do that? And this was a question. 

And I feel quite blessed in a way looking back at the precarity of our infrastructure because, even though it was backbreakingly hard not having any kind of support financially, at the same time, it was a complete tabula rasa. There was nobody telling you, “Oh, you need a license for this. You need to fill out all of these forms before you do this”. You could basically do anything. 

And so it was a blessing and a curse in terms of, it was very hard—and especially as a woman within a patriarchal art space in Ghana, we do have that as well. The art space is quite patriarchal. But the lack of support also meant there was the lack of limitations. 

Charlotte Burns: Mm. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so I could really ask myself, what does this look like? What shape, what form does this take? And just take this quite meandering road of, “Let me try this. Okay, this works. Let me try this. Okay, this doesn't work.” I was able to fail and get up, fail and get up again and again, and try things and feel what worked, and what spoke to people, and what didn't. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: If you could sort of distill your learnings, which I'm sure is an overly reductive question, but what have you learned about the things that have been lost and what can be built in that place to bridge that gap?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I mean, the most surprising thing that I learned was not as much had been lost as I assumed it had. I assumed that the colonial encounter had been very successfully destructive. There was such an effort to eradicate our ways of being and knowing and believing, and replace them with Christianity and Western education, and to “civilize”, and that it had been systematic and therefore successful. 

And so I started off, I think, with a grief of this loss. And the more that I traveled around the country, the more I spoke with everyday people, and encountered this knowledge embodied within people, the grief turned into joy and excitement of, “Wow, there's so much here. How do people not know about this? It's so alive, but it's so untapped!” 

And so, that was the bridge for me, was realizing how rich and how present this was and how alive it was, but that it was just wasn't being translated into what we called the art world or what we thought of as our knowledge bank, in terms of creative knowledge, in terms of what we were leaning on.

And so that, for me, was the bridge, was just that discovery.

Charlotte Burns: You've just described moving around the country. That sort of peripatetic journey, is that what led you to the Mobile Museum?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: It was a bit chicken and egg. And this is what I mean in terms of the experimentation was the journey. So, I really see ANO as being very much a process-led institution rather than an outcome-led one. People see the exhibitions, et cetera, and they talk about those. But for me, what happens in the in-between is almost more exciting. 

I think it was the 2015 Chale Wote Festival, which is this big street art festival in Ghana. I had been asking this question of how do I create a space which is not intimidating, which invites in all different types of people, and I observed that on every street corner we had these, what we call kiosks, which are these makeshift little structures made out of wood and tin roofing. And, they're slapdash put together out of found materials. They are barber shops, they are mechanics, they are hairdressers, they're brick-a-brack shops, everything you can think of. Even like one-room hotels, anything you can think of is in a kiosk. 

So, I saw this structure and I was like, “Well, why not have a museum in a kiosk?” Because obviously, the kiosk is not intimidating; it's on every corner. People can just walk in. It's not this big museum-like structure where people feel like they don't belong, or that it's not for them. 

So, I decided to put a museum in a kiosk. I collaborated with an architect friend, DK Osseo-Asare, and we created this kiosk. And then I spent about a month going through the area where the Chale Wote Festival would be, which is Jamestown—which is an old fishing village, which is now in the capital of Accra—and I started gathering material culture, speaking to people, filming. 

It was incredible. I was so blown away by the response. People were crowding into it. And people would be like, “Oh my God, there's my uncle”, because I'd filmed people doing things. There was so much excitement, so much emotion. At some point during the Chale Wote Festival, this guy, who's Samoa, who's a priest of the river, he came into kiosk and he's like, “In a minute, your kiosk will be a shrine. I'm going to come back with my people.” And I was like, okay. Then he said, “You will be the priestess of the shrine.” And I was like, “Okay”. And he said this very seriously. 

And so he came back. He was all in white. They were doing a procession. He came with all his followers who were also all in white with chalk on them and leaves around their neck. And he came in with them and closed the door of the kiosk so none of the visitors could come in. And then he talked me through what I needed to do, which was he had a bowl of water. I needed to put my hands in the water and bless him three times. 

So, the kiosk became this sacred space for the 30 minutes or so that this priest of the river decided for some reason that I was the one to bless him within this space and within this structure for that afternoon. 

And I love that so much, that it was, and this has been the process with the Mobile Museum—wherever we've gone, people have co-opted it. So we've come with an idea of something that has been deconstructed by the very people that are of the place, and they have taken ownership of it and made it into theirs. And I love that openness and the flexibility. 

I think it went from the “Kiosk Museum”, to the “Living Museum”, to the Mobile Museum, because then when I saw what it did in Accra, I thought, well, we can't just leave this Accra. This is so potent. Let's take it around the country and see, because also we learned so much in the process of it being in Accra. 

Charlotte Burns: And that project is linked to the Cultural Encyclopedia, which is again, moving away from this idea of hierarchical knowledge systems and knowledge sharing. 

Can you tell us a little bit more about the encyclopedia?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. The encyclopedia’s also, I feel like all my projects are really long-term [Laughs].

Charlotte Burns: And ambitious. 

[Laughter]

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. 

Yeah. The end goal of the online encyclopedia is a 54-volume encyclopedia of the whole Continent, which is quite ambitious. 

There was a couple of things I was inspired by. One was when I was little, we did used to have these, I think they were like brown, fake leather encyclopedias on our bookshelf. There was just lots of volumes. And I remember I used to take them down, and there was just such excitement about discovering the world. But obviously, Africa was not really included. It was a knowledge of the world, but the world being the Western world.

I think one of my first writing assignments was writing for an encyclopedia on mythology. And I was to do the African section, and it was literally African mythology in a few pages. And I was like, “Wow, the whole continent is being squeezed into this little space.” 

And then, another inspiration was looking at [Denis] Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which was so foundational to the Enlightenment period, and which obviously changed the whole of Western thought. And I was like, “Wow, what if I could do that with African thought”, and have this space in which I can invite in all of these streams of thought, starting obviously with Ghana. 

It's also something that's evolved over time. At the beginning, I would have these salons, I guess for want of a better word, or living archives, where I'd invite all of these thinkers from Ghana in to think together. So, different types of people, and then document and record that. And then also asking questions of what should be the languages? What is this knowledge, how does it look? 

And so at the beginning, it was this experimental phase of bringing people together in co-thinking. And then we started this fellowship process, where, alongside all the written and known knowledge that we were gathering, and also the creative knowledge, we then started using the Mobile Museum. We were learning things as we were going, and so we were like, we need to document this because this is not accessible to most people. 

And so it became this multi-layered archive of what was already in some way documented and then creative new knowledge, but then also this new-old knowledge that we were discovering as we were traveling around the country. 

We've got the Ghana encyclopedia ready. I think we're gonna launch the beta version. We've had lots of different beta versions, but we're gonna launch the final—and I hesitate to say final because I feel like nothing is ever final—later this year. 

Charlotte Burns: Oh, wow. Congratulations. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Thanks. 

Charlotte Burns: What are the kind of challenges or breakthroughs that you've encountered in this 54-volume encyclopedia? And, again, this project's so massive, it's one of these things that you must think about sustainability and lineage and legacy. How do you manage it? How do you ensure its maintenance, in a kind of ongoing capacity.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I think from the beginning I saw it as a lifetime project, and not just my lifetime, but other people's, if they're interested or want to pursue it.

The most important thing to me was getting the first volume, that we tried everything that we could possibly try with the Ghana volume, because that's where I had some element of control. Once it goes out to other countries, I'm not going be the one there on the ground doing the Mobile Museum and not going be the one gathering research. And so it becomes an unknown quantity. It becomes something that is of itself, in the same way that Samoa came in and made a museum into a shrine, we don't know what's gonna happen once it travels to other countries. 

I think we spent about 10 years trying everything we could possibly try out in the Ghanaian context. And, now, feeling like the Ghanaian encyclopedia is as robust as we can make it because we've tried so many things and asked so many questions of it. It's almost like the encyclopedia itself is a living thing that we were in conversation with and it's told us now, “I'm ready to go out into the world”. 

And it's funny because when we went on the first tour with the Mobile Museum, I said this thing to the team where I was like, “We're gonna let the sunsum lead us.” And in Twi, our Akan language, sunsum means spirit, and everything has spirit like, the trees and the rivers and paper and everything within Akan tradition. Sunsum is the living—I guess in Asian culture it’d be like qi, the living spirit that is in all things. And if you listen, sunsum will guide you, the spirit of all things that is in us and is in everything will guide you. 

And so, I said this trip, isn't it, we do have like our ideas of when we're gonna be where, but it's very much that we're gonna let the sunsum guide us. So, we would see things on the side of the road and we'd be like, “Oh my God, look at this.” And we'd stop. And then we'd go in and behind the road, there'd be this traditional priest who would tell us…It was incredible in terms of being open to this spirit of discovery and being led by it. And so, I would say very much, so much of what we did was just listening, and letting that listening process guide us.

And by listening, I mean also listening to communities and letting them tell us what we should do next. And so yeah, I think the Ghanaian encyclopedia has come to a place where we feel ready to share it, and that we feel that what our intention was will be communicated in a way. Obviously, it's unpredictable how people respond, but I feel like there is a clear path from the kind of heart of our intention to what it looks like now. 

As of next year, there's gonna be, I think, five countries every year where they'll come to Ghana and do workshops with us on methodology, of how we did the Mobile Museum, how we did the Cultural Encyclopedia. But then each of these different institutions will take on the encyclopedia for themselves. 

And also the encyclopedia is something that's never going to be finished. We will have some published versions. I'm hoping they'll be quite cheap. You know how you have the exercise books that in Ghana they're sold at traffic lights and they look a bit like this, [shows Charlotte an example of an exercise book].

Charlotte Burns: Oh, yeah.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Like exercise books. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: And so I'm hoping that we will have versions of the encyclopedia that people can literally just buy at traffic lights, and in villages, and on squares. And there'll be, I think, more robust versions for libraries, and universities, et cetera. But I'm really hoping that the encyclopedia will just be something that people can buy for the amount that they would spend on a, I don't know, Coca-Cola or a snack or something, and that they can just have in their homes as a source of knowledge and inspiration. 

Charlotte Burns: Will it also be digital?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah, that's, sorry. The main encyclopedia will be digital.

Charlotte Burns: Right.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: The published ones is a…

Charlotte Burns: The physical.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yean, it's an online encyclopedia.

Charlotte Burns: I also wanted to talk to you a little bit about the technology behind this. You were one of eight people out of a pool of 400 applicants to receive the 2015 Art + Technology [Lab] award from LACMA, and I thought it was really interesting to think about how you were using technology in your work.

This idea, again, of bridging different traditions and moving into the future. You've said that the encyclopedia places technology at the core of a new forum of cultural knowledge and exchange. And I wanted to ask you how you think digital platforms can shape new narratives and new storytelling, and also how technology can serve culture in ways that center it rather than extract from it.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Hmm, such a good question. I'm doing a project right now with one of my colleagues and a peer, Chao Tayiana, who has a Digital Heritage Africa platform, and we have been speaking a lot about how do we respond to what's happening right now, with what's happening in Sudan, Congo, Kenya, Palestine, in terms of voice, in terms of who gets heard, who gets to be visible, and also the incongruence that we are watching genocides, massacres in real time, and yet can't really do anything about it. And what does that mean, in terms of, like, where we are digitally in this time? So, we've been thinking a lot about these questions of digital platforms and their resonance and what they do and what they can't do and what their limitations are in response to what's happening around us, which feels so, yeah, I don’t if I have the word for it. 

Charlotte Burns: Horrific.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. Yeah. 

So, in terms of what they can do, I feel like everybody has access to technology in some form or other. In places like Ghana, we skipped the analog phase of phones, and went straight to mobile phones. There's almost this kind of technology leapfrogging that's happened, which I think is really interesting and potentially generative. 

There are internet cafes in every village, so if you don't have a mobile phone, or you don't have a computer, you can go to an internet cafe and look at a computer. We do still have the what we call Yams. Yams is like a tuber or that is similar to a potato, which it doesn't have WhatsApp and all of those other things.

Charlotte Burns: Oh yeah. Yeah. Pre-everything. Pre-do-everything phones.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. Yeah. 

Some people still have Yams, but I would say a majority of people who have phones at least can use WhatsApp, look at their social media, et cetera. So, it is something that has, for better or worse, democratized access and information and knowledge. Instead of using it as so many social media platforms do as something that just sucks the energy out of you, thinking of it in the opposite stream of things. How can we use it as a tool of coming together? 

And if there is a little boy in a village at the outskirts that dreams of being an architect, he can easily access a platform where he can look at how architecture was created in Ghana for centuries and how that then connects with how it was built in Mali or in Kenya, and see how contemporary architects have taken on this Indigenous site and he or she can start to create building blocks for themselves. 

We’re also trying to build in community aspects within the platform as well, so people can speak to each other, people who have similar interests. So, the idea is for it to be as inclusive as possible and also as enabling as possible, primarily for people on the African continent and the diaspora. 

And that brings me to your question about extractivism, because as we all know African culture has been used all over the world as a foundational block. It's very similar to what happens with our material culture in which the raw materials are taken out and then refined elsewhere, and then imported back to us. It’s quite a similar thing with culture. 

I mean, you've seen it all over the world, whether it's with jazz or blues or rap or fashion, dance, food, anything, you name it. You can go across the world and see some elements of African culture that have somehow been morphed into something and then import it back into the African culture at a much, much higher price point than they were taken away. 

Obviously, I'm in Lisbon at the moment. A lot of people are here from Western countries. What's interesting about the Western people that are coming here is, first of all, they're not calling themselves immigrants. They're calling themselves expats, which is a whole ‘nother conversation, but it's an interesting moment. It feels like this kind of post-capitalist moment where people don't want to be part of the rat race anymore and are looking for something else. They are drawing on Indigenous cultures in terms of, I don't know, sweat lodges. Like all these things that have been evolved and developed in Indigenous culture and using like these shorthand ways of, I dunno. I'm gonna do a cacao ceremony this afternoon, and it's really fascinating that people are extracting these quite deep and layered and sacred elements of cultures and saying, I want to take this on for myself, for my own well-being and betterment, but without all the necessary steps of relationality and accountability and reciprocity that are actually part of the process or the context from which they were taken from. 

And so, that's been a really big question with the encyclopedia because once I started doing it, at some point, I gave an interview to the New York Times, and it went really big talking about the Cultural Encyclopedia. People were so excited about the idea of it, and I wasn't in any shape or form ready at that point to take on all of that response, because we were still so much in the process. I needed to be in the shadows of still working on it. But, what it told me was, “Wow, there's such a hunger for this kind of knowledge in a way where it's all brought together.” 

But what it also made me do is feel a bit wary of, well, when we put all of this culture out, all of this knowledge, how do we protect it in a way that it isn't taken on in this really superficial, really trendy, yeah, just, that's just paying lip service to something that we are actually presenting as something quite sacred.

Charlotte Burns: How do you protect that? Because, I guess this is linked to the concept of restitution, which you've said is not just about objects coming back. It's about repair, it's about healing. It's emotional work, and it's spiritual work.

I know that as you have been doing work with the next phase of ANO, you've been thinking about the farm and the school in the Aburi mountains, which is this idea of also creating a space of respite. 

How do you protect the knowledge that you are helping to generate?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Ooh. Yeah, I mean, I do prefer the concept of rematriation to that of restitution. Rematriation is this concept that was developed largely by Indigenous women. I feel like the restitution or repatriation debate got co-opted quite a bit by the kind of systems that it was looking to overturn, which are imperial and patriarchal, and still very much trying to define what should happen. 

There were a lot of Western museum directors and academics who were saying this is how it should happen, and were speaking on behalf the African counterparts without ceding voice or platform to them. I mean, I was quite involved in a lot of those dynamics and I found it quite a troubling one.

Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.

I know that you have been very closely, intimately involved in a lot of the return of objects that were so violently looted from Ghana by colonial forces, and so I want to ask you about rematriation, but also how your own sort of position has changed. 

You wrote recently that it had somewhat softened. In 2024, when the British Museum and the V&A announced the temporary return of Asante items, you were asked to comment by the BBC, and you wrote about it saying, “Of course, a temporary return is not a solution far from it. But over the years, my drive towards total healing as soon as possible has softened into doing one's best and meeting each day with solutions that day needs whether these are radical or more hedgingly diplomatic.” And you said, “I can no longer expect to do everything in my lifetime to heal all of our deep wounds of separation, but I will continue to take steps every day towards this. Through one of our knowledge systems, I learned that in order to attain knowledge, you need to uncover your own mysteries, i.e. that the work of the collective is simultaneously an act of self,” which I thought was really lovely in a different voice really on the entire conversation of returning of objects. 

Can you expand on that a little bit?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah,  part of it is just a natural process of getting older.

[Laughter]

When you are young, you come in with such energy and “I can do all this”. My whole aim when I was younger was like, “I'm going to create a cultural revolution and I'm gonna do it all and I'm gonna do it now.” And then you get tired. [Laughter]

You can, you get tired. I mean, I think also I had a huge, whew, huge learning curve. I did the two Ghana Pavilions for the Venice Biennale. I did the very first pavilion in 2019, and then I did the second one in 2022. And I was very ambitious with what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. I remember years ago when I was first starting out, I'd gone to the Venice Biennale and there was an African Pavilion. A whole continent squished into what? A few rooms, and it was miles away from the center of where all the kind of “important” countries were.

At that point I was like, “One day I'm going to do a Ghana Pavilion and it's going to be right at the center where everybody else is and it's going to be incredible”. And I remember just saying that to myself at the age of, I don't know, 21. And so, the 2019 one  was a full cycle moment of that, and I managed to do it in the Arsenale, which is where all the “important” countries were. 

The first one was a huge hit. It was in all the top three, must see pavilions. It was a really overwhelming experience, and then came the second one, which I wanted to do in order to lay the groundwork for others to do it because you need really a particular skillset in order to be able to do it, and I wanted to really codify that, put that all down so that whoever came next could do it because you needed to be locally embedded, but you also needed an international network. You needed to be able to navigate politically and diplomatically, like there were so many different skill sets. 

I was like, “Let me do it once more so that I can actually do a kind of handbook of how it's done for anybody who wants to do it afterwards”. But then a month before the opening, the government defaulted on all payments. Everyone that we had brought on board. I'm still kind of living with the reverberations of that two, three years later. But talk about a wake up call or a rock bottom moment. I was suddenly left with having to pay hundreds of thousands of euros. I mean, I didn't have to, it wasn't my duty, it was a Ghana National Pavilion, but all of the people who had come on, literally everybody had come on because of my relationships with them, because of people that I'd known for 20 years. 

I couldn't say to them, “Sorry, our government says no. This huge work that you've done is going to go completely unrewarded or unacknowledged or unvalidated.” That was a real, I don't, yeah, I don't quite have the words for how hugely disruptive, and what a huge thing that was to carry. 

We had, in a way, reached the pinnacle of what we were trying to do in terms of the art world. Like the first 2019 Ghana Pavilion had a lot of repercussions in Ghana. Suddenly all of the galleries wanted to come to Ghana and see the museums, et cetera. So, the visibility of the 2019 Ghana Pavilion had real world repercussions in terms of what happened in Ghana. But what I realized was that those repercussions weren't necessarily the ones that I had foreseen, in that now, suddenly Ghanaian art was being valued at hundreds of thousands. We were, like, at the top, temporarily, of the art market. I could quite clearly see that it was a bubble, that it wasn't really built on anything slow and foundational. That, at some point, what went up so quickly would also come down.  

Yeah, it was a big eyeopener that achieving your dream, or getting to the top of what you had wanted to get to the top of when you felt like you were at the bottom was not necessarily all that it looked from down here. That was a huge, it was a very humbling experience, in that, yeah, this kind of drive that I'd had an ambition of what I'd wanted to do with culture and Ghana and what I wanted to prove, and all of that kind of dissipated, and turned into something else.  

There was much more of an appreciation of the process of the little encounters that we had with everyday people, because looking back, those have been the most nourishing and enriching. It was like, well, how do we actually maintain these processes of care and of intentionality and of reciprocity and all of these things that are actually quite foundational to Indigenous knowledge systems. How do we maintain these? And the answers were in something slower, not as bombastic as what I had imagined when I first came into this. That it didn't have to be like, ta-da, now and big and, yeah, all of these, tap dancy and blowing everything up. It didn't have to be that way. 

I was literally at rock bottom being like, how do I pay back all these hundreds of thousands of euros? And it deconstructed something so fundamental in me because there was nowhere for me to go and I had to really look into what am I doing? How am I doing it? And how is something that I had such good intentions for, how did it spectacularly blow up in my face so much? And how do I go forward in small ways, in ways of care, not just for others, but also for myself? Because I was going at such speed and such single-mindedness that I was missing things.

There were a lot of flags, like when I look back on it now, that foreshadowed what was gonna happen. But I was so single-minded that I didn't pick up on those. So, in a way, I think the process of rematriation as well is going back to this idea of being slower and more intentional and more care driven for ourselves, for each other, and not being in this huge, bombastic, linear, achievement-driven path.

Charlotte Burns: It sounds horrible. Sounds like such an awful thing to go through. 

You're laughing as you talk about it now. Are you on that side of it or is it still a painful thing?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Both, I would say. Both because, as you can imagine, it's unbelievably difficult to fundraise for something retroactively. 

If the government had told me a year before, we cannot pay for this thing, it would've been a lot easier for me to fundraise than them telling me a month before, and having to fundraise during and after the event.

So, I'm still in that process now. I don't know. There's something almost quite, I guess, spiritual about coming through the other side of this, letting go. I was so angry. I felt so betrayed. I spent so many days in government offices like walking up and down and being lied to, and being told it's coming. There's something, yeah, about coming out of that and letting go of the blame and the victim “why, is this happening to me?” Like all of that, just letting go of it and being like, okay, this is a really big thing. I'm still going through it. It's still hard, but also, it's allowed me to connect with the truth of something really essential of why it is I'm doing this. I feel like we can get into a like hamster wheel, and we externalize the idea of what achievement and success is, and don't come back to the core of what it really is in a meaningful way. When something like this happens, that's so big and so unmanageable, it really stops you in your tracks because there's nowhere to go from there.

So, it makes you turn inwards in a way that you wouldn't normally. I could have easily kept going on, I wanted to build this huge museum and do this, and do that and had all of these plans, and I just had to stop and shut everything down. I've gone from seeing it as this curse, to a gift of being able to start again in a way was much more truthful. I was very going at very fast pace and allowed me to stop in a way that I never would've voluntarily.

Charlotte Burns: That is really profound experience to go through and to talk about so openly as you are is amazing. So, thank you for sharing that with us. 

[Musical interlude]

I was thinking about how we began this conversation, which was with you writing and thinking about ways of seeing and remembering something that had come across in research for the show, that the idea for ANO had come to you on a winter's evening in Russia, where you were living for a year. You've talked about how when you were growing up, you spoke three languages, but you said you never felt fully Ghanaian. You never were fully German, you never felt fully English. When you were growing up in Germany, people would speak to you first in English because of the color of your skin. They felt that you didn't belong and that Ghana is where you most obviously belong, but you'd felt so strongly this amnesia of knowledge. The way you expressed that lack was that you said, “I can't just go to the library and pick up a novel about Ghana in the same way I can pick up a novel of Russian 19th century life with Tolstoy”. So, it's interesting that the end of this sort of crisis that happened in Venice coming back to books again, after your search began there. 

Is it fulfilling in a deeper way to be writing these books to be so engaged with words and filling that cultural amnesia?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yes. I mean, I'm not quite there yet. Even now, as I sit down, I'm not quite in the emptiness of where you are when you are really writing and nothing is hindering your mind. I'm still dealing with the everyday stress of the Venice thing, so unfortunately, I can't say I'm in a place of complete peace and inspiration.

Charlotte Burns: No.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I'm not quite there yet. Which is fine. That's life. I'm not in my early 20s anymore. I mean, it happens, right, to everyone. As you get older, things build up, the consequences of things build up. And that's where I am now. 

But, when I started and I desperately wanted to connect with a part of myself that I felt I had no access to, this whole journey of doing that both individually and collectively, happened. And I feel like I am at a stage where I have managed to connect, and also gathered all of these tools of connection that I can now pass on to others.

It's been really enriching and really fulfilling. And if I can do that, what I'm doing at the moment, which is as truthfully as possible and as meaningfully as possible, pass on to others what it is that I've learned, then I feel like I've done my part in the world. And this is also what I get out of our fellowship programs is they're these young girls especially that were literally like me and they come and I can give them that space that I didn't have when I was in my early twenties. I can say, come and research and dive into this and we're gonna give you a space and we've got the funding and we can support you to think in this way, which is your own. But, also it's within the context of like-minded people that you can reach out your hand and touch. And they're all so brilliant, these young girls, and it's so exciting to me that I can provide that space for them. I can't even put it into words, the feeling of that. 

And, I think, yeah, with what I'm writing at the moment is similar to what we're creating in the collective sense with ANO.

Charlotte Burns: It's so exciting to hear you describe that. It's very rare to interview someone who's so aware of moving through the stages of life, and where they are in that and what that means to be looking forward and passing things backwards. 

I'm really struck by that in this conversation with you, and it brings me on to Koyo [Kouoh], who I know was such a big influence on you. And she proclaimed herself your big sister on the first day you met in 2008, which was also the year that she set up RAW Material Company. And you said, “on the second day, she said, let's go shopping, and took me across all the avant garde shops of Brussels. From the beginning she embodied a kind of permissive female leadership. And, her last message to you, you said was, ‘We shall deliver a Black fist of power’.” She was talking about Venice and her vision for it as with everything was surprising, unexpected, transcendent, everything, what was needed at this moment in time when there is so much unstoppable horror all around. She was about to share with the world what we knew of her all along. 

It's so beautifully written, your tribute to her. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I mean, it's still so abstract to me that she's gone because obviously we lived in different countries, so there's months and months that I don't see her, and then suddenly there she is. 

What do I say about Koyo? When I first met her, it feels almost like a completely different time, in the African art world, it was much smaller. There was no money in it at all. You'd go from the Dak’Art Biennale to something else, and it was a family because everybody who was there and who was doing it out of real love for what they were doing. And so there was a lot of care whether it was from Koyo or Bisi Silva, or even [...], it was very much like big sister, big brother. I was young when I came into it. 

And, Koyo, like I said in that post, she immediately [Laughs] just declared that she was my big sister. I was her little sister. She put that hierarchy in place immediately [Laughs] and I just had to go with it. 

[Laughter]

She defined it from the very first day. 

When my mom died and I wanted to go home to Ghana, but I wasn't quite ready to because it was a Ghana without my mom there. She just was like, come to RAW for a year. Help me write these books and edit them, and this will be your way back into the Continent. She gave me this very safe space of not just nurture, but also of thinking. 

When I went back, it was the first Condition Report’s conference, which brought together all these independent art spaces from all across the world. And it was happening in Dakar, and it was really at the cutting edge of what is art, what is curating, what does it mean for us all to come together? What do these spaces represent in the world? All of these conversations. She gave me something that was so generative, she gave me a place in the world, both rooted in the earth and of the sky because it was like rooted because she gave me home and care and I'm vegetarian and Dakar is not at all, made sure there was always vegetarian food for me.

So, that nurtured that care, but also the kind of more celestial space of thinking and creating, and it was really special. And I don't know if I appreciated enough because for me I always thought it was always gonna be there, like conversations with Koyo. It spanned everything from work to love to everything. Those conversations, they're the ones that you need in life, right? They root you into yourself and they provide you an external, kind of witnessing of self. 

Charlotte Burns: They sort of root you in who you are and allow you to think about where you might go.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. And she did that not just in the personal, but in, we were both navigating, as women, these mechanisms of power. And I think it's not something that we talk about very often is that other journey that we have to navigate.

There's, yes, there's a creative aspect—the curating and the writing and everything—but that navigation of the mechanisms of power, which again, are very patriarchal still. And being a woman within that, navigating it both locally within your context, which is one thing, then the whole ‘nother one of doing it internationally, which comes with patriarchy and racism as well. 

And, to be honest, I don't know if anyone else within my world that really understood what that was like and what it was like to navigate. So, there was a real, something in having Koyo and also, yeah, in her brilliant, beautiful mind, and her strength. She was a force and a power and I just can't believe that she went literally just before she was just about to face outwards into the world with who she was. It's just, it's astounding to me. You know, of course she would've been amazing. She would've dressed in the most fabulous way and gathered everybody and had a ball. I mean, I guess if you are spiritually inclined, you try and make sense of it because the timing was really so crazy. 

But Bisi Silva and Okwui Enwezor.

Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Okwui died when he was advising us on the 2019 Pavilion. Bisi was a also a very close friend and mentor, and all three of them died in their 50s, at the pinnacle, at the height, of this path that they had been walking. Artistic director of the Venice Biennale as a first African woman. All of us in the African art world, it gave us all pause of what are we doing this for? This rat race, this burning out. I remember Bisi was just like we all were or are like burning out constantly, worrying constantly about resources and funding and sustainability and Koyo carrying this institution and Okwui as well, fighting the very racist German cultural landscape. 

And at some point, like especially when you see the very real world repercussions of this kind of constant struggle on all of these different fronts, the cost of it is very real because those of us who really succeeded in this real world way didn't survive it, didn't survive the success of it. 

And so, I think, yeah, for us and even the younger generation, it's really giving pause of what are we doing this for and how are we doing it and what are the costs and are they worth it?

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for sharing that, Nana. 

How for you, right now, does that change the way you are thinking about your work and life and practice? 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I think that I had already, before Koyo’s passing, I had already had this big rock bottom that had made me question my pace. Since going to Ghana, I've had a burnout, and then I've had to build myself up and recover without fail every single year. I've been aware of it for a long time and been like, this is not a sustainable way to live. At some point, I'm not gonna recover from this constant, constant cycle.

Charlotte Burns: Right.  

Yeah, I mean, maybe in the bigger sense it is this question of moving with more care—especially because a lot of my work moving forward is gonna be with young people—is giving them the opening of you don't have to do it in the same way that we did. You don't have to do it in this backbreaking way, that it's not the only way. Opening up in a way these other ways of being, which fits into what I'm writing about now. 

The really exciting thing is connecting also with other Indigenous thinkers and writers from very different contexts, whether it's like Siberia or America or Canada or Tonga, and that we're all reflecting on how do we move forward in a way that honors not just ourselves, but the earth and our relationships and all of this. 

And can we, in a world that is crumbling, can we create these spaces within that?

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So, Nana, before we round out the show, I'm gonna ask you a couple of ‘what ifs’. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. 

Charlotte Burns: You've previously said that the art world paradigm is one that's way too narrow right now. What if you could redesign a different paradigm?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: [Laughs] 

Charlotte Burns: What would you do? What would be your non-negotiables?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Gosh. I think it wouldn't be a world that was cut off from everything else. It would be one that exists within interdependence of all things. 

You were talking about the farm earlier on in the school. That's one thing that I love, that we can plant a healing garden and that it's all part of that. Art isn't in a capsuled off art world, but that it's just one other branch of the tree of life.That it's not this white cube capsuled off world, it exists more in interdependence with all things. 

Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: What if museums were more than art? You've said, “I think the future museum is one that encompasses way more than just art.” I know you were just talking about that a little bit.
Can you expand on it? What is beyond the white cube, in a museum context? And I'm specifically saying here, maybe what isn't in the museum, based on, in around 2010 you worked in the British Museum, and I know that formed a lot of your thinking around what you didn't want to do in museums.

So, what if we were talking about the things that weren't in museums or the things that museums didn't do? What if museums were different? 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I can answer that by an example. I'm working right now on an eco-museum in the Atiwa rainforest. It's a rainforest where I'm from, and our starting point, even before the structure goes up, is the community. 

So, we're having all of these makeshift Mobile Museum meetings and inviting people from the community in and asking and listening. And we're doing that for a year, at least, before we even think about what does the museum look like. It's also really amazing how people open up when they're asked what they want in their opinions. At the beginning, people are a bit suspicious saying, “What do you want from us?” And how much people light up and how much they have to say when you give them a platform to be heard and listened to. 

So, I'd say that for me is the biggest starting point, bringing in the people who, in a way, are most affected by it, because they live there. It's a space made of people, first of all, and then also made of the land. 

So, in Ghana, we still do, actually, when something is built on land, we pour libation onto the land and we ask in a way the spirit of the land. She's called Asasse Ya in my language. If she's okay with being built on. Trees that are chopped down. You also ask the spirits of the tree if they bless you in chopping them down.

So, we're doing a lot of that and not just doing it in a kind of lip service way, but really working with the knowledge keepers who have dedicated their life to listening of the spirit of these things. And so, in listening, not just to people, but also the land and the elements that are going to also be affected by what you do. 

Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning and what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: [Laughs] The ‘what if’ that gets me out of bed right now is…Sorry, sorry. Sorry, got distracted by mosquito. I'm so sorry.

Charlotte Burns: Maybe that's the one that keeps you up at night.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: [Laughs] Okay. Sorry. ‘What if’ that gets me outta, I think it's the joy of, like my little dog, and the people in my life, like I have really, yeah, the love of the people that I have in my life, and that joy of just getting to breathe and be here, and feeling grateful for that, I think.

And being able to, yeah, use my mind and my abilities to see what I can do in the world. Yeah. And how that can connect with people.

Charlotte Burns: Is that the one that gets you out of bed? What's the one that keeps you up?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I mean, not so great. It's like worrying. It's worrying about this money thing with Venice, how I'm gonna resolve that. 

The amount of work that I have [Laughs] and all of the different things that I need to do and finish. Yeah, like sometimes the magnitude of things in the world. Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: Okay. Finally, one of our previous podcast guests, Kemi Ilesanmi, talked about you in her show as a sort of triumvirate of women on the Continent who had been rethinking culture—you and Koyo and Bisi Silva. 

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I'm the only one left. That's really scary.

Charlotte Burns: Well, the next question is this idea of planting seeds. The idea is that, you are a slightly different generation, but all of three of you have been focused on planting seeds for the future.

And so, I wanted to ask you what if you were thinking, I know you very much are, about the future and the next generations? What advice would you give them?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Hmm. yeah, I'm not quite sure I've reached where Bisi and Koyo are yet, because I think of them very much as like these aunties, like with the big hugs. I feel like I haven't quite, not quite at auntie status yet [Laughs]. Do you know what I mean?

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. They were mentors to you in many ways.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Yeah. And I mean it's something in a way maybe that I strive 

for, and maybe there are actually younger girls. Yeah, maybe there are actually younger girls who'd say that I am that for them. 

What advice would I give them?

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, what advice would you give them? What would you wish for them?

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim:  First of all, take it easy, and don't be in such a rush. Breathe. And then what I say to a lot of young people, including artists, is a lot of the time we think the value is on the outside of us with institutions and we're striving and working towards those things. And I always say to them, remember that the value is in you and that to not in a way see, especially the Western institutions that a lot of people work towards and strive towards, that they're not the end goal. That there's something within them that is much more precious than that, and to live into the preciousness of that and to see it and recognize it, and, in a way, polish it. 

And that out of that place of living fully into their value, they will take the right next steps. That it's not that there’s something external to them that they need to keep working towards and that they need to live up to. I feel like that's how I started off was that I had to prove myself, as an African, and as a woman, I had to prove that my culture was as valuable as that of the West. And I was very much operating from like this running place of having to show that I, and what I came from, was worthy, and as worthy as what, in a way, we were working towards. I'm not coming from that place anymore, but I would want the people coming after me to not even have to.

Charlotte Burns: Start from that place. Yeah.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: I'd want them to start from here, from where I am now basically. Yeah. 

So, if I could help them leapfrog that place, which is the place I feel like the world still to, a certain extent, puts us in as women, as people of African origin, if we could see that as just a veil, as something that's not actually real, ontological, but just as something that's a category and connect with the thing that's real in themselves, which is of complete value, and start from that place, which is a loving place of self and of others, and of the work that you are doing. Then, I think you are starting from not the same place that maybe we started from.

Charlotte Burns: Nana, thank you so much for making the time to talk to me today. It's been such a pleasure to speak to you and I really appreciate you making the time.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: Thank you. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Nana. There is so much we didn’t get to cover, including the courses for the launch of the Cultural Encyclopedia, which start this month on anoghana.org.

Next time we’re in conversation with Allan Schwartzman, talking about all things art market. 

Allan Schwartzman: I think there's a certain resistance to reducing prices, but I do think for a lot of artists who were accustomed to having a show every few years and have it sell out and then have their prices rise somewhat conservatively year after year after year, they now find themselves out on the edge of a cliff with nowhere to go. 

And so, I think while there's a huge resistance to reducing prices, a lot of artists and the galleries representing them would benefit from just taking a deep breath and doing some real sharp cutting of prices. One has to make the art accessible to a marketplace in order to support an artist.

Charlotte Burns: It’s a wonderful conversation. I can’t wait for you to listen. 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman& and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @schwartzman.art.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 4 with Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon makes art that asks us to look again. An artist, writer, and curator, his practice moves between the studio and the gallery, the page and the public sphere, spanning painting, neon, print, installation, and beyond. From text-based canvases grounded in the words of James Baldwin to glowing neons that play with the idea of America, and from intimate drawings to monumental works, Ligon explores disappearance, distance, and what happens when language is obscured or transformed.

In this conversation, he reflects on the through-lines in his work: from artistic heroes to navigating institutional blind spots, to thinking about the role of artists as citizens. He shares the advice he’d give his younger self and the doubts that continue to drive him forward.

This is a conversation about art and history, about freedom and responsibility. 

What if the real work of artists is to imagine the future we don’t yet know how to describe?

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us @schwartzman.art for more, and subscribe to our Substack at artandschwartzman.substack.com.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast all about imagining new and different futures.

[Audio of guests saying “what if?”]

I’m your host Charlotte Burns and I’m thrilled to be joined by one of my favorite artists, Glenn Ligon. He has spent more than three decades making art that asks us to look again at the surface, at language, and at the history and conditions we accept. 

An artist, writer, and curator, his practice moves between the studio and the gallery, the page and the public sphere. Spanning painting, neon, print, installation, and sometimes sculpture, he creates art across disciplines, media, and scale, from intimate to monumental. From text-based canvas grounded in the work of James Baldwin, to glowing neons that play with words and nationhood, to exhibitions that rethink museum practice. Glenn’s art is rooted in questions of disappearance and distance. And in what happens when language is obscured or is changed.

In this episode, he talks about the throughlines in his work, from his artistic heroes to navigating institutional blind spots and thinking about the role of artists as citizens. He shares the advice he’d give his younger self and younger artists, and the doubts that still drive him forward.

This is a conversation about art and history, about freedom and responsibility. Glenn asks, “what if the real work of art and artists is to imagine the future we don’t yet know how to describe?”

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. 

Let’s dive in.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Glenn, thank you so much for joining me. It's such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. I'm very excited.

Glenn Ligon:  I am too. Thank you for inviting me.

Charlotte Burns: Well, thank you very much for being here. 

What I think I want to start talking to you about is the beginning and the kind of recurring theme in your work. 

You've said that seeing Warhol's Shadow[s] paintings in 1979 made you realize that “if disappearance could be a subject matter, I could be an artist.” And you've described disappearance “as a constant theme” in your work, in your Walking in Memphis essay. You've also described the use of stencils in your text-based paintings as a way to introduce a bit of distance. 

I wanted to ask you how your understanding of disappearance and distance, as both a formal strategy and a conceptual framework, has evolved over the years.

Glenn Ligon:  Well, I think, initially I started out as a painter, and I do other things now: neons, installations, video occasionally. But, as you said, one of the earliest kind of impulses in my work after seeing that Warhol installation of his Shadow paintings was to think about what it means to be a subject that is not there in some sense. 

Warhol is famously there and not there, famously all surface. And that's not quite the trajectory that I was on. But in a way, this sort of question of disappearance is in response initially, in the beginning of my career, to a particular cultural moment. Multiculturalism, the explosion at that moment, and we're talking the mid ‘80s, late ‘80s, of artists of color showing in museums and galleries. But it came with a kind of demand, I think. A demand that artists of color make work that visibly, and upfrontedly, if that's a word, displays their difference. 

So, a lot of the work was figurative, a lot of the work dealt with important questions around identity, and certainly my work participated in that, but I think my impulse from the beginning, because I was so interested in language, was not to figure the body, but to talk about the body. And I very early on realized that using text from authors such as James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston or [Walt] Whitman or Gertrude Stein was a way to talk about questions of race and identity without actually figuring the body. 

So, in some ways, the use of stencils, the use of quotations was all about a kind of distancing from this notion of autobiography. And I would say also that often I would read critics who would say about the work of artists of color that work is about their identity. And that would be the end of the discussion as if identity or race were something that was fully known and knowable, and evident in the work. And as if that were the only things that work could or should be about. 

And so the use of text for me, the use of stencils, the use of quotations was a way of distancing myself, of withdrawing from that kind of discourse around the work.

Charlotte Burns: It reminds me of something you wrote about in your brilliant essay on Felix González-Torres, which I have to say made me so jealous as a writer because the construction of the essay is so brilliant. You ground it in your admiration for Felix by telling us that you created your own version of his work, Untitled (Perfect Lovers) by creating two identical battery operated clocks hung side by side. 

In the year he died, 1996, you hung it in your studio and say that you were reminded of the “economy, toughness and beauty of his multifaceted practice. Its wit and generosity, its impact on us all”, which makes the reader think that you knew him and then you tell us quickly you didn't know him, you didn't know him at all, but that he's “our Felix.” There's this affection and generosity towards the artist. 

You talk about a publication of his that you say is a new model, and then you very tenderly, almost, critique it. You write that “when the culture foregrounds something, it is because the thing is needed. And that one has the sense that he was the artist that everyone in the early 1990s was waiting for: articulate, bright, clean, and a nice looking guy. Felix was the artist of color whom curators and critics buzzed into corridors of power while the angry torture issue wielding others were told to go around to the service entrance or wait by the cloak room.”

And then writing about the anthology, you say that those who write about his work tend not to discuss his relationship to multicultural or identity art. They simply repeat that he was careful in his practice to avoid being labeled but that they don't really consider that the space in which those supposedly reductive categories aimed to open up. And I was really interested to read that. 

I wanted to ask you what you think the culture needs from artists right now. What the culture you think is fore-grounding, and also how artists can navigate those corridors of power without being co-opted.

Glenn Ligon:  Hmm. Big question. 

Well, there are a couple of things about that Felix essay. There's some little jokes in there. The quote about him being clean, articulate, and a nice looking guy is what Biden said about Barack Obama. This is the acceptable face of Blackness, Barack Obama. Which was a problematic statement because certainly, there were other politicians perfectly qualified to run for President. They had just never been platformed the way Obama had been. So, for Biden to say, “Oh, he's the only one,” was problematic. 

But also, I just think that Felix threaded a careful line in terms of he didn't want his practice to be reduced in some ways. Which is interesting to think about. Is Felix a Cuban artist? Because it was this moment of multiculturalism, it was a moment when artists of color were expected to perform certain kinds of identities and Felix's work, in some ways, refuses that in the same way that it refuses, in some ways, the performance of gayness, queerness. 

I remember Felix in some interview talking about a show he had at Washington D.C. at the Hirshhorn Museum. And it was this moment when there's this outrage about gay artists, queer artists having shows and getting federal tax dollars for it. And Felix says, “Oh yeah. And then they come to my show and all they see is like two clocks hanging on the wall, or two mirrors.” There's nothing to talk about. 

Of course there is a lot to talk about but it's not coded in a way that can be used in these very simplistic, “Oh, look, ‘queer art, two men kissing.’ It's like no, two clocks on the wall called [Untitled] Perfect Lovers.” 

Charlotte Burns: His show's in DC right now, and it's not been critiqued in the same way…

Glenn Ligon: Right. Because there's nothing to say: it's a string of lights. It's a paper stack. It doesn't reduce itself to easy readings or easy parodies. So, it is very interesting that that work is at a museum where the director just quit.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Glenn Ligon: Forced out, some would say, by the Trump administration. It's the same museum [laughs] that Felix’s show had his work. 

Charlotte Burns: It's the same museum and the same work. I know. Thinking about that, reading it again in preparation for this was so interesting. 

And, I read with such admiration in the writing is that you move from what seems like an homage to then the moments of almost ambiguous blankness in the work, that is a kind of critique of saying nothing allows a projection. And the times when there's a lack of specificity in that work and how artists thread that needle, how Felix threads that needle.

Glenn Ligon: Well, I think one of the things that you talked about, Felix's generosity, and one of the things that prompted me to title the essay “My Felix”, was that generosity in that you could go to our hardware store or office supply store and buy two clocks and put them on your wall and you would have a Felix.

And I knew many people who had done that, who had a paper stack, in their house or, had done a version of Felix work as a homage. And the fact that Felix's paper stacks were meant to be taken, meant for the viewer to take home. Felix talks about seeing kids take off of one of his paper stack pieces and saying, “Oh,  for many of them, it's the first art they've ever owned.”
And that kind of generosity is interesting to me and subversive in some ways. Like usually the museum, you don't get to touch art. Felix said touch it. You don't get to take it home. Felix says take it home. It makes the museum have to navigate, perpetually, what it means to have a piece by the artist. The stacks have to be reprinted so that the more viewers take them, they have to be reprinted. So, the institution is always engaged in the stewardship of the piece. It's not just like, “Oh, it's here, we own it, and that's that”. 

So, there are many ways that his work has been inspiring. But you asked a question about what's demanded of artists at this moment and it's a complicated moment. And I think artists are responding to it in different ways. One way I would say, this is not a demand on the artist, but something I've noticed, particularly of artists of color, is their generosity around setting up institutions, foundations, residency programs. 

So, I'm thinking of Denniston Hill, started by Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer. I'm thinking of Mark Bradford's Art + Practice. I'm thinking of NXTHVN, Titus Kaphar. [Indistinct] is setting up a residency program in on the continent in Africa. Michael Armitage, the painter, also setting up a residency program. 

And it's fascinating to me. These are relatively young artists and I think they have the sense of service, of a necessity that needs to be filled. And they're successful enough in their career that they feel like they can put their own resources into making these things happen, for making these programs for other artists. So, I think that's a response to a moment, not a demand. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Glenn Ligon: Nobody says you have to do this, but I think that is a response to a need, and artists being generous with their resources and showing a sort of commitment to younger generations of artists, too. 

Charlotte Burns: I think the key word there is ‘need’. To identify the need. Something I've been thinking a lot about with those models, which truly are generous and generative and innovative, thinking of two things really. A lot of the growth of those organizations or entities or spaces was because of market conditions that have been really specific to the past couple of generations. There has been an unprecedented growth in the contemporary market, so artists have used their own power to create new models. And essentially it's a response to the failure of the art world or the art industry that they operate in, that they've seen that need, that they've seen those gaps and created those things. 

And I wonder about the sustainability of that going forward because of two things.

One, the art market isn't in that moment now and two, the art industry, rather than reacting to artists creating these brilliant institutions essentially, by supporting them in a more robust way by providing another layer underneath them is just going, “Oh wow, that's great. That's innovative. Well done. Off you go.” Rather than saying, “Okay, how do we help you sustain this? How do we build another layer underneath this to make this something that you don't have to carry in addition to your artistic practice?”

Glenn Ligon:  Right. Yeah. It's a complicated space to operate in. I think that you're right, as the fortunes in the art market rise and fall—right now everyone's fortune is falling a bit—it is a difficult situation for artists who started organizations with their own resources to sustain that.

And I would say there's a difference between something like what Lauren Halsey is doing in Los Angeles, which is more community-focused, because I think she thinks of it as part of her artistic practice. And I think other things like Denniston Hill or Mark Bradford's Art + Practice are different from what they do as artists. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. 

Glenn Ligon: Do you know what I mean? 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. 

Glenn Ligon: So, that is maybe one distinction. 

But, these organizations have also tapped into the philanthropic world. They write for grants from foundations. And that's another difficulty they're gonna have to navigate because foundations have shifted their priorities. I'm on several boards of nonprofits, and I've seen it over the last year or two, that the shift in priorities in terms of funding, the sort of the sun-setting of certain kinds of funding initiatives. 

And so, in a way, artists have to be professional non-profit administrators to navigate this field because it is not sustainable, as you said, for the work to be totally financing these organizations. It just puts too much pressure on the artists to produce work that sells to fund something else, rather than…

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Glenn Ligon: …do the work you wanna make.

So, it is a tough moment. It is a tough moment.

Charlotte Burns: Can you speak a little more to the philanthropy side of things? I know you're on several boards, like you say. How have you experienced that shifting of priorities?

Glenn Ligon:  Well, I think partially, it's coming from the artists themselves. 

I'm on the [Robert] Rauschenberg [Foundation] board and we had an artist council, and the artist council had their own funding, so they could decide what organizations they wanted to fund, outside of any approval by the rest of the board. 

And that was an amazing thing because rarely do artists get in the position of actually giving out money. They're usually in advisory capacity in relationship to these foundations. So, this was set up by Kathy Halbreich, who had retired from MoMA and became director of the Rauschenberg Foundation. She set up this artist council. 

But the artists themselves were funding things like housing initiatives, Moms 4 Housing, an organization in Oakland that had taken over abandoned housing in the city and claimed it because there was a dire need for housing. So, why are these empty houses just sitting there? 

So, that was one of the initiatives that the artist council funded. That's not art, [laughs] but I realized just listening to their conversations that social justice, Native rights, water issues like Flint, that's the subject of art for them. So, they weren't making those distinctions that maybe I, as an older generation, was making between art and not art.

Think about an artist like Pope.L, who did so much around water contamination in Flint, Michigan.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Glenn Ligon: That was art. That wasn't social work, he was making art. But making art that had a very direct impact on the lives of people in Flint, through the sale of work to fund certain initiatives there. So, I think it's really interesting that those divisions between things for younger artists aren't so rigid.

Charlotte Burns: Has that changed your practice? Has that changed the way you see your art?

Glenn Ligon: It's made me want to be more philanthropic. It's made me realize that the boards I'm on, I have to dive into. One is a dance company, one is a nonprofit in LA and I'm still on the Rauschenberg board. So, just to be more committed to what it means to be of service through that. And Rauschenberg is a grant-giving organization, so there's a direct correlation between my participation and the grants that we give out. 

So, yeah, it's made me more aware of the rigidity in some ways, of my thinking about what's art and what's not art. 

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Glenn Ligon: And I think that younger artists don't have that kind of rigidity. But also I think they're, yeah, they're just interested in how to be a whole person as an artist. 

I have a friend in Canada, Stephen Andrews, who says, “Oh, when people ask me what I do and I say, I'm an artist, a blank look comes on their face because most people don't know what artists do.” But then he says, “I've started to say, ‘I'm a citizen. I use my artwork to talk about issues that citizens need to think about, like democracy, government, fairness, equity.’” 

Charlotte Burns: That's interesting that you would create that distinction in your own art because you've written about other artists. 

Julie Mehretu, when you wrote an essay about her art, you said “an artist, after all, is a citizen, not only of the nation in which they reside, but of the world. And as a citizen, Mehretu has seen it as her duty over the course of her career to witness and to act.” And I noted that down because, in that same essay, you quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his “refusal to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.” And, because you are a witness to history in your work and have been through these decades. So, it's interesting that you would see that rigid delineation. Because I have a note here being like, “Ask Glenn about citizens”, since it's there in your work.

[Laughter] 

And so, yeah. I wanna ask you about that. Where is that delineation in your mind? Is it about being a witness? Is it about being a participant? Where is that delineation? 

Glenn Ligon: I think it comes from listening to and learning from younger artists and realizing that in some ways the field in which I operate is small compared to the field in which they want to operate. 

Not everybody can start a nonprofit, not everyone can do a Denniston Hill or a NXTHVN or Art + Practice, so that's not in my personality. But I think what I'm talking about is that commitment to, on a broad level, reaching out to the community around…

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Glenn Ligon: …them as artists, being engaged internationally with issues, not just locally. 

I don't know, their sense of politics, their sense of engagement, it just feels different than mine. But as you said, I am interested in and engaged with history, and maybe that's why someone like Baldwin comes up as a touchstone for me so often because he had this sort of particular kind of engagement with history and the moment and the necessity to be a witness. 

I just saw last night a concert by Meshell Ndegeocello at the venue on the waterfront in New York City, and it was dedicated to James Baldwin and it was called, No More Water: the Gospel of James Baldwin. Fantastic title. 

Charlotte Burns: That is such a great title.

Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] We're just in the fire [Laughs] now. No more water. We're just in the fire. 

But thinking about James Baldwin as this fiery critic of America, and masculinity and all sorts of things. So, he has been a touchstone for a model for a kind of citizenship for me. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: During the pandemic, you tackled Baldwin's essay, “Stranger in the Village” in its entirety, making a vast 45-foot painting using that complete essay rather than fragments, and I was interested that you said you'd done that because of the pandemic, that because coworkers in your studio space didn't come into the studio, so you'd had this vast space.

So, thinking about disappearance, that when those coworkers disappeared, the work  was able to come forward. And you said, “I feel like I'm at the end of this investigation. It's taken me all these many years to get to this point to see if I can tackle all of Baldwin.” And I read that and I thought, do you really feel like you're done with Baldwin and that essay, you're at the end of that investigation? Do you feel like you are? It's been such an important touchstone for you through these many years. Did that painting get you to somewhere, or do you feel like there's more to be done with that text?

Glenn Ligon:  Oh, no, there's definitely more. Never say it's over. And in fact, I've done two of those paintings, and the third one is on its way for a show at the National Gallery [of Art] in Washington, eventually. 

But, thinking about Julie Mehretu again, we did a talk a couple of years ago at the Walker Art Center around her retrospective. Julie asked me to be in dialogue with her, and at the beginning of that talk, the curator of the show did an introduction of Julie's work and did a land acknowledgement as many organizations were doing, acknowledging the Native land that the museum sat on. And as we were talking, Julie and I, I was thinking about that land acknowledgement and realizing like Julie, in particular bodies of paintings, starts with an image of a conflict: Tarhir Square, Aleppo, Ferguson. Those images are the ground on which she makes her marks. 

So, it starts with this abstracted image of this kind of protest history. And then she starts making marks on top of that. And I thought, “Oh, that's so interesting that the world, those conflicts, are the ground on which she makes her paintings.”

Extrapolating from that, I was thinking Baldwin in some ways, particularly that essay “Stranger in the Village” is for me, after so many years, like the ground that I make my work on top of. It's so embedded and I'm so identified with it that, in a way, it's become a way to get somewhere else, using the text as a ground.

And it's very important that it is a ground for me, that it structures kind of how I'm making a painting. But it's not so important to me that every single word is visible, that the text of Baldwin's essay is there visible in the painting, because the text of Baldwin's essays are available in the world.

And also, I guess because, when I first started—I've told this story many times—started thinking about Baldwin in the ‘80s, I was in a program called the Whitney Independent Study Program here in New York City and we had all this complicated reading of psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralist theory, and also reading [Jacques] Lacan and [Jean-Martin] Charcot and all these things and it was just head bangers. 

So, I was talking to the person I was sharing my studio space with that, because this material was new for me, I was having a lot of difficulty with it. And as a palette cleanser, I was reading some James Baldwin essays and she turned to me and said, “James Baldwin, who's that?” And it wasn't a shock that she'd never read James Baldwin, it's just she'd never heard the name. But she knew who Charcot was. She knew who, you know, [Michel] Foucault was. She knew who all the -caults were, but she had never heard of James Baldwin. 

And so, in some ways, that sparked this idea of like, well, you've never heard who Baldwin is, or Zora Neale Hurston, or… I'm gonna make my work about that. That will be the work.

Charlotte Burns: Make that visible.

Glenn Ligon: Yeah, make that visible, but in a complicated way. And part of the project was making that visible, but we're in a different moment. Baldwin is everywhere now, you know, so we have a different relationship to those texts. 

Charlotte Burns: What's that been like for you as an artist to watch? Because for you as a person it's such a profoundly meaningful text. You've spoken about as a young boy what reading meant to you. It was this world where you could travel and you could go somewhere else. And then obviously discovering Baldwin in college through your life, it's been a constant companion. And then as an artist, it's become your ground. I guess you've borne witness to Baldwin becoming a bigger part of the cultural consciousness over the past couple of decades really.

Glenn Ligon:  Well, it's been amazing in some ways because it just means that there are more people thinking about him and more people working on it in scholarly ways. So, that's great. 

There's a whole trove of correspondence of Baldwin's from various people that's embargoed. There's some date in the future where it'll be opened up to the public.

So, there'll be more Baldwin when those letters get opened up. 

To think about Baldwin in terms of film, there's only been one film, Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk, that's the only major motion picture that's been made out of Baldwin's writing. So, there's a lot more work to do.

But I think there's a lot more work to do because Baldwin was such a rich source of knowledge and an amazing writer who keeps speaking to the moment, even though some of those essays were written 30, 40, 50 years ago. 

This performance I went to last night with Meshell Ndegeocello, someone was reading Baldwin quotes throughout the concert and people were cheering wildly. These are things that have been written 50, 60 years ago, but they still spoke to the moment. So, he's amazingly prophetic in that way. But also just a beautiful writer too. So, it is a pleasure to think about him again.

Charlotte Burns: What is it about that essay, particularly that essay—I know a lot of his work is important to you—that you return to.

Glenn Ligon: Well, I suppose, initially it appealed to me because I could map my own biography onto that essay. Baldwin in the ‘50s, going to a little Swiss village in the mountains to write a novel and says, for many of the villagers, he's the only Black person they've ever met. 

So, me [laughs], coming from the South Bronx to an elite private school, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with mostly white classmates, starting at that school at first grade and going through 12th grade, you know. Kids whose parents had duplexes filled with [Pablo] Picassos and [Marc] Chagalls and going off to tennis camp in the Canary Islands for the summer and all sorts of that, and me living in public housing in the South Bronx.

So, that sense of being an outsider, of being a stranger, of being a curiosity, I think when I got to Baldwin's essay, and that would've been probably in college though—maybe it's possible I read it in high school—that it was a real revelation, that somebody understood and could articulate all of the complexity around those kinds of positions.

Charlotte Burns: Do you find that as you've grown older, the texts have grown older with you? Because you were a young man when you read them. Do you find that, as your position in life has changed and your emotional space, do you find that Baldwin has grown with you, that you've seen new things in the text?

Glenn Ligon: Oh, definitely new things in the text, but also new ways to approach the text too. Right now I'm making a series of drawings that I'll be showing in an exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum at the end of the year that are literally rubbings from the surface of Baldwin paintings. So, [laughs] it's a new way to approach the text. Talk about ground. The text has become literally the ground on which, like a gravestone rubbing almost, except, they don't look like gravestone rubbings, but yeah, in a way I found a new way to approach that text, literally using it as a ground.

Charlotte Burns: I love that. That's amazing. 

I wanted to talk to you about a quote from the essay that's really stuck with me, in general, but it came to have a new meaning as I was thinking of your work. He says in the essay, “people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. And anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster.” 

And something I wanted to talk to you about is history in your work. What I mean is the way that you find specific details in your writing and in your art and in your curating, across your practice; you have a gift for finding the perfect detail that captures a historical moment, whether that's in your writing and your mom calling Hip-hop pioneers, “hoodlums, scratching up perfectly good records”, or your recollection of 9/11, which is finding yourself directing traffic on Flatbush Avenue pressed into service by a cop who needed a break to use the bathroom. Or, your Million Man March paintings, which is a multi-layered work, ostensibly about a historic march organized by Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, to address the visibility of Black men in the country—Black women were not encouraged to attend that march. And in the images you were looking for their absence or their disappearance, but you were also thinking, at once about this specific moment in time, but the repetition of these moments in time and you said, “Black people gather every 20 or 30 years at the heart of this nation to assert our presence here. It's doomed to fail because we keep having to do this.” 

And you write about that sort of repetition, that loop of history in your essay “On Walking in Memphis” the presence of the past in the present, and an art student who says this to you, who wants to think about all this stuff, and you have these collectors telling you about how they marched in the Civil Rights Movement or even when you're watching The Wire and you talk about how victories are fleeting because the playing field is not level. 

We're talking now in the summer 2025, and that Baldwin quote, like you say, feels so prophetic. And I'm sure it felt prophetic at all those times you were writing. 

So the question is specific: How do you find in your writing and in your art and in your curating—I'm thinking also of the show you just did in Cambridge—that very specific detail. Is it an editing process? Is it an instinct for looking at the specific thing?

Is it a filtering process? Like how do you get to that detail in the text, that text itself in the work or the image that you want to abstract, or if you're curating even the absence of an image; in Cambridge you took away a work and showed the wallpaper behind.

How do you figure out which is the detail that's going to reveal absence or major historical moments to us and how the narrative around them is something we might want to question.

Glenn Ligon:  [Laughs] Ooh, big question. 

And, well, first I would say that often I don't know what the work is about until I start making it. So, I have to go through a process to figure out what I'm actually interested in. And that's true with everything: writing, curatorial projects, making artwork. It's a kind of thinking about all these different things and then chiseling away. If I'm talking about the kind of Michelangelo, what is it, the cliche about, like he chiseled the block of stone to reveal the statue within, sort of like that. 

But maybe it's more mysterious than that. Maybe it's just kind of something sticks in my head out of all the research that I've done or all the essays I've read and whatever, the images I've looked at and I say, “Oh, that's interesting,” and I keep thinking about it. It's like, well, if I keep thinking about it, maybe that's, that's the thing. 

So, your example, when I did the show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, I just happened to walk through the galleries about two and a half years before the show actually happened. And they were changing out a display of paintings and so this amazing gold wallpaper that was 100 years old, that was in one of the galleries, was bare. And where the paintings had been was bright gold because the paintings themselves had blocked the light, and then you would see this bright gold square on a kind of faded gold background because the sun had faded the rest of the wallpaper. And I just thought, “Oh, that's beautiful.” That's all. [Laughs] Just thought, “Oh, that's so beautiful.” And they were like, “Oh yeah, we, you know, we’re a museum, we have to change that wall.” I was like, “Why would you change that wallpaper? It's beautiful.”

But that stuck in my head because I thought it was super interesting to see the outlines of past installations in this wallpaper, but also to realize that there's some beauty in things that are normally not looked at. So nobody really thought about that gold wallpaper. But I just thought it was beautiful. 

And then I realized, like, it is very cheeky to ask in the early Renaissance galleries, which that was, to ask them to leave off all these paintings. We took down like 12 paintings and just put up one painting in its place and focus on the wallpaper. 

And I think it was just a way of saying to a viewer, we imagine the way that institutions hang their collections is the way it has to be, but it doesn't have to be like that. It's just conventions that we've grown used to, that's all. [Laughs] And it sometimes takes an artist to come in there and shake it up sometimes.

Charlotte Burns: I like something you said about curating that it's something you do outta necessity, but when we had our pre-chat, you also said to me that you have strategic ignorance, where you can play dumb as an artist about things that curators could not like shipping costs and what works you are and are not allowed to remove, which I thought was really great. Because essentially what you're talking about is freedom and where you found freedom in your practice. 

And so could you talk a little bit more about that? How much freedom there is in curating for you and what that's brought to your practice overall? 

Glenn Ligon:  Well, talking about, sort of, sense of permission that younger artists feel around their work and their practice, being different than mine. My first instinct, walking into the Fitzwilliam Museum and seeing that empty bay with a beautiful wallpaper is like, “Oh, I should just make that part of my show. Empty out this whole bay, but they won't let me do that.” And I was talking to a younger artist, we did a podcast, it was Rene Matić, and they were kind of aghast because they don't think like that. They don't think about what the institution wants. They think about what they want, first. 

So that was very interesting because I felt how internalized systems were for me, and so in some ways, doing a curatorial project is about unlearning things, unlearning the ways that I think about institutions or museum display, and working with these institutions to change things. 

And at the Fitzwilliam, there were very subtle things. I just, I wanted the show, it was a show about rearranging displays of their permanent collection. But I decided, “Oh, I wanna write my own wall labels. The curators can write their wall labels too. We'll just put them side by side.” 

But what I'm thinking about as an artist when I fill up a gallery with 500 Dutch still life paintings from the 17th, 18th centuries is different than what the curator might be thinking about when they do that. And in fact, my wall label, the title of it was “Trouble”, because I said, something like, a room full of flowers, how nice. But in these images, Dutch still lifes, we see the spoils of empire. These tulips, these butterflies, these plants are coming from colonial holdings. They are the spoils of empire. 

So, as much as we admire the skill of the artists painting these beautiful flowers and plants and animals, we also have to acknowledge that these are records of conquest. Now I hadn't seen that really on the wall labels before, so that was kind of what I wanted to do in that situation.

But I've forgotten what you asked me. You asked me a big question and I've forgotten the specifics of it.

Charlotte Burns: It was about freedom and how it's changed your practice and you’re answering it beautifully, about internalizing institutional values and trying to change them. And the example you're giving is really interesting because every review I've read of the Fitzwilliam show quotes that wall label that you've written and how people would never look at a Vermeer in the same way ever again.

Glenn Ligon: I took that from the writer, Teju Cole, too, who wrote a beautiful review of Vermeer show, that was, maybe two years ago, and talks about this very issue of trouble, and so I was extrapolating in some ways from his way of looking at this works and his deep scholarship.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wanna ask you some questions about institutional values, but sort of detouring past a story that you wrote about getting lunch with your mom, that I really liked, where you were walking to get grilled cheese lunch with your mom who worked as a therapist aide at the Bronx Psychiatric Center. Since it was an outpatient facility, you said half the people you ran into on the walk were being treated at the hospital and you would play a game. You would guess whether someone was a patient or employee when that person shouted “Ligon” at your mom and you were never very good at that game.

Reading that, you said with such economy, so much about institutions and their values and about what society thinks is acceptable or not, and how we can tell, whether people fit in or don't fit in, and what that says about you and how you felt you fitted in or didn't fit in, as a young person.

Some of the things you listed in the 2021 essay “Advice for Young Artists” are comments that institutional leaders, directors, and curators of museums have said to you and they're truly appalling comments. And you write that some of these things you would hope would be easier to navigate as you gain more success, but are not necessarily.

Are you ever tempted to say who speaks to you in that way? Is that going in the autobiography that you mentioned in the front of the book?

Glenn Ligon: Oh, that autobiography’ll never get written. It's too much work. Writing is as hard as making artwork. I'm writing an essay for Hurvin Anderson, for his exhibition at the Tate. It's only 1,000 words, and I've been working on it for three months. So, there’s not going to be an autobiography. 

Charlotte Burns: But 1,000 is harder than 10,000 words. That’s…

Glenn Ligon: Okay! 

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: Economy is harder than abundance, when it comes to writing.

Glenn Ligon: Right. 

Well, I, you know, it may have been in that essay, but maybe in another place where I say, before you curse out the curator that hung your work upside down at the group show, remember that they might end up running a museum someday. And that, that is true. [Laughs] That has happened where it's like, thinking the long game here. You never know who that person is gonna be and how helpful they will be to you in the future. So, before you curse them out, just think about it. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, that's a very good point. 

You did, politely critique the Met[roplitan Museum of Art] and SFMOMA when they posted your work during the Black Lives Matter movement without permission, and you were interviewed about it in the Brooklyn Rail and said it was “what the kids call virtue signaling”, noting that the Met had put up an image as if there was a vast holding of your work, and they were so committed to it when they only owned a handful of prints. 

Beyond just asking permission, in your experience—and your work is collected by institutions all over the world—what do you feel like genuine institutional support of artists actually looks like and feels like?

Glenn Ligon: Well, I think it's about a commitment to the work over time. Not just, “We bought one thing and we're one and done. We bought a painting of yours 20 years ago, so we're done. And we put it up every couple of years just to signal that we have something in the collection.” 

So I think it's that, but also I think scholarship and resources too. At this point in my career, if a museum's doing a show, there’s got to be a catalogue. There's got to be some institutional buy-in. There's got to be some talk about an acquisition if they don't have holdings of my work. So, I don't want to be in the position that

I find a lot of times artists of color are where we have to curate our own shows at major institutions, or we're told crazy things like, “Oh, we don't have money to build drywall.” I was like, “Well, [Laughs] you have money to build a whole new wing of the museum [Laughs]. How do you not have money to build a drywall?” 

But this doesn't end. This is not like ancient history. This wasn't when I was a young artist that these things get said to me. So, it's a constant struggle, I think, so… 

Charlotte Burns: How do you navigate that? I mean, your essay was titled “Advice for Young Artists”, but I guess it's “Advice for Artists”?

Glenn Ligon: Yeah. It's advice for artists basically. Because it doesn't seem to…you don't ever get to the point where you get to just relax. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Glenn Ligon: Well, I think you negotiate that by making microclimates, finding the curators who respect your work and think through it with you. I think a perfect example of that is Rashid Johnson's show at the Guggenheim is lovingly curated by Naomi Beckwith. And I heard that she said in a talk, “Oh yeah, I've worked in the show for three years—plus the 16 years before that that Rashid and I have been talking about his work.” That's how you get loving care in an institution, is to have that kind of advocacy for the work and deep dialogue. 

Charlotte Burns: Do you have a dream curator or institution you'd like to have a big exhibition with?

Glenn Ligon: No, I mean, there are lots of curators that I have loved working with, Thelma Golden obviously. But in terms of institutions, I realized that different institutions can do different things. 

The show that I had at the Fitzwilliam, for example, was perfect because they had a comprehensive collection from Egyptian antiquities to Rembrandt’s to modernist paintings, et cetera. So, to be able to work with that kind of collection was great. And to work with it unexpectedly. 

You know, Glenn's interested in Dutch still live paintings? I was like, yeah, Glenn is actually, Glenn is interested in Chinese porcelain? It was like, yeah! Glenn is interested in Chinese porcelain. So, that was a great opportunity to work with the breadth of things that I'm interested in. 

But, big institutional shows allow you to make big statements, so that's a very different kind of show. If you're doing a retrospective and it's 8,000 sq. ft., it's a different show. So I like working both ways. 

I like working in smaller institutions or most bespoke, more focused projects. The show at Aspen is one gallery, one floor, of the museum and is focused mostly on works on paper. And it's not a show I've ever really done before, so I'm very excited to. It’s sort of an expanded notion of works on paper, but it's a show I'm really excited to work on, because it's the first time we've done it. 

Charlotte Burns: Are you a deadline driven artist? Do you work towards exhibitions? Is that the way that your practice moves through?

Glenn Ligon: Inevitably, one does work towards exhibitions, but I don't like to work like that. Sometimes you need artificial deadlines just to get things done. But I don't necessarily work the best under that kind of pressure. I tend to be slow in terms of making the work and thinking it through and changing my mind and editing. So, I need more time.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. 

One thing I wanted to ask you about was a recent work you installed on the High Line, the Untitled (America/Me), which takes the 2008 America neon, which seemed like, kind of ambivalent comment on that era's, optimism, the Obama era, and it crosses out several letters to just leave “me”. You made it in 2022 and I wanted to ask you what it was like to revisit your own work and what it was like to revisit that specific work? 

And also you spoke about neon being a material, and the word “America” being a material, and the idea of playing with a word we all think we know what it means. So, what that word means to you right now?

Glenn Ligon: Well, I think it means to me the sort of thing it meant to me when I first started making “American” neon. It says, we have this sort of notion of what we have an agreement on what America means, but clearly we don't. Current politics has shown us that. 

But also I think one of the strategies around that work in neon was to defamiliarize that word, to make it seem strange. To make it blink off and on in annoying ways, to invert it, to cover the neon with black paint. All these ways, strategies, of de-familiarizing this word that we think we know somehow. 

Jasper Johns: take an object, do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. So this is, take a word, do something to it, do something else to it. Do something else to it. 

So, when I was approached by the High Line to do this billboard project, I went back to not actually the work, I actually went back to a postcard I had sent someone. There was an invitation, I guess for show that had that 2008 America neon in it, and I just took that postcard and mailed it to a friend and crossed out all the letters of America and left the “m” and “e”. 

When I started thinking about that billboard I just happened to be at a dinner party at my friend's house, and I saw that little postcard I sent them that they very kindly kept and put in a frame, and I thought, “Oh, that's not bad.” [Laughs] So, I basically borrowed back my own work to make that billboard. 

But it's nice. Sometimes you don't know when you're making art, I guess. 

Charlotte Burns: I love that. 

Glenn Ligon: That was just a little postcard. I was like, “Oh, I'm just, oh, me! Hi!” 

Charlotte Burns: That's literally a gift from your past self, you know?

Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] Yes. And I like when things like that, you see things like that. I thought, “Huh, that's not bad.” But sometimes you need somebody to point it out. Like they put it in a frame.

Charlotte Burns: Literally put it in a frame.

Glenn Ligon: They put it in a frame, and I thought, “Oh, they think that's a piece of art.” Maybe it is, you know.

Charlotte Burns: And now it's an enormous installation in neon on the High Line sitting atop New York City.

Glenn Ligon:  Yes.

Charlotte Burns: Definitely made it to work of art status. 

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: It also is reminiscent of David Hammons’ Black Light, the idea of taking something, which is that sort of space of emptiness and making it familiar and unfamiliar.

I felt like we couldn't have a conversation and not talk about David Hammons, who I know has been such an influence on your work. You met him when you were an intern at the Studio Museum [in Harlem] in 1982, and you've said you always looked to David to think about how far one can go.

Can you talk about what you've learned from his approach to navigating the art world and how far one can go?

Glenn Ligon:  Well, I think David's a pirate. He doesn't settle in one port, so he famously said when he started having success, making body prints—these fantastic drawings he would make by greasing up his body, putting a graphite on and pressing it onto paper, and doing that with his body and other people's bodies. And he said once he became known for those, he stopped doing them, and I thought, “Oh, check that.” [Laughs] Check. [Laughs]

You know, once you stop learning from doing something, once people give you too much applause and acclaim for doing something, stop doing it. Because that's when you get trapped. That's when you become, “Oh, he's that artist that does body prints.”

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Glenn Ligon: So there's an irony in the art world of everybody loves that thing, until they're tired of it. “Oh, he just does body prints,” you know?

So, David was always out running that. But also David is just an artist who's not interested in institutional acclaim in the way that other artists are. So David Hammons is invited to do a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So the show he does is he gets them to put up a work by his mentor, Charles White, a fantastic teacher, draftsperson. And in that room is a [Leonardo] da Vinci drawing from not any old collection, Queen Elizabeth II’s collection. [Laughs] So he gets the museum to borrow that one, and I thought, “Genius.” They thought they were getting a David Hammons’ show, and that's what they got. Brilliant.

Charlotte Burns: Brilliant.

Glenn Ligon: But to be able to just work with institutions on your own terms or work with galleries on your own terms is amazing to me. 

I remember a show he had at a gallery in New York, and you walked in a very grand townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He had a lot of his tarp paintings, which I love.

Charlotte Burns: I remember that show.

Glenn Ligon:  Yeah. And in the doorway between rooms, this sort of archway between rooms, was just this piece of clear plastic hanging down from the arch. And I thought, “Is that a work?” A collector friend of David said, “No, David just got annoyed at them during installations. He just put that up to mess with them.” Just this random piece of plastic. 

[Laughter] 

And I love that impulse, just like, it's my work. I can play with it, I can play with you, I can play, I don't take this grand townhouse so seriously. I don't feel like you're doing me a favor showing my work, I'm gonna do what I want. So, that is always a model for me.

But also just his attentiveness to environment, the street. It makes it seem like I'm big friends with David. I've talked to him maybe an hour in my entire life, over 25 years. [Laughs] One hour. 

So, but he's been a deep influence. I admire the work so much, and I'm fortunate enough to live with a couple of things that I've acquired over the years, and hang on every word he says. 

Charlotte Burns: I love that. It makes so much sense that you have not pursued an intimate friendship with him because so much of your work, your art, and your writing shows such restraint and careful moderation and modulation between intimacy and distance. 

Glenn Ligon: I dunno. I just, I'm just scared of him, that's all. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: What do you think would happen? 

Glenn Ligon: Well, I have met him and he's been perfectly nice. I mean, I was in a restaurant in upstate New York and I was on the way to the bathroom and I hear this “Glenn”, and it's David Hammons sitting in a booth with a friend and I go over to say hello. 

And I guess I was gone from the table that I was sitting at so long they thought I had fainted or they came to look for me. And they're like, “Oh, he's talking to David Hammons. Oh, you must know David really well.” It's like, no. That half an hour was the most I've ever talked to David. And even though I had to pee really badly, I was waiting till he was done. The minute he was done, I was going to go pee. But before that I was not moving. Because that's the most I have ever talked to this man.

Charlotte Burns: Oh my gosh.

Glenn Ligon: And it was lovely. It was amazing.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: That's meeting a hero. [Laughs]

Glenn Ligon: Sometimes they disappoint. David never disappoints.

Charlotte Burns: That's so good to know. That's so good to know that there are wonderful things in this world. 

You also talk about the space that he creates of imagination. You have this beautiful passage in your 2004 essay on him, which also is the essay that launched your career as “an artist who writes”, as you put it, and you say, “it's hard to leave your body behind, especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face, but being heavy is a motherfucker. The question is how to remove weight, to move towards lightness as Hammons has done. How to do this while still acknowledging the particular history of a body that has been used, as Stuart Hall suggests, as if it were, and often was the only cultural capital we had.” And then you have this wonderful end in the final paragraph as you're closing, you say, “If Blackness is a construct, then we are all construction workers. And what Hammons has done is to provide the space in which Blackness can be constructed in light.” 

You revisit things often in your work. You come back to his work Concerto in Black and Blue and you say it later, it's a response to the post 9/11 melancholy, but also a meditation on Black space, and you connect it to projects like Rick Lowe's Project Row Houses and Theaster Gates’s work as examples of speculative geography that reimagine Blackness as chains of association, or acts of imagination. 

I wanted to ask you now how you see that work, because I know you revisit it, and how you see your work now and others, in creating or imagining that space.

Glenn Ligon: Well, I think there's a lot of talk amongst my peers or artists about Black space and what that might mean. What that might look like. And I think Concerto in Black and Blue, which was from 2002, right after 9/11, was in New York City. Imagine walking into a sort of cavernous, I don't know, 20, 30,000 square feet of dark space, in the wake of 9/11. That was terrifying, in some ways. We mistrusted each other. 

And so to walk into David's installation, which was just dark, empty rooms. You're given this little blue flashlight to walk around with. You saw other flashlights off in the distance of other people walking around. There was nothing there. 

And so this idea of this Blackness, Concerto in Black and Blue, which is a great title because the blue being you walking around with your flashlights, but also, what did I do to be so black and blue, from the Louis Armstrong song. All these associations with those two colors. As a friend once said, David can make a masterpiece with two words, black and blue. And he did. 

So, I think, for me, that was a super important piece because it, without naming something specifically, was full of so many possibilities. And so, if Black space is anything, it is that, the space of possibilities, without a kind of specific naming. 

And I think other artists deal with this too. I think Arthur Jafa's work, I think, deals with, Torkwase Dyson. I think there are a lot of artists who are thinking through the politics, poetics of this notion of Black space. 

And so Hammons has been super important, but also I just, you know, Hammons said, “The less I do, the more of an artist I am.” And so, that's a sort of instruction manual for future artists too. Do less. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. I love that. 

Talking of doing less, you said there probably won't be a follow up to the book Distinguishing Piss from Rain, which is the collected and collated writings and interviews. Although you, and we briefly touched on this, you have been telling people you're gonna write an autobiography. What it's about, you're not sure, although you said it's a perverse spin on Toni Morrison's statement, that if there's a book you really wanna read but hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

So, what if you wrote an autobiography? What is it you want to read?

Glenn Ligon: [Laughs] Well, I think, yeah, it's hard to know like what its focus would be, because a lot of my writing work is autobiographical. The autobiographical is the touchstone, and it's a way for me to get into whatever work I'm writing about. So, that's always been a strain where I sort of start with an autobiographical kind of story and use that as a way to talk about a relationship to a particular artwork or whatever. 

So I guess it would be an exploration of how I became an artist, growing up in the Bronx, despite my mom's comment about rappers, being hoodlums, scratching up perfectly good records in the parking lot. What influence, talk about use of words and transforming words. What is rap, but that, the transformation of words, the emphasis on current events and history. 

But also graffiti, which I don't think was an influence at the time. I saw it every day on the way to school, on the subways. I grew up in the Bronx in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Nothing but graffiti on the trains then, but it didn't occur to me that my work would be so much involved with text. But in a way, graffiti set the model for that, text as art. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. 

It was amazing to read that when you wrote about [Thomas] Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument and how if you'd have been a kid and that had been there, would that have changed your life any more than riding the subway and, seeing the graffiti and then later seeing [Jean-Michel] Basquiat and that kind of link or that permission that you felt when you saw Basquiat’s work to use text and what it is about art and life. Which brings you back again, I guess to what you were talking about with the younger generation.

Glenn Ligon: Yeah. 

Well, also just thinking about growing up and we are going to continue with the autobiographical strain, Gordon Matta-Clark was cutting out floors and walls in tenements in housing around where I lived, but I didn't know that. I didn't know who Gordon Matta-Clark was, didn't encounter that work. I see it now, Bronx Floors, so it is amazing to think that was going on at the same time, but more immediately was the birth of Hip-hop and graffiti, those were the influences. 

But I also, as I said, I was going to this private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with kids who had Picassos in their houses. So, that was an influence too. I was seeing that work. And I also went to the Metropolitan Museum, after school drawing classes at the Metropolitan. So, I have notebooks from when I was a teenager of drawings of [Henri] Matisse paintings, French landscapes, hundreds of drawings from paintings at the Met, and maybe that was more about I wanted to go to France [Laughs] and I was from working class family. We didn't have money to travel like that, but I traveled by looking at the paintings, drawing the paintings. That was a way of traveling. 

Still love Matisse. Still love [Paul] Cézanne. Still love [Claude] Monet.

Charlotte Burns: And what's amazing, if you go to those places, is that you see, they were just drawing what they saw. 

I remember the first time I ever traveled to the south of France, they have those kind of little billboards.

Glenn Ligon: Right. 

Charlotte Burns: And they have like, “This is a pointillist painting.This is where they sat.” You're like, “Oh my God. It actually just looks like that.” Like, I thought it was, I thought it was a leap of the imagination, but you're like, “Oh, they just drew what they saw.” Like it actually is. It just looked very different than my local landscape.

Glenn Ligon: Maybe it's come to look like that. What's the Gertrude Stein, I don't know if this has happened or actually happened or not, but when Picasso paints her portrait and she says, but it doesn't look like me, and he says, “It will.” So, maybe we've just…

Charlotte Burns: It's true. 

Glenn Ligon: …looked at the paintings enough that the landscape looks like the paintings rather than the paintings look like the landscapes.

Charlotte Burns: It’s true. I think you’re right. 

I want to ask you a little bit about the future. I'm thinking here of your essay, “Remember the Revolution” and again, this is touching on your autobiography. You write about your Uncle Donald's and then your own pair of white vinyl boots and you link them to the 1974 Sun Ra film, Space Is the Place.

And you say—this is in 2010 when you were writing this—that, “No one believes in the future anymore, but we still believe in representations and representatives of it.” And you elaborate, “perhaps what we believe in most about the future are those like Sun Ra who truly believe in it”. And the final words of that essay are, “I remember the future.”

Do you think that the future belongs back in 1974? Like, thinking of the future now in 2025, do you have faith in the future now? If you were writing your autobiography, is it still linked to that kind of promise of those white vinyl boots? 

Glenn Ligon: I don't think it's linked specifically to that, but I think in general, Afrofuturism was about this—I mean, what became termed Afrofuturism that, not that Sun Ra called what he was doing Afrofuturism—but I think some notion that our fate as Black people is not tied to what we see around us. You know, better to be from Saturn and the future than to be from America at that particular moment. And I would argue that's probably true now too. 

Also, it's very hard to articulate what we want. It's easy to say what we don't want.

Charlotte Burns: Mm.

Glenn Ligon: It's very hard to articulate what we want. So, I think that's partially the project of artists, is to start to articulate, speculate about what we might want the future to look like. Because we know what we don't want, but what do we want? What is our vision for it? And that's harder, harder to know, harder to know. 

So, I think that's one of the jobs that artists give themselves is to imagine, try to imagine the future. Try to imagine what we want. Think about what we want the future to be. 

I think.
Charlotte Burns: I mean, I certainly think your work does that. You create a space for new thinking. Every time I read an essay of yours, I have to reread it about seven times because I think I understand it and then I'm like, “Wait, no, there's another thing there.” And over time I read it differently because the layering and the legibility of it shifts so much. Same with your art. 

But for you, what if you were defining that future that you wanted, what does that look like?

Glenn Ligon: Oh, I dunno. [Laughs] I dunno. I think I have to start making the art to figure that out. I'm, I figure things out by making the work. So, it's hard to define the future. I just have to work…

Charlotte Burns: In the present.

Glenn Ligon: …on it. Work in the present to start thinking about the future.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So let me ask you some ‘what ifs’ as we round out. 

What if your younger self could see you now, what would surprise them most?

Glenn Ligon: I think my younger self would be surprised that I still live with doubts, but my older self would say, that's how you keep going. That's how you keep fresh, feel like you haven't accomplished something, so you keep going to accomplish that thing.

Charlotte Burns: What if you had unlimited time and resources to create, what would you do?

Glenn Ligon: Ooh. Maybe I'd write that autobiography.

Charlotte Burns: [Laughs] And what if you could go back and give your younger self just one piece of advice when you were starting out, what would it be? 

Glenn Ligon:  I think follow the instincts, even if they seem nonsensical because that is your work—your instincts, and the trajectories that you wanna follow. It's a lesson I learned from my painting teacher in college. She was talking to a colleague of hers, and this conversation was overheard by a friend of mine and she said, “Oh, I have this student in my class, his name is Glenn. He's making a still life. He painted the shelf, then he painted the bowl, then he painted the fruit in the bowl. I've never had someone paint a work like that before.” 

And it's the first time I realized that the way I did something, which was different than how anyone else did, was actually valuable. That is the first, literally the first time I realized like, “Oh, I have a way of doing things and I shouldn't try to do things the way other people do them. I should hang on to this way I have of seeing because that is my work, that's my sensibility, that's what will take me forward.” So.

Charlotte Burns: So, be more you, but do less as an artist.

[Laughter]

Glenn Ligon: Exactly. Exactly. 

Well, it took a, took Hammons a long time to do that, to be less of an artist. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. 

Glenn Ligon: I think Concerto in Black and Blue was his masterpiece because it was doing so much with so little.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, sort of like you have to get to the top of the mountain and then go back down the other side.

Glenn Ligon: Yes.

Charlotte Burns: So what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and what's the one that motivates you to get up in the morning?

Glenn Ligon: Uh, keeps me up at night is the clock is ticking. [Laughs] So, there's so much time I have and so many things I think I wanna do. And that's what gets me up in the morning is there's so many things I wanna do, and it's not always about art. There's other things I wanna do too. I want to go to Japan for a year. I better get going with that.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: Oh, amazing. When are you gonna do that? 

Glenn Ligon: Well, I have a godson that lives in Kyoto, so he's old enough to, and he's bilingual, so he can be my studio assistant and translator. So, we've, we're already setting up. 

Charlotte Burns: Oh, this is so great. You've got it figured out.

Glenn Ligon:  Yes. And I love, I mean, my Japanese is atrocious, but I love the culture. It's amazing.

Charlotte Burns: Oh, wow. Maybe we should do an in-person recording in Japan next time.

Glenn Ligon:  Yes.

Charlotte Burns: [Laughs] Go and see you.

Glenn Ligon: Go that. Live from Kyoto.

Charlotte Burns: Oh, I'd love that. 

Okay. We've recorded a podcast with Kemi Ilesanmi on the season as well. We talk about the seeds that we plant.

Glenn Ligon: Hmm.

Charlotte Burns: So, if you are planting seeds right now, if this is a planting period, what seeds are you planting? What are you growing?

Glenn Ligon:  Hmm. Well, I guess the seeds I'm planting is, in one way is, putting out a book of collected essays and putting in that book advice for young artists. It's the advice that I wish I had at as a young artist, and I feel like, okay, let's give that to them now. So, have it all in one place, rather than piecemeal.

Charlotte Burns: There's one thing you say in the advice. You say, “Dealers are not your friends. Your friends don't take 50% of your money.”

[Laughter]

Glenn Ligon: I got in trouble for that. [Laughs] 

Well, that's one piece of advice. Artists should be getting more than 50%, so we’ll add that on.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. Yeah. What if there was one piece of advice you could take, would it be that one, would there be another piece of advice? What stands out to you?

Glenn Ligon: Yeah, get more than 50%. [Laughs] Took me a long time to get to that advice, but that's.

Oh, that's one thing I would say. Artists don't talk to each other enough about the business side of being an artist. We don't know each other's deals. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, more transparency. 

Glenn Ligon: Yeah. More transparency between artists.

Charlotte Burns: I think that sounds great. 

Glenn, thank you so much for everything today. This has been so, so wonderful. I could keep you for hours, but I know that's unfair. Like you said, the clock is ticking. 

Thank you very much, Glenn. It's been really great.

Glenn Ligon:  Thank you for the discussion. It's been really fun.

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Glenn Ligon. 

And if you haven’t read his book Distinguishing Piss from Rain: Writings and Interviews, I highly recommend that you do. 

Join us next time. We’ll be talking to Nana Oforiatta-Ayim about bridging ancient wisdom and contemporary practice. About rematriation, institution building, and knowledge-sharing. And a 54-volume encyclopedia of African culture and a brand new trilogy, an updated take on the classic book by John Berger, Ways of Seeing.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim: The most surprising thing that I learnt was not as much has been lost as I assumed it had. I assumed that the colonial encounter had been very successfully destructive, and the more that I traveled around the country, the more I spoke with everyday people and encountered this knowledge embodied within people, the grief turned into joy and excitement of, “Wow! There’s so much here. How do people not know about this?” It’s so alive but it’s so untapped that it just wasn’t being translated into what we call the art world. 

Charlotte Burns: It’s a fantastic jam-packed episode. I can’t wait for you guys to hear it.  

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art​.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 3 with Kemi Ilesanmi

Kemi Ilesanmi is planting seeds for the future. Three years ago, she stepped back from running The Laundromat Project, took a gap year in which she visited 13 countries, and came back full of ideas and possibilities.

Now she's an independent arts worker. A diaspora weaver. A connector of people and worlds.

She says that five core values drive her work: Assume abundance. Foster connections. Multiply knowledge. Center joy. Manifest dreams.

In this third conversation with host Charlotte Burns, Kemi reflects on building sustainable institutions, the women who shaped contemporary art across Africa, and why she believes in looking for "new suns" even in difficult times, sharing insights about the projects and people inspiring her now.

The ecosystem needs tending, she says. The seeds need space to grow.

What if we stopped trying to do it alone?

---

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello, and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast all about imagining new futures. 

[Audio of guests saying, “What if?”]

I'm your host, Charlotte Burns, and in this episode, we’re joined by long-time friend of the show, Kemi Ilesanmi, who is planting seeds for the future. Three years ago, she stepped back from running The Laundromat Project. She took a gap year, visiting 13 countries, and came back full of ideas and possibilities. Now she's an independent arts worker, a diaspora weaver, a connector of people and worlds.

Five core values drive her work: Assume abundance. Foster connections. Multiply knowledge. Center joy. Manifest dreams. And she's putting them into practice everywhere. From healing and art research in East Africa to legacy convenings in New York. From art tours in Nigeria that spark residencies across continents, to oral histories capturing voices before they're lost.

Kemi sits on influential boards. She helps shape foundations. She builds networks that stretch from Brooklyn to Lagos to Dakar. The ecosystem needs tending, she says. The seeds need space to grow. 

What if we stopped trying to do it alone?

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, thank you so much for joining me again. Third time's a charm.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Thank you. I'm so happy to be back. How are you doing?

Charlotte Burns: Good, good. It's always a pleasure to see your face and to be in conversation with you, so I'm really looking forward to this. 

Now our conversations have stretched over a few years, and I was looking back to the first episode. I think it's gonna be interesting to talk to you about what's changed, what remains constant. I thought we should just dive in. Are you ready?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I am ready. 

Charlotte Burns: Let's go. 

So when we first spoke, you were just stepping back from an amazing run of 10 years as the executive director of The Laundromat Project. Then, for our second interview, you'd come back from a gap year. 

So, let's talk, Kemi, about what you are doing now. What can you tell us?

Kemi Ilesanmi: [Laughs] I can tell you that I've landed on the language of “I am an independent arts worker”. I get to pursue passions and my own personal mission as it relates to Black and brown arts network-building and institution-building, and I get to try different things.

I have learned a lot from watching artists and the way they go into the world and move in the world, where they're making this wonderful body of work over years and decades, when they're lucky enough to do that. And each project is its own little universe within that. And they're putting together a series of projects, and that's one of the threads that I pulled from them into the way that I'm thinking about the work I do. And it's really varied. 

Charlotte Burns: Let's start with an interesting project that you're doing on the power of healing.

Kemi Ilesanmi: The beautiful thing now is being in a position to respond to things that I am interested in building. 

Last fall, I had lunch with Jason Drucker, who is at the American Friend[s] [Service Committe] Society, which we commonly refer to as the Quakers. He was just at the beginning of thinking about pulling together a convening and a bit of research around healing. 

Unbeknownst to me, certainly, Eastern region of Africa is actually one of the areas with the highest growth in Quakers. So, he and I started talking about what it might mean to start looking at a bit of research in that region about the way art is showing up in their work around peace building, gender, anti-violence work. The Quakers have been in that region for going on 100 years.

Charlotte Burns: Wow.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I also didn't know that. 

Jason had also led a convening project in the MENA region, so the Middle East, North Africa region, during Covid to maybe around 2021, 2022. A report had come out of that looking at social practice work in that region and how that was showing up. 

So, this is an addendum to some of that research, but looking again at the horn of Africa and East Africa. 

We were able to pull in an African research firm called Andani Africa, run actually founded and run by an artist, actually Molemo [Moiloa], to help us think through what a convening would look like, what some of the key questions might be, what we know or don't know or should know about how arts showing up in this region that has been both fraught with issues of conflict and post-conflict, and how to re-knit together as societies, how to pursue peace, how all the different art forms and the artists engaged in this, living on the Continent, how are they working through those issues? How are they using their artistic skillsets and creative innovation to pull together conversations, people to talk about things that are difficult? 

Charlotte Burns: So, who was it convening for? Was it for the artists or the organizations?

Kemi Ilesanmi: For the artists. 

Charlotte Burns: So interesting. What's the report going to focus on?

Kemi Ilesanmi: This report is really going to look at the history of this work of healing and art in East Africa, specifically, but also beyond. 

What artists are both doing, and struggling with, in that context, and what are the possibilities and, to a certain extent, defining it. What is arts and healing? What is the connection between arts and resolution in a country or a community? How might that work look in Sudan, and how might that be different in Ethiopia, and how might that be different in Rwanda, right? 

So just being able to take a closer look to learn directly from artists who are doing the work is the heart of the report.

Charlotte Burns: So interesting. And the Quaker organization is underwriting that work in an effort to facilitate more healing, essentially?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes. Part of their mission is very rooted in peace-making, peace-building. Peace for humans doesn't just happen. There's a lot of work and we continue to pursue. We have not yet arrived. 

So their work around the world, and particularly in that region—they have a head office in Kenya, and another hub for research in Addis in Ethiopia—is very centered around issues of peace-building, gender equity, and other kinds of efforts to make the world a better place, in a really concerted way. And this work, and how does art fit, is something that's been on the periphery, that they wanted to take a moment to look at in a more concentrated and centered way.

Charlotte Burns: It's really fascinating. As I'm listening to you talk, I’m reminded of something you said in one of our conversations over the years, where you talked a bit about your career and how, at the beginning of your career, you were dealing with international contemporary art, and then it was American contemporary art. You were at the Walker [Art Center], then you were at The Laundromat Project where you were dealing with the local community, and when you were leaving, thinking about what it meant to expand that again and think about community in a different sort of way.

And it's really interesting because you're talking now about projects that you would have to catch several planes to get to. 

Talk me through the kind of guidepost you built yourself for creating a career after leaving an institution, what your own missions and values are.

Kemi Ilesanmi: So, it's interesting. One of the first things I did after leaving The Laundromat Project was I sat down and wrote myself a personal mission and a set of values. 

This is because I had been at that organization for 10 years and really felt driven and deeply connected to the mission and the values of the organization. And when I left, I felt a little unmoored, frankly. I wanted to have a sense of how I was gonna show up in the world as an independent arts worker. 

So, I wrote a mission that was about strengthening and supporting an ecosystem for Black leaders, Black institutions, and Black networks. So, really thinking at the ecosystem level, after having thought through and been deeply grounded in an organizational level. 

And I also defined a set of values for me, for Kemi. They're just five of them. I want to assume abundance, foster connections, multiply knowledge, center joy, and manifest dreams. 

And ever since, over the last two and a half years now, since I left The Laundromat Project, believe it or not, time flies, that’s what I ground myself in.

Charlotte Burns: I've written them down: “assume abundance, foster connection, multiply knowledge, center joy, manifest dreams.” I wanted to talk to you about all of these things. Actually, they're all written down anyway in my list of questions, so that's great. 

I want to talk to you about another gathering that you organized for Hue Arts [NYC] last year. Can you tell us a little bit more about that convening? 

Kemi Ilesanmi: So, not long after I returned from my gap year, Stephanie [A.] Johnson-Cunningham, who I had partnered with on the Hue Arts research work during Covid, reached out because she was starting a leadership academy, actually, growing out of that Hue Arts work, right? So, this idea of things being able to ripple out over time. 

Museum Hue had just received funding to put together a six-month academy for POC arts leaders in New York State, so everywhere but New York City, actually. There were about 10 of these leaders, and we met once a month, over six months in 2024. 

One of the opportunities this gave was, in partnership with Museum Hue, I was able to build out a six-part, six-month curriculum that looked at what is needed to be able to build a lasting organization, a lasting institution for Black and brown leaders across the states. They were dance organizations, history organizations, film…a range, right? What it looked like to connect them to each other. 

The sense of isolation was really strong among them. Among the fellows, there were leaders who had been running their organizations for decades. They were working in a lot of just very different geographies, and often the only organization like themselves for tens, if not hundreds, of miles. 

We actually did a bit of peer coaching and learning to draw out what each of them knew into the room, to help each other through dilemmas, and we invited different leaders to come and speak with them; Black and brown leaders who were running organizations of their own and have been that they could learn from. That was everyone from Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum [in Harlem], of course, to Marcia Minter at Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine, to Ayesha Williams, who was my successor at The Laundromat Project, who came in to talk to us about the power of using money in interesting ways. 

Being able to sit and work in partnership with someone I'd already been in partnership in the past, and to create something that could be meaningful and helpful and invest in our long-term strength as an ecosystem, was a real dream come true.

And they're now doing a New York City version. And we'll be working and building on some of that, and I'm really cheering them on in being able to keep moving this work forward. 

Charlotte Burns: So, the question of what is needed?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte Burns: If you had to distill that, what is needed to build those lasting institutions?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I believe that one of the things that is most critical to building a lasting institution is to be part of an ecosystem and to be connected to one another. That's a running theme in all of our conversations, Charlotte, that sense of not trying to do it alone. 

So, for instance, there were 10 organizations and that sense of isolation, it just kind of keeps you looking down, that feeling of precarity and fear is so strong because you don't have examples or connections of folks who've been able to keep it going or to know what to do when the money runs low or you're trying to work with your local government to create a policy that supports the work, or any myriad of things. In fact, applying for state support or other kinds of support can be really mysterious. 

So, being able to just connect, and hear, and build together and partner, particularly Long Island—there were a number of organizations in that region and they started building connections and visiting one another. And then there was another little bubble in the greater Albany area. “Oh, you are not that far away. You're 30 miles down the road,” et cetera—being able to just feel in connection, because the issues of resources and time will always be the issues. They're just there, but they're not insurmountable when one can get creative in community and with other peers.

So, at some level, if that sense of we deserve to be here, we can survive, and that feeling and understanding of that, and we can center our vision, center our joy, and we can build these dreams together, feels really critical and central to me. And it's a lot of what I'm seeing and manifest as well on the Continent is that sense of, how do we start looking up and at each other and moving forward as a collective unit?

Charlotte Burns: Do you think it's possible inside institutions? And the reason I'm asking that is because on our last podcast, you said that you were “looking for freedom of movement, freedom of ideas, and freedom of manifestation of those ideas. And right now it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.”

Because I know these convenings we're talking about, they're different convenings. One centered very much on artists, one was on institutions. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Mm-hmm. 

Charlotte Burns: And I'm wondering, do you think institutions are where we're going to see the next great chapters of culture being held, given that so many people like you are leaving institutions? Or do you feel that institutions can hold those changes?

Kemi Ilesanmi: It's such an interesting question. My first instinct is that it's a little bit geography-based. I think within places like the US, the most interesting work and possibilities is medium and small organizations, institutions. And really at a kind of grassroots level is where I see the bravery, where I see the willingness to take risks, partially because it's not a choice. Risk-taking is built in at that level, and different value systems are at work, particularly smaller community-based. 

I believe, very much so, that POC-organizations often, not always, but often lead with a different value system, and I think this political moment, again, calls us to our core selves. If we circle the wagons, and who we circle them with, begins to tell us our stories.
I think precarity wears itself differently for bigger organizations. It's one of the reasons that I haven't worked in one for 20+ years. It's not where I'm putting my investments. It's not where I think the greatest change can happen. 

On the other hand, if I move to Africa as a Continent, or if I move even to Nigeria and Lagos as a geography, the building of institutions feels much more critical and needed. And the opportunity is that, because we are in a time of building new institutions and trying to root them, we can also bring a different set of values, and we can actually learn from what we see in other spaces to build things up, from the ground up. 

So, I actually put a lot of heart into institution-building on the Continent. 

So, there's something about the geography, the longevity, who's involved in the conversation, and where the opportunities are. I'm not writing off American institutions, but it's not where I'm putting my efforts.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So let's talk about those institutions on the Continent.

When we were preparing for this conversation, you and I had a phone call, and you had said that you really wanted to center part of the conversation on the women who had been shaping culture on the Continent, specifically Bisi Silva and Koyo Kouoh.

That was before we had the tragic news that Koyo had died. And I was thinking of you a lot. We were messaging as well and talking a lot about this. 

Let's pick up on where you wanted to go.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes. I was in Lagos last month, and gave a talk about Black institution and network building at Angels & Muse, a wonderful artist-centered space founded by Victor Ehikhamenor, an artist and, as part of that talk, I shared that I felt like three women, all working around the same time-ish in the ‘oughties’, had really propelled Black arts institution-building on the Continent forward and planted all these incredible seeds that we were all continuing to till and harvest. 

They would be Bisi Silva and the founding of [Centre for Contemporary Art] CCA Lagos; Koyo Kouoh, who of course had founded RAW [Material Company] in Dakar and at that moment was running [Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa] MOCAA in Cape Town; and the third, who in fact was mentored by Koyo, is Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, who has been working in Accra, Ghana for 15+ years running an organization called ANO [Institute of Arts & Knowledge]. 

There's so much they have done to make the current return, deepening, of contemporary arts and institutions on the Continent manifest. They have all been visionaries, dream builders. They've all challenged systems and really pushed against the grain. 

It's interesting that they were all curators and brought some of that energy to the work. And each of them really thought about ecosystems and knowledge building, running fellowships and training, and in Nana's case, working on an encyclopedia of African culture. Such incredible work. 

One of the things I've been thinking about is the kinds of spaces that are needed in Black and brown networks and spaces, and arts ecosystems are spaces where artists can think, can play, can fail, and can disturb the peace, and what it means for our societies, our democracies, with whatever asterisk we have to put on that, in whatever the spaces we're in. 

We don't get to survive for long, talk less of thrive, and build, and change, and move forward, if we don't have spaces where artists can do those things. They can experiment, they can push, they can ask us those hard questions, they can challenge us, they can build new things, they can do it right and then do it wrong, and then come back and try to do it right again. Whatever that is, right? Pushing that forward. And those three women created those kinds of spaces. And they were doing it in 10, 15, and 20 years ago. So they just planted a lot of the seeds that I see us continuing to try to till, even now.

Charlotte Burns: Bisi died young. She died in 2019. Koyo tragically died recently—which we're all in shock about—ahead of organizing the Venice Biennale next year. 

Do you see other generations coming up underneath that? Obviously, Nana's still doing great work. You're on the Continent a lot. Do you see other spaces opening for artists? Those seeds, have they spread? Have they fostered other plants?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely! It's been so amazing, and fascinating, and affirming, actually. 

One of the things that really struck me upon Koyo’s passing is, we're in the time of social media, and everybody was posting tributes, right? That's all my feed was for that whole week. 

But one of the things that really struck me about that was how many spaces—so people, yes, absolutely—but also spaces on the Continent she had visited. Everybody had a photo of her in their space, all over. That was a traveling somebody, right?! Like in the best possible beautiful vision of the word. Like, she really went on the ground. 

And Bisi’s Àsìkò school, which continues, is currently in Cairo, and they traveled and moved around the Continent. That was part of that vision. 

So that sense of connectivity was really important, and because of that, there are all these folks who are deeply inspired and trying to move that work forward. This idea of pulling and building Black institutions is really central to what people, I feel, are really pulling as one of Koyo's legacies. And similarly, when Bisi died, also unexpected, people around her were more aware that she was also dealing with cancer at that time, but it didn't move as quickly, but the shock, similarly, right? 

During the 1-54 [Contemporary African] Art Fair here in New York City, Teesa Bahana, who runs 32° East in Kampala, Uganda, one of the spaces I got to visit, actually, during my gap year, and I've recently joined their board. Teesa was here and, along with Ayesha from Laundromat Project and Amy Andrieux from MoCADA [Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art], we pulled together just a meet and greet with other community and arts-centered spaces in New York City. She was able to share with us their building project, the artists they work with, and their vision as the first purpose-built art space in Uganda. Full stop. How exciting, how amazing, and yes, Koyo had been to the space. There were the photos, there was Koyo. 

So, it's both a shared tragedy, which has made it both hard and easier, and this shared sense of, we can't let her down, we can't let Bisi down, we can't let Okwui Enwezor down; All three of them died before the age of 60. All three of them died of cancer, which has been a really hard thing to take in, how much we have lost collectively by that, but also what they passed on to us to keep holding and pulling forward. 

Charlotte Burns: Something that Koyo spoke about on the podcast, and spoke about many times with many people, was the idea of building something beyond “projectiti,” I think she called them.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes.

Charlotte Burns: Personality-driven things. And she talked about Zeitz and how proud she was and how focused she was on Zeitz, and this idea that she had to do that job because it couldn't fail.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes.

Charlotte Burns: But also that there needed to be so much more. RAW, obviously, continues, and she made sure that would continue beyond, like you said, Àsìkò continues beyond Bisi, so there's already legacy in the actual institutions they created. 

But I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that idea of sustainability because on the show last time you mentioned various artists projects that you were visiting and we often talk about those kinds of things as examples of leadership or innovation but to what extent do you think it's because artists have recognized there are things that just aren't existing and they're building something that needs to be there, and how much we just accept that those things exist, rather than saying, “Okay, well maybe they need more help in making sure these institutions and spaces that they're building can have sustainable futures.” Should we recognize who's building what, where the burden's falling, and why it's falling so disproportionately on some folks? 

Kemi Ilesanmi: So, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is research; what we know, what we don't know, and how to make things legible to ourselves, right? 

The reality on the Continent is a lot of the most interesting, exciting, affirming spaces being built or tested, et cetera, are coming from artists who have a Western market. Not only, but certainly just coming from artists who want to build a thing that isn't there. 

One of the most interesting things that Koyo always talked about was she made RAW because it needed to exist, in the same way that she took the job at Zeitz because it could not fail, and she was the one standing that felt she needed to stand in the breach between utter failure and all the possibilities of success that she was actually able to put in motion. 

Often, the people closest to it are the ones who can see and go, “wow.” Artists need these spaces to connect, to learn to be together. So, in traveling around the Continent, one of the things that became even more clear was how much people were doing things on the ground, if you got there and could see it, and how open and porous things feel, which is exciting. And yes, very much also a reflection of lack of investment from what we might see as traditional spaces or traditional sources; Foundations don't exist on the Continent in the same way, don't exist out of the United States in the same way in a lot of places. That's such a unique thing to this particular country. 

But when I think about some of the research that would be so interesting to do, some of it is understanding the money, how it flows, where it flows, how it's circulating in art spaces. I'm really curious about the different policy contexts in which different organizations and artists are functioning in. The Dakar Biennial is sponsored, at least in part, by the Senegalese government; the President spoke at the opening. South Africa looks very different than the support in Kenya or Nigeria, et cetera. So people are working in very different kinds of policy contexts. 

And the other thing that I really feel would be so beneficial for us to understand differently is models that are being built across the Continent, and I'd say African diaspora. I'm really interested in what's happening in the Caribbean, how Black and brown art organizations are being built and have been built in the United States, and even, of course, London and different parts of Europe. 

And I say that because Space NXTHVN by Titus Kaphar here, how does that relate to Angels & Muse in Lagos, or Zoma [Museum], which has been built by Elias Sime in Addis Ababa? Like, how are they speaking to, what can they learn from each other and what, where is their funding? What are they doing? How do they think of themselves in terms of long-term versus short-term? 

Because I've also been thinking a lot about notions of longevity—are there times that things should just be there to be catalytic and to spark the next idea, but don't need to be held forever? And the example I have is, the artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji had a really incredible space called [The] Treehouse, that you had to walk up eight stories to the top floor, and it was a space where artists could think, play, fail, experiment, disturb the peace, research. There were shows, there were workshops, there were different ways that she just invited a really high level of experimentation. And, she did that for roughly 10 years. And then her time was done. Last year she sunsetted that project. 

Well, don't you know a young artist named Taiwo [Isimi] who had known Wura and spent time at Treehouse, went for a graduate degree in the UK, returned to Lagos, rented an apartment in a neighborhood called Onikan, Lagos Island area, a very historic part of Lagos, and started something called 1-98, which does really similar work. She picked up the baton.

Charlotte Burns: Hmm. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: And, sometimes, you don't have to do it forever. If we build a strong enough ecosystem—which is why I'm really focused on this idea of all the different art roles, all the different ways organizations can show up from small to big, from temporary to permanent, from ephemeral to longstanding, and all of the different varieties in between, is that then—the ecosystem, people can pass the baton. You can say, “Wow, I've done this for about 10 years, and I'm moving into a different phase of my life and my career and my time, and I get to step back or move into a different role and trust that something will pick this up.” 

And that's similar to me; leaving an organizational setting, an institutional setting, in my 50s with almost 30 years of relationships and experience and thinking in the field, was about trying to do more, not less, by being able to move around, by being able to act as a connector. 

And all of that is what I see happening, even in contexts that are incredibly challenging, particularly around issues of monetary resources. But there's so many other ways that people are looking to support each other and move things forward, despite that constriction. And in fact, with other kinds of riches and other kinds of resources that they get to move around from connections to knowledge, to ideas, to just being in support of one another's journey.

Charlotte Burns: That is so interesting to hear you talk about this. And, for you being on that journey of being more free, I know that one of your guideposts is to center joy. Do you ever feel fear, or do you focus on joy?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Fear is just a part of being human. It's a part of life. It is certainly a part of 2025 America. [Laughs] It's more embracing this idea that the only way through is through. 

One of the sayings that I'm really holding dear—there are actually two that I'm really centering myself in right now, and I'm very much gonna paraphrase—but one of the things I often think about is Toni Morrison said, oh my goodness, people, racism is there to act as a distraction. It's there to keep us continually trying to prove our humanity, our worth, our value, and we just keep spending all of our time doing that, instead of doing the work, whether it's writing, or building, or making art, or whatever the other 101 things we could be doing, instead of trying to be focused on racism and all the fears that it generates. 

So that's just one. You could fit in sexism, you could fit in transphobia, homophobia, all of these things, but fear is one of the great manipulators of the human experience, and many people have used it for ill since humanity began, right? Like that's just part of history, and it's one of the things I feel I learned by going to history museums around the world. I'm like, “Oh, we've been up to this bit of shenanigans since we could figure out how to manipulate others.”

So for me, the invitation, and what I try and lean into, is to not let it be a distraction. Which is not to say it's not there. Fear is always… It's there. But I'm always trying to figure out, like, what's the thing I could do anyway? What's the joy that's happening underneath it? And Black Americans are experts at that, which happens to be a community I'm connected with, right? Like, we've always been able to figure out where the joy is, even when the shit was hitting the fan, in all the ways. That’s been our experience in 400 years. 

The other thing I'm trying to hold on to is Octavia Butler said there's nothing new under the sun—but there are new suns. I’m constantly like, “What's the new sun?” There's nothing new.

We're such cyclical creatures, as humans. We can always find historical analogies to almost anything we're up to now. We have been down these various roads before, of backsliding and fear-mongering, et cetera. So I can acknowledge that, because it's true. That's just what it is. But I'm going to spend my time, and I'm going to look for new suns, and that's what I see happening in Black and brown spaces. It's what I see happening on the Continent. 

One of my most fun things that I got to do last year was completely self-directed. I actually organized a history and art tour of Lagos during Art Week. Five African American women ended up going on this tour with me. One of my main goals, besides introducing them to the city in which I grew up and getting to spend time at art spaces and history spaces, taking walking tours, visiting galleries and studios, et cetera, I wanted to make sure they had their own friends by the time we left. Create these person-to-person connections. Over the course of that week, that's where I led from.

Don't you know, several things have happened since then that had nothing to do with me. One, an artist that we met at the closing night party for ART X Festival [Lagos], is now going to be in residence at Indigo Arts Alliance; Marcia was one of the people on the tour. Her husband, Daniel Minter, is going to be in residence at the G.A.S. Foundation, Yinka Shonibare’s space in Nigeria in the fall. Another person, a curator and artist on the tour, Ashara Ekundayo, is going to be in residence at Victor [Ehikhamenor]’s space, Angels & Muse. Folayemi Wilson, who's a professor at Penn State, invited Nengi Omuku—who we did an incredible studio visit with, a really amazing, beautiful painter—to give a talk at Penn State. 

Those are just a few of the things that happened out of that one week of really connecting people together. Create new worlds, new suns. I didn't even know exactly how things would manifest, but I thought very intentionally about how to weave them together. 

I think of it as diaspora-weaving, as part of what I can do in the world just because of my experience, my accident of birth, as someone who's African American and Nigerian. So how can I lean into these things instead of the fears? How can I make new suns?

Charlotte Burns: I love that, Kemi. That's so good. 

So, tell me about an amazing oral history project centered very much on Koyo Kuouh that you've been working on. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: It is amazing and beautiful. 

So, the African American Studies Department at Columbia University, currently headed by Dr. Kellie Jones—the woman who led me into this field when I took a class with her in 1997—reached out to me and said they were doing a part two of a project they started at the top of Covid. They have been working on an oral history project with Black American curators from childhood to career. Dr. Deborah Willis, Dr. Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden, Franklin Sirmans, and others were interviewed for that. 

They then were able to get continuing support from Mellon Foundation to do a part two that would focus on African curators, and invited me to be the person who captures the oral histories. Three curators that we are interviewing are Tumelo Mosaka, who is South African-born, now an independent curator, but has had a long career including institutional and independent work; Elvira Dyangani Ose, born in Spain to parents who immigrated from Equatorial Guinea, and has had a career that's taken her to a number of different countries—including for a year or two here in New York City—and now is the head of MACBA [Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona] in Barcelona; and the third was Koyo. 

And we have already talked a little bit about her history. We were able to capture one of the two conversations we had planned. The second conversation was scheduled. And the beautiful, heartbreaking thing is that we spent most of the two hours talking about her childhood. We only got up to about age 18. At the time, I felt a little guilty because I was like, “Oh my goodness. I'm sure I was supposed to get further chronologically.” But a lot of Koyo’s career and journey through RAW and Zeitz had been captured. I had done all this research. I had listened to your podcast two-parter with her. So I knew a lot of that had been captured. I had new questions. I had other things I wanted to dig into, certainly, in what would've been the part two, but knew that this stuff about her early foundation hadn't been captured in such a concentrated way. 

She talked about how she knew her grandmother, she knew her great-grandmother. They lived very close, a five-minute walk of each other. Her mother's journey to Switzerland, her early years, and transition into Switzerland. But we really spent easily 75% of the interview just in Cameroon. Where she had grown up, the language that she spoke, what she did, how art played into that early life. And I feel so lucky to have spent that time to get that story, and to have followed my instincts and followed her joy. She was so clearly joyful to be talking about this matrilineal heritage that she was part of, from her great-grandmother to her grandmother, to her mother, to herself, and spoke so lovingly and expansively about who they were and how they had informed her journey and who she was. And now that's captured. 

By the end of the month, I will have finished all of the oral histories with Tumelo and Elvira as well. And these will be captured into a book that I'm helping to co-edit with Kellie and Tumelo—Tumelo is the person actually project managing this. And there will be a public program sometime in the fall of 2026 that builds on the oral histories themselves, the book, and brings it into real time.

Charlotte Burns: Oh my goodness. What a great project. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: Amazing that you have that on tape. So sad that you were in between windows of time for that second interview, but like you say, those first questions were the questions that weren't on tape. So it's just wonderful for everybody, but especially her family, that you've caught that history.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Mm-hmm.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, you're working on so many interesting projects. You'd said on the last podcast that part of your travel, part of your gap year, was that you wanted to give yourself a new identity, and also it was an invitation for other people to think about you differently. Do you think you achieved that? Do you think other people think about you differently now?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I do. The first thing people ask me is whether I'm here or whether I'm traveling. So I do have to remind people the gap year was its own intensive year, and now I live in Brooklyn again. But that travel is a part of what that looks like. 

I intentionally—and I know I shared this with you—wanted to work at The Laundromat Project at that community level. I wanted to subway to work. That was intentional on my part. I was like, “Ah, I'm tired of getting on planes. I wanna take subways and see what I'm doing.” And now I'm back on planes again, which is something to get used to, but also enjoyable, because I really want to be at this level where I can see the ecosystem, see the map, see the possibilities for connection, for conversation, for learning. 

The things that bring me joy are connecting people. It just, it really does just bring me joy to connect good people together. People can learn from each other, be inspired by each other. It's one of my joys that costs me nothing. And this idea of multiplying knowledge. My values capture what I love doing, right? So being able to do research, to learn about healing and art in Africa, and being able to be in conversation with people about that. So, I do think I have been able to refashion myself in a way that builds on what I was. I didn't abandon anything of who I was or what I've done. I've expanded my own notion of myself to myself, and then I'm doing that by having other people be able to see all these other possibilities as well, and as an invitation for all of us to think about how we get to grow. 

One of the cliches that I really leaned into—and I'm building a talk and possibly a workshop around this—it's a corny poem. I don't know when it was written, but decades ago, called “A Reason, A Season, A Lifetime.” And it's looking at friendships, like some friends come into your life for just a moment, and others last a lifetime. Some are just there for a season of your life. I've always known this saying a lot; some people have heard of it, and a lot of people I’ve mentioned it to have never heard of it, but I've leaned on this for decades. So I don't know. I grew up in Nigeria. Maybe it was one of the things we kind of tossed around. 

I love it because I feel like my reason for being is to build these networks, to have been able to lean in for so much of my career into building, upholding, supporting, learning about Black and brown artists and the networks and leaders in those spaces. Incredible. That is my lifetime work, and it has only become clearer and deeper, and more interesting to me over time. But the season shifts. 

So when I was at The Laundromat Project, I was in a season of really being grounded in one organization and being able to think through that and create a few models that could be adapted and shared more widely. When I was at the Walker Art Center, I was learning, I was new, I was gathering these little seeds. I was really interested in urban spaces, and our residency kind of program helped me learn that. I wanted to learn about different artists, and I met so many incredible artists over the six years that I was there—people I'm still in relationship with 25 years later. 

And then now, as an independent arts worker, I am able to pull myself up to this connective, this role of weaving this diaspora, of being able to connect people across space, being able to think at the ecosystem level, the whole animal, instead of just one limb. And that's the season I'm in now. So it means I get to move differently, and it just helped me to think through why different things, different roles serve at different times. 

My current season is my favorite season, and my next season will be my favorite season when it comes along. 

Charlotte Burns: You’re sort of making me think, it's like a ‘what if,’ like what if you could see things from a bird's eye point of view? And you have insights into so many different organizations, and artists and foundations, academia, and lots of different entities, and people that create the art world in a very expansive way. 

And you also sit on boards. That's a different role. That's the sort of governance role. Thinking with that sort of hat on, that board hat, what are the biggest challenges boards are facing right now, and how are you navigating them?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes. I'm currently on the Brooklyn Museum board as an appointee for our comptroller, Brad Lander, and I've been on the Joan Mitchell [Foundation] board for about seven years, and I just recently joined the [The Andy] Warhol [Foundation for the Visual Arts] foundation board. I'm only half a year in. And to your point, lots of advisory boards. 

I'm gonna speak about the Joan Mitchell piece. It’s the one I've been on the longest, and I've really seen what the possibilities are at a close range, because I think a lot of organizations—boards, institutions, particularly foundations, in this case, two of my foundations are artist-endowed foundations—it's sort of how do you show up in these moments of societal shift? We’re in a sort of kind of earthquake. 

And the Warhol board, along with the Helen Frankenthaler [Foundation], jumped in when the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] canceled so many grants for all of the organizations that I certainly care about, and were able to fully fund the challenge grants, right? Being able to see them, kind of step in, in that way. 

The Joan Mitchell Foundation was holding a convening around the legacy field, the field of which they are a part, right? Like Joan Mitchell left her paintings, left a will that said, “I want to create a foundation that carries my work forward and supports visual art and visual artists.” 

And there's so many workers in that space. There are people stewarding their family, their father, their cousin, their sister, siblings’ work. There are foundations that have been set up. Some are much smaller offices. There are archives and oral history projects; all of this, these different ways of doing what we began during this three-day convening, to call “legacy work” and “legacy workers”. Some of them are lawyers, some of them are artists, some of them are themselves, some of them have passed on, et cetera. Really, really incredibly broad. 

It was an incredible few days. There will be a report, there will be information. And I really feel proud that I'm on a board that, two years ago, started thinking about “There's a field happening,” and there's work that Christine [J.] Vincents and others have been doing at Aspen [Institute]. There's been bits of this, but really let's pull together 120, 150 people from around the country, and a few from around the world, to be in the same room together, have people on stage who are giving us models, telling us challenges, really diving deep into what this looks like. 

It was funded by the Mellon Foundation. So it was a partnership, essentially between Joan Mitchell and the Mellon Foundation. And the ripples from this, the things happening in that room were incredible. Again, all the people who run family estates at a very kind of under-the-radar way, not a Joan Mitchell, right? Which people have heard of, but several of these that you haven't yet heard of, they're stewarding this incredible work. Being able to get them in community together, they're now going to do their own, like getting together, supporting one another, and really beginning to move out to that 30,000 feet level, so you can actually see what the ecosystem is. That's incredible work. 

The power of being able to convene, the power of being able to pull people together in physical space to plant seeds so that they can take that and be together and learn together. And the power of being able to get all those different models on stage. There were, I counted, we heard from around 50 people over two and a half days.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, the incredible artist who's now in her 80s, started off with a conversation called “How to Become an Ancestor,” and really beautifully grounded us in the ancestral imperative of remembering. And this legacy work is about remembering over again. 

Visual AIDS got to tell us this story of this collective work that came out of another moment of a different kind of earthquake, and a different kind of societal crisis, that actually gripped the world, right? Art and artist, and legacy came out of that and continues to thrive till today. 

Many people in the room namecheck Teresita Fernández's 2016 gathering around Latinx artists and arts legacies that continues to be giving us gifts. There are still things happening now that people are pointing to. The seed that was planted was Teresita pulling people together. 

Those are some of the examples that we were able to learn about together, and that the board at Joan Mitchell was really committed to. We didn't know it was going to land in the political context that it did. But it turned out it was a really important time for people to gather and to think about legacy, while the very notion of who gets to be remembered is being attacked at the highest levels of US government. 

So, it was a very highly charged conversation that would've been just as important, but it would've felt really differently a year ago than it did right now. And that's the possibilities of what can happen. 

Most of the board was in the room, all of the board was incredibly in support of this and had been over the two years of planning. We all understood why it was so incredibly important right now that we were stewards, we were protectors, right? Like we weren't gonna abandon this work because the world had gone topsy-turvy, but instead would lean into the work, and that we can take those learnings into the different ways that we move in the world. 

The Joan Mitchell Foundation, in particular, has many artists on the board. That's actually a really big part of the value system of the organization from the beginning. So that level of investment is there in the room at all times and was in the room during the convening.

Charlotte Burns: That's so fascinating. I remember years ago when I was at The Art Newspaper writing about artist estates like, “there's a growing section of the industry…,” it was Christine Vincent's report, I think, that we were quoting, and since then, there's been so much more. It’s something Allan talks about a lot. Obviously, he works with artist estates and artist planning. But it's interesting because, at that point when I remember writing about it, it this inevitable growth industry from a market perspective, that there were going to be these artists and you were thinking like, “Oh, it's gonna be like Warhol”, and now it's more, well, the market definitely won't be able to support all of those foundations. So how do you have sustainable legacies? How do you make sure that things are preserved when not every estate is a Mitchell Foundation?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely, and that was so huge. And my takeaway to go back to your initial question is, I love being part of boards that understand their power to shift, shape, and make conversation and to invite others into what that looks like, right? Like that level of influence is very real. So you want people to use it for good and to make space. 

Again, 50 voices. A very minuscule number of that 50 were people that were officially part of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Instead, it was other voices from Indigenous artists, collectives, to South Asian, just this incredible range of examples, and possibilities, and leaning into where we do have power and being able to harness that, shape that, and invite in others who may not have been able to convene and have 150 people show up. And they were all supported in being able to be in that room. That was part of the commitment, to take care of folks' ability to be there. 

That's powerful, and that's what feels important and necessary at the board level for any of us. How can we share our power in a way that helps shape the conversations that need to be happening, shape the actions, from there, that need to happen to support what emerges as critical, as necessary? And that's the work that we'll continue to have in our boardroom going forward, and that other boards are doing as well. 

Again, Warhol has been such a leader in different kinds of conversations, thinking about the censorship debates of the last great culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and the role that that foundation played in helping to move those conversations forward. 

So, really feeling like that's where the possibilities are, and not everybody feels comfortable or able to do that, but that's one of the powers that boards have, particularly certain boards. So, that's where I try to lean, or “look for the helpers” as Mister Rogers told us.  

Charlotte Burns: That's so interesting. Most workers in the art world have communication through groups. You know, if you think of curators, they often travel in groups. Galleries, there are natural sort of industry convenings. Artists will convene. It's incredibly important to them. 

I was struck when we did the Hope & Dread[: Tectonic Shifts In Power In Art] documentary a couple years ago, that boards don't necessarily share information, and they don't necessarily exist in conversation with one another, and there aren't reporting mechanisms for them either, that sort of hierarchy of governance. So it's interesting to hear you talking about a board that's existing more publicly in conversation with others. That isn't the natural thing for cultural institutions. There are state laws and bylaws and things like that that they have to adhere to, but generally there's this board structure and they report internally and that sort of that. So sharing that knowledge, it seems to me that it often gets stuck.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely, that is an issue, and there are all kinds of reasons, including time, right? Those are like, “I'm doing all these meetings, you want to add new meetings?” And you're right, there are no natural convening spaces, but you sort of have to go searching for it. And I do think there needs to be more of that. 

Years ago, Karen Brooks Hopkins talked about sharing board members with intention. Because I sit on multiple boards and I know other people that sit on multiple boards, becomes the way it happens in a not-intentional way. You get to share information, bring new, like, “Oh, we're trying this over there,” or “Hey, can you guys talk to each other and be in connection?” 

Again, I always lean into there's so much possibility there, and who's gonna lead the charge to make that happen? And what are the incentives? I'm not sure that everybody sees the pay-off for that and would pursue it. So, somebody has to take that charge. 

I do think a lot of board members go to art fairs and other things that allow them to connect. They may go in there with their collector hat or their art lover hat or their day job hat as opposed to their “I'm on a board” hat. But I've been thinking a lot about opportunity windows and exclamation points, why they're important. Times of crisis can often be an opportunity window. HueArt's report came out of the crisis of Covid and in fact, more pointedly, came out of the crisis of the George Floyd murder, and really everyone kind of rethinking their relationship to people of color, entities, and Black and specific, but not only being like, “Oh, this is a good time to raise money to do that thing we've always wanted to do and do this research that we've always needed,” and it worked. It took time and effort, and all of that, but there was an opportunity window that allowed that conversation to happen and be positively received because it wasn't a new ask. It was an ask that got a yes, because of the context. 

I think we need to be looking for what the opportunity moments are, to think differently, to do differently, to be connected more deeply, differently. And I think we're all still searching for that, but that's my big take. The thing I'm trying to lean into is that new sun. What's the new sun that we get to create in this moment that we couldn't create six months ago? Even though it's hard. 

And then I think about exclamation points as the moments that we get together. As an example, this convening, I think is gonna lead to a lot. I think the convening in Nairobi around healing is going to lead to a lot that we can't even predict. I think the convening around artists' legacy work that we just had here in New York is going to lead to a lot of new possibilities, new ideas, new questions, new tools. It is an acceleration moment. 

When I was in Dakar for the Dakar Biennale and in Lagos for ART X, a lot of people who care about diasporic arts work on the Continent were in the room. They flew in. So I know these biennials often get a bad rap, but they are the moments when there's a lot of cross-connectivity, a lot of conversation, a lot of those possibilities. 

Those exclamation points are actually important as spaces to gather, to exchange, to think, to inspire. And the way that those things happen in person is very different from the way they happen online, even though Zoom has been an absolute game-changer.

Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm. Totally. 

Kemi Ilesanmi:  And looking for, what are the opportunity windows? What are exclamation points, and how do those accelerate possibilities?

Charlotte Burns: I love that, Kemi. I'm going to think about that. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, I'm going to ask you, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Erm. Just as an aside, you told me this, I saw the text this morning, didn't come up with anything, but… 

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: Last time you knew this was coming. So the ‘what if’ that had kept you up was this ‘what if.’

[Laughter]

Kemi Ilesanmi: That is true. That is true.

Charlotte Burns: At least you got a good night's sleep this time. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: I did. I did get a good night's sleep. 

The ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is related to the crushing reality of this moment, that isn't not true. That this is a really hard moment in the history of humans and humanity, and we've had other really hard moments. And I'm sure the intensity of it is always very present if you're in it, but I don't think that's to be sneezed at. It is to be looked at squarely and moved through.

Charlotte Burns: I agree.

Kemi, what is the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning?

Kemi Ilesanmi: There are new suns, and we're going to go finding those suns.

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, what if your younger self could see you now? What would surprise them most?

A new one. I'm throwing a curveball at you.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes! I know!

[Laughter] 

I think on some level my… I'm going to pick an age…. I think some of my younger selves, my early 20s self, would be pleased, yet surprised, to see me reconnecting to my African and Nigerian heritage with such depth and intention. I spent a lot of time reintegrating, because I moved back at 15, into what it meant to be an African American, Black American, and the joy of being able to be in a new season of my life is being able to reconnect myself to this other part of my heritage that was always there, that I always loved, but had never connected to as a professional. And being able to do that, I don't think my 25-year-old self saw that coming. And it's so exciting, 30 years later to be doing this work.

Charlotte Burns: Okay, final one, Kemi. You've talked a lot in all of our podcasts about the seeds that we plant. So, what are you growing? I know you like to name things, so let's name. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Sherrilyn Ifill wrote a beautiful essay about this being planting season, this moment in 2025. So thank you so much for pulling that into the room. 

I like to think that I'm helping to plant the seeds for an African future—and I think about that diasporically—that is a space in which we get to think and to play, and to not get everything right the first time. And to question and to be complex, and to be contradictory and to build things that we love and we care about in the most beautiful, self-determined way, which seems so simple to say, but is not what Africans at home on the Continent, or in diaspora, have ever really truly been given, the space to do that. So instead, we're going to take it ourselves and do that, and that's the seeds that I hope that I'm helping to plant.

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, it's such a pleasure to talk to you, as always. Thank you so much for being our guest today. Thank you so much for the time.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Thank you. This was wonderful as always, Charlotte. Really, really love being in conversation with you over the last, going on, three years.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Kemi, as always. Join us next time when we’ll be talking to artist Glenn Ligon.

Glenn Ligon: "There's some beauty in things that are normally not looked at. So, nobody really thought about that gold wallpaper, but I just thought it was beautiful. We imagine the way that institutions hang their collections is the way it has to be, but it doesn't have to be like that. It's just conventions that we've grown used to. That’s all. [Laughter]"

Charlotte Burns: It was so hard to choose which clip to include here because there are so many great things that Glenn says. It’s a fantastic episode, and I hope you’ll tune in.

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 3, Episode 2 with Allan Schwartzman

Longtime podcast collaborators Allan Schwartzman and Charlotte Burns sit down for a conversation about an art industry in profound flux. After almost a decade of podcasts tracking how everything has changed, the duo is now looking ahead—and the view is complex.

In this frank conversation, they discuss everything from the art market to museum models to artists that history has overlooked. This is a reckoning with the art world at a crossroads.

Schwartzman reflects on challenging times but also opportunities. What new possibilities emerge when old systems transform?

What if we could reimagine how art is supported?

---

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Welcome back to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast all about imagining new and better futures.

[Audio of guests saying ‘what if?’]

I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and what a season we’ve got in store. More artists, more voices, and more stories you haven’t heard before. For this second episode, I’m talking to Allan Schwartzman. We’ve been making podcasts together since 2016, which is almost a decade of conversations with art dealers, museum directors, curators, collectors, philanthropists, a futurist, an astrologer, and lots of artists, building an archive that tracks how everything has changed. Now, we’re looking ahead. 

First up, Allan and I dig into everything from the state of museums and the art market to the artists that history has overlooked. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Hi Allan, it’s good to be back. 

Allan Schwartzman: Hi Charlotte. It is. 

Charlotte Burns: So, to begin, I guess my ‘what if’ for you is: what if you look back, what threads would you pull forward into this season, and what would you like this season to do and cover?

Allan Schwartzman: When I think about what threads tie forward from the past, I think more on the dread side than on the hope side, even though up until recently, I was always thinking the opposite—more along the lines of hope than of dread. But we live in very troubled and troubling times, societally, politically, in terms of dissolution of the family, and in terms of the self and a sense of detachment of the self. And so I think we're heading in a direction that is alienated from itself and disconnected from its times at a moment when I think we should be having greater clarity about our times. But it's a very troubling and confusing time. 

I think in terms of art, it's harder today to identify artists of great promise, at least ones that one has confidence will be lasting, than ever before. A lot of that has to do with the amount of hyper-speculation that takes place in the market, and the desire on the part of seasoned collectors who were never pursuing art collecting for investment purposes to see a likely future to value for an artist. And so data has become increasingly important. And if an artwork doesn't sell for a good amount of money at auction, then a lot of seasoned collectors are saying, “Why would I buy another work if it has no value? What am I gonna do with it? I can't sell it at some point. My family can't sell it when I'm gone. Museums aren't going to want to take it.”

And so we seem to be at a moment where this thrilling many-decades that began in the early 1960s, of taking a very “avant-garde” and small calling, making art, yet we've created a market that can't keep up with it. We've created an overpopulation of artists.

I mean, I've been working a lot on legacy planning for artists and their estates and there are many, many artists who turn to us, who are wonderful artists who have needs that I believe I understand how to fulfill or begin to address their concerns, but at the same time, I just don't think that there's enough of a market both in money and in institutions to absorb them.

Charlotte Burns: Is a lot of that about, if you're talking about that post-war moment, it was a moment of optimism. So, when you begin thinking about that decades-long period that you're describing, beginning post-war, it was a moment in which the future was something people felt very invested in, very hopeful about.  And you've used the word “future” just now when you were talking, saying it's hard to see the future. Collectors are saying if there isn't a dollar value attached, they don't see a future in the artist or the point in supporting that artist. It’s hard to think of how to support sustainable legacy planning.

So, a lot of this is about doubts in the future. How much of that is to do with the moment we are in right now? By which I mean two separate things: One, this is a moment that's frightening for a lot of people, but also this is a moment of profound change, and has been. I think one of the first newsletters we did was called the Tectonic Shifts In The Art World, and how the structures underpinning the art world have gone through enormous change, as have the broader institutions. What we are experiencing every day is that the institutions that seemed durable are not. 

So is it a broader crisis of faith in the future, or is it specific to art?

Allan Schwartzman: Hmm. I don't know if I can speak to faith in the future outside of art. Well, I guess I can because friends of mine with children who are under the age of, let's say 35, they have no faith in the future. Many of them see no reason to get married or have children because they don't see a positive future for the children that they would bring into the world.

In terms of art…well, in terms of art, I think there are fewer and fewer artists that the market will be able to support, but there's also fewer institutions that will survive. I think that we're likely to see institutions closing or merging, or being absorbed into other kinds of entities, non-profits becoming, in a sense, for-profits. So, I think the institutions are as threatened as the individuals.

Charlotte Burns:  What you say about institutions is where we ended the last season. We had a podcast episode with the editorial advisors who have so brilliantly worked with us through the past couple of seasons—Deana Haggag, Mia Locks, and Jay Sanders. And in that show, Deana said something that I've been thinking about a lot over the past several months, about where we go from here and how we build. 

I asked Deana about whether she thought there was viable future funding, and here's her answer:

Deana Haggag: I don't. Not in our lifetime. And I actually, maybe, I'm going through this sort of evolution in real-time. So it's with like deep regret and shame that I think things are going to get a lot worse, not better. And so what does that mean for how we make and participate in art together? And so I don't feel hopeful about any kind of government intervention.

I'm actually arriving at a place where I don't know that we want that, even if it was possible. Because when we say that there is government intervention, we talk about it like it's objective, and it's not. And I think we're watching that all over the country right now. I think this is the system we have. And so I am thinking a lot more about what I'm willing to give up to divest from the system. I think all organizations and all artists and all institutions might just want to shrink, for good reason, not because their arm was forced, but because it's not just the money flowing in, it's also the money flowing out that's not sustainable.

We're doing too much on too little resources, and it's burning a lot of people out. I do think, over time, that we really will dislodge New York and LA and a small subset of European cities as the centers of the art world, if just by force. People can't afford to be there anymore. I don't think that there is anything to work towards.

I think we are making art in an increasingly fraught and dangerous context. And rather than try to cooperate with them, rather than beg—and that's what it's increasingly feeling, that we are begging for this kind of resource and attention—I think we have to build away from it. 

So yeah, and I don't know, I also want to be clear because I sound so dreadful right now. I don't think that's all going to get gobbled up in even the next couple of decades. I am really thinking about the art world my child will live in, and that will have even less government intervention, even less public support, even more censorship, even more rules. Things in this country and increasingly globally are moving at a 50- to 100-year timeline.

And a lot of the stuff that came up in Bryan Stevenson's episode, a lot of the folks that have organized, the folks that have helped us hold up against the system, they've known this is coming for a long time. So I think it's going to get a lot worse, and I don't think we're going to run back from it.

Charlotte Burns:  Do you remember that recording, Allan? What do you think of that now?

Allan Schwartzman: I think Deana’s very wise and was very spot on. It's very imaginable that there will be challenges to the tax deductibility of donations to museums and other kinds of arts organizations, and that can have a huge impact on private support for them. We've already spoken about great limitations on public support for the arts, so I think we are where Deana said we are. 

Charlotte Burns: What do you think building away looks like? We've talked so much through these podcasts about growth having become a main driver of the art world; we've talked about the growth of museums not only in the number of museums, but in the size and scale of the museums, and how that size and scale has created a distance within the institutions of what their mission is, of who they're for, a distance between leadership and staff and artists and audiences. If we're at a moment where growth itself is not the possibility for most institutions going forward, that in itself is a fundamental shift from where we've been.

Do you think that more can be done with less, from your vantage point of having advised so many institutions and built so many institutions? How would you advise institutions to think about that in this moment, or nonprofits, or artists?

Allan Schwartzman: I think the notion of always growing was flawed, particularly once you get outside the largest museums in most major cities in this country. An institution needs to understand who their audience is, what their resources are, and they need to live and work within that. And that often means not growing. And in some cases, it means shrinking or reducing, maybe having fewer shows and having them up for longer periods of time. Maybe it means doing more temporary projects in order to bring in additional programming at the same time that there are permanent displays or long-term exhibitions on view. So, I think one needs to understand one’s audience and what that audience wants, and what the institution's capacity is to fund that.

Charlotte Burns:  Right now, obviously, it’s a moment of crisis for a lot of institutions. The IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which is the largest federal funder of museums and libraries, staff were placed on leave following cuts from the Department of Justice at the beginning of April, after an executive order called for the agency to be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law. A lot of NEA grants have been rescinded as the National Endowment for the Arts has aimed to comply with President Trump's executive orders on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The New York Post has referred to these developments as part of the museum wars. Do you feel in this moment in time that that kind of cultural war is something the art world is equipped to withstand?

Allan Schwartzman: I think it will be stunned by it. I’m sorry, could you go back and repeat some of the things you just said, because there are a few specific topics I wanted to pick up on. 

Charlotte Burns: For instance, the IMLS, it's a relatively small federal agency, around 70 employees. It awards grants to museums and libraries across the US. It's an independent federal agency. It awarded $266 million in funding to cultural institutions last year. So its budget is more than the National Endowment for the Arts;  the projected 2025 budget for the NEA was $210 million. And so it's the largest federal funder of museums and libraries in America. And it was expected that there would be cuts as part of the Doge budget slashing after a 14th March executive order that called for various agencies, including the IMLS to be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.

Allan Schwartzman: Well, that certainly fulfills the meaning of the word “drastic.”

Charlotte Burns: It certainly does. 

Artists I'm talking to are saying that NEA grants that they had received notice that they should expect, and that they'd budgeted for have since been withdrawn. The National Endowment for the Arts has rescinded grants and instructed grantees not to use federal funds to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion or gender ideology. For a lot of cultural institutions, that's an existential problem. And for a lot of artists running residency programs or convenings, that's enormous gaps in budgets, effective immediately. And meanwhile, certain words are being purged from government websites, which means that organizations, particularly organizations affiliated with universities and colleges, are very fearful of the language they can use: words like “women”, “gender”, “non-binary”, “race”, and “sex” are words that are being purged from government websites.

Allan Schwartzman: 

The word “women” has been purged?

Charlotte Burns: 

It's one of the words on the list.

Allan Schwartzman: 

There's a museum of women’s art [National Museum of Women in the Arts]. Does that now become, if they receive federal money, the “Museum of Art”?

Charlotte Burns: Well, it's interesting you mentioned that museum because a recent executive order on the 27th of March, which was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” specifically targets the Smithsonian. And the Women's Museum, that's part of that Smithsonian complex, is one of two museums that was specifically singled out.

Allan Schwartzman: That's a way of saying we don't believe in funding culture. We'd like to see culture die, which in a way is not surprising because culture's never been central to this country, unlike in Europe. In fact, it's often been seen as a threat to American identity. 

Charlotte Burns: The order singled out an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” saying that it was a part of a “widespread effort to rewrite history, [and deepening] societal divides, and [fostering] a sense of national shame.” And then also singled out the Women's Museum for allegedly including men in a women's exhibition. The order is to be implemented by the Vice President, and it calls for the restoration of the Smithsonian as a “symbol of American [greatness].” 

Over half of the Smithsonian's budget comes from the federal government. The complex is the largest museum complex in the world, of its kind. So when we talk about drastic cuts and existential threats for many museums, they're experiencing exactly that right now.

The secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Lonnie [G.] Bunch [III], has confirmed that the organization is committed to research and scholarship. He sent a message to staff following the order saying, “We'll continue to employ our internal review processes which keep us accountable to the public. When we err, we adjust, pivot, and learn as needed,” and the Smithsonian would “remain committed to telling the multi-faceted stor[ies] of this country's extraordinary heritage.”

But the institution was in the news recently after artist Amy Sherald withdrew her solo show American Sublime from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery after being told the museum was considering the display of her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty in order to avoid provoking President Trump. The exhibition would have been the first by a Black contemporary artist at the Portrait Gallery. Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama's presidential portrait in 2018, cited "institutional fear shaped by political hostility toward trans lives" after the museum proposed adding a video discussing transgender issues alongside the work. The Smithsonian expressed disappointment that audiences won't experience the exhibition.

When I speak to other museums, they're having lots of different reactions to this moment in time. Some cannot change their mission. They would be the nothing of nowhere if they removed all of the language out of their mission statements that is being focused upon. Other institutions are going to lengths to avoid being singled out further.

Allan, based on your experience of American culture, do you think that this is something the cultural sector is equipped to deal with?

Allan Schwartzman: No, the cultural sector is like a big boat. It takes a lot to turn it around. So I don't think so. I think that outside of, let's say, museums, I don't think there's a lot of understanding of politics and how that functions within American society in the art sector. So, I think we're in for some rocky times. 

I guess what I would add to that is a kind of ‘what if.’ What if in three-and-a-half years the politics change? Does that reverse things, or are there certain kinds of cuts that remain forever in place? And then what impact does that have on institutions?

Charlotte Burns: Well, technically yes, anything can be reversed. 

Allan Schwartzman: But is there an appetite to reverse them?

Charlotte Burns: Well, there's a flurry of executive orders is the number one thing. So there'd be a lot to deal with, and it would be difficult to bring back that institutional memory. 

Allan Schwartzman: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte Burns: What kind of conversations you can have in institutions, we've talked about that so much on these shows—who museums are for—and that seems to be being rewritten.

Part of the executive order aims at monuments. For instance, our first show of Hope & Dread focused on the confederacy monuments and the executive order about restoring truth and sanity to American history called for the restoration of monuments that had been removed. So it's very much about the reins of history, about shaping narratives of America. Like we asked in one of our very early podcasts who gets to be an American? That's still the question driving this. 

I spoke to a major artist yesterday who's lost their entire income, and this artist was a subject of one of the most significant museums in America, a monographic exhibition there last year, but has lost all income because they have been disinvited from university campuses at which they were meant to speak. They've been disinvited from private events at which they were meant to speak. And the official explanation has been that their work is in a DEI pot, and as this artist said to me, “But if I'm in a DEI pot, then who's in the main pot?” They just were in a contemporary art pot, and now they are being taken out, and they have no source of income this year. So if you've lost your income, how do you get through the year? Do you wait? 

So I think it's a bit of a wish and a prayer to think about that timescale when things are changing so fast now and having such a drastic impact.

Allan Schwartzman: So what does such an artist do? 

Charlotte Burns: They're carrying on making their work, they're carrying on making their work. They are an artist. They will keep making art. And actually the body of work they're creating right now sounds fantastic. So they'll still keep doing that. 

There's several artists I've spoken to in the last couple of weeks who are in these positions of imminent threat, and that's a financial threat but for a lot of them, it's also an existential one because it's the work they make, the income they have, the lives they have, the people they support, and what rights they have, and they feel that the art world is immediately not available. The resources of the art world have withdrawn. 

Do you see anything countering that? Do you see that there are patrons and museum groups or museum directors who are out there looking for alternative ways to support artists?

Allan Schwartzman: No. In short, no. However, we are starting to advise the collectors we work with, who are also patrons—which most of the collectors we work with are—to be funding artists, to be doing some direct funding, so that artists can receive support. 

Charlotte Burns: I guess that links back up to what you were saying at the beginning about what collectors and philanthropists see as the value of art. Like if there is all of a sudden a drastic fall-off in market value or in institutional support for artists, then it's a faith project. 

What proportion of the art world, as we describe it, do you think would be on board with that kind of faith project at this point? How many people will drop away if there is a period of retrenchment?

Allan Schwartzman: We've always advised the collectors we work with, even those not interested in new art, to be spending a certain percentage of their budget, even if it's a very small one, on collecting young artists. I always felt it was important for a collector to see art as being produced by somebody and not just being a product that’s the result of a process. And similarly, I think it's, we're now at a time where collector/patrons should be giving money to artists who need money. I don't know if too many organizations that do, and so collectors have to pick up the slack.

I do think that we have placed too much of an emphasis on tax deductibility, as though one needs a tax deduction in order to give away money. I mean, one's still giving away money even with a tax deduction. So I think one needs to break loose from that notion that a tax deduction is necessary in order to be a patron.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: A lot of dealers I'm talking to at the moment are saying that this is a cliffhanger moment for the market as well. One dealer last week described it to me as not being like any other previous dip in which the market actually comes out stronger, but being more like the 1990s when there was fundamentally a new chapter written after a rupture. You've been talking for a long time about cycles. Do you think we're in a cycle, or is it a new chapter in terms of the market? 

Allan Schwartzman: I think we're at an unprecedented moment, at least unprecedented since this market began in the late 1970s, and that is that there's very little appetite to be buying art right now. I hear a number of dealers say to me that it's never been this difficult to sell. I think it's because people have become overloaded with art. And so what's going to cause somebody to buy another work of art? 

Well, if it's a collector of masterworks, it would be the availability of a masterwork that's greater than the masterworks they already own. People who are very rich tend to not be motivated to sell when someone comes forward with an extraordinary sum because what are they gonna do with the money except put it back into more art. And if they can't find art better than the art that they'd be selling, then why would they sell anything? And so it's like the wheels of the market come to a grinding halt. 

Of course, that changes, that'll change as art changes. That'll change as one sees opportunity in places where they didn't see it before. And that's been a mechanism that's always been an operation. It’s certainly an area we've focused on. We seem to have had great success in identifying great talent and work that is undervalued ahead of the market. 

Charlotte Burns: Mm-hmm.

Allan Schwartzman: And so I think that will continue. 

Charlotte Burns: You're not gonna say where you’re looking now, are you? 

Allan Schwartzman: Of course not. 

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: So, something else that stayed with me from last season was the artist Alvaro Barrington. 

Allan Schwartzman: Can I just say before you get into it…

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Allan Schwartzman: I should say Alvaro is an extraordinary artist. This is an artist of such a great generosity of spirit that…He's the only artist I know who has a huge number of shows and produces a huge amount of work and doesn't seem to, in any way, diminish the quality of what it is that they produce. 

Charlotte Burns: I agree, and when I've been thinking about people who stood out to me from the last season, there are certain quotes that percolate through time. Deana’s was one of them for me, and Alvaro’s was another where he had said something to me about Abstract Expressionism. This would've been, I think, late ‘23, early ‘24, so a completely different moment than the one we’re in, through a period in which the art world had been saying it was recognizing the massive amounts of artists that had overlooked and what the canon had prioritized. And I guess we're in a moment now of reaction to that. 

Alvaro was talking about the Abstract Expressionist movement. It always struck him that that was an identity movement. I'm just gonna play you the clip. 

Alvaro Barrington: I think everything is identity-led, but I think one of the stories that sort of gets misread about Abstract Expressionism or action painting is what was happening politically at the time and this is something that my professors like Carrie Moyer, Katy Siegel—I went to Hunter [College] and the school of abstraction was deep in the DNA. It basically presented itself as this sort of non-identity kind of Americana art, but almost all of the artists involved were Jews. Even though [Jackson] Pollock became the face of it, his wife Lee Krasner was Jewish, his best friend Philip Guston was Jewish, Helen Frankenthaler, the people who wrote about it, [Clement] Greenberg, [Harold] Rosenberg. It's interesting how it got written in history because what that would mean is that a movement that started in 1946, 1947, meant that they had no concept of what was happening in Germany or throughout the rest of the world. That they were somehow protected from the knowledge that them, as Jewish folks, were deeply hated. In fact, I think we kind of live in an era now where maybe some of us forget that, but it would, it just is an impossible ask. It's an impossible ask to imagine that somehow [Mark] Rothko and these guys weren't understanding something about how the rest of their community was being treated. And I just think that's an impossible ask. 

One of the solutions that they came up with in terms of dealing with this was, how do you make art that acknowledges that your existence is real, when so many of the world was ready to kill you, including America? These artists were struggling with how to figure out how to move forward after what they had experienced, and action painting was one of the cleanest ways of saying “I'm alive.” I mean, a Rothko painting can be read as just a sunset that anybody could appreciate; it's a landscape that, whether you're Jewish or non-Jewish or whatever, you were able to meet at this commonality. 

Starting the conversation from where we all agree, and then maybe we could get into the nuances of where we disagree, and I think that was their sort of way of, their strategy of how they wanted to move forward, the art strategy of how they wanted to move forward.

And I think, obviously, that came from them going to any of the jazz clubs and realizing how Black Americans had, through this music genre, created this thing of how people can be in the same room together. And then, from there, maybe have conversations.

Charlotte Burns: That was an excerpted clip of Alvaro speaking on the last season of the podcast. I've been thinking a lot about what he said about this idea of an art born of grief and confusion, the person behind it striving to say, “I'm alive,” and process the world around them, which, I've been thinking so much about it because if the way Abstract Expressionism is put out into the world is often how much a painting cost, the most valuable, the biggest museum collections, and I'm not sure we focus on what Alvaro is talking about, which is what the people making it were experiencing and seeking and trying to get towards.

You and I have spoken a little bit about specific Jewish customs of grieving and absence, which seemed another powerful way to read that work.

Allan Schwartzman: What stood out for me as Alvaro was talking is that nearly half the artists of Abstract Expressionism were Jewish: Rothko, [Barnett] Newman, [Ad] Reinhardt, Krasner. These were all Jewish people, and underlying the work of an artist like Newman and Rothko, was a sense of…was an existential sense that I think of as being very linked to Judaism. And I also think about Barnett Newman. Didn't he do a series on the Stations of the Cross? So, religion was always a part of the work in some way or another, whether directly or indirectly. And Reinhardt creating “the last paintings”, and then spending the last six or more years of his life remaking that same last painting, so never making it, that kind of existential joke, I also think of as a very kind of Jewish way of thinking. 

I'm curious to how that work is viewed by people who are not Jewish or brought up in a different kind of faith. But I think it's really interesting the way Alvaro has connected to that aspect of those artists’ work. 

Charlotte Burns: You also talked a little bit about mourning customs after a death, and the idea of covering up mirrors, covering up reflections, acknowledging the absence of the life with a blankness, with gaps. And that also seems to speak so much to the work. 

Allan Schwartzman: Well, in Judaism, you’re supposed to mourn for seven days, and then you go on with life. And so I always thought it was a very kind of humane, and practical way of looking at time and life and death that was very different from life in a Jewish family at times not of death, which can be very neurotic and deeply engaged and overly suffocating.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: Do you think that the way that we, in the art world, have been defining value and thinking about art and artists has become too narrow? Do you think the frameworks we've inherited are too constrained?

Allan Schwartzman: Absolutely. Money has become a primary, the primary way in which we're looking at art, and not in terms of content. And the money's never been the interesting part. That's maybe the headline, maybe that's the reason why we have more stories and newspapers and magazines about art, but it's not what makes art interesting.

Charlotte Burns: Julia Halperin and I recently published a report based on a survey of women artists that was commissioned by Anonymous Was A Woman in partnership with SMU Data Arts and Loring Randolph. What the response told us, which was an overwhelming response from women artists, was that the art world, as we know it and talk about it, has already ceased to be important for many of those professional artists, which was about 85% of the survey-takers. And in its place, they forged new paths, finding different ways to sustain themselves. 

Almost two-thirds of the respondents, 63%, said that a lack of museum or institutional backing hindered their careers, and 59% felt the same way about galleries, and 55% were selling work totally independently. 

But in contrast, when asked their most valuable resource, the overwhelming response, 79%, was each other—artistic community and networks were key to their careers. And this experience was shared across ages, locations, and races. 

That idea of community and connection is something that artists have always known as important. But it's interesting, because a dealer was telling me the other day that they felt we needed more community in the art world. And I was thinking about that. 

Do you think there is a community within the art world that you move through,  compared to other periods in your career and life?

Allan Schwartzman: Well, collectors I know exist within a community of collectors, and often within a community of museums and institutions that they support. 

I mean, I'm on the board of Artists Space, and that's always been a kind of community-based organization. So many so-called alternative spaces that came into formation in the 1970s became more and more focused on their perpetuation as institutions and not on the programs that they funded, and Artists Space—since I've been on the board for at least the last 20 years—has been very community-based. And the programs, especially under Jay Sanders, the current director, have been very much about having a gathering place for community. I think that's essential. 

I don’t know where else that's happening with institutions. I'm hopeful, and assuming that that's happening throughout the country, but I don't know for sure.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What are your hopes for this season of the podcast? Is there something you hope we can get to?

Allan Schwartzman: I'd like to be speaking to more artists. I think that we're in a period where there's a lot of very great artists that have not gotten their due, that have not been recorded, and there are great stories to tell. There are artists in their 70s and 80s who are still with us, still cogent, and I think it's time for that to be put to tape.

I was thinking about when you were talking about women and women artists, feminism has had a greater impact on the art of our time than I think virtually anything before it, and yet we still don't give women and feminism the credit that they deserve. And maybe it's because feminism was a collective movement. So many of the women involved in the feminist movement in the early years sought to support the collective more than to develop their own careers and identities. And I think also the fact that it was a content-based movement, and not a style-based movement, made it something that the market doesn't know how to hold onto. The market knows how to support a Jasper Johns or a Brice Marden, because it's work that's very consistent. It doesn't know how to deal with inconsistency. 

It’s never known how to deal with someone like Sigmar Polke, who's one of the truly greatest artists of the Post-War period. But his work is so sloppy in terms of understanding a chronology and a style of an artist that we haven't known how to deal with it. I think the retrospective that Kathy Halbreich curated for the Museum of Modern Art did deal with it. I think that she understood all of that and how that operated within Sigmar's work. But it's hard for an audience to see. And so how to make that visible, whether it's an iconoclast like Sigmar or a content-driven artist, such as women artists of the early phases of feminism.

Like in our advisory work, we're working with the estate of Hannah Wilke, and I think about how Hannah was reviled by so many of her American peers for flaunting her body and her sexuality because that was seen as a kind of ‘50s notion of a woman; the idea that she would objectify her own body and use it as a subject of sexual titillation was taboo. But I think that she did it in an empowered way. 

And so I've been spending a lot of time looking at Hannah's work, and looking at the impact of feminism, and her own experience, and not feeling like she needed to be liberated, like she was somehow already liberated. I think that's made her a pioneer. And I also think that of her generation of artists, she's definitely not gotten her due. She has not had a major retrospective in a major museum, and yet I think we'd understand the work very differently if we got a chance to see that, so.

I think there are not that many retrospectives of art by artists of our time that I can visualize how most of them would look because I know the range of what they did and where the market supported their work, and therefore how such exhibitions are likely to be organized. But there aren't that many artists where they're likely to be presented in a way that defies our understanding of the work, where it's telling a new story. So I'd love to see that with Hannah. 

We've seen it with Yoko Ono, who was one of the most reviled artists of the Post-War period of her time, and yet one of the most significant, and I think it was precisely because she spanned from the last days of the avant-garde to the most empowered moments of living in a world of pop culture when pop culture defined the new generation. 

So, I look to museum exhibitions to tell us stories of these artists.

Charlotte Burns: I wonder if they will. I was thinking, you know, you and I had a brief conversation the other day about that moment in the late ‘80s and ‘90s where there was a surge of focus and research, and museum exhibitions, and acquisitions looking at artists who were not the market darlings of the 1980s.

Allan Schwartzman: Mm-hmm.

Charlotte Burns: One of the exhibitions that the artist Sam Durant mentioned to me the other day as being really meaningful for him was a show I'd never heard of called “The Decade Show,” which took place in the late ‘80s across three different venues in New York, including the New Museum and the Studio Museum [in Harlem].

And when I looked up the exhibition and the artist list, it was so many artists who you know, the market darlings, but they were mixed with artists who we also know, but largely because several of those artists have been “rediscovered” in the past decade or so. And I thought it was really sad in a way that those artists briefly had a prominence, were positioned as being just as important as these other artists for a moment, and then largely disappeared, for some of them, for the rest of their lifetimes; they were rediscovered after death or at the very, very end of their life. They’d struggled financially to make the work they really wanted to make, some of them, and then were heralded with big museum shows in the teens and 2020s. And I wondered whether it was a similar moment now in the art world. 

We've seen this a little bit with the data study that we do, the Burns Halperin Report, where in 2018, when we started gathering data, it was a moment of open conversation around how there needed to be more diversity in collections. And then already by 2020, we noticed that there was backlash to the idea of what that was, and this idea that things had maybe gone too far. Whereas when we looked at the numbers, the numbers had not shifted yet. The change hadn't yet begun. And so even within the art world—which thinks of itself as progressive—what people were reacting to was a conversation that seemed to have gone too far, rather than action. There had been change, and there were more exhibitions, but actually statistically on balance, it wasn't a fundamental repositioning. And there was a backlash pretty quickly.

So, it's not even been a decade since we've been doing those reports, but when we look back and we mark the years in which we've done the studies and the different ways we've approached people and talked to them and the language that we've used, it's really had radical shifts every couple of years. 

And the conversations I've been having with artists this week about how many of them are losing their income, their livelihoods, they are having an immediate drop in support. I was thinking about how much it is we lose in these moments, and maybe in 30 years, there'll be a market rediscovery of a handful of those artists who were part of one of the best group shows of this recent period of time.

But what happens right now? They're artists in their prime, making work full throttle with ambitions, and if they're not getting supported, then it's a loss. And those losses aren't press-released. Museums aren't sending out press releases, the [National Endowment for the Arts] NEA's not sending out press releases, the curatorial positions, the research positions that are being withdrawn, that's not getting press-released. It's not being mapped or marked. So we don't know the landscape as it's being redrawn. 

So I wonder which museums are doing those shows. I hope you're right. That we'll see that. But I wonder.

Allan Schwartzman: Who are committed to doing shows like “The Decade Show”?

Charlotte Burns: Well, no, you were saying you wanna see, you were talking about Hannah Wilke and saying you'd like to see artists being presented more fully, and overlooked artists who haven't been given their dues. But it just made me think of that cycle of when that happens and how quickly.

Allan Schwartzman: Well, there is great interest in a Hannah Wilke retrospective amongst certain curators, so, I think it is likely to take place in the next few years.

Charlotte Burns: Well, that's good. That's good news.

Allan Schwartzman: Yeah. 

And the Tate’s [Modern] retrospective of Yoko Ono, which is traveling, I think it's going to, it's currently in Berlin. It's going to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It will perhaps travel to Asia. That was a show that really began to get at the fullness of Yoko and her importance, and that's getting out into the world. 

So, it's happening somewhat. 

Charlotte Burns: So, reasons to hope.

Allan Schwartzman: Yeah.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Allan, what's the ‘what if’ driving you right now?

Allan Schwartzman: Hmm. It's what if all that's being lost today due to funding cuts is forever lost? What if it kills an appetite for discovery and rediscovery, and to supporting the arts outside of those few major institutions that seem to always have a base of support?

Charlotte Burns: Allan, thanks so much. It's been, it's been great being back in the, well, I don’t know if you call it the saddle, but the seat.

Allan Schwartzman: Yeah. It's getting the rust out. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, exactly.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Allan, as always. 

Join us next time when we’ll be talking to Kemi Ilesanmi, returning for her third appearance on the show. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: We need to be looking for what the opportunity moments are, to think differently, to do differently, to be connected more deeply, differently. And I think we're all still searching for that, but that's my big take. The thing I'm trying to lean into is that new sun. What's the new sun that we get to create in this moment that we couldn't create six months ago? Even though it's hard.

Charlotte Burns: I love talking to Kemi, and I think this might be our best conversation yet. 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art​.

The Art World: What If…?! Season 3 with Agnes Denes

The artist Agnes Denes saw it coming. Machines taking over. Technology converging with consciousness. History on a pendulum swinging perilously back and forth.

In this intimate conversation recorded with host Charlotte Burns in Denes' downtown Manhattan loft apartment and studio space, they talk about her work. When Denes wrote about these things more than 50 years ago, it was prescient, unsettling, and brilliant.

Now the artist is in her mid-90s and is still writing and making art every day. And she’s still asking the questions that matter: What is humanity's purpose? What is love? How do we survive?

Denes planted wheat in downtown Manhattan on a landfill that would become Battery Park City. She made ecological art before climate change was front-page news. Her work spans conceptual art, poetry, drawings, installations, sculptures, writings, and more. Twenty thousand pieces, mostly never seen.

Today? She hands out wheat seeds like promises. Plant hope. Harvest peace. Become part of the art.

The questions never change, she says, only their importance shifts.

What if we listened?

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Charlotte Burns: Welcome to the new season of The Art World: What If, a podcast all about imagining new and better futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.

[Audio of guests saying “what if”]

Our first guest, the artist Agnes Denes, saw it coming: machines taking over, technology converging with consciousness, history on a pendulum swinging perilously back and forth. When she wrote about this more than 50 years ago, it was prescient, unsettling, and brilliant. Now in her mid-90s, she’s still writing every day and still asking the questions that count. What is humanity’s purpose? What is love? How do we survive? 

Denes planted wheat in downtown Manhattan on a landfill that would become Battery Park City. She made ecological art before climate change was front-page news. Her work spans conceptual art, poetry, drawings, installations, sculptures, writings, and so much more. 20,000 pieces, most never seen. 

Today, she hands out wheat seeds like promises. Plant hope, harvest peace, become part of the art. “The questions never change,” she says, “only their importance shifts.” What if we listened?  

[Musical Interlude]

Agnes, it's such a pleasure to be here today.

Agnes Denes: Thank you.  

Charlotte Burns: You posed a series of philosophical questions in 1968 in the work Rice/Tree/Burial [with Time Capsule, 1969-1979], such as: What do you consider humanity's most important achievement? What is love? What is humanity's purpose? How do you feel about death? Should we be more practical or more visionary? 

And I wanted to ask you, would you still ask those questions today, and have your answers changed?

Agnes Denes: We never have the answers. The questions change. They change importance. They change direction. But the questions are always there, and the questions are always the same.

Charlotte Burns: Do you feel we should be more practical or more visionary?

Agnes Denes: We should be both. Obviously.

We should be as much as we can possibly be. And we have to be very strong. Humanity has to be very strong and less impressionable. 

We are too impressionable right now. And that reminds me more [of] my sheep work, [Sheep In the Image of Man, 1998] than Rice/Tree/Burial, when I compare humanity to sheep.

Charlotte Burns: Tell me more about that.

Agnes Denes: I was at the [American] Academy in Rome, and I brought sheep into the Academy. 

I brought sheep—dirty, smelly sheep—into the pristine gardens of the Academy. They represented humanity. As we are running, we don't have any vision, we don't have any space. 

We are running the way sheep do, with our nose in the back of the sheep in front of us, and that is how humanity is propelling itself. 

You have to read the text to go with sheep to understand this project, and it was done like 20 or 30 years ago, and it's so appropriate today.

Charlotte Burns: That reminds me of something you wrote in the 1970s about technology. You were an early adopter of computer technology, and you forecast then—more than 50 years ago—some of today's problems, in your writings. 

For example, you wrote:

The general direction of development is towards the convergence in function of man and his machines. With the humanization of machines comes the dehumanization of man. Wouldn't it be a shame if mankind were beginning to understand its own mind and the nature of consciousness just as it was losing its humanity? In the distant future, when Homo Sapien has long been extinct and our only descendants are intelligent machines, those sentient beings may remember us with awe and reverence for humanity was but a form of organic life with such a simple chemistry that it could be created spontaneously from the dusts of the earth. And yet through the random forces of evolution, it somehow wondrously developed a good enough brain to create machine intelligence, a higher form of intellect that eventually succeeded its creator. 

You wrote that in the early 1970s. I read it the other week, and I was dumbfounded by how prescient that was.

What made you write that then, and what are your views on technology and humanity now?

Agnes Denes: How should I respond to that? 

I feel that what I'm saying now is I'm paraphrasing myself, what I have already written, and when it was so well written, and so eloquently expressed, whatever I'm saying now, answering these questions is simply paraphrasing myself. 

So, let's start with new questions and fresh beginnings, rather than going back to something I have written 30 or 40 years ago.

Things don't change. The problems are always the same, and I just wrote the piece the other day called “The Pendulum.” The pendulum swings back and forth. You have to deal with it. You have to deal with the ups, the downs, the sideways, and try to survive.

Charlotte Burns: I want to ask you about writing. You said how eloquently you'd written that. Do you find it difficult to write? Do you write and rewrite? What's your writing process?

Agnes Denes: It's very easy for me to write. I am a writer as much as I am anything else, and I have written several books. I must have written a couple of million words, and I'm writing every day.

Charlotte Burns: You write every day?

Agnes Denes: Every day I write, and I'm 94 years old. I write every day.

Charlotte Burns: Do you have a habit? Do you write even when you don't want to?

Agnes Denes: Writing is not a habit. It's a very difficult thing to do if you want to say something that's meaningful. Otherwise, what's the sense to write? 

No, that's not true. I also write poetry, and that's for my pleasure. I just started a new form of poem. I called a 10-minute poem. It takes 10 minutes to write it. Whatever blurts out from my mind, it's hit on the paper. It's very interesting. No looking for things, no searching for words, it just comes right out.

Charlotte Burns: It's interesting that you're creating in poetry now because you've said at other points in your life that when you were a child, you wanted to be a poet, but then you lost your language as you moved countries. And then you found that your creative impulses had found other ways of blurting out and expressing…

Agnes Denes: Right. 

Charlotte Burns: …themselves…

Agnes Denes: Right.

Charlotte Burns: … and you've been so creative in so many different forms. You were a painter, but then you found painting frustrating, and you wanted more than the edge of the canvas. 

Which of the media in which you've worked have you found least frustrating?

Agnes Denes: I can't say that, they're all the same. It's not frustrating, it's interesting to explore. And we just found my old paintings, never shown, never seen by anybody.

Charlotte Burns: Never shown?

Agnes Denes: Never shown. I have so much work that was never seen by anybody. I have maybe 20,000 works that I'm leaving, and you only know maybe 10% of my work. 

Charlotte Burns: Wow.

Agnes Denes: And I find that interesting. 

Yes, you go from one form to the next, and all creative process I went through was to investigate how I would react to it. 

I went into painting, I went into sculpture, I went into color. I removed color from my work for 11 years to test if I could work without color. 

That is putting yourself out there. It's investigating what you're capable of doing, and I did that to myself. 

And in addition to being neglected, I did…I created difficulties for myself that I see now. I call it the back-view mirror. I see my life very clearly in a back-view mirror.

Charlotte Burns: Have you always been able to see it clearly, or is that something that you have more clarity on now?

Agnes Denes: If it interested in what?

Charlotte Burns: Your back-view mirror. Can you…

Agnes Denes: That’s new.

Charlotte Burns: Is it new?

Agnes Denes: Yeah. You get that when you get as old as I am. 

Charlotte Burns: What do you see in it now?

Agnes Denes: How many hours or days do we have? [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: We can be here as long as you want. [Laughs]

Agnes Denes: I see everything more clearly. Let's put it that way. It's like putting a back-view mirror to your car. You see what's behind you that you don't see when you're driving forward. 

It's very interesting. Exploration and examination of anything is very interesting, and I find it more interesting every day. 

I'm very fortunate to have my mind. It never failed me, and you get as old as I am, you’ll find, without holding back, without vanity, you find the true meaning of what you can produce, and I find a lot of brilliance. And if I said that 20 years ago would be stupid, but saying that at 94, I can say I find a lot of brilliance, especially when you read something from early work. It had an awful lot of insight, and it still does. 

Now, how far insight gets us, that's another story. Doesn't get us very far. Endurance does. I want people to be stronger. All my work is meant to have people become survival-oriented, but not in a sense of a go-bag. 

I started writing a poem when you guys appeared, and it's called “The World on a Go-Bag”. Forget it, you can't plan. There is no getaway. There is no island. There is no money. There is no vanity that you can hide behind. You have to stand up, do what you were meant to be. Each one of us different, each one of us our own way, and do the best we can. Don't question why we are here. We are here. We are product. We must survive. We are survival-oriented. It's built into our system. We must survive, and we must help each other. That is very important, and that we must learn. 

Any questions?

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: You talk about the rearview mirror, and in the Book of Dust [The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter], you talked about time. “Time is a passing train. In the blink of an eye, being born and dying.” You said, “One thing seems sure, it definitely kills us.” 

Your work is always navigating between mortality and infinity. When you think of creating the work, or you are doing the drawings, or you're writing the poems, or you are doing the writings, how do you think of the scale for the idea when you're conceiving the idea?

Agnes Denes: The scale? 

Charlotte Burns: The scale. Because the scale of the ideas are from humanity to the infinite. What you're conceiving, they're big ideas.

Agnes Denes: I’m not thinking of any scale.

Charlotte Burns: No?

Agnes Denes: I'm not even thinking. It comes from a creative process. I'm not thinking the effect it's gonna make. I'm not thinking of how it's going to be received. I'm not thinking of its survival. I'm thinking of expressing it the best I can. That's all I'm thinking about. And that is automatic, so I'm not even thinking it. It's automatic. 

Be clear, be precise, and be interesting. Maybe, if I have any thoughts. But there are no thoughts, other than expressing a concept. The concept rules the game. 

I get a concept, must come out. You leave, I'm gonna get a concept, I'm gonna write it down. 

That's the best I can explain it. And it's all about communication. I want to communicate with you, I want to communicate with humanity. I want to communicate with anything that moves. Even a spider. 

I was just reading about spiders in parts of Africa, and I don't like spiders, and I was thinking, “How could I learn to love a spider?” And it was easy. If a spider liked another spider, I liked a spider. Interaction. Communication.

Charlotte Burns: If you view your work through that lens of communicating your ideas, what do you think you've most successfully communicated? Which work do you think has communicated the most clearly?

Agnes Denes: Well, I like the sheep. I like my [Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space:] Map Projections. I like the fact that—next to philosophy—I have a lot of humor in my work, and people sometimes miss it because they get gulfed up by the philosophy, and the humor is always there. 

And humor is necessary because it's the saliva to swallow the heavy stuff. So. That’s not a very nice example, but that's the best I can come up.

Charlotte Burns: Someone said about, I think it might have been in a Shakespeare play, that laughter is a graveside pirouette.

Agnes Denes: Yes. Yes. Humor. Laughter is the same. Yes, you're right.

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to ask you also about beauty because your work relies a lot on other disciplines beyond art. It brings a lot into art, whether that's maths or philosophy, or science. And you talked about people finding mathematics stern. But if you created something beautiful, then people would be drawn in by the beauty, and then, once they're drawn in by the beauty, then you've got them thinking.

Agnes Denes: Yes, exactly. You get people—you don't really care how—you get people into your thinking, if you want to communicate honestly with people. 

And beauty is one way, humor is another. And they can swallow the philosophy, which is not so easy. So, it's communication. It's all about communication. I could, I just wish I could communicate to people not to be afraid. Whatever is being done today or tomorrow or yesterday. Don't be afraid. The pendulum swings. It’s going back and forth, up and down. Things change. Learn to work with the change. Be flexible, be lovable, and plant a lot of wheat fields. [Laughs]

I'm gonna give you a gift. Here [gestures to Charlotte].

Charlotte Burns: One second.

Agnes Denes: I can't reach. It just came yesterday. 

Charlotte Burns: Let me just move this. 

Agnes Denes: It's very valuable. Take out one piece, honey.

Charlotte Burns: This here?

Agnes Denes: Oh, one. 

Charlotte Burns: What, this? 

Agnes Denes: Yep. That's wheat I planted. 

Charlotte Burns: Oh my goodness.

Agnes Denes: Read it, honey.

Charlotte Burns: So you've just given me a gift, and it says:
Agnes Denes, Plant/Hope/Harvest/Peace. This wheat was harvested from artist Agnes Denes, 2024 Ecological Artwork, wheat field, and inspiration. The seed is in the ground. 

Contained in this packet is Bobcat Winter Wheat harvested from Denes' installation at Tinworks Art in the fall of 2024. Bobcat was developed by the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station and released in 2019. Bobcat is a hard red winter wheat with a solid stem, improved yield potential, and bred to be drought-tolerant. The artist encourages the community to plant the seeds, tend the wheat, harvest the grains, and process them according to local customs. By participating, you become part of the art.

Agnes Denes: Okay, that's…that explains it. And that's my wheat. I grew it, and it…I want it planted all over the world. 

And why wheat? It doesn't matter. It's a symbol. Why do I use pyramids in my drawings? It's a symbol. The wheat is a symbol. I could have chosen rice, I could have chosen anything else. I want wheat to be planted all over the world so that we give strength to everybody. And the wheat represents solidarity and strength with each other. 

So, it's just a symbol. And I think my work is a symbol. I don't want to say things. I don't want my talk to sound like a lecture. I just want to make sure it's honest, simple, intelligent communication that I give you.

Charlotte Burns: When you talk about symbols, I want to ask you about that. It's really interesting. Behind you, there's a little banner poster saying “A pyramid is forever”, which I love.

Agnes Denes: Pyramid is unimportant as a pyramid. It's a symbol.

Charlotte Burns: And the symbol for you is hope and solidarity… 

Agnes Denes: Of communication. It’s a method. It's a key. It's very important that when we communicate that we have good keys to communicate with. Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: How many good keys do you think there are?

Agnes Denes: Two and a half? I don't know. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: There's a great image of you, a famous image of you—probably the most famous image of you—standing alone in a golden wheat field in downtown Manhattan, and what would become Battery Park. You're wearing blue jeans and a pastel striped shirt. It's two acres of wheat. Behind you is the rubble of landfill, and then rising up vertically beyond that is the Financial District, and it's an image that anybody who's studied art history will know, and there's something really magical about the image. It seems like it's a dream. 

Agnes Denes: What a nice way to put it.

Charlotte Burns: It feels that way.

I wanna ask you a question about that in a minute, but what I read too, the critic, Holland Cotter was living in New York that summer and he wrote, “if you stood in the middle of the field—and anyone could—you had views of the Twin Towers rising nearby and the Statue of Liberty off to the south. The scent there that hot summer was pure country (as were the bugs),” and I'd never thought about the way it must have smelled. 

But what I wanted to ask you was, whenever I've seen that image, it feels magical and dreamlike. But what did it feel like for you walking amongst that field?

Agnes Denes: Very strenuous. It was very hard. I worked at the field all day, and I needed volunteers, so after I went home, I had to create sandwiches for the next day's volunteers, and then start working again early in the morning, in the field all day. It was extremely strenuous. I wrote a poem describing my process at the field, and that's what's left of it, of course. And the memory.

When we harvested, it was such a triumph. The adversity. I was chased by the people who worked at the field, I called them the mafia. They were construction mafia, and the guy was after me. I was good-looking. I was young. And he wanted to bed me the worst possible way. “Come with me to Atlantic City one weekend, and we'll leave you alone. We won't harass you anymore.” So I said, “Harass me.” 

We fought all through the summer. The end of the summer, he brought me the key to the city, on a rug on his knees. [Laughs] That was my triumph. 

But it was very difficult. The work itself, the attention it took. “Don't make a mistake. Don't do this. Don't do that.” It was a very difficult project, but most of my projects are difficult. 

When I was at the edge of Niagara Falls facing death for eight days, that was difficult too. I was ready to die for my art, and that was in Rice/Tree/Burial. Niagara Falls didn't have barriers in those days. They probably put them up because of me. And my students, my assistants, left me there overnight, and I was alone facing the sky over me, which is gorgeous because of the falls, the turbulence it causes. And the thoughts that I had, the incredible creativity that was given me there. And I was facing death. 

When I photographed my wheat field, lying in the mud, I never felt cold. I never felt wetness. I was thinking, “How will that shot come out?” 

When you make art, you don't think of, if you're a real artist, you don't think of anything else…What effect it's going to have, if people will even understand it. You think of doing it, and you think of doing it the best possible way you can. 

That is…remembering my art and thinking back, and doing it today. That's what I can impart best. If you want to communicate honestly, don't think of anything else but to communicate what you have to say to someone else. 

Any questions?

Charlotte Burns: Yes, I do. 

This idea of focusing on communicating and not whether the work is received well or anything like that, you only got your first New York retrospective in 2019, aged 88, after living in the city for more than 60 years. And you said, “A lot of your projects remained unrealized. Perhaps because I'm a woman. They would always prefer a man.”

You were part of A.I.R. Gallery, which is a nonprofit created in 1972 by and for women artists, including you, Howardena Pindell, Judith Bernstein, and several others. And you were at a historic protest that year at the Corcoran Gallery [of Art] in D.C., where 350 women artists protested the male-dominated art world, and you denounced a vaginal sensibility, saying that, “The only inner space I recognize is where my brain is and my soul.” 

And I wanted to ask you, as you look back in your back-view mirror, how you reflect on your place within the women's art movement, or think of your career as a woman artist, and think about what has changed and what hasn't for women artists in that time?

Agnes Denes: It's a very good question, but I don't think of my work as women's work. I am a creative entity. I'm not a woman or a man. Sure about that. I don't think in those terms. I would be segregating against myself. 

Yes, I've been pushed down, I've been ignored, and I was given, now, at the end. They usually give you success toward the end. That's the way humanity is. 

And the best answer to that is, learn to live with success without it spoiling you. It's not spoiling me. I find it as difficult as it is to make art today, as it always was, and men are still favored today because that's the way humanity is wired. Can't help it. I am not saying to put up with it. I'm not saying to fight it. You just do what comes naturally. It's not much you can do. You roll with the punches.

Charlotte Burns: I meant to ask you a question when you talked about Wheatfield as well. We talked about that photograph of you, and that photo's quite unique because mostly you take photographs of your own work through your career. You talked about lying in the mud and taking a photograph, but that image I hadn't realized of you in the wheat field was unusual because it was taken by a Time photographer. And you said they came in and they told you to hold a staff in your hand and you said…

Agnes Denes: To hold what in my hand?

Charlotte Burns: To hold the staff. 

Agnes Denes: Oh, the staff. Yeah. Okay.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. And you said, “That's ridiculous,” and he said, “Just hold it.” 

And I thought there was something quite…I don't know. I never knew that the photograph was taken by someone who made you hold a prop, and that you thought it was ridiculous at the time. And I wondered how it felt for you.

Agnes Denes: Well, he wanted me to show that I was in charge. He didn't say it nastily; he said it nicely. And I said, “But you know, it's not just me. It's a lot of people.” And he says, “Hold it. Yeah, it's you. You inspired everybody.” But that's neither here nor there. It's like taking credit at the end of…for something is so ridiculous. If…  

I'm not gonna say that. Agnes, don't say that. Don't get into that. 

Nobody should take credit for humanity. So you can’t take credit for anything. Just...please, humanity! Be the best you can. Don't be so easily swayed this way or that. Stand up for what you believe in, and that belief be good.

Charlotte Burns: Do you feel hopeful at this moment of time for humanity? 

Agnes Denes: I don't know. We are going through very difficult times. I'm communicating with the future with all my time capsules and letters 1,000 years into the future. I wanted 5,000, and then one million, but it's a little bit more difficult.

I did send something out into space that's one million years, but I am constantly in communication with 1,000 years in the future because I am fascinated what's going to happen to us in 1,000 years. And humanity will, most of it will be destroyed, but not all of it. We’ll survive, we’ll start all over. And probably make the same mistakes all over again.

That's the way the pendulum moves, and we just have to keep moving, keep creating. You do the best at what you do. You do the best of what you do. And that's all we can do. Be proud of it. Be proud of yourself.

Charlotte Burns: In your work and in your writings, you're a visionary. You've written things years in advance of things happening. You've been able to synthesize ideas, bringing together different disciplines and forecasting events before they've happened and pointing away ahead. And I wonder if that is a lonely place to be when then you see humanity ignoring those things. 

Is it easier to communicate with the future than with the present?

Agnes Denes: No, it's just an interesting thing. It fascinates me how they're gonna see us, the mistakes we made. “Oh, why did they do that?” Why did humanity go this way or that way? I'm fascinated by what's…how they're going to see us. So it’s just interest. 

I'm a very curious person. I'm one of the most curious people you've ever known. I'm never satisfied with any answer. And I was reading just recently about a piece on Einstein, and it's very interesting. He also felt that the answers were not as important as the questions. He says, “I am not so smart. I'm just very curious.” And I said the same thing, was written by the time I read what he wrote. It's very interesting. 

I'm not so smart. I'm just very curious.

Charlotte Burns: When you look back now, you're in your 90s, when you look back at the you who wanted to communicate with the future when you were in your 30s, what surprises you about the world now, and you now, and the work you're making now?

Agnes Denes: Oh, nothing surprises me in the world today. There is nothing new. Absolutely nothing. We do what we're supposed to be doing. Dumb, stupid, intelligent, fascinating, exactly what we're supposed to be doing. It's what we are doing. And nobody can tell us differently. Nobody is wise enough to tell us what we should be doing differently. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to ask you…

Agnes Denes: One more crescendo.

Charlotte Burns: One more. Well, can I have two more?

Agnes Denes: Yeah. Two crescendos.

Charlotte Burns: Okay, thanks. 

So, the show's called What If. I'm gonna ask you two ‘what ifs.’

Your work is so innovative. I'm thinking of things like Future City [Snail Pyramid - Study for Self-Contained, Self-Supporting City Dwelling - A Future Habitat, 1988], to Wheatfield, to the first ecological works of art anybody made, to being a pioneer of climate-forward pieces. 

What if people embraced innovation? What would the world look like?

Agnes Denes: We'll go through the process, and we go through to another phase, and another phase from that, we go through phases. And what if there is a disaster? Some of it will survive. What if it's all a myth? We find another myth. 

I mean, there is no answer to the ‘what if.’ The whole world and the whole life is ‘what if.’ And it depends if you have a question mark after it, a period, or an exclamation mark. That's the only difference.

Charlotte Burns: We do “...?!” So we do all of them.

Agnes Denes: That's all the above. 

Charlotte Burns: All the above. 

Agnes Denes: All the above. Thank you.

Charlotte Burns: So my final question for you is, you talked at the top of the show about having 20,000 works of art.

Agnes Denes: Yeah. Maybe more.

Charlotte Burns: What do you think about your legacy? I know that you are very flexible when it comes to materials and media, or you know, you 3D printed a pyramid recently, for instance. What do you think about your instructions for how people should view those works of art in the future?

Agnes Denes: I want people to understand it, study it, and pick what's good for them and let them benefit from it. I was never after money. I don't want people to be after money. I mean, if that's what you're into, go for it, but just do what’s good for you. Take what's given to you, what you can use. And that's what I'm giving to humanity. Take from my work. Whatever benefits you. That's all I can say. And however banal it seems, good luck.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much, Agnes. I really appreciated your time today.

Agnes Denes: Thank you.

Charlotte Burns: Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I had? Anything else you'd like to say?

Agnes Denes: An assistant. I'm functioning with a hundred emails a day without help, and I shouldn't have to at this stage of the game. Somebody should be able to help get me an assistant, so that's all I want out of life.

Charlotte Burns: I think you should have it.

Agnes Denes: Thank you.

[Laughs]

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Thank you to Agnes. What a privilege to speak to her—and I hope she gets an excellent assistant. 

Join us next time when we’ll be talking to Allan Schwartzman about all things art, market, and museums. 

Allan Schwartzman: 

There are fewer and fewer artists that the market will be able to support, but there's also fewer institutions that will survive. I think that we're likely to see institutions closing or merging or being absorbed into other kinds of entities, nonprofits becoming, in a sense, for-profits. So, I think the institutions are as threatened as the individuals. 

Charlotte Burns: See you next time on The Art World: What If…?!

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&, and executive produced by Allan Schwartzman. The series is produced by Studio Burns, with audio design by Tamsyn Kent. Follow the show on social media @Schwartzman.art​.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Bonus Episode 17: Dr. Mariët Westermann

In this bonus episode, we’re joined by the newly appointed director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Dr. Mariët Westermann, who is the first female appointed to the role. Mariët oversees the “constellation” of museums—four over three continents united, she says, in one mission, “to create opportunities for anyone to engage with the transformative and connective power of art and artists”. Mariët is inheriting opportunities and challenges, and we delve into some of those, from the back histories to the budgets. She talks to us about the future of the museum—from plans for the opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the nuts and bolts of balancing the books. One of the key changes Mariët advocates for is a shift in the institutional mindset. Rather than taking a defensive stance, where the museum might try to address gaps or criticisms reactively, she hopes for a move towards a more open approach. "We are learning communities," she says. "We're full of curious people. Artists are curious." All this and much more in this special episode, which brings to an end our second season.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of The Art World: What If…?! the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

In this episode, we’re joined by Mariët Westermann, the newly appointed director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation—and the first female appointed to the role. Mariët oversees the “constellation” of museums—four over three continents united, she says, in one mission: “to create opportunities for anyone to engage with the transformative and connective power of art and artists.”

Mariët is inheriting opportunities and challenges, and we delve into some of those, from the back histories to the budgets. She talks to us about the future of the museum—from plans for the opening of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the nuts and bolts of balancing the books. One of the key changes Mariët advocates for is a shift in the institutional mindset. Rather than taking a defensive stance, where the museum might try to address gaps or criticisms reactively, she hopes cultural institutions might move towards a more open approach. "We are learning communities," she says. "We're full of curious people. Artists are curious." She offers a blueprint for art institutions striving to balance popularity with purpose. By promoting learning and curiosity, they can evolve into spaces that not only house art but also nurture intellectual growth and cultural understanding.

I really appreciated Mariët’s candor—and her taking so much time with us just weeks into the new job. This is one of my favorites. Enjoy.

Mariët Westermann: I am Mariët Westermann. I'm the director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York.

Charlotte Burns: So Mariët, you just introduced yourself there. You're only a few weeks in. How does it feel to say that?

Mariët Westermann: It is wonderful to be here, and I'm still pinching myself to have been given this very special responsibility. It's really a calling.

Charlotte Burns: Does it feel that way to you? You were at NYU Abu Dhabi before and when you left there, you said you wouldn't have left for any other art museum. But You felt that there was a resemblance between the Guggenheim and NYU. What did you mean exactly?

Mariët Westermann: I had the incredible privilege and joy—and challenge—of developing, with hundreds of people, a new university: New York University Abu Dhabi, a university in and off NYU, and in and off this country on the Gulf. 

It was a passion project of a lifetime when you're trained as an academic and a researcher, and a professor—an art historian, as I am. And I was involved with it for 17 years. I am NYU through and through. I did my graduate work at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. I later was the director of the Institute. I then got to develop this incredible university, and later on was asked to come back to lead it as the vice chancellor and chief executive. And so I would never really have left that. I had fully intended to stay another three to five years running it. I loved the job. I couldn't imagine leaving for another university. 

Even though I always have worked with museums, and I always thought one day maybe I would run a museum or try to lead it, I could not imagine leaving for any art museum that was just an art museum—even though it's wonderful to be just an art museum, let me say that. The Guggenheim is much more than a single art museum. The Guggenheim Foundation works essentially across four art museums, four collections, individualized collections of modern and contemporary art that are brought to the public in four very distinctive architectural jewels, in four very different cities, in four dynamic countries, on three continents. In that, I have to lead across this constellation with wonderful directors in these various sites. I myself will lead the museum in New York directly, but I will work very collaboratively with these other directors in the three other places—in Venice [the Peggy Guggenheim Collection], Bilbao, and soon Abu Dhabi—to make sure that constellation coheres. 

And in that respect, this constellation is a lot like New York University, which is the largest global private university in the world and works across all continents—except Antarctica for the most part. And so as the startup leader for NYU Abu Dhabi, and then later the head of it, I really learned how much there's to be gained from working across all these different sites where you have one university working around one set of shared values, but in very specific local instantiations. And in that regard, you could say that the Guggenheim is, in a way, the global NYU of contemporary art museums.

Charlotte Burns: It's a really interesting way of putting it because there's a difference though, in that NYU owns all of its properties. 

This show is a ‘what if.’ It's very much about imagining new futures and it seems that you at NYU had this enormous ‘what if;’ what if you can create a new university—which you did. Whereas at the Guggenheim, you're inheriting a model and mapping a ‘what if’ onto something. So there was a model that was developed for a different point in time, according to a different set of values, and that comes with opportunity, but also with challenge. 

So how do you approach that, because, of course, you're not just creating something from scratch?

Mariët Westermann: When I rejoined NYU in 2002 as director of the Institute of Fine Arts, the university was just beginning on this journey to truly become more cosmopolitan by going to all these different sites, including study abroad sites in Florence, England, Accra, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Tel Aviv. And the next step was building out of this still somewhat traditional university, something new, which was this global, integrated, interconnected, circulatory system of a university. 

And so in a way, NYU Abu Dhabi, too, is a university born on the one hand out of an old university, but also in a new place out of a partnership—and it truly is a joint partnership with the government of Abu Dhabi, and we did something very similar in Shanghai. And so in this regard, you can compare that to how the Guggenheim has developed over time. 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was created in 1937, always in the charter, already saying, we exist to steward and develop museums, plural. They even imagined then that there might be more than one museum. And they soon opened the Museum of Non-Objective Art [Painting], a way of talking about what we would more typically call abstract art now. And they opened that first one in New York City and soon then commissioned the building from Frank Lloyd Wright—that opened only in 1959—to become the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. But there was always a sense that there might be more to it. The foundation fully owns and wholly owns the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 

Some 20 years later, Peggy Guggenheim decided—10 years after the opening of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue—in the late 60s, she decided from her beautiful Peggy Guggenheim collection palace, her little palazzo in Venice, that she wanted to deed it as a bequest eventually, with all the collection in it, to the foundation. So we also wholly own that as a subsidiary, you would say in business language. 

And then we have these two other situations that are a lot more like NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai, if you will, where the Guggenheim has long-term, very enduring, visionary partnerships with government authorities in the Basque Country in Bilbao and now also in Abu Dhabi to build the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. 

So the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao opened in 1997 and you see this journey continuing. But both NYU and the Guggenheim have really been on this journey and nothing is ever created exactly out of nothing. Just like art is never created out of nothing. 

And so it really appeals to me this thought that how do you draw on traditional values in the case of a museum, in the case of a university, to build something new that didn't already exist?

Charlotte Burns: So there's option to keep creating something new. 

So as part of your constellation thinking, do you imagine that there would be new Guggenheims or new partnerships?

Mariët Westermann: I started my job three weeks ago, so it might be a little premature to talk about that. And I am really, really focused on making sure that our constellation really coheres even better than it already does and becomes more visible in the world and legible in the world as one Guggenheim with a shared set of values dedicated to the art of today.

That is what I'm really concentrating on. How can we do that across our four sites? Really making that all work together, even more than it already does, in a way that's also locally specific in these four very dynamic cities that have interesting, diverse, and all maritime histories—which really connects them and appeals to me.  

That's really the main challenge today. That means a different kind of thinking where not all roads go out from New York but there is really circulation through that whole system so that each of those global sites can be yet more than it already is in its beautiful local instantiations. 

And so one of the really big tasks right ahead is building on the work of my two immediate predecessors, Tom Krens and Richard Armstrong. Visionary but very different leaders for the institution who took the institution global, out of the base of New York and Venice. And so opening the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which will happen sometime in the next couple of years—it's rising fast. That's, of course, an extremely high priority. So thinking beyond other sites would seem not the right priority right now.

Charlotte Burns: I understand. But I guess, not asking you to be specific, like “we're opening in Las Vegas.” Tom Krens suggested lots of different places that came and went. Richard was much more circumspect and would say “Mars,” as a way of shutting that conversation down. It seems that you're landing somewhere in between. 

To extrapolate from what you're saying, that you think it's an interesting model, you just need to consolidate where you are, bring coherence to it, and then look beyond it once you get to the point of stability and opening the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?

Mariët Westermann: It's so important to see through commitments that you make as an institution. And as a director, you inherit them. And so I feel deeply committed to making sure that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opens to the full benefit of this country and region that I've gotten to know so well over the last 17 years, and also at the same time, that it does right by the Guggenheim Foundation and helps us lean into what has been a very forward-looking, international global direction that is really in our DNA.

And just as the Foundation's charter talks about museums “plural,” you always have to stay open to other possibilities. But at the same time, you want to stay focused. I think it is not hard to look at my life's journey or my career to know that I deeply believe in trans-border, transnational institutions. And as Zora Neale Hurston, the great journalist, said in the 1920s: “You've got to go there to know there.” That really is very much in my personal background and in my life. And that also means that you understand that when you commit to building Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, you better go do that. And do that as a mutually beneficial learning project with members of that society. 

So, I'm really very focused on that—I have to admit—but I will always stay open.

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: One of the criticisms of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project is that it's been an imported model, that it's been much more a Western project looking at what it might mean to be global than the other way around. And the project has had problems. It was initially announced in 2006 due to open on Saadiyat Island, along with the Louvre Abu Dhabi—which opened in 2017—and other museums in the Emirates Cultural Quarter. It was stalled several times and then was scheduled to open in 2025. Stephanie Rosenthal was appointed project director.

I've heard that there have been problems. Can you talk to us about what you're going to be doing to bring the project to the point where it will be exactly what you want it to be?

Mariët Westermann:  Of course, there's always stories out there and as a leader for NYU Abu Dhabi, I have noticed that there's always a lot of chatter about what might be the motivations for an institution from New York, or other parts of the world, to go to the Gulf—and particularly the UAE—to take advantage of the opportunity to build something new. And I've always said: ”Listen, no one should go do something like that unless it's aligned with your values and where you want to take your home institution. And unless you're curious and want to learn. You need to do it because you can do something there that you can't do at home.” 

The question I was always asked in 2007, 2008: “How can you guarantee that we can do precisely in Abu Dhabi what we do on Washington Square in New York City?” And then I would say, “If you're talking about having academic freedom on campus, we've got that. We've worked that out in important negotiations, all sorts of walkaway issues that we took care of, tripwires, and so forth. But I think we should not be asking “What can't you do in Abu Dhabi that you can do in New York,” you should ask, “What can you do in Abu Dhabi that you can't in New York City?” 

And when you flip that lens—as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has also done—you get to very interesting places, as it turns out. And so I wasn't there, of course, in 2006, 2007, when the Guggenheim was negotiating its arrangements in Abu Dhabi— although, I understand them very well now and they're very similar to NYU—but I assumed that was the same impulse that you could do something new. 

Tom Krens was very gregariously curious, as Richard himself was, and it takes time to build these things. The Louvre Abu Dhabi faced delays as well. NYU Abu Dhabi opened on time in 2010—I'm very proud of that. But it's, in a way, easier to build a university because what you need is people, a good recruitment strategy, and a bunch of real estate. And we worked on all of that. 

The real estate that's involved in museums is a very special thing. The Guggenheim could never build a museum anywhere unless the architecture was really just so. We have buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright. We have this Palazzo Venier [dei Leoni] in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. This magnificent Frank Gehry building in Bilbao that transformed that city. So there's always going to be an extremely high standard.  

And I also want to say something about the ambition of the Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi. The way it's laid out is something like the Museumsinsel in Berlin or the National Mall on Washington. Those kinds of conglomerates of cultural institutions, those took more than 100 years to build. They're doing it there in what's now 17 years. And let's look at what they're building and what has been built: The Louvre Abu Dhabi. Next year or so, the Zayed National Museum—which is a history and culture museum for the Gulf and the Arab world and the country, designed by Norman Foster—will open. The Museum of Natural History will open. TeamLabs, from Japan, will open. And not long after, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open. And that would then be a span of about 10 years. That's pretty extraordinary. 

And of course, seven years before the Louvre, NYU Abu Dhabi opened on Saadiyat in 2014. It is actually an incredibly rapid pace to build a cultural district of that quality and heft alongside a religious complex, that’s an interfaith complex involving a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, the Abrahamic Family House, also in that same district. That is a lot of projects to manage for a country that has one and a half million citizens. It's amazing when you think about it. 

Charlotte Burns: You're going to be the director that gets it across the finish line. 

So, what do you see that it needs to get there? Obviously, you're on a continuum. Obviously, there are things that you inherit, but there are also things that you will recognize that need to be different—that you want to do. What are they?  

Mariët Westermann: The development of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi of course, is a relay race, like any institution is and so you're mindful of the histories and you learn them. And what's very distinct about the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as a contemporary art museum, is that it was not actually designed to be just another Western import to Abu Dhabi. Already over the last 15, 16 years, a collection has been built and this collection will stun people when it comes to the full light. 

It is a very significant collection, a large collection, and a truly diversified global collection, grounded in the Gulf, in the Arab world, in the [Middle East and North Africa] MENA region, with these important crossroads connections that country really has to South Asia, across the Indian Ocean, to East Africa, across North Africa, to Western Africa, Southern Africa, into Europe, into Central Asia—and really with art from all continents from 1960 going forward. That really is the founding vision.  

I don't think any other institution has done that to this day, and I want to continue to  make sure that representation, as developed by our curators, which is a very joint project. We were building an entire curatorial team, or have been doing that, in Abu Dhabi, and it works closely with curators dedicated to the project in New York. It's very interactive and collaborative. I want us to continue to lean into that global vision and what I call, really, a crossroads vision. Global is such a large and globby term. 

Charlotte Burns: Corporate, yeah. 

Mariët Westermann: We understand what it means, but Abu Dhabi and UAE are really crossroads countries where people live from 195 nations and the country really has leaned into that. And we, as the Guggenheim, can, of course, also diversify our own thinking about what we do, including in our other museums. So, it's a kind of an interactive work that needs to happen. 

What needs to happen to get it over the finish line, of course, is underway very rapidly. I've had the blessing of the last six months to be able to think about it on the ground in Abu Dhabi because I was still living there. And so you can see this rapid work on the development of the opening installation, including a wonderful program of exhibitions and commissions that, of course, I can't say anything about quite yet, but can I say will, I believe, stun the world, and indeed the ‘what if’ world of art in your community of listeners. 

Charlotte Burns: One thing about the Guggenheim model is that it was so much about New York being the epicenter, with models spanning from there. Will the work that you're collecting, with a curatorial team based as a hub in New York and then in Abu Dhabi, will that work come back to New York? Will it travel to the other hubs? When you think about the constellation, do those constellations speak to one another? 

Because the works are obviously owned by Abu Dhabi rather than the Guggenheim Foundation. Is there anything in the agreement that the assets, as in the collection, be shared in that way? 

Mariët Westermann: The Guggenheim constellation of stars, and Abu Dhabi you can think of as the latest shining star joining this constellation—I love astronomical metaphors because I'm an amateur astronomer. But anyway, it appeals to me and I was already there. I've inherited it, which is great. 

And what we've learned from the work between New York and Venice—the first, internationalization that happened after the creation of the Foundation and the work done with Bilbao—is that there is a lot of interaction, knowledge transfer, and collaboration, but also actual circulation of works. The Guggenheim Foundation always lends work. And we certainly hope that this similar circulatory pattern will develop. 

But of course, in the first instance, it becomes now very important for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to be able to show its work. We already have more than enough to show in the building, but that we do this in a carefully curated way. But it is very much our hope that we will see that similar kind of circulation. Just because there are these different ownership arrangements doesn't mean that art doesn't travel and isn't shared. 

One of the really great developments of the later 20th century and the early 21st century that we've seen is that we've moved, for the most part, from a history of almost frenetic collection building that museums did in the 20th century to collection sharing, joint ownership, long-term lending agreements and so forth. And I think that Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism has already shown how good they are at this with the Louvre Abu Dhabi. This truly can be done, these kinds of arrangements. 

And, now you might say, “All right, you're building this collection in Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi is building national collections. Good for them.” Why shouldn't they? So much was taken away from the Middle East over the years, absolutely rapaciously by Western countries. So it's about time that those countries there build collections as other countries have been doing in the Gulf. I think it's not a contradiction to build a great collection in the country of modern contemporary art, where we are really the key advisers and consultants, and we do this very collaboratively with them under a shared vision, but that it's actually owned there. But that doesn't at all preclude the idea that we could be showing this work in other sites of the Guggenheim constellation.

Charlotte Burns: I think it's really interesting, this idea of a shared vision and advising. It came up on an earlier podcast that we did with Hoor Al Qasimi and I wonder to what extent, when the Guggenheim advises, is a Guggenheim collaborating on that advice? Where does advice become supportive and where should advice be collaborative? 

How do you think about that as you think about this constellation?

Mariët Westermann: When you think about how museums do acquisitions, as collecting institutions do, it's always the curators. The curators bring forth ideas. The director, of course, will work with the curators and say, “This is the overall vision. This is where we fill in the gaps. This is where we want to develop new strands of our collection,” as the Guggenheim has done very well in the 21st century. It's also made its own collection in New York more global.

How does that work in museums? This is standard operating procedure. The curators bring it forward, they make the case, and in the end, the board of trustees decide. But the board of trustees does not say, “Thou shalt collect this way. Thou shalt buy this or that.” The board of trustees may approve a collection strategy. That's the governance level that should happen. 

Now, as I understand it, in our Guggenheim Abu Dhabi relationship, and I've seen this because I've already been involved in some of these meetings, of course. Again, our curators are out there. They know the markets. They know our targets. There is a broad collection strategy that I've already indicated. It's global. It's crossroads. It's diverse. It's 1960 to the present. It's significant. It also looks at emerging artists, at Indigenous artists. It truly is as inclusive a contemporary collection, as will have been built anywhere. There's no question because we can do it from the ground up. But we, as the Guggenheim, make those seasoned recommendations, those creative recommendations, because our curators are unbelievable. 

And of course, curators here in New York who see things may tell the team that is developing the collection recommendations for Guggenheim Abu Dhabi about those connections and help with that. I see that in action every day. 

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So I'm going to move us away from the satellites through a financial question. A larger portion, obviously, of the Guggenheim's budget comes from traveling and royalties than most museums, which is to do with its satellite arrangements. In its most recent [Form] 990, which is its public filings, it's stated that its contract liabilities are for $33.5 million and almost $34 million, respectively, and that they’re licensing deals that were payments made in advance, dating back to when those deals were made. Would that be a correct reading of those finances?

Mariët Westermann: I have to tell you, Charlotte, that is a level of detail I have yet to get into. So I truly wouldn't want to declare myself on the 990. I've seen a number of 990s, obviously, but I truly can't speak to that at the moment.

Charlotte Burns: But in general, so I can understand the function of the licensing arrangements, they’re payments that were made in advance to the Guggenheim, or are they payments made over time? 

Mariët Westermann: I cannot, I can't speak to it. I truly am here too recently to know that precisely. But what I can say is that these arrangements between the Guggenheim Foundation and the authorities in Bilbao and in Abu Dhabi, that are building these institutions and leading them with us, these are long-term partnership arrangements. 

I was often asked similar questions about NYU Abu Dhabi and obviously these things are really hard to read from 990s because they organize information in a way that works for the IRS but may not necessarily reflect directly at what time various transactions happen. 

But the point being that these are very long-time, long-term arrangements, which is why the Guggenheim Foundation board felt comfortable committing to the name. We're committing one of our most precious resources. So you lend that name only if you feel secure in the long run. So that's how I would talk about any sort of details of these financial arrangements come underneath and support that long-term vision. Precisely how that's been enacted here over years, I honestly don't know that yet.

Charlotte Burns: Okay. Because for you, obviously coming into the Guggenheim, it's an institution that has a tough budget and that's obviously something you have to look at and that you will have looked at. And I'm not going to be grilling you on the specifics, but it's something that we do need to talk about because it is an institution that needs the books to be looked at. 

A figure stood out to me when I was doing some research that, right now the operating budget is slightly more than $70 million. The endowment is around $123 million. And actually, I realized that the endowment is less than it was when Tom Krens stepped back in 2008. At the time, the New York Times reported that he'd grown the endowment from $20 million to $118 million, which if you adjust for inflation is around $170 million now. 

In that period of time since Tom Krens stepped back, it's been a period of unprecedented wealth in the art world, but the Guggenheim's endowment is less. And I was wondering why the wealth surrounding the art world and the wealth surrounding the Guggenheim in New York hadn't translated into a culture of philanthropy at the Guggenheim in those intervening years.

And obviously that's not something you're responsible for. You can't go backwards in time, but it is something you're inheriting. And endowments are something that keep museum directors up, even the ones with the biggest endowments. Glenn Lowry said on a panel recently that he's had sleepless nights for over 20 years and he has a one billion dollar endowment at the MoMA.

So, to what extent do you need to grow your endowment? And other forms of revenue to feel financially secure?

Mariët Westermann: It's an incredible contradiction of New York museums, I would say, and cultural organizations, that they are among the most magnificent and richest organizations in the world when it comes to their real estate, their collections, their offer, their stature, the way in which they are loved in the world, and the extent to which all of them are at the same time undercapitalized. And this is something I, of course, got to know extremely well, not just when I was at the Institute of Fine Arts, where we did very well, but still I had some sleepless nights there too because there had been an over-reliance on endowment and I wanted to build it. 

But I really got to know it in the nine years I spent as the executive vice president overseeing all the grant-making for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This huge private foundation. We were spending some $300 million to $380 million a year on these wonderful fields, and I really could see all the budgets, all these museums—including the Guggenheim—and I could see how they struggle to some degree because they have to find the mix, and the endowment is the holy grail. 

But what do we know about endowment? And it is important for the long-term sustainability of an institution, the longevity, but there's also a real challenge with them because when you have a crash, as there was in 2008 and they are underwater and they cannot use their endowment at all because you can't dip into the principle by law. All of a sudden, the bottom falls out.

So, I became less completely addicted to endowment thinking than I had been, in terms of the security of that. So, I think when you come to lead a cultural institution, even MoMA [The Museum of Modern Art] or the Met[tropolitan Museum of Art], which have magnificent endowments, you always have to think about a broadly diversified resource base. And I thought about it that way at NYU Abu Dhabi as well, frankly. You cannot be dependent on one resource. 

I do think that I would love for all those New Yorkers, and many people come to us from around the world, to love the Guggenheim yet better, I think, and to show the love. I think that's important. And I think our board is very focused on that. We have definitely strengthened the board in recent years with great financial acumen, which is a good thing. 

But also thinking much more creatively, maybe about how the world of museums has changed from what was essentially an exhibition economy where you say, “Here's my exhibition. Look how great it is. Please come,” where it becomes an experience economy. And so leaning into that so that you find other sources of revenue around your programming seems very important. 

There's another very special value proposition that the Guggenheim has to offer—around which I truly hope to be able to raise significant resources—of being a transnational, global museum that really believes in artists today and what they bring into the world, and that connects that art to people of all stripes anywhere. We are the only modern and contemporary art museum that does that in these four very distinctive buildings and sites and cities that people are excited about. When you go to Abu Dhabi, you are in the gateway to Asia, and to Africa, and to Europe, and, of course, the entire Arab world. 

So that is a very interesting proposition that I also find many people, and in places with resources, are interested in. Not only in New York, in London, Paris, Beirut, South Africa, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore. Just as the Guggenheim needs to think of itself not just as a base in New York with satellites, it's really an interconnected system from which you have jump-off points, of course, to art, but also to people who care enough about art and artists and how we bring it to the people that want to support the institution. 

So the global aspects of the Guggenheim also translate to global fundraising opportunities that I became, of course, very aware of in Abu Dhabi.

Charlotte Burns: Do you mean an expanded single board or international councils or something like that?

Mariët Westermann: Even today, the Guggenheim has a wonderful group of councils dedicated to the arts of Latin America. We have an Asian art initiative that we've long had that also includes an Asian art council. We have an international directors council. A photography council. So I think there are real opportunities there of connecting those dots. We have wonderful traveling programs that people can join. Our board members are excited about that. We already have international board members, and I hope that, again, we will expand those possibilities for those potential donors and people who love the Guggenheim, but also for our institution in New York.

Charlotte Burns: It's interesting because during your time at the Mellon Foundation, that comes down to the philanthropy of one man. And so much of Krens’ ability to fundraise also came down to the largesse of one man, which was the most prominent backer at the time, the Cleveland philanthropist, Peter [B.] Lewis, who had given the Guggenheim around $77 million, which was, obviously in today's money a lot more and even then was around four times the amount of any board member in the museum's history. There's something so interesting if you remove yourself from the specifics of the Guggenheim just to look at what that says about cultural institutions that they can be so dependent on the largesse or otherwise of their board members. 

Having been inside philanthropy and now working inside an institution, how do you think about that philanthropy? How do you think about how to corral and make more robust the cultural institution in terms of cultural philanthropy within the US and internationally?

Mariët Westermann: I think people will only support institutions if they see themselves connected to it, engaged with it, believe in that institution’s mission, and the people who lead and do the work inside those institutions. I also believe that it is the responsibility of a chief executive of a cultural institution to make sure that this is properly resourced in a diversified way that de-risks that dependence on the one great person. 

I love your question because I am in many ways a historian of museums. You become that when you're an art historian. And it is remarkable to think about the J. P. Morgans, the Andrew W. Mellons, the Henry Clay Fricks, and how wealthy they were, how large a share of the American economy they commanded. You can do that analysis too, retrospectively, and you can see that on a share of the economy basis, these guys were wealthier, by far, than Bill Gates or [Mike] Bloomberg or [Jeff] Bezos or any of them. And so just as wealth has become much more distributed, so needs the resource base of museums and cultural organizations and universities to be much more diversified from the very small to the huge contributions that you can garner. 

From my time at Mellon, of course, I got to see that the traditional 501(c)(3) grant-making foundations, which the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It's a perpetuity foundation, it wants to be there forever, so it spends only roughly 5% of its value of its endowment every year—there are now all these other instruments. There are foundations that wind down, they're not perpetuity foundations. They're urgency foundations. That's an opportunity, when you think about it for museums. 

People may be less inclined to fund endowments for the reasons that I've mentioned. They want the money out there now to do new things, to build new business models, to build a new experience model for museums. I think there's massive opportunity to look into that new kind of philanthropy that lives in the so-called DAFs, the donor-advised funds, which is that new, relatively young, tax advantage structure for giving that is a lot more flexible for the owners or for the donors because they don't have to give it away quite as fast as you have to when you create a 501(c)(3) foundation. 

But I think there is a lot of under-explored, developed capacity there. And the number of those foundations that have been created over the last 15 years is unimaginable. The transfer of wealth that's happening at the moment around the world, but especially in the United States, is very significant. The amount of wealth that's been built in the tech venture sector has barely begun to be tapped by cultural institutions. And as we know, artists are very interested in these new technologies. They often lead the way to see where technology can go. This was true in the 15th century with Jan van Eyck and his oil painting. It was true for Rembrandt and what he did in printmaking and painting. It's true for artists today. 

And so I think, for example, making the connection between artists already very interested in what art and these new technologies can mean and connecting that to people who have made a lot of money in that sector is something that really interests me and one area that probably is still rather underdeveloped for most museums.

Charlotte Burns: But generally the tech industry hasn't been that interested in culture. It's a nut that a lot of people have been trying to crack, for want of a better way of putting it. Do you see an opportunity to interest tech?

Mariët Westermann: The great collectors who support museums historically are a little older. They've had time to do their big moves in business, to create enterprises and value, and now to convert that value into what is that very special asset class called art that they're developing, also because they have a passion for it. And so I think it is not so unusual that we haven't seen that much of that unlocking of resources built in the tech community, because many of these people are still quite young and very busy running their businesses, seeing new opportunities and beginning to collect. But I believe, therefore, that since we have a Young Collectors Council, for example, developing in that area is a long game, and we should be in it now and not wait until those people reach a certain age.

That said, there are also some collectors right now that we very much have in our sights and are in conversations with.

[Music interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: So a priority for you would be diversifying the programs in a sense, because right now more of the Guggenheim's revenue comes from admissions than most of your counterpart museums. I think it's 23% of your total operating support and revenue is from ticket sales, whereas for other museums, it's around 13%, 14%, 15%. 

Mariët Westermann: In many ways, having a large percentage of gate in your budget is a good thing. It shows that people want what you have. And so making sure that people continue to come and enjoy the offer of a museum is really important. And we're always working on that, of course. 

But there also are these other programming opportunities, including in the space that I think we haven't fully developed or optimized, and in fact, no museum has, and that is the fifth site of the Guggenheim, which is the Guggenheim anytime, anywhere, the online space. And I am very interested in this because, of course, in universities, you're very close to that, and you're constantly offering things through your internet and social channels. And so there is opportunity there. 

I think the experience economy has not been fully embraced by museums. Frank Lloyd Wright built a theater into this museum. He built a restaurant, The Wright, into this museum. He was ahead of his time, thinking about the museum as a space where you come together to look at art, but also to see other people looking and engaging with art. And that's something that I think we'll be leaning into quite a bit so that you will see that alternative revenue, that is not just the gate, but also how do people like to shop? How is that connected to our global and local brands in any one of our sites? I think that's something I'm very interested in. 

How can we tap better into the tourism economy of New York, for example, is something to think about. Very few people know that we are one of only two official World Heritage Sites in New York City. And it's very personal to me, which is why I feel so excited to be here, because the Guggenheim in 1980 was the first art museum when my mother brought me to New York. She took me to this museum. And I had no idea what to do with this museum. I thought it was such an unusual-looking thing. Like the Statue of Liberty, a sculpture that's a building. How crazy. When I asked her why she took me there first, she said, “I wanted you to know that only in America, and really only in New York, would they build such a creative museum.” 

That kind of register, I want to bring back that sense of the magic of this museum that was commissioned to be, in the words of our founders, a temple of the spirit and a museum for the future. That is a magnificent history that's taken us eventually back to Europe in Venice to Bilbao and now soon to Abu Dhabi.

Charlotte Burns: I love this idea of bringing it back to your biography because I was reading when you were appointed to this role, the New York Times headline was “Guggenheim Selects Director, First Woman to Lead the Museum Group”. And I thought that was really fitting because in 2015, when you were vice president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, you wrote for a staff demographic data study that you commissioned that, “since museum staff had become 60% female over the past decade or so, with close attention to equitable promotion and hiring practices for senior positions, art museums should be able to achieve greater gender equality in their leadership cohorts within the foreseeable future”. The fact that you were in that position yourself around a decade later was lovely in a way. 

Did you imagine seeing yourself in that leadership position when you were commissioning that data study? Was it something you wanted for yourself as a ‘what if?’

Mariët Westermann: As a ‘what if,’ Charlotte, you and I share a real commitment of doing the work, not just to talk about diversity, inclusion, and equity in museums by making sure that it is not just about your offer to the community and inviting people in, but seeing yourself as part of the community and therefore making sure that the inside of museums, and especially the C-suite, is populated with people of all stripes and all walks. 

When I was asked by the Guggenheim to consider this role, at first, I thought, “Why would I go do that? I love my job at NYU Abu Dhabi.” But then I thought, “Wow. While I was at Mellon, I was working with all these museum directors and constantly encouraging them by asking questions, but also pushing them a little bit to be true to what they were saying: to walk their talk about their interest in diversity and inclusion by promoting women, by promoting people who hadn't been so well represented. 

So, when I was told that I might have this opportunity, I thought, “Wow, now it's being put to you. You should step up. You should do this.” And then the opportunity to do it across this constellation as the first woman CEO, but frankly, I am actually the first CEO as a title for that constellation, that was just a great opportunity. And I do want to say that I took on that role and it feels like a calling, honestly. I'm also very aware of the very foundational role of women in the Guggenheim. 

Charlotte Burns: Can I ask you about the timing? Because of course, there are more women in leadership positions than there were. But some of those women in leadership positions are also saying that they are witnessing a backlash. Are you aware of that? 

And a question I've asked other guests on the show this season is how do you better support leaders? How does the board support leaders who might be vulnerable? And of course, it's not just female leaders, it's leaders of color, but how do you foster better support?

Mariët Westermann: I think it's a given of history—I'm a historian—that power is never ceded voluntarily, or even when it is ceded voluntarily up to a point, it's never done so terribly willingly. And so backlash against the presence of previously minoritized or previously marginalized communities is always going to be there. And it is therefore very important to stay resilient to that and to support each other across institutions. 

I want to say that coming back into the museum community, it's been absolutely heartwarming how the support for me personally has felt. I have felt nothing but a warm welcome and offers of support in all these different ways and in different countries where I've worked. I have heard a little bit about, of course, these challenges for women in museums and leaders of color in museums. I need to learn more about it. I've only just returned from Abu Dhabi, of course.

I will say that looking at what happened to new women presidents of universities, of top universities, of whom, of which, we have more than ever—and after all, I led a university as the first woman to lead that university, NYU Abu Dhabi. I think it is an interesting question, an interesting observation, to see that in what's happened in the past year or last seven months, say, is that all of a sudden these new women leaders were in these extremely harrowing circumstances and had wealthy donors, sometimes board members, sometimes not, and even congressional leaders leaning on them and holding them so-called accountable, but it's essentially just really also engaging in very aggressive behavior towards them. Sometimes being a little bit remote from it in Abu Dhabi, of course, where I would say to myself, “Would they be saying these exact same things if those presidents were men?” I think that's a question that many of us as women, but many men as well, have been asking. 

To what extent this is playing out in the museum sphere, I think I'll find out soon, but I can say that personally, I feel extremely well supported by our board, and I agree that it is up to boards to support the leaders that they appoint. They have to hold them accountable, of course, but they also should support them and not that the first sign of trouble makes things difficult for them. So, I hope that I will find it really that the progress isn't just notional and nominal, but that there is actually warm and sustained support for women in leadership positions of our cultural institutions.

Charlotte Burns: In that same study you did at Mellon, you found that there was no comparable “youth bulge”, you called it, of staff from historically underrepresented minorities, particularly in the job categories most closely associated with the intellectual and educational mission of museums—which was 84% non-Hispanic white. And your finding was that even with the most intentional promotion protocols,  it was going to be very difficult to create more diversity without a simultaneous increase in the presence of historically underrepresented minorities on museum staff altogether. But more broadly than that, that the nation needed more programs encouraging students to consider museum work. 

I wanted to talk to you about that from where you are now at the Guggenheim, which has had such a tumultuous few years with its own racial reckoning. It's been accused of a culture of institutional racism. In 2020, there was a letter signed from the curatorial department to the Guggenheim Museum, sent to its leadership, demanding urgent change to what was described as “an inequitable work environment, enabling racism, white supremacy, and other discriminatory practices”. There've been some changes since then, but you're inheriting, to some extent, troubled past circumstances that haven't been fully resolved. How do you plan to move forward? 

Mariët Westermann: Diversity is a baseline. It's a given. Humanity is diverse, so that's not a goal in itself, but you can track, of course, which is why I commissioned those studies and I did it again three years later, and we saw some progress. But then you have to act on that to make sure that you get that diversity inside the museum. It’s so critical if you really want to make progress. And that is a little bit of a slow progress because you can't just switch out the entire staff that you have. 

So you need to build pathways for people to see themselves in museums and then support their ambitions, which is why we created a wonderful program, a curatorial development program for students in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in Atlanta, in Kansas City, in Houston, in Philadelphia, where we worked with the major museums there, who could also connect to local strong universities that had diverse, student populations. And that has been a quite successful program. 

And in a way, we modeled it on the remarkable work of Thelma Golden, of all those years in the Studio Museum [in Harlem], who showed the way, how you do it. And then to scale up the kind of mentoring and training that Thelma has done for the entire country and the world, frankly, and support her vision. And having her vision enacted by all these historically white institutions seemed very important.

So we've done a lot of that. And I think looking at where the Guggenheim has been, where, of course, I inherit all the beauties and all the challenges of the past, but also need to move on and move forward, I want to say that there has been remarkable progress. If you look at some key hiring decisions that Richard Armstrong made in our curatorial team where, especially some of the exhibition programming that we've done in the past years, with Only the Young[: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s] on Korean arts of the ‘60s, and Going Dark, the wonderful show by Ashley James, that kind of work really helps change the learning within the institution. It isn't just signaling. 

Of course, the world comes into these shows, they're popular, people like them, but it is also fostering learning within the institution about these neglected histories, these beautiful histories, these interesting histories, and changing the conversation, which I think the Guggenheim still needs to work on more, and I'm happy to be doing it with everybody. Changing the conversation from one where the institution takes a defensive posture and says, “Oh, but wait, we'll run around and do this, we still need to do that,” to one of learning. 

We are learning communities. We're full of curious people. Say, let's not see this as all traumatic, but let's see how do we use our learning to become truly as diverse as this city is in what we offer. It won't ever be a precise proportional representation, but you can just make that a very important lens: diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. You can make that a lens through which all decisions are filtered in some way. Make sure that you broaden the lens.

Charlotte Burns: There's been something of a backlash to that too in recent years, this idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion is somehow separate to the great art of the past, rather than it being also great art of the past that we just have ignored. Do you feel that you have to foster that support? 

Practically speaking, how do you do that? When I read your bio, people say you're an empathetic leader who brings out excellence in people and moves people along. How do you actually do that as an institutional leader, create that culture change? 

Mariët Westermann: It's very nice to hear that about oneself, but you have to do it. Obviously, you have to do it. I think it is thinking about leadership structure and about leadership as distributed through an organization. There's leadership at all levels of an organization and making sure that your leadership team has diverse viewpoints represented, and diverse personal experiences represented and that those experiences that can be given a voice. 

So what does that mean? It means not only having one-on-one meetings all the time but bringing the groups together and letting people sit with the discomfort when someone says, “You know what? I actually don't think this is true, what you say because I experienced X, Y, or Z.” So often in the conflicts that you see now within organizations or within our society, people say, “Well, that can't be true.” Just recognizing that people need to be able to speak their truth to you. I really believe that. And not immediately believing that they're just making something up just because you haven't experienced it yourself. 

That's something I learned in America, to be honest, because America is so diverse. You need to open people's minds and their dispositions, really. It's not their minds, it’s their dispositions. Being willing and sit for a few minutes with what someone is saying that may feel threatening, or you may feel that it attacks your identity and your sense of yourself as empathetic, maybe. That's what leaders can do and they can do it at all levels. It isn't just in the C-suite. 

And so working with that kind of learning culture, collaborative culture was something I really enjoyed at NYU Abu Dhabi. And I hope to be able to work with the community here in similar ways. And so far I feel that really is possible. I've had very good reception to the kind of chat conversations I've been trying to have informally so far.

Charlotte Burns: What if museums could listen? You think they can, you have hope.

Mariët Westermann: What if museums could listen to what people say to them who have not historically been part of their main core structures? And I think they are doing that. They are trying to do it. It isn't easy. We know that within our own families, some people we like to listen to more than others. But that is the job of a leader, I think, and then also making the discernment. Just because everybody speaks doesn't mean that everybody is right or that everybody has something of greater value to offer than someone else. I think you have to really be discerning. But in the first instance, learning by listening, learning by walking around, which I do a lot, is valuable.

Charlotte Burns: I read that about you. What happens on the walk stays on the walk. So if people want to catch you, they have to get you on a walk, right?

Mariët Westermann: They don't have to just catch me. At Abu Dhabi, I organized it. We had total free sign-up walk with Mariët, and I did it in the mornings to get everybody into the environment of Abu Dhabi because I felt they stayed too much on our beautiful Rafael Viñoli campus and got too locked into studios, almost. I would walk with 20 students apiece, maybe bring another professor, a community leader, and we'd walk for an hour. Not to be competitive. No, if people couldn't walk fast, we’d walk slow. If people couldn't walk, they could join the breakfast afterwards. 

The idea was just that I would answer any question they would ask me to the best of my ability. And of course, there's often institutional constraints, but I would try to be as transparent as I could be in a way, in a good way, I hope. And I would also listen to them and ask them questions and all that would stay on the walk, almost like Chatham House rules. We could use the information, but we wouldn't attribute it or say precisely where we heard it or how we heard it. 

And I acted on so many things I learned from our very diverse students at NYU Abu Dhabi. 125 countries. I acted on so much of it in the other things of that job that I had to think about as we built and grew the institution and got it through Covid, frankly.

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Mariët, thank you so much for your time. I'm going to ask you a couple of ‘what ifs.’ 

What if you were the newly appointed CEO of a constellation of museums and you had in 2010 ran a conference called “Art Museums Here and Now” and in 2020 you'd co-convened “Reframing Museums” and now in 2024, you had to think about the future of museums. What would you say were the most pertinent issues thinking of the future of museums?

Mariët Westermann: I would hope that when I do this conference again in 2030, that we would find that the entire constellation had become a lodestar for how art museums enact their mission of bringing art of today and the recent past to all people who wander into museums or come to them intentionally without regard of the backgrounds or preparations of those people. 

And I would hope that the museum would be so well resourced that it could be free almost all the time for any people who couldn't afford to come in and that we would welcome in these people and that any people who might have been suspicious of art would see art as a value, not something threatening, not something holding back, but something provocative. That they would see works of art as really good things to think with, and really good things to see new possibilities with and to feel through, in a way that historically has been reserved to rather a narrow elite of people. 

I hope that we can accomplish that by really going global. That is what this hypothetical director would be achieving.

Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Mariët Westermann: I sleep very well at night, so I'm having a really hard time answering the question. 

What is the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night? It tends to be more about personal matters for me. I'm a very purposeful person, and therefore I have a vision for what I want to achieve, and I get up every morning very much intent on making whatever I do that day be joyful or manageable at least. There are many hard things you have to do, but always keeping in view that it is for the greater good of achieving something with this institution—and institutions are always communities. 

So usually I wake up in the morning saying, “what if I figure out a way to raise another $5 million today?” That's probably the big ‘what if.’ And you could say that could keep me up at night, but it doesn't really because I really do believe in good sleep as the thing you need to get up in the morning to fulfill your ‘what ifs.’

Charlotte Burns: You did say you were an astronomer, so I'm imagining that if you are up at night, you're probably looking at the stars, Mariët.

Mariët Westermann: That's right. Absolutely. 

And one of the things I'll miss most about Abu Dhabi is that it's clear skies 95% of the time so I truly could follow the movements of the moon, the planets, and the stars, and the sun through the year. But we will make sure that aspect, in fact, of Abu Dhabi also will shine a bright and starry light onto our entire constellation.

Charlotte Burns: What a perfect note to end on. ‘What if’ indeed. 

Thank you so much, Mariët. I appreciate you being so frank with us today and making the time just a few weeks into your new role.

Mariët Westermann: It was a pleasure to have this wonderful ‘what if’ conversation with you. Thank you very much.

[Music interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Mariët Westermann. 

If you enjoyed this series and want to delve into our back catalogue, there’s plenty to enjoy. This season we’ve had illuminating conversations with the artist Alvaro Barrington. And we were blessed to spend time in a rare—and the final—interview with the late, legendary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, whose recent passing we mourn. 

This interview brings our season to a close.

This podcast has been brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 16: Editorial Advisors

Join us for the almost final episode of this season where we welcome back our incredible team of editorial advisors who guide, suggest—and even challenge— what we’ve discussed in this series. 

Joining us are Deana Haggag (program officer at the Mellon Foundation), Mia Locks (curator and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward), Jay Sanders (curator, writer, and director of Artists Space), and of course Allan Schwartzman. Together with host Charlotte Burns, they reflect on the wonderful and wide-ranging conversations with our guests this season, talking about creativity, the nature of change, the future of museums, the balance between wealth and art, and new thinking in philanthropy. 

What if we focus on what’s urgent? What if we treat art like it’s essential? All this and MUCH more…

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to the almost final episode of this season of The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.

[Audio of guests]

We welcome back our incredible team of editorial advisors who guide, suggest, and even challenge what we’ve discussed throughout this series. 

Joining us are Deana Haggag, program officer at the Mellon Foundation; Mia Locks, the curator and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward;  Jay Sanders the curator, writer, and director of Artists Space; and Allan Schwartzman, of Schwartzman&. 

With their expertise, we reflect on the wonderful and wide-ranging conversations with our guests this season. We talk about creativity, the nature of change, the future of museums, the balance between wealth and art, and new thinking in philanthropy. 

What if we focus on what’s urgent? What if we treat art like it’s essential? 

Let’s get going. 

[Music break] 

Charlotte Burns: Deana, Jay, Mia, Allan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all of your work and all of your insights. We're at the end of another podcast season. What are your thoughts on the way out? Shall we start with you, Jay? 

Jay Sanders: I thought this season was fantastic.

I was struck by this kind of massive work in progress that was mapped across all these episodes and then the bravery expressed by a lot of our guests—for sure the ‘Transforming Museums’ episode—coupled with an unflinching belief in art comes across this. There's a sense in the conversations really about a path and a journey and an unfolding. Bryan Stevenson speaks about that in his work and also in the experience of the Legacy Sites but, also you hear it across really different conversations like Jarl [Mohn]'s how he entered into art and then became a philanthropist, in Mia and Laura [Raicovich]'s conversations about institutions after being within them in moments of crisis, and then coming back and finding fruitful and really fundamental avenues of advancement. And then Kemi [Ilesanmi] in this really different reflective state of very active, attentive, unknowing. Maybe a feeling of process that I thought the season conveyed across a lot of different times and spaces.

Charlotte Burns: Thanks so much for sharing that. I think that's really true. And I think the point about the bravery, it struck me that there was a real vulnerability to a lot of the guests and I appreciated how open they all were with us, how willing they were to share with us that sense of uncertainty. 

Allan Schwartzman: That vulnerability comes out of trust, so each speaker felt comfortable with the context.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, Allan. I think trust is really important. It's a different thing to do a podcast in 2024 than any other year. People really want to communicate. People really have things that they're trying to process and trying to share.

I've really noticed that, from where I sit, that there's much more urgency around the need to connect and much more trepidation around whether things will connect.

Which is why the idea for the ‘Transforming Museums’ show came about, through the experience of building this series, and the sense that, actually, that kind of crisis that people are fearing has been in the industry for a while. 

Deana? 

Deana Haggag: For me, and this definitely came across in the museums’ episode, the timing of this season, I could really feel. There is actually something about the first season of What If…?! that felt like we had not yet landed post-crisis. Like, even though things were starting to calcify back to whatever back was before Covid, before 2020, before 2019. 

There's something about this season where people are really standing firm in the possibility that some of the systems we thought may shift after 2020, may not. And maybe there was some kind of vulnerability I got off of that. Or maybe I'm also speaking a little bit about myself, too. Like, there is no great hope coming. 

And I felt like some of our guests, especially Koyo [Kouoh], to some degree Karen [Patterson], a little bit Salome [Asega], like they themselves are not a solution to the thing that's happening to us, that people have to meet them at the world we may want to make together if we can actually organize as a collective that's interested in the things our field has said it's been interested in for many years. 

And I think there was a shift for me this season, really looking at these people is just because I'm in this role or in this place at this time is not in and of itself the solution. 

Charlotte Burns: I think that's really interesting. Something I have on my notes is “systems plus success,” and I was thinking about this in preparing one of our first guests this season, Alice Smith said that her only real trauma was escaping the apparent success of making it, and she said that breaking free of her record label contract, her creativity wasn't valued by the industry that was supposed to shepherd it. 

[Audio of Alice Smith]

Alice Smith: Because what you're doing when somebody else decides all the things that you're creating, coming up out of your soul, and then they are saying to you, “Nope, that's not it.” Their suggestions for what is gonna make it right, they’re fuckin’ made up. There are no real true rules to how to make music or art of any kind, right? You can't be like, “There's a formula.” Maybe there's a formula for a particular thing, but I never was after that particular thing. 

When I left there, it took me a long time to try to heal that up. And then retrain my brain again just to kind of trust what came out.

Charlotte Burns: I was thinking the thing that kept emerging through the season that the systems were sort of broken. It keeps coming up in all of the guests in lots of different ways whether it's collecting, philanthropy, whether it's over and again, you have people saying, “I don't want to run a museum,” or “That role isn't working.” So it's a thread through the season that the systems are in question, at the very least. 

Do you think our guests are answering those questions? Do you think they're creating new systems? Do you think that they can?

Allan?

Allan Schwartzman: I think each of them is very acutely immersed in what it is that they are doing. While the nature of the systems is a kind of cloud hanging over it all, I think most people are simply trying to do good work and then step back and assess it within a broader context through these moments of interview. Part of what I picked up is the power of so much work is in being very specific about what the goals and needs of a situation are and then working outward from there. 

Koyo spoke about that very much of her work being in the place that she is and not being for every community, but how that sense of building within a community builds community in a larger way.

Charlotte Burns: Mia, as someone who's been a guest and an advisor this season, you've talked about transforming the system. You're someone who very much is focused on that change. So you have hope—you are one of our very hopeful guests this season. To what extent do you think the systems can be changed?

Mia Locks: The systems have to change. I don't even think about it as like they can or they can't. They have to. And I know some people would probably say the systems are actually working perfectly well. They're working exactly as they were designed. But in 2024 in our sector, even those that know that they're benefiting from those systems, I think everyone's acutely aware that they have to change. I think it's a question of how exactly, and really the question for me is always how long. It's also like the style, it's like the nature of the change, and I feel like part of what Deana was saying about feeling this moment or feeling 2024 is it's super scary for folks. We're in an election year in a very divided moment on so many levels. The system has to start to embrace some of those conversations and the only way that happens is, to Jay's point about the bravery and courage of people that are willing to do that, but to be able to do that from a place of like grace and mutual respect and not in the fever pitch of crisis, if you will.

Charlotte Burns: I always wonder about that. I remember a museum director saying to me once when we did the female artist data study in 2019, “We have to be patient. These things take time. We're getting there.” And I was like, “With respect, we have known about women for a while now. How many more millennia do you think it's going to take?” And also the numbers showed the progress peaked in 2009. Like this isn't even change. This is actually going backwards. And actually, when you really study it, change is cyclical. So we might need to address our understanding of change because it isn't some linear thing. What does it take to make change? That's something that one of our guests addressed this season. Hoor Al Qasimi said, “I always say that if you want to make change, then you have to be part of that change.” 

[Audio of Hoor Al Qasimi]

Hoor Al Qasimi: You can't sit and wait for things. So for the world to change, you have to make an effort because nobody is going to know what you need if you don't try, if you don't open your mouth, if you don't say, “Actually, this is the kind of thing that we are interested in doing.”

I think putting yourself in that position is very important. We all have the same ambition that as artists, we want to create space for other artists, and we want to do that at home, and I feel it more and more seeing artists creating their spaces.

Charlotte Burns: I really liked that, and I liked her story of her just deciding that she was going to run the [Sharjah] Biennale—that really stood out for me. 

I really like the way, obviously, that Bryan Stevenson made change. He's a hero of mine. 

Who, for you guys, stood out? Thinking about change, what it takes to make change, did anything hit a nerve for you this season? 

Mia?

Mia Locks: I really liked what Koyo said about doing what is necessary and how that has been the driving force in all of her decisions. She says that you’d never imagined she'd be a museum director, that she didn't necessarily want that job, but the realization that there was a necessity and an opportunity, being really inspiring.

And I heard a kind of echo of that in some of what Karen shared about intuition and instinct and how that is something that she's really respected and been tuned into. But this sense that in these moments when things need to change, there is a degree of just stepping into that because there's always going to be somebody in the room that's, “Hold on, we need a process. We need three years of exploration.” 

Institutions like to really take their time and part of me really understands that—I'm very sympathetic to the need for taking our time. But we're at this moment where we can't just wait until the process gets sorted out and maybe in some cases we could just move at the level of instinct and trust people to try a different thing. 

Deana Haggag: Just to pick up where Mia's leaving off, I can't stop thinking about Koyo saying that she decided to move back to the continent to move to Senegal to raise her son and specifically, I can't stop thinking about the part where she says that everything that she really values about herself, she sees as having come from being raised in Cameroon and that she didn't feel like her son would get the tools he needed in Europe or the weapons and like the throwaway or the weapons at the end of that really hit me.

Koyo Kouoh: I didn't want to raise a Black boy in Western Europe in the late 20th century because of all the odds that he will be confronted with as a young Black boy and I always thought that my strength comes from my upbringing on the continent. My upbringing in Cameroon, that is where culturally I am. I was grounded and I was formed in ways that gives me the strength to be the Black woman in the world that I am.

Deana Haggag: When she said she didn't think her son could get the tools or the weapons he needed to survive in Europe, I think the art worlds we make are something that give us tools and weapons. The things we consume from this kind of global arts community is one really palpable form of knowledge for me. And so I think the folks who are really shifting it in lifetime to better prepare us for the world we're actually living in and for the world that's ahead of us. There were so many folks this season that I think we're doing that either inside the institution or outside of it. But the way Koyo talked about doing what is necessary and then knowing exactly what has to change to better orient you really blew my mind.

But the other person I feel like has really done the work and formed real change in our field is Kemi. The way that Kemi can make a container for exactly what is needed, the way that she will let the world lead and build around it, I think is really admirable. 

The other thing about Kemi that I think really came through for me in her episode is like not being attached to something because we must. Everything is on the table, everything. And if the institution needs to change, if the location needs to change, if the way we work needs to change, she really felt to me like someone who has made change integral to her practice, and I think we've also seen that in the containers she's built and the things she's left behind. She will move at the speed of the society that she is in, and she will shift alongside of it. She will not wait. She will not make a relic of our present, and like something about that really, really stood out for me this season.

Charlotte Burns: I agree. I love talking to Kemi. You're right, she so embodies that change. She's an idea maker and a community builder in the truest possible sense. She really sees it and builds it. And it's really amazing to watch her create it with words and then actions. 

I was just looking at her ‘what if,’ she talked about creating a beautiful, joyful, sustainable cultural infrastructure for brown and Black people across the globe. 

[Audio of Kemi Ilesanmi]

Kemi Ilesanmi: I'm similarly interested in what does it look like to build infrastructure that works, a net that works on the African continent so that our culture can be preserved. It can also experiment and build new things connected to or not connected to what came before. All those ideas being able to bubble up, but how do we create it? They need different kinds of supports to make that happen and different kinds of infrastructure. 

What if that were possible, and what if I could help with that? And who else could help with that?

Deana Haggag: The way Kemi worded her ‘what if’ really demonstrated for me why she has had the single most successful succession plan in the field. When she left Laundromat Project, that organization is only stronger. As someone who talks to thousands of grantees across this country every day, and everyone is stuck in like what it means to succeed someone, what it means to hand an infrastructure to another person, Kemi is by far and large is the single most successful example I've seen of that, that many of us, I think in we have seen of that. And I think her ‘what if’ question, like the way she layered that, “Who else could help with that? How could I help?” It's just, it's really beautiful.

Charlotte Burns: Is that why it's successful, you think? Because it's that idea of layering help?

Deana Haggag: I think that she really sees people. And I think that she is not afraid herself to evolve. She can move on from an idea, she can move on from an infrastructure, she does not need to be buried in the work she's doing. She can move on. That is something I don't see modeled very much in the field all the time. I feel like something about her ‘what if,’ like she wants to create the space, who else could help? And it almost always works out because she can really let go and she can really move on. And I think some of the reasons our field is stuck where it is people don't know how to move on from ideas, from models, from their jobs, and so we're stuck.

Mia Locks: I agree with you. But part of what I read between those lines is so much about a kind of antidote to the culture of individualism like it's not about accruing power or the museum director's legacy or this person's particular mark on the field for Kemi. It's like that question of, “Yeah, how can I help? Who else can help?” It's actually about the work. 

So much of what we've seen in the past is it's hard to walk away from a position of power. It's hard to get off the pyramid or to share the podium with somebody else. So maybe part of her success as a leader, as a colleague, as a builder has to do with that collectivism at the center of all of the thinking. That is part of what is really inspiring to me, at least.

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Allan, you said something when we were talking about the pre-prep for this, something that stood out to you this season was that many of the guests were coming to grips with aspects of identity, what defines each of us and where we meet this idea of reckonings. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what you meant by that?

Allan Schwartzman: Oh, lots of things. 

When you're dealing with large scale institutions and with large systems, big change requires big rethinking, and ultimately it's about sharing power, giving up power. Whether that's economic or political, we are not yet coming to grips with necessary reckonings that are the result of horrible historical collisions that have built the system and that have brought the system to a kind of breakdown point that we're in now. Especially when it comes to institutions, the capacity to embrace change tends to reside more with the small C than a capital C. The big change is ultimately going to be at the cost of power and how it has been exercised for hundreds of years, if not through most of civilization.

And, I think that's the part where each of the people interviewed this year is making truly profound impact in their individual initiatives. But the larger issue of white male power, for example, that's not giving up. And so how far change can go is, it's very reassuring and affirming to see it happening on a specific individual case-by-case basis. One hopes, as Kemi and many others allude to, that as those cases become a kind of norm or become interwoven into daily lives, maybe the needs for much larger systemic changes become less necessary because there's place for different realities to exist in parallel that play out what they seek to play out. 

I think that's part of the challenge of today is that it's like we're waking up all of a sudden to see all these problems that we've built all along over hundreds of years and that most of us or many of us have been victim to or governed by in our own various ways. And the world of culture has been almost simple-minded in how it's looked at growth and therefore has been stunned. It's like things had to be really off for there to be demands for change. I see this in a much larger kind of epochal shift, but where this ends up going, I'm very curious to see what impact can ultimately happen on larger systems and institutions.

Charlotte Burns: Where do you think is different than when we first started? A shift I could see from this season is that we've never had so many people saying they don't want to be museum directors or that the job of a museum director doesn't work. Something that people were saying quietly a few years ago now seems to be being said on the record, much more publicly. 

Allan Schwartzman: I'm not sure how much that our world has shifted as our focus in who's being interviewed has shifted and that certain people doing work independently of existing institutions have evolved to a certain place within their work and that's reached a point where we can see these points of change. 

Our dialogue and our consciousness has shifted dramatically since the beginning of a global view toward art began in the early ‘90s. Now we are truly aware that anything meaningful can happen anywhere. It depends upon the conditions, the people, and the convening. And that's what's exciting about Hoor, for example, is she just made it happen, built it step by step. This was somebody who was trained as a traditional art historian and realized that “History doesn't include me,” or “It includes me in one very specific way.”

I loved when Koyo spoke about seeing postcolonial as beginning in Ireland. That was such a mental shift. Somehow the geographies of the world and the people within it have developed more complexity or nuance or fluidity then in the past.

Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting.

Jay, did you want to say something here?

Jay Sanders: Picking up on a different thread of what Allan said, this kind of idea, just this transforming through deep sea and LaToya Ruby Frazier had been on my mind, especially Charlotte, the way you conducted that interview. She so clearly details a kind of model or proposition for the role of an artist in society and also the role of an artist to interrogate the real concrete social material specificities of their own medium and then deconstruct and transfigure those kind of from within. There's so many things about that practice and the conversation that I found both instructive and really inspiring.

[Audio of LaToya Ruby Frazier]

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I really am unpacking the power of photography not only as something to raise awareness or tell a story but literally as the platform to advocate for social justice and literally as the resource itself that would bring about the monetary difference so that the people in the work can enact the change that they need. And it also underscores that they actually are the change they need. It’s the creative solution to the situation at hand that the work is revealing to the viewer.

Jay Sanders: Through really studying conceptual photography and documentary photography, you can create a different dynamic that refoots the power intrinsic in the images toward the subject, and not toward the entity commissioning it or the photographer. And that's done both aesthetically in the work but also structurally through a redistribution of resources, equity, including actual money. 

That fundamental shift within practice, I think, is really profound in LaToya's work. And then how image making becomes collective memory, becomes public discourse, how her work calls the bluff of advertising, and what it articulates as a potential for an artist to be, I think.

Allan Schwartzman: I love how LaToya speaks about her work as a calling. She found true power in society through art that is quite brilliant and magical and it sees connections that the rest of us may have seen as not really feasible. Every decision she's made has been intentional. It's been with a thought toward where she's going and what this means in her life and her impact on others' lives and within communities that parallel her own. Hers is a very beautiful interweaving of personal and cultural stories and commitments.

Charlotte Burns: I loved interviewing her. Like Jay says, it's this idea that art is the means. She took the photographs, then the sale of the photographs bought the water for the people in Flint, Michigan. It's so amazing. She did something with her art that no government did, no private organization did. She did that with the art that she created and the community that she created the art with. It was a collaborative thing. And, that's, I guess for me, that's one of the big through lines. That's one of the truly joyful, hopeful things that each of the guests has had this season, which is this fundamental clarity around what art is for them. 

From Mia talking about art being the baggiest thing; It can hold all of these questions, you said. It's this space that's given you so much to think about all of these things. To Bryan Stevenson, when I said, why did you move from arguing in front of the Supreme Court into opening sites of cultural memory in Montgomery, Alabama? And he said that around 13 years ago, he thought that Brown versus the Board of Education was going to be overturned during Obama's administration and so he knew that he wanted to move into the space of cultural narrative.

[Audio of Bryan Stevenson]

Bryan Stevenson: I began to worry that our courts today wouldn't do something to protect the rights of disfavored people, marginalized people without power, and that made me realize that we were going to have to get outside the courts and engage in this narrative struggle that we had largely just been watching. And when we chose to do that, it became clear to me that race was the most critical narrative issue still looming in America—our unwillingness to confront this history. That's what motivated this idea of creating these Sites. My hope is that we can change the relationship to the history. We don't want people to just learn about it. We want them to think about it differently, feel it differently, understand it differently, and then be motivated to act differently. 

Charlotte Burns: Or Alvaro [Barrington] and how much he understands that art just has to be much, much more in people's lives. It has to figure that out, from the generosity of his practice. 

Or, Alice Smith talking about the importance of creativity for her and that feeling. Or,  Barbara talking about the importance of art. Koyo, the urgency of culture.

In a period in the broader art world where there is a lot of confusion generally, the guests on our show, each of them I think knows what they're doing and why, what art has meant for them, what it can be. 

Do you agree with that?

Allan Schwartzman: Absolutely. The value system by which we've all lived here, not we individually, but this world in which we function, is rooted in and defined by a market and what it values financially. And that's become very thin. It's led to safety, art that doesn't challenge to a hyper obsession with painting because that's more practical to place value in.

And I think that this is what the wider system is beginning to reveal, the schism between art, its potential, and what many individuals are doing versus how the market had overpowered what stories got told and how they got told, and how everything became valued.

And so I feel like there's space now opening up out of necessity, through a line that was empowered by money but has become rather thin in its ideas and it's thoughts. It's a little bit like we're in a moment where painting reflects the kind of, the perfumery of the Rococo rather than the power and vision of other periods of time.

Mia Locks: Yeah, that's interesting. What you're describing has a lot to do with the clarity of mission and purpose. I say that as somebody who's only ever worked in the nonprofit world. And I think a lot of what you're talking about, Charlotte, a lot of these folks are similarly minded where it's just values alignment. And then it's just this is our mission and we just move toward that thing. I think things do get really confusing just due to the concentration of money and power and just, obviously, the fact that art is a global asset class is almost separate from this thing that Emily Rales said in the last season about art is essential, and actually a lot of the different people on this season talked in a really personal way about that. 

I really appreciated hearing people's individual sort of journeys into this. Jessica Morgan talked about class and about her experience of feeling outside of stuff growing up in the UK, or Koyo talks about it a little bit too. Our way into this thing from wherever it started genuinely follows some kind of belief in the fact that art is essential.

I talked about it in terms of bagginess, but just I was a young person who I think probably like many people was interested in lots of stuff and curious about lots of things. And art really was the thing, the one space where you could actually be interested in all those things and ask a lot of questions and like fumble your way through and like maybe get it wrong, but just to keep thinking like that was the space that valued that type of process and thinking. 

Jay’s points in the beginning about process and how people are talking through that, that's the real value of art, you know, that these other sectors and industries and worldviews don't allow. For those of us on the hopeful side, it still is, and that's like what keeps us here. Keeps me here, I'll say personally.

Jay Sanders: Yeah, Mia, in your conversation, your definition of art helping us find out how to be in the world. In reading through the transcripts, I actually highlighted different people's definitions of art and Koyo says, art is the spiritual social science and then says that, expresses that bringing back artistic practice into a solid, independent, valid social science should be the goal.

And Jarl says I think it's a shortcut to the soul. Barbara says—even about collectors—that it's people feeling a bit incomplete and we're searchers. That they wanted to find something that gave them answers and they found it in art. And I think, I have to imagine that in this era, maybe when there's probably more divergent opinions about what art is than ever, and more participants, and more definitions—and that, of course, is challenging to attend to on all levels—but yeah, that maybe there's a, there is a band of kind of philosophical hopefulness that we see in these conversations, for sure. 

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I want to ask you all about the pressures on some of that philosophical hopefulness, a lot of which is the financial strain. And money came up a lot in this season as well. One of the first guests was Jessica Morgan, whose ‘what if’ pointed to a different funding system in the US. 

[Audio of Jessica Morgan]

Jessica Morgan: I feel that everybody in America has always rolled their eyebrows whenever I talk about real funding support in the US coming from the government, and that it's impossible and it's so wound up in politics—although sadly we've seen the same thing happen in the UK in recent years as well—but I still think that there's something to be said for the feeling that the people who are visiting your institution have helped pay for it. And actually I think what's hilarious is that I think most people do think that. I think most people here actually do think that tax dollars go to support museums when they don't. I think there's appetite for that as well. It would be wonderful if somebody would actually take that on.

Charlotte Burns: And we ended the season with Laura Raicovich outlining an idea for a system in the US where we could bring in money from governmental infrastructure bills.

Laura Raicovich: Which I think could be an interesting way of doing it but I'm not talking about trying to impose a European public funding model on culture, for culture in the United States. That would not work. That's just not historical. It's, it just would not work. So this is rather a rebalancing so that the public sphere actually has a stake in what happens inside these cultural spaces. And also that we have the opportunity to have a public conversation as a nation about what is culture and how is it mobilized in our daily lives. 

Charlotte Burns: But in that same episode we also included an excerpt from Glenn Lowry, MoMA's [Museum of Modern Art] director, talking about the real possibility of political attacks on the tax system that currently undergirds many US cultural organizations. He was speaking on a panel organized by Talking Galleries, in collaboration with Schwarzman&, and Deana was on the same panel. 

So Deana, I'm going to go to you here. Which of those ends of the thing is because there's hope there, the idea that we began the season talking about a possible solution to more governmental support. We ended the season going, “Okay, maybe there is a way.” But then we also ended the season saying, “And maybe things could also get worse.” 

Where do you sit on that scale? Do you think there are viable funding solutions other than the one that we have? Just an easy question for you.

Deana Haggag: No. I don't. Not in our lifetime. And I actually, maybe I'm going through this sort of evolution and in real time. So it's with like deep regret and shame that I think things are going to get a lot worse, not better. And so what does that mean for how we make and participate in art together? And so I don't feel hopeful about any kind of government intervention. I'm actually arriving at a place where I don't know that we want that even if it was possible because when we say that there is government intervention, we talk about it like it's objective and it's not. And I think we're watching that all over the country right now. And so, no. I think this is the system we have. I am thinking a lot more about what I'm willing to give up to divest from the system. 

I think all organizations and all artists and all institutions might just want to shrink for good reason, not because their arm was forced, but because it's not just the money flowing in, it's also the money flowing out that's not sustainable. We're doing too much on too little resources and it's burning a lot of people out. I do think, over time, that we really will dislodge New York and LA and a small subset of European cities as the centers of the art world if just by force. People can't afford to be there anymore. 

I don't think that there is anything to work towards. I think we are making art in an increasingly fraught and dangerous context. And rather than try to cooperate with them, rather than beg—and that's what it's increasingly feeling, that we are begging for this kind of resource and attention—I think we have to build away from it. 

I also want to be clear, because I sound so dreadful right now, I don't think that's all going to get gobbled up in even the next couple of decades. I am really thinking about the art world my child will live in, and that will have even less government intervention, even less public support, even more censorship, even more rules. Things in this country and increasingly globally are moving at a 50 to 100-year timeline. And a lot of the stuff that came up in Bryan Stevenson's episode, a lot of the folks that have organized, the folks that have helped us hold up against the system, they've known this is coming for a long time. So I think it's going to get a lot worse and I don't think we're going to run back from it.

I'm curious more actually about the way that Koyo built up RAW [Material Company].

Charlotte Burns: In what way are you curious about that?
Deana Haggag: I guess I'm curious when the math is done, what was more helpful? Was it RAW or was it Zeitz MOCAA? And why? And I don't have an answer for that, but I am curious about the difference between a slow, small-moving residency in Dakar versus a massive, multimillion global infrastructure like Zeitz MOCAA. Which thing will Koyo say felt better and which was more meaningful? And I don't know, but I think when we talk about the infrastructures of support, those are two very different models. And I'm curious about the difference between what it takes to make something like the Laundromat Project and what it takes to make something like MoMA. I wonder if over the next 50 to a hundred years, there will be significantly less of these massive global infrastructures that take so much to do in a world where there's just less and less resources to do them, and in the very least, the RAWs and the Laundromat Projects of the world, they're adaptable. 

The thing that's making me hopeful is I think there will be a return to the small and to the low and to the steady in the face of an organizational infrastructure that I don't know how it sustains itself. And it's definitely not the government. I really think we just need to put that thing away and not put so many brilliant minds into trying to convince the government to see us. I don't think they ever will.

Mia Locks: I have a question, though.

Charlotte Burns: Oh yeah, Mia, you go.

Mia Locks: I was reflecting on that point that Glenn makes about the tax system and how that feels under threat if those on the right do really scrutinize the tax status of higher ed, that the same one applies to museums. But the question I have is, again, as somebody who works in the nonprofit sector, has tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3), I understand how the taxes work, but for the wealthy people that support museums, and I really ask this very genuinely, is it really just the tax benefit? Is that really the reason? Is that driving 100 percent of those people's support of museums? I don't think so. I think that's a pretty cynical view. If that status changed tomorrow, would those people really just stop giving to museums?

Allan Schwartzman: I think they would give in different ways. In 1987, I believe, when there was a change in the tax code that eliminated for a period of time, the tax deductibility of donations to museums, the number of donations of artworks to museums plummeted. 

Mia Locks: Mm-hmm. 

Allan Schwartzman: I remember doing a study that a museum like the National Gallery [of Art], I think the numbers dropped to far less than 10 percent of what they had been in years before. Now, that could have been…

Mia Locks: Mm-hmm. 

Allan Schwartzman: …very specifically because people were waiting for another change to come but I think you will always have people who believe in things like culture and their value to society, whether or not they are able to write it off because ultimately it's still money. It may be less money, but of people who have extreme wealth, it's not really making a difference in their balance.

Mia Locks: That's the question. Yeah.

Allan Schwartzman: And I can think of a couple of people I know of great wealth who have great commitment to culture and to its potential impact on people's lives and on society in general and they're giving away most of their money. I think this gets more into a question about, do we need substantial change to distribution of wealth? Did the Reagan era in deregulating everything start this tumble where you have such excessive wealth that it actually becomes obscene and animalistic when you see it played out in many instances?

Deana Haggag: Yeah. I think maybe, Allan, you're hitting on something. We cannot solve this as a field in isolation from the conditions of the global economy. We just can't do that. This idea that government, first of all, the very infrastructure that has made most of this mess, is going to be the one that saves us is ridiculous. I think we can't separate how an art market is made, an art world, be it the market or the nonprofit, whatever it is, as separate from how value is created monetarily in this country—they're like completely intertwined. 

I think a lot about restaurateur friends in the Bay, specifically in San Francisco, whose restaurants close because they can't afford to hire anyone because no one lives anywhere near them. The hardest thing to find is a waiter and a busboy, but you can find an executive chef. We've built a world where the wealth has gotten so inequitable that our country is buckling under it, and I think so is the infrastructure for the art world. 

But Mia, also, just to go back to that, no, it's not the only reason, people choose to donate to museums. And also, I would say that what happened in ‘87 would happen today, bar none. That if those things got deregulated or overly regulated, we would lose a substantial swath of the things that support the museum-making field. They are tied.

Mia Locks: This connects to what you're saying though about constricting and doing less. 

Deana Haggag: Yes.

Mia Locks: And simplifying, and clarifying. 

Deana Haggag: Yeah.

Mia Locks: Nobody wants to be forced to do that because of the tax code any more than they want to be forced to do that by law. 

Deana Haggag: Yeah. 

And I also want to be really clear. What I mean when I say that because it's painful. We will show less art. We will employ less people. As a sector, there will be less to do in this world. It's not like that, it's also some tidy arrival point. It will also suck. But if the question is, how does this field sustain itself writ large? This thing we're doing is not sustainable. 

And today I talked to more EDs that are curious about capping their work. And I'm really interested in that. What does it mean to say our staff will never grow more than X? Our people will not make more than X. We will not do more than X number of shows. And it does cut off possibility in a lot of dimensions, but it makes it so that they've found something that works for them.

Allan Schwartzman: This was the rub in institutions, or museums in particular, growing in the same way in which businesses grew. It meant that growth was always the goal. That if you didn't continue to grow, you shrank or you died. How many “robber baron” mansions remain on Fifth Avenue? A tiny percentage of what used to be there. The nature of wealth and how it gets concentrated and how it gets passed on, it changes over time, usually based on necessity or practicalities. So many of these very large scale behemoth museums grew independently in parallel. But at a certain point, they can't all survive. It's not practical. It's not practical for what the art requires to be responsible to the art. 

There are institutions that will be challenged sooner than others. And ultimately, I think it will take collaboration for the essentialness of institutions to be defined, enforced, and made practical for survival or else you'll have a very random kind of collapse.

Mia Locks: Deana, you said something about the field not being able to sustain these giant, behemoth institutions, that, that has to shift. But my fear is that actually they're the only ones that can afford to survive. Like we're already seeing the closure of galleries at midsize, organizations, artists spaces that, by all accounts are wonderfully designed and people love them, but…

Deana Haggag: Yeah.

Mia Locks: …they can't make that leap, that capital leap. And I just feel like we've seen that show before, we're seeing it again. Are there still going to be makers? These are really big questions. But like in our field, the hardest part about it, which is different from those other sectors is, the like proximity of that precarity and that power being like literally down the hall is so intense…

Deana Haggag: Yeah.

Mia Locks: …that we have to deal with it in a way that is different than those other sectors. We have to deal with it on that like human, relational level. And that's the part that I'm like, maybe not hopeful that it's going to be easy. I agree with you. It's going to get harder before it gets better. But I feel like that's our opportunity.

Allan Schwartzman: It's a tiny number of these large museums that are actually self-sustaining financially. Glenn himself spoke about always being in deficit. 

Mia Locks: Structural deficit, yeah. 

Allan Schwartzman: It's a massive problem. Once you step beyond the three or four, five cities in this country in which the museum has always been central to the identity of that city, the basic give for board members is a fraction of what it is in places like New York. And so all these places struggle and at a certain point, you have moments where new approaches are more enlightened approaches to giving develop, but by and large, these are not sustainable in the same way that the highest concentrations of wealth are not sustainable.

Deana Haggag: I don't think that the large museums, the ones we perceive to be sustainable, even though I agree with Allan, I think very few are if any at all. I think there's like new things coming that will occupy the vacuum lift when inevitably the entire field shrinks down. 

We don't have to talk about this so abstractly, we lost two art schools this year. They have shut down. They no longer exist. They are closing. If you had talked to leaders in that field, they knew that in 2020, they predicted that by 2025, we would see a three percent shrink, that in the next 10 years, maybe half might close entirely. 

We're living in a world where someone like Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it X. And I fear that because of the wealth inequities that the art world might look really similar in the next 50 to 100 years, where some of these institutions are straight up purchased and rebranded to do a similar thing, but not the exact thing it did when it was quote-unquote “publicly owned.” 

And so I don't think, Mia, sorry to add, I don't want to like, even more sinister than the small place will close and the big place will survive. I think it's like until we get the economy in check, we're actually facing something so much worse. And I say this sitting on Andrew W. Mellon's wealth, who single-handedly props up so much of this field. And that was a billionaire, however long ago, whose wealth has now made this field possible, but you could not have told people that.

Charlotte Burns: The other thing I'll just add to that, to the point of art schools is, of course, Alvaro talked about this in his episode that he graduated with something like quarter of a million dollars in debt. It's a really different kind of industry to saddle young people with that kind of debt. 

[Audio of Alvaro Barrington]

Alvaro Barrington: The amount of times I've walked into a classroom and as a teacher, know that there's at least five of those students who have become sex workers because they cannot afford the education, and the housing, and so many other things. It's one of those things that make me so upset. But I just think that we're creating these conditions in which people are making decisions that 10 years from now they will realize how fucked they are. 

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: There's two things I want to ask you about. I was talking to someone today inside a museum. Not inside, they weren't locked inside. [Laughs] I don't know, they might have been. Everyone works long hours. 

I was talking to someone today in a museum and they're working on a kind of data project and I was asking them if it was appreciated and they were saying that the way that museums are organized is such that they aren't by nature forward-looking institutions. It's not really the way they're organized, it's not really the way they think, it's just not part of their business. Even if you are meant to be a standard bearer for your field, you leave the reflection on whether that's a success to other people. So you will organize a great exhibition, but then you'll leave it to the critics to say whether that was a great show or not. So the reflection isn't something that museums really do and it got me thinking, apart from artists, I couldn't really think of a particular area within the art world that was future-focused. And it made me think maybe this is why we have so many problems because you can think of other industries that are geared to the future. 

Is there a part of the art world that you can think is future-focused?

Mia Locks: Artists.

Charlotte Burns: Apart from artists.

Mia Locks: [Laughs] 

Charlotte Burns: Who are also engaged with the past.

Mia Locks: But they're always thinking about the future because they're making a thing today that they're going to share with the world tomorrow, or next month, they're thinking about their work in the future. 

Deana Haggag: I think the entire intellectual class around artists is future-forward. Curators and writers and educators and the whole apparatus that helps us transmit ideas from artist to audience and vice versa is really future forward. I feel like just around the time that folks opened up the possibility that you could do that thing for a living alongside people that you respected, the economy will shut it down. I feel so sad actually, that there isn't…I think the entire workforce in this field is remarkably future-forward. It's just not sustainable to be in the field anymore, and what does that mean? Where will we all go? Where will we put this interest in talking about what it means to be a human being among other human beings? Like, where will this vernacular, where will we go?

Charlotte Burns: That sort of brings us back to the beginning, that question of the systems. If the creativity is not valued by the thing, by the system, where does the creativity go? 

But then Alice is our first guest this season. She found a new path. Our last episode was people talking about working past crises and finding new ways. Maybe they find new ways. 

Mia, you were our guest in that last episode. Do you think you find new ways?

Mia Locks: Um, I don't know. I'm thinking about your sort of hypothetical question, Deana, more literally than, like, where will we all go? We were talking about shrinking and doing less and the field getting smaller and there being less museums and I think with all change and with all loss, there's like some amount of grief in that process, but I guess I wonder that if that time is coming and if we can have some collective understanding that is a reality that will come, maybe not tomorrow, but in some future tomorrow, could we actually think together about what would be a succession plan, so to speak? If we actually could all make a plan together, I feel like we might be okay. But what's gonna happen, or what I fear will happen, is that there'll be—and honestly this feels like such a metaphor for everything else in our country but—there'll be some people that are denying the reality of that future coming. There will be some people in the sort of moment of that and in the wake of that trying to hoard as much power for themselves. But I just feel like there's an opportunity for us to be like, “Huh? If our field is going to look different in 20, 50, 100 years, what are some steps and actions we can take now and in the next 5 to 10 years that will start to take us toward, I don't know, a world where the field has far more racial and ethnic diversity across the workforce and throughout leadership? Or like a world in which an ecosystem includes not just the tiniest and the biggest, but a pretty healthy middle, right? These are like all much bigger political questions, but I feel like they're so meaningful, both in terms of what kind of culture can be seen and who gets to survive, but how we, in the very like capacious sense, want to see this thing happen.

Deana Haggag: I think that's why I care so much about the organizations that are not downsizing, but like really trying to figure out what they can do with the resources that they have that take care of the artists they work with and take care of themselves and their staff. So, I guess, Mia, it doesn't get to that, the sort of cliff. It's like thoughtful and mindful. I'm struck by museum directors who are saying things like, “We're not going to expand, we're not going to get a new museum. We're not going to do a big architecture project,” even though that's the board that inherited them, that's what they wanted. That's the milestones and they just won't do it.

Jay Sanders: I was struck by something you said at the very beginning, the question of the system being broken or there being a solution, and then you sort of reframed that. I'm thinking about like some of our guests this season, like Karen Patterson and Salome, maybe there's their leadership model, and their kind of organizational model isn't quite like a structural reinvention but there are these very sensitized, active, caring question-asking entities that are trying to work in the morass or something that some of the leaders to hold up are working at that wavelength and not the kind of master builder or, of course, not huge scale, but that attentive, like situational way of working feels practical right now, and maybe more apropos to the moment than grand claims for reinvention, which, I think we're saying don't feel so possible right now. 

Charlotte Burns: Karen is working at that scale. It's a different vision of power.

[Audio of Karen Patterson]

Karen Patterson: Money is the tool that the US speaks, and it is very effective. But there are so many other tools at our disposal, and so I think about the ripple effect of the funding, absolutely. But I think about the ripple effect of the ethos and the ethics in a more creative way, because I think about how people mostly remember Ruth [DeYoung Kohler II] will eventually be her ethics and her ethos over the generations.

Charlotte Burns: It is an enormously well funded organization that just has a different vision of support and growth and what it means to support the field and whose power she wants to lean into.

Mia Locks: Yeah. I was super inspired by her episode for maybe somewhat obvious reasons; she was a curator, she understands what it's like to be applying for funds or asking for support, but also to be like in an institution thinking, trying to be creative, throwing ideas at a dartboard. And she's so reflective in that episode of what that experience has taught her but also just thinking about the ways in which, you know, foundations and philanthropy can not just support in literally like transferring of funds, but creating an opportunity, increasing ease or relieving burden beyond just financial, right? That there's also like a relational aspect that I felt like she really understood and articulated quite beautifully.

Charlotte Burns: A big part of her work is those retreats which is the opposite of direct impact philanthropy, this sort of Silicon Valley idea of hoops that you have to jump through to prove that the money has had a certain impact and it's just this idea of there will be positive outcomes to making people feel supported and enabling them to do better work, asking them what they need to do that work. And you're seeing so much more of that in philanthropy, with Melinda Gates's recent announcement. 

Does any of that make you feel more hopeful?

Deana Haggag: Yes. I think the thing about Karen—and, full disclosure, I work really closely with Ruth Arts, so I know them quite well—they don't think the money is the most important thing at the table. And I think that is such a shift in how we think about philanthropy. The hope goes in so far as we believe in others. I am hopeful that other people are working night and day to make the world better and if I am in a position to have money, the thing that very few people actually have, then it is my duty to get that money to them and to care for them so that they can go do the thing they're doing. I've gone to those Ruth Arts retreats and they are, no hyperbole, like the single best thing I've attended in the decades that I've worked in this field and it's because they do not want to take anything from you. It is really a place of just understanding that you are doing so much with so little and inevitably the people that are on those retreats take a sort of similar to the season, a kind of vulnerable tack that they don't get to take in their day to day, but it's to just take care of the people that are doing it. 

If all philanthropy operated that way, I'd be so hopeful. Then we could solve this. There is enough money on the planet right now to solve for the issues that ail us in this problematic economy. It exists. The issue is, I think for so many, the money has given them a sense of, I don't want to say their importance because it's not even offensive. Like some of these humans in foundations, individual philanthropists are lovely, but I think there's still something about the importance of the money at the table. It no longer acts as one resource. It acts as the resource that makes it like, impossible to let go and let people really get to the work. There are thousands of Bryan Stevenson's. But we don't support all of them because we need the money to transmute and transmit a sense of importance and social class and it takes on a meaning and Ruth Arts just doesn't do any of that. They barely talk about what they do. They don't see themselves as important as the work itself. And there's something about that I find so hopeful, but I don't think that's the trend. I don't think that's the trend. People aren't just like calling up museums and giving them unrestricted gifts because they believe in them.

Allan Schwartzman: Is it not possible that this degree of wealth is still young…

Deana Haggag: Yeah.

Allan Schwartzman: …formed mostly in the ‘90s, maybe built upon bad values that were entitled in the ‘80s, and that as is often the case with growth and development that when people, individuals reach a certain level of maturity or of proving their worldly success, they then start to look for meaning. I think having the examples of some very enlightened people moving forward, whether it's financially or in terms of concepts and communities, I do believe that can build. I don't think that most people on museum boards consciously took on the position of creating elite environments that did not evolve with their audiences. 

So I think it, it takes examples, and it takes examples who others look up to or who have influence over other people. We happen to live right now in a moment where negative power is far more present and commanding than positive power. But it doesn't mean that that can't shift. Despotism eventually gives way sooner or later. Similarly, somebody owning all the coins in the world gets to be a little lonely there. So that's my hope that there's enough, especially, most of this leadership is coming from women and people of color who are bringing to these fields a kind of fresh way of looking because they're of communities that hadn't been empowered or populations that hadn't been empowered to that extent.

Mia Locks: I agree with you, Allan. Obviously a lot of the people I see out there that are women, that are folks of color, that are relatively new to leadership, or are leading, and part of me is “Yes,” but also protect them at all costs. We're all watching what happens in higher education. Like it is real, and the people that have been there a long time or who look the most like the people that have been in this field a long time, they're going to be fine. 

That's the thing I'm worried about. How can we keep those folks in the situation that they're in and support them as this kind of bridge between whatever the hell we're in right now and wherever we want to go? Because I agree with you, Deana. It's dark. It's not going to be good. It's going to be bumpy. But the people that are trying to do the thing, there is no system set up to support them.

And actually, I would argue that the system is designed to like quickly expel them. 

Deana Haggag: Yeah. 

Mia Locks: The second there's like a whiff of trouble.

Allan Schwartzman: I think the more meaningful the art we produce, the greater likelihood that these kinds of enlightenments spread.

Deana Haggag: I think people need to decide what they want to last for longer. Do they want art and ideas to last for longer, or do they want their money? This is really it. It's just you can either spend your money in lifetime to make a world in the present that will make the future better, or you can hang on to that dollar after you're dead. But you don't get to take both. And I think right now, there's too much focus on building a wealth for an imaginary future that says something about the life you lived in the present versus actually just like engaging your present. 

I agree with you, Allan, that there are trends that's not the majority, that might influence what will be a very different wealth and economy in the next 50 years or so. I think the reason I'm anxious is Covid was at least one of the only crisis we've all navigated in modern times where we weren't sure there would be a tomorrow, right? It was very present. It was very real. It was like in the moment. And it did not dislodge the majority. People still hung on. 

I did not see such a free-flowing everybody just, helping out in what they thought maybe, like, the quote-unquote “end of times.” That's not what happened. And so I'm like, “Oh yes, okay.” Even at our most terrifying, people are still imagining the wealth in the future, not people, not art, not community, not ideas. So I don't know, but if philanthropy moved in the realm of where Karen's taking Ruth and where a few other folks are really imagining—what Kathy [Halbreich] did at [Robert] Rauschenberg [Foundation]—like if things moved in that direction, I think we'd solve the problems of our field and if not the world very quickly, actually. 

Allan Schwartzman: I think it's very possible. We now have generations of artists producing in various ways wealth on a scale that never existed in the hands of artists before. And we are especially seeing in real time how artists of color are putting that money to use to make real change and to create opportunities that they themselves may not have had. So we can see pockets of it. 

Yeah, it's like the it's the devil and the angel are both at play and can have impact on where things go. But I think ultimate believers are what is going to sustain art period if it sustains itself. Maybe art becomes something very different in this epoch we're entering than how we've seen it before. And maybe that's interesting and good.

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I really appreciate all your time. It's been such a brilliant season because of all of your input. 

So Deana, Mia, Jay, Allan, thank you so much. This has been the second season of The Art World: What If…?!

But before you go, of course, I'm going to ask you what are your ‘what ifs?’ What is the what if this season that keeps you up at night? What is the what if that gets you out of bed in the morning? 

Mia, I'm going to start with you. 

Mia Locks: Well, I was gonna offer a ‘what if’ based on what you just said, Allan.

Charlotte Burns: Okay, let's go. Let's go rogue. Mia, you go then.

Mia Locks: Allan, you were just saying that you're seeing a lot of artists of color if they're successful in the market, reinvesting that in various ways. That's, it's like a new trend and I see that and I obviously really honor that and respect that and would invite all of the white artists or older artists or all the other artists to jump on that bandwagon so that it's not the responsibility of folks of color to feel like they have to be the redistributors of the wealth. But for the, all the, whatever the highest, the living artists that are all making all their, those folks could follow that trend and then I think I would be hopeful that we might see, and I say that for basically every corner of the art world, but that it isn't those that are new to power or new to wealth that have the largest responsibility. I think they feel that. It's like that metaphor of if someone finally lets you in the room, you like try to hold the door open to bring all your friends versus the people that have been in the room for a long time and don't even realize that the door is still there. 

So yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's not the best ‘what if,’ but I just thought of that as you were saying that, Allan. 

Allan Schwartzman: I'm trying to work on that, Mia. 

Mia Locks: Thank you. Keep going. Keep going.

Allan Schwartzman: So, the ‘what if’ that I'll add is hopefully, I have enough brain power in my aging head to keep myself moving forward doing the work that I believe in.

Deana Haggag: What if every philanthropist individual and foundation doubled or quadrupled their annual giving over just the next five years and without making people—oh, sorry. Caveat, as general operating support.

Mia Locks: Unrestricted funds.

Charlotte Burns: Jay?

Jay Sanders: The ‘what if’ that gets me up in the morning, I think, what if art and culture are essential to our lives? And I guess that's echoed throughout so many of our guests this year. And I think about it 24/7. 

And then maybe similarly broad and basic is what if the one that keeps me up is what if the industry is fundamentally working against artists, and I think that's something I also really worry about.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you all so much. Thank you. I love this group.

Allan Schwartzman: Thank you.

Mia Locks: Thank you, Charlotte. Always such a pleasure.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you.

[Music interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Thanks so much once again to our peerless editorial advisory team who are inspiring as always. 

This is our official season finale, but we do have some bonus episodes coming up—including next time with Dr. Mariët Westermann, the new director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. So listen out for that and follow us on social media. Search for Schwartzman& to be the first to know who’s coming up. 

If you’d like to hear more from our extensive back catalogue, you can delve in. I’d like to thank all of our guests this season including the Los Angeles art collector and philanthropist, Jarl Mohn; Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of the Laundromat Project; the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier; and Hoor Al Qasimi, the director of the Sharjah Biennial; and everybody else. They’re all there to be enjoyed. Please dive in. 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 15: Transforming Museums with Mia Locks, Fatoş Üstek, and Laura Raicovich

What if you were embroiled in a public workplace controversy? And what happens on the other side of the headlines—would you walk away from your field, or would you reengage with it to try and improve upon it? 

 This very special episode is a break from the norm. In it, we discuss museums and change—and what it takes to get to that change. We’re joined by three curators—Mia Locks, director and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward; Fatoş Üstek, curator and former director of the Liverpool Biennial; and Laura Raicovich, writer, curator, and former president and executive director of the Queens Museum. Each of them has been through a public furor. In those moments, they have found a lack of institutional support and, afterward, each has shifted from their previous career paths. But each has re-engaged with the field in more ambitious and ultimately hopeful ways. Museums can't be taken for granted. But what does it take to create change? Tune in now for more.

Photo credits: Pari Dukovic for the New Yorker (Mia Locks), Christa Holka (Fatoş Üstek), and Laura Raoicovich.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If..?! This is a show all about imagining new futures. I'm your host, Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This is a different kind of episode. We thought we'd experiment with a show about museums and change. It's also about how you get to that change. What if you were embroiled in the kind of controversy that could scorch your reputation, your career, and your income? How does it get to that? How do things escalate? And what happens on the other side of the headlines? What if you could walk through that fire and survive? And instead of turning your back on a field that had burned you, what if you decided to reengage with it to try and improve it? Would you? 

We're going to talk to three guests in this episode who've done just that. Each of them is a curator who's been through some kind of professional, public, media, and online furor. Each of them has, in those moments, found a lack of institutional support. And each, after the crisis, has had to shift career path. But instead of leaving the field, they're wholly committed to improving it, which is interesting and I wanted to go into that instinct and ask them, why? And what it is they're proposing instead. 

Having grappled with the scope and scale of what's at stake, our guests have reemerged in more ambitious, ultimately positive ways. They are trying to create profound and very considered change rooted in what they think needs doing, and what they think can be done. These interviews were also a helpful reminder that while it can feel like this period of extreme politics and polarization is new, it's actually been long enough that people in our field have been through these fires, written books, regrouped, and galvanized. We have more experience and capacity than we think, particularly in the realm of culture, which, at its best, can hold a lot of space for complexity. 

But museums can't be taken for granted. The people who work inside them, including their leaders, are increasingly sounding an alarm. Our guests in this episode are both witness to the dysfunction but also offer some hope and new ways forward. 

So, what if? Let’s get going. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: First, I wanted to know how it feels to go through that fire, which is a fear for so many people, and what then compels you to reengage with the field on the other side.

Our first guest is Mia Locks, director and co-founder of Museums Moving Forward, which is an organization founded by curators. Its mission is to create a more just and equitable museum sector by improving the workplace. 

Mia, who’s also one of our editorial advisors on the podcast, was the co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. It was one of the most controversial in recent memory for its inclusion of Open Casket, a painting by Dana Schutz of Emmett Till. There were protests and calls for the work to be removed and destroyed.

Several years later, in 2021 Mia, who’s been widely heralded as one of the country's most prominent curators, resigned from her position as senior curator and head of new initiatives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, saying that she met resistance to the diversity and equity initiatives she’d started there. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Charlotte Burns: What if you can go through what is a massive fear for most people, that sort of public professional maelstrom, and come through it? Do you feel less fear on the other side? 

Mia Locks: That's an interesting question. I mean, I think a lot of people fear public scrutiny. I don't think anybody I know wants to be involved in a controversy of any kind. I do think something happens when you go through that. It's very humbling to have people out there criticizing decisions you've made. They say all kinds of stuff about you. You learn that first of all, you can't please everybody. And you learn that this is actually a profoundly human thing; that every human is like, “Oh, I said a thing or did a thing and now I'm not sure it was the thing I meant, or I'd love to reconsider it.” 

Once you've gone through something like that in the public eye, yeah, it's humbling. There's some people that could respond to an experience like that by hiding under a rock for the rest of their lives or deciding to have some sort of explosive emotional response. But, for most of us, especially those of us that are really invested in museums and this idea that art is essential and that museums, at their best, help us figure out how to be in the world, that actually going through something like that is not unlike what we hope we experience in the museum, which is gathering together to experience difference or confusion or awe or disgust, what have you, and learning to engage with each other in that process. I guess for me, nothing else in the world has given me that other than art. Like art's been the baggiest thing to hold all of that.

Yeah, I guess maybe that is a fear for people to have to do that publicly. But I don't know. I'm not sure if there's less fear on the other side. Like all things, when it's a bit of, like, the fear of the unknown, it's scary, but then we do it, and maybe it's slightly less scary because now we have some sense of what it is. 

Charlotte Burns: Our second guest, the writer and curator Laura Raicovich, is the former president and executive director of the Queens Museum in New York. She resigned in 2018 after tumultuous years in which national politics took center stage.

[Excerpt from interview with Laura Raicovich]

Charlotte Burns: You wrote in your book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, and I'm going to quote you here: “As I know from personal experience, fear often pervades the staff at the museum during controversy at all levels. This fear is partially tied to the possibility of internal retribution, but also connected to a larger and more insidious dread, a fear of public failure. Revealing any vulnerability or uncertainty in the face of critique can be overwhelming, given the perceived precarity within an institution. If only this fear of public failure—which would presumably result in the threat of exclusion from museum work—could be mitigated by the realization that courage and vulnerability are one in the same, we might be able to imagine better museums.” 

Laura, I was really struck by the fact that having been through this very public fire, you've come through the other side and have been determined to imagine better museums, as have the other guests in this episode. And I wonder what it is that's compelled you to engage with the field in that way? 

Laura Raicovich: Thank you for this question. It's a really important piece of my own journey, actually. It was pretty much inconceivable for me to not be a museum worker or cultural worker that was inside of an institution before leaving the Queens Museum and finding my situation there untenable. And I think for me, the power of culture and art to help us imagine other realities is at the core of what keeps me in the game, as it were. 

At the end of the day, I really believe in the power of culture and the power of what art does in our minds, in our hearts, and our imaginations to actually bring us to a different way of perceiving the world, of understanding our place in it and that is why I stick around. I still really believe in that power. And I definitely get frustrated at the moves that cultural institutions make. Maybe I don't have as much faith in these spaces as I used to, but I have faith in what the art that's their main charge does in the world. And that's where I think my stubbornness persists. 

Charlotte Burns: I spoke to Fatoş Üstek who stepped down as director of the Liverpool Biennial in 2020 following a dispute with the board. Two trustees stepped down in solidarity, protesting the board's treatment of Üstek. 

[Excerpt from interview with Fatoş Üstek]

Charlotte Burns: Can you talk a little bit about what happened with Liverpool, and what you learned through that experience?

Fatoş Üstek: So it was also published widely. What happened was a clash between members of the board and myself at a time of major crisis erupting in the world, the global pandemic. But I think what happened was that there were gaps and cracks in the structure and how the organization operated that kind of accentuated themselves. There was also a confusion of roles and responsibilities and the organization ended up literally not enabling me to do the work I wanted to do and to also actualize the vision I built and I was celebrated for by the board in the first place.

Charlotte Burns: Looking back on that now, how do you feel about that time? Do you feel that it's changed your practice?

Fatoş Üstek: It has definitely changed my practice. At the time, as a director of Liverpool Biennial, I think that is the most lonely I felt in my whole career. I've learned a lot. I think I could say that I'm a better person, a better manager. And I also now understand where I need to make people accountable and responsible for their positions. I'm someone who reflects and also finds mistakes, like what was my contribution? How did I deliver and what I could do differently? So that's been really important for me.  

When I think of building a new institution, I have a lot of experience to bring forward. And of course, you can rest assured that I wouldn't do it as a counter-position. For instance, now I'm a chair of an arts charity New Contemporaries, and I have been really building a different practice of a board culture there. And that is not controversial or contrary to my experience. It is a different way of being a chair and supporting an institution.

Charlotte Burns: That's so interesting. Thank you for being so open about that.

Fatoş Üstek: It's important to be open. I think we don't talk about these things as much.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: People in museums are talking. But are we listening? 

Major institutional directors are increasingly sounding an alarm. Here's Glenn [D.] Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a guest on season one of this podcast.

[Excerpt from Glenn Lowry speaking on a panel at Talking Galleries]

Glenn Lowry: The key to the success of our cultural ecosystem, and here I mean it writ large, could be at risk. 

Charlotte Burns: Glenn is talking here on a panel at Talking Galleries conference, which was organized in partnership with Schwartzman& in New York, in April. Asked if there are political events on the horizon that could shake the system, here's what Glenn said: 

Glenn Lowry: Absolutely. I mean, we saw in the fall what happened to higher education when Congress went after three remarkable leaders, who all happened to be women, who all happened to be in the first year of their tenure. You can say it was an ambush but the consequence of it is a congressional focus on whether or not higher ed is, quote, “performing,” as it should. And antisemitism may be the trigger, but once you start unraveling that, the next step is to look at whether or not those institutions deserve the tax benefits that they do. Well, they're the same tax benefits that museums, and symphonies, and orchestras have. And those benefits have been reduced in the past under [former President Ronald] Reagan. They were then restored because there was an outcry. But they're not a tablet from Moses that says they're a given. So I actually think that it is not impossible that in the relatively short term, there could be a real attack on whether or not the not-for-profit organizations in this country, except for religious ones, deserve the tax benefits that they have. 

So what's the result of that? They could be removed. They could be diminished. Either one of those creates havoc. Some museums will survive that, the vast majority will not. And it would be a travesty because this country has built the most extraordinary ecosystem of cultural institutions in the world and it did it in very short order. And the trigger to that was a change in the tax code. 

You look across this country, what we have is astounding. So, I worry a lot that without thinking about it, in an effort to kind of punish people, institutions, the whole system can get unraveled.

Charlotte Burns: Glenn is not the only leader talking in plain terms. Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, and one of our guests this season, recently said: "We’re witnessing a broad-scale backlash…and it is disproportionately taking down women." Talking to me for an article for Art Basel on International Women's Day, Jessica said: "There is more fearfulness about putting your neck out…because, when things head south, the forces are so strong they can quickly take people down.” 

This is serious stuff. These are major leaders saying that they feel museums may not survive. That cultural leaders and organizations are under attack. This isn’t paranoia. It's happening. 

In the US over the past eight years, rights for women have been rolled back, with the overturning of major laws like Roe v. Wade. A female President feels like a pipe dream. The art world might like to see itself as a progressive outlier but it’s not. There is not gender parity in museum collections or displays—progress peaked in 2009. Nor is there parity in the market, nor in the workforce. 

It’s a silent crisis that since 2017 almost 40 senior female museum staff, mainly directors and chief curators, have left their positions, mostly in the US. But rather than being looked at as an industry problem, these departures are treated as one-offs. Of course, every story is different. But still. 

This came up in my conversation with Mia. She said she’d been reading the writer Sarah Ahmed. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Mia Locks: There's a couple of great phrases from her work that resonate with what you're describing about a number of us women having been through something in an institution and moving through it. I feel like the common thread is, when you expose a problem, you pose a problem. And there's a way in which once you've exposed an issue or an inequity that's happening, you, yeah, you sort of are like, oh, the person that maybe created that problem. And suddenly that reveals something about the system. And sometimes people don't want to hear that. Or sometimes the room isn't prepared to grapple with it. 

I don't have any expertise in this, but I guess I can just speak personally. One of the things I've noticed is that when you go through some sort of difficult moment or when you're forced into a position that you weren't prepared to be in, or when you're frankly harmed by an institution—we hear about this a lot—a couple of things happen. Suddenly you really redefine what's important to you. That can, I think, increase a lot of your commitment to personal mission, which for sure has been the case for me. But the other thing that happens is this kind of increased bonding, or you seek out networks of support and others with shared experiences and you collectively revise your priorities. There is this sense that nobody wants to feel like what they experience is for nothing. What is it that we could do together to make sure that these things don't happen again? And what are some ways that we can support those that are trying to shift dynamics so history doesn't repeat itself?

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What if we can learn from history? What if we can figure out how to do things together differently? I mean, that's the kind of stuff we talk about within museums, so how about we listen to the swell of voices inside them at every level asking us to pay attention? This is a tough time for cultural institutions. Their future is not guaranteed. But there are a lot of people working hard to figure out solutions. 

Here's Mia with more on Museums Moving Forward, which came about when dozens of museum workers got together. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Mia Locks: One of the key questions we kept asking ourselves was, “Are these problems and issues that we're finding ourselves in the midst of specific to us as individuals, are they about our specific institutions, or are we really dealing with a structural issue?” We were also asking ourselves, “Okay, so let's assume our hypothesis is that museums as workplaces have not developed at the pace of all kinds of other sort of movement in the field. How might we even begin to tackle something that complex?” So we actually designed a quantitative data study that could help us bring some numbers to the things that we were seeing and experiencing ourselves. We released our first data study report in October of 2023.

Charlotte Burns: The report was called Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums and of the 1,900 museums staffers surveyed based at 54 US arts-focused institutions—so it's a really broad-based participation—74% reported an inability to cover the cost of living; 68% of those surveyed had considered leaving the field. So these were quite damning findings, reflecting a real discontent, which you sort of knew but this really named. 

Mia Locks: I guess it could be seen as damning, but I think for anybody who has worked in a museum for more than, I don't know, a few months, I don't think any of this was surprising. And actually, we heard that from a lot of people; nothing actually really shocked people. There were a few things people were like, “Oh, that's actually the number kind of helps.” But nobody was “Wow, workers in museums are unhappy?!” 

But, for us, it was still important to bring some of those numbers, to synthesize them in the format of a report, which is ultimately a tool. What we were hearing from people in leadership positions was, “Yes, I know, but actually, it's really hard to have these conversations because without actual numbers, it's really hard to a) advocate for change and b) to measure if we are indeed changing.” So, developing a tool felt really important. 

Look, I mean, Charlotte, you and I know this, but it's not like I'm naive about the fact that museums are facing a whole host of issues. But I do think we also know that it's not sustainable to continue as a field if we're not going to take much more seriously these questions about what's happening in the workplace. The report needs to be at the table as leaders are making decisions about their strategic plans, their budgets, or their operational plans. 

Charlotte Burns: Museums Moving Forward is an independent, limited-life organization devoted to not only envisioning but also creating a more just museum sector by 2030. So it's a really ambitious organization: it's not here forever and ever. That's a big ‘what if;’ what if you could create within a short space of time a better work environment, a more just sector. How do you go about creating that? 

Mia Locks: We'll do a report every two years. You can't just look at a single data set. Of course, you want to be looking at longitudinal data. You want to be able to say, “Here's what's changing. Here's what isn't.” And then in between, we're gathering really critical and complimentary qualitative data. And we do that in convenings or gatherings where we bring folks together across departments, institutions, cities, regions, to actually roll up their sleeves and sharpen their pencils and co-design solutions, but grounded in the data and really focused on what would be a different way of thinking about this.

It's classic workshopping experimentation that, in my experience, doesn't happen a lot inside the museum for a whole host of reasons. And our mission is designed to fill that gap. 

Charlotte Burns: When we were having a conversation preparing for this, you were saying that one of the really heartening things was that kind of coalition of the willing that you've been able to build. That there are people that really want this to happen. You're not banging your head against a brick wall. You are finding lots and lots of partners who very much want this change, very much are happy that there is an organization trying to find these solutions, and want to support this work. 

Tell me a little bit more about that, because I think we don't often hear that side of things.

Mia Locks: Yeah. I guess that has been somewhat surprising. As we've started to gather again, after the report, we've given a lot of talks and we've been in conversation with a whole host of stakeholders across the field, across the country. And at every turn, literally, we are hearing that the vast majority of our sector really does want to see this kind of change. I think people really do believe that the museum workforce needs to be more diverse by every metric and that museum leadership needs to be more diverse. For sure that's something I believe. I think that's something you believe. I think we've talked about that a lot on this podcast, but I really do believe that the overwhelming majority of the field has alignment on that. 

And it feels somewhat rare to me that there be that much alignment on something. There's so many ways in which the art world splinters and doesn't agree but I really do think the vast majority of us want to see that happen. The rub, or where the rubber meets the road, as they say, is exactly how do we get there? What's the time frame for that? And ultimately, how do we prioritize that when these museums have other missions? 

Most museums, nowhere in their mission does it say, “And we're trying to be the best workplaces out there,” or that, “We're committed to improving the lives and conditions of our workers,” like that's not their mission. That's our mission. And the reason we're limited life in large part is because if we're successful, we shouldn't have to exist anymore, that this will somehow get embedded into institutions because the data will show—and I think it already does, but hopefully in a long-term way, we'll demonstrate—that the dominant organizational structure of museums is not sustainable. That if we as a field can't figure out a way to have culture workers thrive because of their commitment to art and culture instead of in spite of it, then we're going to continue to see the fracturing, the frustrations, the protests, the kind of dissolution of trust in our institutions.

I'm hopeful that we can agree on that longer-term goal and I'm hopeful that Museums Moving Forward can help provide tools that will get us there as well as some recommendations we could try both in separate institutions, but together as a field.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So Mia is optimistic about the field. It's a helpful reminder of how much change can actually happen in a relatively short period of time. The crises we face aren't new. In the cultural field in America, we're almost a decade into this specific political period. Re-reading Laura's book took me straight back to 2016 and the early, chaotic days of the Trump presidency. The book captures the surging force of a new kind of political reality and its immediate impact on the Queens Museum. 

Around 5% of the staff were impacted by the Trump admin's promise to revoke Obama's [DACA] Dreamers program, which gives protection to undocumented immigrants brought to the US unlawfully as children. This set off immense panic and fear in communities around America, including the Queens Museum. Then, shortly after the museum was in the headlines again, the board had decided against hosting a political event only to reinstate it after media backlash. Then during the event, Vice President Mike Pence announced a key piece of policy, dragging the institution further into national politics and national tabloids. 

Here’s more from my interview with Laura.

[Excerpt from interview with Laura Raicovich]

Charlotte Burns: So there's a presidential election, it immediately impacts your staff, and you're dealing with that as the director navigating between the staff impact and how to move forward as an institution and explaining your decisions to the board. Then that quickly moves to you, there's another decision made about an event at the institution. You explain your decision to the board, the board agrees. There's a backlash that comes out in the press and it escalates, it becomes very political. The vice president comes to speak, you're accused of antisemitism. Your husband counsels you to talk publicly about his family's history, including how his grandparents were Auschwitz survivors, and you write: “It felt horrible to trot out facts about my existence in the effort to convince people who'd known me for years that I did not hate people for their cultural or religious backgrounds.”

As a reader, you feel this swirling sense of escalation that there is a political event and then you as a director, the circumstances unfold, enveloping first your staff and then you. It's just this escalation that's really beyond anything you could control, and then by January 2018, you write that knowing a group of board members was unhappy with you and decisions you'd made as a director, you made the decision to resign. 

You also write about things that other museums were doing, the [Solomon R.] Guggenheim, MoMA, and immediately took actions in defiance of this promise to revoke Obama's executive order. And I was thinking, “Gosh, I'm not sure that institutions would move so quickly now on things like that.” It feels further away actually that museums would take such swift action politically in 2024 than it did in 2016. That felt like uncharted territory and it felt like the beginning of a new moment. But that new moment now is not so new. 

Laura Raicovich: The Queens Museum is a very special place in part because especially when you're talking about issues of immigration, migration, and precarities related to those conditions, these are not abstractions. It's about how a change in policy actually is unfolding in real-time in people's lives. This wasn't about taking a political stance because it sounds good in a public statement. This was about recognizing that the people who I worked with every day, some of them were under an enormous amount of stress and they were swept up in this, the chaos of the entry of the Trump administration, and they were in free fall. As a human being, I just felt like I wanted to support them in some way. And I felt that the museum, as their employer and as an institution that had devoted itself to working with immigrants since far before I got there, and that had been a very much a point of pride, should actually restate those values and actually act on them.

And just to be clear, it wasn't necessarily that the board didn't believe that, but some of them did not want it to be quite as public as I thought it needed to be. We have to remember that in that particular moment, there were literally people living in Corona—which is the neighborhood just surrounding the museum—that might have even had documents, and for fear of ICE sweeping them off the street, people, if they left their homes or going one at a time. 

This wasn't an abstraction. So I felt a real obligation to engage with that in some way. It didn't occur to me not to, and I guess, what's changed between then and now is that moment hasn't left us, right? These are conditions that we are now living with for an extended period and we are now facing an even more conservative turn in the culture at large. But I also think that there are many popular movements and things that make me have hope about the change that might eventually come. There's that gripping onto power that often happens in the face of very real change. 

Charlotte Burns: Laura, what you said then about moving into a more conservative moment echoes something that leaders in institutions were saying to me recently that they fear that there is a backlash brewing. What if you were a board member who wanted to better support your leaders? How could you do that?

Laura Raicovich: It would depend on what institution we were talking about because it's very different to talk about a place like the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art] or the Whitney [Museum of American Art] or The Laundromat Project, but the work has to happen on multiple levels. There have to be shifts within the operational structure in order to operate the values of the institution. Actually paying attention to how things are being done as well as what is being done. 

In these moments, we need to have the courage to not shrink away from the tough discussions. And I mean that both from a governance stance and from a content stance. There are a lot of tough conversations that need to be had now and I think they should happen. How they happen and in what context and who's in the room and how that all unfolds, that is something that is a strategic question and a tactical question. All of those things need to be considered. But to stop moving the conversations in the direction we know they need to go would be a mistake, especially during this period.

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: Who wants to be a museum director these days anyway? According to each of our guests, the role is ripe for a revamp. Having once never imagined a career outside the institution—Laura can't now imagine being a museum director ever again. 

[Excerpt from interview with Laura Raicovich]

Laura Raicovich: It's just an absurd balance with the consolidation of wealth and power being so collapsed into the board space and the gap between the life experiences of what a typical board member experiences on their day-to-day of an institution, say, like the Whitney Museum and a staff member. That's a very big gap to negotiate all the time and it's only growing; it's grown even since the pandemic. 

These are much bigger questions of how society is moving in a more consolidated way towards many fewer people having an even vaster relationship to the wealth that exists in the world. These are social and economic conditions that far exceed the museum but the museum is a perfect mirror of them. And to me, the museum is a very useful space to experiment in these kinds of ways, because it so closely mirrors that of society that we can hope to perhaps learn something from it if we can succeed in reorganizing things.

Charlotte Burns: So what if you were designing the institution of today and tomorrow? What would you do knowing the problems from the inside out? Can they be fixed? 

Laura Raicovich: Different kinds of institutions can be fixed to various degrees. You have so many different kinds of players within it, so the expectations can't all be the same, right? However, one of the primary problems with cultural spaces is their dedication to the leadership models of late capitalism and I call this the ‘Marlboro Man’ problem. If you think back to those ads from the 1970s, which are so iconic for the Cold War era, I feel like you see this kind of cowboy rugged in the sunset on his horse, smoking a cigarette, and it's the kind of very American, self-sufficient individualism that is such an enormous mythology within our leadership structures.

And so one of the things that I think could be really useful is understanding and reenvisioning the museum as a profoundly collective endeavor—which it clearly is, given the number of people that it takes inside of museums to actually make stuff happen on the day to day—and dispense with this idea that the director or the curator is this lone, brilliant, visionary individual that's making it all happen because that's, in fact, probably very useful from a fundraising perspective, but not necessarily very useful in an institution-building perspective. 

Charlotte Burns: Mia also thinks that shared leadership is the way forward. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Charlotte Burns: Do you mean specifically then the title?

Mia Locks: I think all if we can try it in all the ways. It's not something that could happen tomorrow, but I have heard rumblings from folks that sit on search committees, there's an interest and a curiosity about that, probably a bit of fear, trying something new. Especially a high-stakes move like at the kind of executive level, it'll certainly be scrutinized and I don't think any museum leader is looking for more scrutiny right now. But I think ultimately, yeah, I'd like to see us experiment a little more with that. That kind of lone-wolf leadership model doesn't work anymore. I think people know that but they don't know how to get out of it. 

Charlotte Burns: Fatoş has written a book called The Art Institution of Tomorrow, which pitches a different kind of the leadership model. 

[Excerpt from interview with Fatoş Üstek]

Charlotte Burns: Your opening lines for this book, I love, I'm going to quote you. You say: “The world is in crisis, seeking a new direction in which to evolve with meaning and integrity, although it often does not seem this way. On the contrary, it may at first appear as if we're heading in precisely the opposite direction, where our experiences are hollow and communities divided.” 

I thought there was such great summation of where we are right now, this search for meaning and yet a sort of lack of ability to get there. Your book is an attempt to envision a new model. 

Fatoş Üstek: It is so significant to bring a wider perspective to what's happening in the world before we talk about the specificity of art institutions and their role. Art institutions are stagnating. We live in a society that is unlike any other. The concept of locality is different. There's also the change in the arts. The art itself and the artistic practices are changing. And exhibition making, the traditions and histories of exhibition making are due to have a change. Artworks don't want to be only stable. There are shifts happening in a continuum at a faster pace in the 21st century than ever before. And institutions are not really equipped to respond to these crises in a meaningful, very informed manner. What happens then is the outcome is reactive programming, or very short-term solution-making that does not necessarily address or revise the underlying inherent structures. 

Charlotte Burns: One of the things you talk about that I thought was really interesting was this kind of competition in the art world that you define as unhealthy. You talk about small steps taken towards cooperation, but say the art sector is still very disjointed, exclusive, and competitive. How do you address that? What if the art world were less competitive? How would that work? What would that look like?

Fatoş Üstek: Big tech conglomerates now use this methodology of embedding distributed intelligence within their organizations. Organizations can restructure themselves, their operations, in order to make the most of this distributed intelligence that is brought in by every specific person in the team. The same methodology could be applied in a different scale, in an external scale, where a distributed intelligence can be formed among the institutions that are taking part in a local, national, or an international context. That means perhaps we don't need to deliver on all fronts as a single institution but we share knowledges, we share skills and we share our methodologies of overcoming hardships or trainings, learnings, that we have developed through our experiences. Because even though institutions might be going through the same crisis, they're going at it at a different scale and at a different impact. So that would be my antidote to the problem that we are facing right now. 

Charlotte Burns: When you say you want to think about shifting the institution, do you want to shift it? Do you want to build something new? Do you think it's possible to change it as it stands?

Fatoş Üstek: So my ambition is actually to really start this new institution from scratch, but I also don't want to be the only director of that institution. I think the future is really built on decentralized forms of knowledge production and sharing of that knowledge and skills. I think it's really about everyone in the organization being a sensor for the organization, not only the ‘genius director’ that is set on top, or the boards. So, yes, the ambition is really to start one. And one of the core things that needs to be tackled is decision-making, how decisions are made in the organization, and who makes the call. Perhaps that needs to be decentralized. 

Museums were the drivers of visual culture and now visual arts and performing arts are only a subset of a wider domain of visual culture that is foiled by the advancement of technology. So how do we then step outside of that old cloak of being a cultural authority, or being the centers of discourse and validation, to being parts of that global culture that is actually produced at different scales by everyone that's part of that global society?

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Ultimately, this is about the value of art and culture, and what they mean to us. What do we think museums are for and what do we think they can do? How do we then pay for them? That brings us to money, which is also often about power. New kinds of thinking are required. 

Laura has one proposal. Together with Laura Hanna, she recently wrote a guest essay in The New York Times called “To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways". It looks at cultural infrastructure and spending in the United States on a national level, via governmental infrastructure bills. It's a rebalancing, she says, so that the public has more of a stake in what happens inside cultural spaces and so that we have the opportunity to have more of a public conversation about culture and what it means.

[Excerpt from interview with Laura Raicovich]

Laura Raicovich: What is culture and how is it mobilized in our daily lives? There is something very profound that we need to talk about around what the difference is between what happens in museum space, in community space. What happens in a bar is culture—and I say that very knowingly because I've recently opened a bar in the East Village that also functions as a cultural space. How do we begin to rethink what, in our imaginations, culture might look like?

Charlotte Burns: I really loved the op-ed; it gets to this issue of how we treat art, and brings it quite back down to earth and, says, no, it's just part of life and we need to start treating and funding museums, theaters, and galleries less like sacred spaces, less like these rarefied things and more like interstate highways, the internet, and use money that's earmarked to maintain the country's infrastructure. 

You provide a pathway to lobbying, essentially, for bringing federal funding into the arts via infrastructure bills. Can you tell me more about where any of those initiatives are going? 

Laura Raicovich: Yeah. The op-ed is basically the very first shot over the bow, I think the expression is, to basically begin a conversation about what this might look like. I have been thinking about cultural infrastructure as a question of equity for a very long time and cultural infrastructure is not only the physical buildings and deferred maintenance and other kinds of physical matters but it's also people. If you don't pay people to open the doors and clean the toilets and do all of those things, but also to actually put the work on view or work with the artists to make the production or record the music, you don't have culture. That's why we call them culture workers because they produce the culture with the artists. And this is an important point, especially in the US, because if you don't have a full-time job, it's very challenging to get health insurance. And so culture work would be wrapped up as a form of infrastructure that would not only provide the literal tools to actually make culture, but also provide a massive amount of fuel for the economy. 

The economic development argument that has been used for a very long time in the US has been, if you have a museum in your town, it will bring tourism and other things. And yes, it will employ people and all of that but the focus has really been on bringing people from outside that area to spend money there. That is important. But I also think paying people a living wage to do the work near where they live to get health insurance, you're creating a level of stability. Never mind the fact that in the US I think…I don't remember the figure…

Charlotte Burns: We have it here. Culture in the US employs about five million people and pumps about $1 trillion into the economy annually. 

Laura Raicovich: So that $1 trillion number of economic impact is enormous. That's a big industry when you compare it to other industries in the US and it's also spread very unevenly over the US. It’s a very large nation, obviously, and there is so much more that could be developed across the nation. 

So, all of these economic realities really affect how people understand what culture is and where it's physically located. And so this reexamination is about really thinking about what is culture? And what if we thought about culture in a radically different way? How would we feel about funding it, as a society? And if it included, perhaps, the line dancing at the bar in the West, that whatever is a popular thing for people to do on a Wednesday night that's not in a big city or whatever, that's an important piece of the puzzle. 

Charlotte Burns: It's additive rather than oppositional. People tend to get stuck when we have conversations about funding. And you say here, “It would help disentangle larger arts institutions from the largess of wealthy individuals and corporations,” and it would, “defang” some of the culture war arguments because it's harder to object to paying to fix a leaky roof than to paying to exhibit a photograph.

Laura Raicovich: And I guess I would also point out that it's a very tiny percentage of these enormous bills would make an incredible impact on the cultural world. What we're talking about in the kind of many trillions of dollars that is allocated towards infrastructure is that a teensy piece, a half of 1%, half of a percent, would change the landscape. And so it all of a sudden doesn't seem like such a big ask. Or maybe? I hope! 

So the idea now is to really work out how do we now find the right people who can help advance this idea. And I'm working with Laura Hanna, who is my co-author on the piece, to actually begin to map those next steps. 

And, obviously, these are long campaigns to be thought of in years, not months. But this is the beginning. And so I hope that we begin to lever open some of these spaces for conversation and discussion about how government works, could work, doesn't work, and figure out how to take those next steps to make something shift. And undoubtedly, the idea will change over time because what do I know about federal funding earmarks and all of that. 

Charlotte Burns: That's really fascinating. But it seems very pragmatic. You say here in 2021 in a bipartisan bill, the federal government allocated $1.2 trillion to national infrastructure projects over five years. And this isn't even 0.5% of those funds, which would be $6 billion or $1.2 billion annually. 

Laura Raicovich: The NEA, which is the National Endowments for the Arts, which is the good housekeeping seal of approval, if you will, I think that they give out about $250 million a year. Just as a comparison to the $1.2 billion. It would change the game.

Charlotte Burns: What was the reaction to the piece? 

Laura Raicovich: Overwhelmingly positive. I would say that there's a lot of work to do on understanding what the realities of attempting to go forward with this are and that was pointed out by several people, who are very much in the know, whose work I respect. And I do feel like this is a way of putting a big idea out into the world so that other people can begin thinking about it as well. This isn't something that Laura and I are going to do on our own. It's going to require a massive network of people who believe that we can make this kind of shift in the United States. And to envision how it might work. As I say, it's a very beginning first step. 

Charlotte Burns: Bravo on taking a first step. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: The real power in American museums are the boards, which fund the institutions and are responsible for their well-being at every level. We’ve heard a new funding proposal from Laura. Mia and Fatoş are also experimenting with the existing model. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Charlotte Burns: What if governance were different? What are your recommendations in terms of leadership, in terms of ultimate authority? Which is the board composition? 

Mia Locks: That's probably the toughest one. It's so much easier for me to say this because we're a new organization, but we've structured ourselves in a way that separates the governance from the fundraising. Our board is made up entirely of museum workers because we're focused on the workplace. The expertise of what's happening in museum workplaces, I think we can agree, comes from the people that work in them. And we have a separate group called our Vision Council that we're building. It's basically a nationwide network of philanthropists and other art supporters who see the value of what we're doing. Maybe they're already on a board or they don't need to be on our board. And that's not even the invitation. The invitation is to support the opportunity for somebody else to sit on our board and in some cases, maybe it's their first time on a board. So they're learning really hands-on skills about being on a board. 

A number of our stakeholders pretty early on in our convenings in 2021, when we asked them, many of them were getting interviewed for the first time or getting brought into these searches for leadership positions, more management positions, some of them, director positions. And so many of them—and I will just say almost exclusively women, and a majority of them women of color—said to us, “We get into those rooms, we're on these lists, we're invited to present some ideas, and then we're ultimately told, “But you don't have enough board experience. You need board experience, but we can't give it to you, but you need to figure it out or you can't get to this next level.” And we thought, that's something we could do. So why don't we develop a board that is effectively a kind of professional development opportunity, so that people in museums could actually learn about what it means to be on a board? 

So that's one of the ways that I see, for our work, a really critical difference, which is to say the people that support us don't need to be our governors. The people that support us because they believe in the mission. And I wonder sometimes if other organizations could think that way. 

But it's much easier to build a new thing than it is to fix an old one. So, that's not lost on me. But because we were in this nascent moment thinking about all these things and asking ourselves these questions, we thought, “Actually, let's structure it this way so that our board of stakeholders are the sole governors and that the philanthropists and others that support us are a different group.” And of course, there's overlap and of course, they connect, and of course we gather together to talk about these broader issues. But to us, that separation between governance and fundraising felt like one way we could experiment with the model as it exists.

Charlotte Burns: Fatoş also suggests a new governance model. 

[Excerpt from interview with Fatoş Üstek]

Fatoş Üstek: Yeah, I am suggesting a radical systemic change because it is really about employing a different mindset. The hierarchical pyramidic models of organizational structure has come to an end, that model we inherited from the birth of the museums.

However, in today's accelerating society, we need institutions to be able to respond and engage in the same pace. Something that has been really blocking the institutional ability and agility is the bureaucratic systems that are set in place. So, in this new model, the boards and the governance bodies and advisory boards and stakeholders and benefactors don't have hierarchies that are built on the status of dominance. There are certain processes that are obstructions to be attentive to change, to be spontaneous where it is needed.

What I am suggesting is that boards, instead of separating themselves as the strategy and vision and overall decision-making structure, really integrate their work with the team so there's more of a porous collaborative ethos instead of these stratifications of who holds the knowledge of the institution and who makes the decisions for its future. 

Charlotte Burns: And how does that process work? Because I can already hear half the art world saying, “Ugh, you can't make decisions by committee. We don't have time for a million conversations.” How does that work? 

Fatoş Üstek: We actually need to demolish departments. Instead of departments and heads of departments, we actually need to build cross-skilled teams and those will also need to be skilled in self-management and conflict resolution. 

My ideal institution that I'm sketching right now is composed of five teams: experienced fundraisers and newly starting up curators, or marketing people or communications or systems coders. Different people with different mindsets and skill sets. They could work together to deliver a project. 

Charlotte Burns: So, you're sketching out your ideal institution. How are you going to fund it?

Fatoş Üstek: Again, it's going to be decentralized. But also non-hierarchical. There are multiple hierarchies that we operate within the art sector and those hierarchies look really healthy and sustainable, but they have been coming with strings attached. My main goal of thinking about a business model for art institutions is how to make institutions more autonomous. How could we delegate agency and autonomy in an institution where the business model is supportive of that? 

I think, as society, we perhaps need to change our understanding and perception of art institutions, that they are here to contribute towards the expansion and a wealth of culture. And maybe that is where we could connect with them and build a much more non-hierarchical support.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: While Fatoş wants to make something totally new, Mia hasn't given up on the museum just yet. The only way through is...through. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Charlotte Burns: What if you were thinking of museums now? Could you imagine yourself going back into a museum? Could you see yourself wanting that life? 

Mia Locks: Absolutely. I think I'm interested in going back into museums. My question is whether museums are actually interested in people like me being inside of them. That's actually a question I can't answer. 

But yeah, I still really believe in museums. There's a lot of people out there that don't and say we can't with the old models, we’ve got to invent new things. And I think we need that too, but I'm not personally willing to let go of this idea that these institutions can change, that historically they have served a certain purpose and they've been structured a certain way, but that ultimately they're still doing something that I value, which is showing art and holding onto objects that tell us something about who we are now, but also hundreds of years from now. So that people could know what mattered to us and what we were thinking about and talking about. So I guess in a very romantic, with a capital ‘R,’ way, I still really believe that. So of course I would absolutely love to help the field figure this out from the inside. 

But at this particular moment, I think most people are afraid to step into that role because they know the public scrutiny is so real, that the standards are so high, that the kind of stakes of the game are just intense, but yeah, I guess maybe I'm less afraid of that having been through it, but also I just don't think there's any way through, but through. I just don't see us avoiding this wholeheartedly and powering on. We can temporarily delay. We can take our time with our priorities, but at the end of the day, these institutions are going to have to change if they're going to survive. And I think everybody knows that. 

So yeah, I would love to, of course, be part of that change. I just don't know how much the existing structure is really ready to, like, kick into gear and how much we're still evaluating and assessing our next steps. But, yeah, I'm in it for the long haul, if you will.

[Musical interlude]

[Excerpt from interview with Fatoş Üstek]

Charlotte Burns: So I'm going to ask you two questions. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Fatoş Üstek: I think I'm an optimist in general. I was thinking about this question because I knew it was going to come. So my ‘what if’ is, what if it all works out? So that keeps me up at night and gets me up in the morning.

Charlotte Burns: I love that. 

[Excerpt from interview with Mia Locks]

Mia Locks: I actually don't let things keep me up at night anymore. That's like the gift of getting older. I don't let that happen. It's not worth your health. That said, I do wake up each morning pretty motivated to figure out how we can prepare museums to really embrace the change that we're in because I think if we don't, I am really scared that they're going to close. We already know that there's all kinds of structural deficits that it's already quite expensive and challenging to run a museum. But if we can't solve this broader issue about how to be better workplaces that we are ultimately going to see museums fail. And that breaks my heart. I don't want them to go away. I don't want people to not have access to them. But I do think if we can't find a path forward, that we are going to see that. And that definitely motivates me to help prevent that from happening.

[Excerpt from interview with Laura Raicovich]

Charlotte Burns: Laura, what's the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?

Laura Raicovich: What if Trump gets elected again? [Laughs] 

I shouldn't be laughing when I say that, but, oh dear! I'm worried about that one. 

The global slide towards authoritarian leadership seems to be happening in all corners. And I think there is this grand mythology that the United States is somehow magically resistant to that, but it clearly is not. But I guess that's a piece of why I think the cultural aspect of making change is so necessary because if we can't imagine how we want to live and the world we want to live in, how can we possibly make it happen?

And I always go back to this Karl Rove quote, he said this during Bush's administration. He said, we're creating reality right now. Everybody else is just reacting to it. And this is where I think the right has actually made enormous strides. They've constructed this reality. This is the violence that's being perpetrated, is a violence in our imaginations, which is, in the end, why I think culture matters.

Charlotte Burns: Laura, what's the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Laura Raicovich: What if we could create that, as my friend Jonas Staal says, emancipatory propaganda, that elusive story. Remake that story into a narrative that is not about consolidating wealth and power and influence, but mutual liberation. That may sound like a utopian idea, but that is what gets me out of bed in the morning.

Charlotte Burns: What's wrong with utopia? 

Laura Raicovich: That's another podcast. [Laughter]

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Thank you to our guests Mia Locks, Laura Raicovich, and Fatoş Üstek. Thank you so much for taking part.

We’re heading to the end of the season. Join us next time for our editorial advisor roundup. But we have some bonus episodes coming up too. More details on that next time on The Art World: What If…?!

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 14: LaToya Ruby Frazier

This time, we’re joined by the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, just before the opening of her major new exhibition Monuments of Solidarity at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “This exhibition spiritually uplifts people,” she says. “It inspires people to be the change they need, but it also inspires them to be better human beings. To look beyond the self to look beyond individualistic desires to think about the fact that you are connected to an ecosystem and a world around you. People won't be the same. This is a transformative exhibition.” We delve into LaToya’s faith and the impact of art on our lives, its power not only to shine light into the darkness but to move through people and communities and so to create profound, lasting change. Enjoy.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This time, we’re joined by the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier just before the opening of her major new exhibition Monuments of Solidarity at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: “This exhibition spiritually uplifts people. It inspires people to be the change they need, but it also inspires them to be better human beings, to look beyond the self, to look beyond individualistic desires, to think about the fact that you are connected to an ecosystem and a world around you. People won't be the same. This is a transformative exhibition.” 

LaToya is an amazing artist and this is such a great conversation. We delve into her faith and the impact of art on our lives, its power not only to shine light into the darkness but to move through people and communities and so to create profound, lasting change. 

I really hope you enjoy listening to LaToya as much as I did talking to her. Let’s begin. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for making this time to be with us, LaToya. It is so great to be able to talk to you.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Charlotte, it's my pleasure to join your program.

Charlotte Burns: Especially because you are so busy. You're in the middle of your install for this MoMA show. I imagine time is a sort of precious commodity more than ever right now. How is it going?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: It's going really smooth. It's going really well. It's just a lot of work because it's 10,000 square feet, nine massive rooms, really immersive photographic installations that become quite sculptural, and there's also multiple sound components. It's a lot to install, but we are moving along pretty swiftly and it's really taking shape.

Charlotte Burns: So this exhibition, LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, it's your first major museum survey in the US. You've reimagined 10 bodies of work as a sequence of immersive installations that are monuments for workers' thoughts. 

You said something a few years ago that you want to establish a museum of workers’ thoughts. An institution aimed at fostering solidarity among working-class people around the world where you would teach and you'd maintain your archives. And you told the [New York] Times, “Maybe I could see it happening before I die. Maybe I could help plant that seed.” 

So is this show part of planting the seeds for the museum that you want to create?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yes. This exhibition is absolutely the inception, the beginning of that invitation to really invoke and also bring into existence this institution that I do believe will transcend all the things that are holding us back as a society in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and religion. It's hard to do that without having a real visual aid. 

And so this exhibition, unexpectedly [Laughs]...because the way it happened, I was at the photographer's forum where Roxana [Marcoci] has those contemporary art conversations. And I was talking about [LaToya Ruby Frazier:] The Last Cruze and it being a workers’ monument and just requesting that it would be beautiful if it were here at the Museum of Modern Art.

And so, I believe I spoke it into existence without realizing it until I actually started to work on the show these past several months. It only dawned on me as we began to get through the catalogue and start to lay out the show that this actually is the idea that I proposed at the end of that New York Times article about a museum of workers thought.

So it's really here at the Museum of Modern Art where it's taking shape and coming into existence. And I see it as a springboard for me being able to actually launch the type of cultural center that I would like to after this exhibition.

Charlotte Burns: As you're working on the show thinking about that springboard, what are the things that it's shaping in your mind? Where do you start seeing things take more concrete shape?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I'm of two mindsets at the moment. One thing is I do have this belief that people are walking institutions. It's about the energy and the care and the knowledge that we put into each other and that we reflect in each other. Oftentimes as artists, we're being pressured to have a brick and mortar, to have boards, to become very institutionalized ourselves and I'm concerned about that. 

I think that we are extremely institutionalized as a society, and the only way to really get through and to help transform people through art—for me, over the past 25 years of my practice, it has been in the most intimate, personal spaces and ways. For example, when I'm in families’ and workers’ homes late in the evening, eating dinner with a recorder, passing it around and talking to them about the crisis that they're facing, like, those are the most transformative, emotional, and compelling moments that occur between me and the people that I'm representing in my work through me as a messenger and a platform and an artist to share their story and their vision in their lives with this society. 

So that one mindset that perhaps it isn't a physical building or a space. That it simply is the work that I've already been endeavoring to do, which is, be a walking institution and view everyday working people as institutions themselves and to continue to show up, meeting people where they are, and having these conversations and recording them and then working with them to make the type of depictions and representations and images that they would like to make. And in that way, that then becomes an archive. And that archive perhaps is what could then go on to a university, whether that be a HBCU or to a leading research institution. I've worked at every university level possible. I've worked in community centers and churches. So, I really think it's about finding that right partnership.

And then the second approach, I'm from a place where it's too toxic and unsafe for me to return. In a lot of ways, I am in exile from my own hometown, and community, and family. I've been on the road making this work for more than 25 years because it's not safe for me to return home for a multitude of reasons. In that sense, I'm like an artistic insurgent that goes wherever I'm called and you will see this in the exhibition where I'm called into various places, whether that is from Pittsburgh in the steel industry to Flint, Michigan, and automotive industry, to a place like the Borinage, which is the coal mining region of Belgium, to California with Dolores Huerta. So, I'm really deploying myself into these places. 

At this point, I would like to be able to settle down and be embraced in an actual local community and to be able to work with elected officials to perhaps purchase a property or a building so that I can then shape into the type of photo center and cultural center that it needs to be. The vision that I have is that it would combine art and healing so that it would allow for it to be a space where people can come and learn about the power of photography, the power of telling stories. 

I often think about this discrepancy that we have in society where, in particular in Lordstown, [Ohio] those auto workers had a gag order. They were not allowed to come out and demonstrate and speak while they were still working on the assembly line of the [Chevrolet] Cruze sedan vehicle and that's why you see someone like Werner Lang, who appears standing outside carrying his 40-day vigils. You see me make the portraits of him protesting because he's speaking up for the people. 

I think one of the great contributions I could make to this country and society is creating a cultural center that is a place and a space for everyday Americans to come to talk about their work, their labor, their lives. Somewhere where they're not being seen in conflict with their employer or in conflict with local elected officials. What would it mean to this country and society if an artist were permitted to create a space in an archive, where suddenly CEOs and politicians could come and really learn about how their policies and the things that they say in mass media are impacting the general public or impacting the workers without creating division and strife.  

My work really does look for peace, love, and justice through unpacking the power of photography as a platform for art, social justice, and cultural change.

Charlotte Burns: Tell me about the audience. What you want with these immersive installations at MoMA? Talk us through what we're going to see. 

I know you think very much about who the work is for and what the effects are when you make the work, so what are you thinking in this instance?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yes. Let's start with the title itself. 

Monuments of Solidarity is not about a statue or a physical space. Solidarity is an action. So the exhibition immediately conveys to the viewer that I need you to act, right? It's a proposition for you to think about what does it mean to take action? What does it mean to take collective action? What it means to think about others in the community, and in particular, what it means to think about things that are larger than yourself. So Monuments of Solidarity is not about thinking about a statue of a human figure, but the love that we enact for people, and for people that we may never meet or never know. And for people that may not necessarily be able to do something for us. What does solidarity look like when you look beyond yourself? 

Monuments of Solidarity is a rare art exhibit where the people depicted speak back to the audience. As the viewer walks in, they're going to see The Notion of Family, which is a body of work that shows my coming-of-age story in a steel town as a little girl trying to negotiate my voice, how I see myself in my family, my community, and in the world, right?

I think all the time, everyday Americans are thinking about this. We're constantly negotiating how to see ourselves. What does our self-portrait—in the way that we're engaging with our families, community, and society—what does that look like? And how do images and stories that we tell ourselves about our lives, and what we represent, and where we get our start, how that places us within the greater context of society and enables us to make a type of cultural impact to the greater public? 

And so in The Notion of Family, that's what you see. It's my coming-of-age story as to what it means to move from being a child and a teenager in a post-industrial landscape, in post-Reaganomic era. And as a little girl, I'm not aware of any of that language or what these policies are, but they are surrounding me. Through that first room, the viewer gets to experience and see all of those things that I'm grappling with, right? I was born into that context and space. It's not something that I asked for, but I needed to visualize that through portraiture, still life, landscape, so that it becomes visible and tangible. I'm trying to harness how you make visible history that's constantly surrounding you and through each portrait, transforming my life my identity, and my voice, one portrait at a time. 

From there, you move into that second room and you see where I come outside. It's no longer the portraits of my mother and my grandmother. I start to deploy myself amongst the elders of the community. In the activist group called Save Our Community Hospital, where I'm photographing them demonstrating and protesting the closure of our hospital. 

And then of course this forces me, after coming from out of the house onto the street, to then go up into the air and get a bird's eye view on these situations so that the people who are living amongst all of this new redlining, rezoning, and new redevelopments that are impacting their lives and their livelihood, so they can finally see how it's all taking shape around them, and it sets up these important questions around who lives in a place and who gets to control the way that it's shaped. Then suddenly you see the impact of government neglect and abandonment as well as the denial of American democracy—which is the Flint water crisis.

The works become more confrontational and activated in a way where they stand on their own authority through these formal architectural, and sculptural languages of looking at the atmospheric water generator, which is a machine that was used to create, clean, safe drinking water for the residents of Flint. It moves from the photographs themselves documenting and archiving the situation to echoing those interventions and in particular that generator that stands on stilts. The portraits of the people who are drawing the water from the generator are now themselves standing in this very—I guess it's confrontational, in a way–stance with this concrete staring directly at the viewer.

And then there are direct testimonies where they're telling you exactly what it's like to live without clean water and then it continues to move, introducing more and more characters, in particular women who are at the forefront of making all of this grassroots activism happen, where they are circumventing their local government because they can no longer trust, lean on, and rely on them. It requires us to take grassroots action ourselves in the meantime of waiting on justice to come forward.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I can't wait to see the show. 

As you were talking, I was really struck by that journey that you've been on that now you're putting the viewer into. It's another evolution in your work. 

Preparing for this interview, looking back on The Notion of Family, I was struck by how young you look. Now I have a daughter. I think I looked at the family dynamics in a different way and can see how you're navigating those relationships and finding your own power. I was so struck by the tenderness and frankness of them as well as this clear need that you have in your work to talk about something, to say something, in a conversation with the people around you. 

At first, that's you finding your own vision through that. You took that vision out from your own home, onto the streets, and then up and gave it back to people so they could see. Now you're bringing that into the institution and reflecting it back on an audience that may not typically see. So it seems that this is an ever-growing, ever-evolving sense of the possibility and potential of what the camera can do. That act of photography, the collaboration.

Your art is such a bridge between social documentary and conceptual photography, this idea of taking theory and putting it in people's lives. It just moves in terms of your sense of what it can do. And this show seems like a further step in where you can take it, where you can extend it. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about when you feel aware of that power of the work itself. Are you aware of that as a conscious thing? Or is it something that just develops in and through the work?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Let me back up to what it is that I'm actually trying to do, what my obsession here has been, because it's two things really that are the driving forces. Being an undergrad student, being in my photography course, my intro class, and seeing the two photographs that I think were important for me, which was Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother and Gordon Parks’ Portrait of Ella Watson. When I looked at those two images, it's not that I saw a representation of a figure by a photographer. As soon as I looked at those images, I immediately was struck by what I saw as structures of power. I immediately saw a schematic, a diagram overlaying it, floating above the actual image that was saying to me, “Oh, there's an opportunity of a paradigm shift here.” If you imagine this overlay, over top of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, what I see in that image is a triangle. At the top, it's the government and the corporation, who are the ones benefiting from the existence of that image, right? That image is created to say that the President's policies worked. That's supposed to be the evidence for the government and the corporation. Then at the bottom left-hand side is the photographer who is commissioned and yet that photographer isn't getting to contextualize or frame the information or the narrative around the image because it's proliferated and used as an iconic image, but yet it doesn't have the voice of the woman and the children depicted, nor does it have the photographer’s field notes. To the right of that is the subject themselves, a mother and her three children. They never receive any royalties, and they don't get to have a say over how it's depicted, contextualized, and disseminated into the world. 

For me as a student thinking about the images, it really is that question of how to take an image, rotate that paradigm, or invert it, so the subject comes first, the photographer comes second, and then whatever structural entity it is comes third. A complete inversion of it that allows the people depicted to narrate, author, and benefit from that image. That is the driving force behind all of the work for 25 years and that's what I've been trying to build into an actual sustainable practice.

But you have to start somewhere and it started out with these singular portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. But then I started taking more initiative and authority about the type of narratives and storytelling that would be around it. And then another step further, which is where Gordon Parks comes in.

In that image of him and Ella Watson, what you're looking at is the relationship of the photographer and the sitter who are both trying to exist and see each other's humanity in a segregated Washington, D.C. This is our nation's capital where these two Black figures are negotiating their rights and their citizenship through looking at each other and acknowledging each other's existence, right? That's a relationship that's key. And I think what Gordon is saying to someone like me or between that collaboration of Gordon and Ella is, what is the value of a Black woman's life in America? How am I going to navigate this? Perhaps it's not about a negotiation, it's about me really taking initiative and authority and writing myself into the history. 

When it comes to Braddock, if you were to Google it, you wouldn't know that it was predominantly Black. You wouldn't know that someone like me is from there. I had to, through The Notion of Family and all the photographs, write myself into that history—one portrait at a time, one still life at a time, one landscape at a time—writing my grandmother Ruby, and my mother Cynthia into that town's history. Otherwise, if I didn't, it would still be the continued grand narratives of Scotsmen like Andrew Carnegie and the first settler, John Frazier. That is the story that they tell about that town, when in reality, it is predominantly Black due to systemic, spatial, and structural racism. And we have to continue to write that history into existence so that we understand the legacy that town is coming from, which is actually shaping US history. 

So for me, it gets down to that simple question, thinking about those two images and those two great photographers; well, what would Florence Owens Thompson’s self-portrait have looked like had she photographed herself. And I have been pursuing that for many years. It started with The Notion of Family which allowed me to branch out and work with all of the other families that you see me working with now. But then the next step, if Gordon Parks is using his camera to fight back against racism and bigotry in the 20th century, then it affords me that opportunity to use my photographs, right? Not my camera. Use my photographs as a platform for social justice and equity. 

And that's what you see that's starting to happen where I really am unpacking the power of photography, not only as something to raise awareness or tell a story, but literally as the platform to advocate for social justice and literally as the resource itself that would bring about the monetary difference so that the people in the work can enact the change that they need. And it also underscores that they actually are the change they need, and that the photographs then become the resource for them to enact that change. And that's the through line that's happening in this work and why it's starting to become larger and more robust and it really starts to become the answer and the solution, right? It's the creative solution to the situation at hand that the work is revealing to the viewer.

Charlotte Burns: That's the thing that's so compelling about Flint Is Family In Three Acts is a work that you produced over many years and it culminates with you using the proceeds of your gallery sale of the photographs from the first two acts to buy the machine that will bring clean water to the town with a fund from The [Robert] Rauschenberg Foundation and to do something that no government did, no water body did, nobody did. That collaboration between you and the people you were photographing, the town you were in, created the means and created the water. 

And it's amazing to hear people talk—and you write about this—because it's not just the photographs. They're accompanied by your writing, which sometimes is plain document of a moment and sometimes is lyrical and poetic and sometimes is testimony, people's words. Especially with the Flint water pieces, hearing people describe the sickness that they felt showering in unclean water and then saying things are so simple, like “I feel strong and I feel healthy,” “I feel speed in my body,” because they can wash with clean water. It's so amazing to think that all came about through the power of the creative act and the collaboration between everything you did. 

I want to come back to the catalogue for Flint because you began your essay to that catalogue with a quote by James Baldwin. I know you come back to James Baldwin a lot in your work. I wondered, do you want to read that quote for people? 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yeah, I do. I have it.

Charlotte Burns: Can you read it? Do you mind?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I'm going to take a sip of water. I think I'm now settling into a groove with you. So I'm feeling good that we can start really digging through all this stuff now. 

So, artists, my students, or whenever I'm out giving talks, they're like, “What is my role?” I think we're constantly negotiating and trying to figure out what is the role of an artist is in society. And I think that the person who says it the best is James Baldwin in his essay, The Creative Process, that I believe he wrote in 1962.

So when young practitioners, young artists, young photographers are meeting me and they're like, “I don't really know what my purpose is or what my role is,” “I'm not really sure what I'm really doing here,” I have them print this speech by James Baldwin out, and I say, “Put it on your wall, put it on the mirror. Read it every day,” because I think he's being very clear about what the role of an artist is in society and how different we are from all of the other institutions that exist. And so I'll share an excerpt from it, and this is my mantra and my manifesto, is what this means to me. And Baldwin writes: 

“The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society—the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists—by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven. One cannot possibly build a school, teach a child, or drive a car without taking some things for granted. The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” 

I'm literally following his instruction in each body of work that viewers will experience and witness. You see me unpacking what he is saying about our role and position. And I believe that my work has always run parallel to mass media. It has always run parallel to the way that elected officials are governing their municipalities. I see my role as an artist as offering an alternate route to what some of these other larger structural forces are in this country that people have to negotiate every day. For example, why should the people of Flint pay the highest water bills in this nation for toxic, contaminated water?

Charlotte Burns: It's appalling.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: But as an artist, as you can see, the role that I play by coming in to shoulder the water operation with Amber [N.] Hasan and Shea [S.] Cobb, I'm providing an alternative solution. I'm working with two mothers and artists and activists in Flint to circumvent their local elected officials who didn't care to bring access to free, clean water because they had to be bound to their political party, and to the larger structure for the roles that they play within politics. Whereas everyday people who are trying to survive these discrepancies in their mistakes, or when racist policies and institutions are impacting their livelihood and their basic human rights, when they have to be confronted by that, you have to do that in a more grassroots way to circumvent and offset that. 

And so, as Baldwin is saying, the artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society, right? We are separate from politicians. We are separate from legislators. We're separate from educators. We're separate from scientists. And as my own laboratory, I can show up in Flint, Michigan, and use those photographs to tell the story, then stand on them to raise the resources, and then use them to get the technology that they needed to their city, and circumvent that government, and put it on land that was owned by their families, because they didn't want to help them.

And so I think that Baldwin is right when he's declaring in The Creative Process piece that we're not here to serve the requests or the demands of these institutional entities. We're not. That's not our role.

Charlotte Burns: How did it feel for you when you got to the end of Act Three? When you did that, you went, you were your own laboratory, you took the photographs, you raised the resources. You had this outcome that was a victory in every sense. You've documented what it did for the community, but I wonder what it did for you. How did that feel?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: On a personal level, it brought me a sense of peace. Shea's daughter Zion was eight years old at the time that I arrived to Flint and what they didn't know—because I was new to their life and a complete stranger—was that, like Zion, I was eight years old when my hometown also had contaminated water and needed its water pipes replaced. And so it was like a poetic justice. It was bittersweet because through making that work for five years with Shea and Zion, I was able to get the justice that my family was denied and that I was denied as a little girl through showing up for Shea and Zion. And so that made me feel good to be able to stop the type of slow violence that [former] Governor [Rick] Snyder and his administration inflicted upon Zion without her even knowing it because she's a little girl. She's a young girl that's just starting to dream and have her life and her mother's working so hard to protect her and shield her from this. So to be able to say, I'll stand there with you shoulder to shoulder and ensure that I am thwarting this type of pernicious, institutional, racist behavior at the hands of the state and the government was important. And I felt a sense of pride and retribution being able to do that.

The other thing that made me really joyful and happy is that when people see Act Three, I switched the color. They become much larger and activated and suddenly you see, like, all the people who are really involved. When you think about, in terms of our consciousness of how the water crisis was covered, I don't think that we'll be able to recall or say that we saw images like mine. This is the story that mass media neglected to tell. And here's the story. 

In the fifth ward of Flint, Michigan, local residents and outsiders that are Black, white, Latinx, South Asian, that are Christian, Catholic, Muslim, Atheist, Queer, Heterosexual, scientists, inventors, artists, and veterans, all came together to work toward a common basic human right, and that is to distribute safe, free, clean water daily across the city of Flint. It's important that images like this from Act Three were disseminated. You realize that Acts Two and Three from Flint were never published in media outlets here in this country. No editor or magazine outlet wanted to publish those images. And that's something that I had to get around not only as a photographer but as an artist, and this is why you see my photographs are not simply documentary photographs. It's not photojournalism, it's art. It's art and activism because of the fact that our own channels that are supposed to be to create images and tell stories like this to help our country heal and come together, refuse to do so. They don't believe that this is newsworthy. So here's the alternative route. A photographer and contemporary artist coming into the Museum of Modern Art in order to share this story for the first time. Like it is the 10-year anniversary tomorrow [April 2024] for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And this work has not been seen by an American public and will not be until the Museum of Modern Art opens this show on May 12th…

Charlotte Burns: Wow. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: …for them to see.

Charlotte Burns: That says a lot. It's very damning.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yes. 

And my work is. It's a human document that shows how people resist inequality, how resilient people are, how creative they are despite our own laws and governments coming against us. That we remain steadfast and in grassroots collective solidarity and unity, get the things done. But the role of an artist to come in to make visible and tangible to people that possibility. It's so vitally important. Like my work, it's so much about justice and love and the fact that we can achieve these things together. And not only that, it really calls for new futures, right? A new way of living. It starts to propose these ideas of different ways of living right under neoliberal capitalism. It's the privatization of everything right from your education to your health care to water and in Flint Is Family In Three Acts, you see the possibilities of what life might be like if we reprioritize some of our values. It doesn't have to be this way. Neoliberal capitalism comes into existence in the 70s and 80s. So to me, that tells me there's a possibility for other ideas, other economic theories. Trickle-down economics failed in this country. And this work is an indictment on that. And it reveals it and it shows it. But it also shows that people are already working on other solutions. And that our governments and elected officials and policymakers could learn from looking to the very people who are sitting at these intersections of all the calamities that their policies created.

Charlotte Burns: Your work shows that people are always coming up with other solutions—communities coming together, this idea of solidarity, of people working together to achieve things in spite of, despite, has always been the case. And you're photographing that narrative. It's a future way of doing things, but it's not a brand new way of doing things. It's the way people have been doing things and are doing things up and down the country every single day. That exposure, this is what your photography can do. 

You have a quote in one of your catalogues, “Part of the root of the word photograph is phos, which means light or to shine. The ancient Greek phosphorus, means bearer of light or bringer of light”. You have this line—which I loved—where you said, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” And the idea that these images shine a light into an alternative and the kind of power of that is, as you can see, it moves through communities. It moves through people. It that has real tangible effects. 

I know that Frederick Douglass is someone you've looked to and he noted photography's potential for shifting things in a speech he gave in 1865 [1861], “Pictures and Progress,” where he said, “Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is and endeavor to remove the contradiction.” 

You said the mind is the battleground for photography and how your mind had been deceived and deluded, but your images can change that. And that idea of shedding that light and bringing different people into that picture is so powerful. 

When you go through your show at MoMA now, do you feel in conversation with those past bodies of work yourself like the audience would? How does that feel to have that moment to bring these things together? 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: This feels like a massive triumph, but a triumph for the people, right? It's not about me. This is so much larger than me. And I feel like seeing it come together that I really have carried out the purpose, meaning, and the will that was predestined for my life. In a spiritual sense, I was obedient to what I believe I was called to do and in that way, I feel very proud to have been a servant. 

I see myself as a servant and as a messenger for the people of this nation. And in particular, for people from the industrial heartland of America and for all working people around the globe that don't see themselves praised in these types of elite spaces. And who don't see themselves written into the histories next to these large, industrial capitalists that they've made wealthy and made fortunes for. 

So for me, I feel not that the work is completely finished, but that I definitely have achieved a large bulk and a large part of finding out who I am. We're all wondering who we are and what we would like to do and who we think we would like to be and what we need to become in order to bring about change and justice. Like I am a firm believer that whatever era you were born in, whatever situation you were born in, it is better to use your life as a gift of love and service to make it better than what it was when you were brought here.

And so Monuments of Solidarity for me as a survey show, looking at the past quarter of a century of my artistic practice and production, it's a triumphant moment. To say that I started from a place called the Bottom, literally. I'm from a place in my hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, called the Bottom and now I'm all the way here, at the height of one of the most prestigious national museums making sure that all of these families that I've been advocating for 25 years are seen at this high level. And in that type of realm, I feel at peace and I feel like I've carried out a big part of the mission.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Can you talk a little bit more about your faith? The title for your essay is Photographed by Faith, Not by Sight. You just talked about yourself as a servant in this spiritual practice. Can you tell me a little bit more about your faith system, what it is you have faith in? I know you have faith in the subjects. I know you have faith in the work itself. You quote religious texts in the catalogue essay. Can you talk us through that faith and how important that is for you because there's a level of endurance to the work that I'm sure is taxing upon you and must require faith. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yes. If you don't mind, I'd like share a part of my favorite scripture that I'm always using in order to carry out my work, and that is an excerpt from 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13. In that spiritual sense, I'm thinking about faith, hope, and love— understanding that love is the most important, and what that scripture teaches is that:

“Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects. It always trusts. It always hopes. It always perseveres. Love never fails. And now these three remain. Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” 

And I think being from an area called the Bottom, being raised by my grandmother, Ruby who, in order to protect me, kept me either in school or in church—where she raised me as a Baptist Christian—I think I'm also paying homage and respect to her, for how she provided care and protection for me so that I could survive one of the most tumultuous times in this country, which was, again, under Reagan's administration. Them inflicting the war on drugs upon our Black working-class communities after all our jobs were exported and social services removed. Right at that moment when Black workers were starting to be involved in labor unions and getting these better jobs and better positions, this is when it all gets stripped away. And so we lose a part of what we were starting to amass in terms of being able to get some type of semblance of an equal footing with our counterparts in this country. It's taken away from us in that moment. And it has to be, for me, surviving that era through the faith and spirituality that I learned, from how she raised me. 

I've always seen myself, as a little girl who had so many questions about what was happening to Braddock's landscape and environment, I've always seen myself as this entity, as this human spirit that is walking through all of these valleys, these very dark valleys. Braddock is in the Monongahela Valley. Flint, Michigan is in a valley. Lordstown is in the Mahoning Valley. These are all valleys, all along these ancient bodies of water that are actually spiritual names, when you translate them to English. And there are these sacred people that are in these places, that our government has forgotten about, that our society has forgotten about, that we exist. They're there, and I see myself as someone who is walking through these dark valleys and capturing the light that's reflected from the people that are there.

To me, all of the men, women, and children in Monuments of Solidarity and all of the bodies of works, they are all prophets and apostles of this era. Even Flint Is Family In Three Acts as a book is designed and based off of my amplified Bible. So literally, you are hearing what really happened in the Flint water crisis, first person, through Shea Cobb, through her father, Mr. Smiley, through her best friend, Amber Hasan, and Moses West—his name is Moses, and he's made an atmospheric water generator. 

To me, every single person that I have made a photograph with and interviewed, they're that precious to me. And that's where the spirituality also is enacted with how I'm treating their voices, weaving all of their narratives together so that it becomes one voice, one accord, one choir of voices harmonizing together to uplift each other's humanity.

Charlotte Burns: I love that. That choir. I got a real sense of that as you describe the spaces in this show and also this idea of the institution you have in your mind as a convening place for more voices and more testimony, more gathering, and more archiving. 

Also, obviously, the solidarity is taking place in a cultural institution when there's so much unionization happening in cultural institutions. MoMA's had a union since 1971. There's much more unionization happening in the art world itself. Is that in your thoughts as you make this show about solidarity, thinking about the specific cultural institutions and specific cultural workers?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: One thing that is important to celebrate when this exhibition opens, the reason this show came into existence is because of MoMA's decision to acquire The Last Cruze. 

The Last Cruze is a worker's monument. That is about the history of the United Auto Workers Labor Union and in particular locals, 11, 12, and 17, 14 in Lordstown, Ohio. While I was in the midst of making that work, it was serendipitously during that moment that MoMA's workers joined the UAW, the United Auto Workers labor union, and of course, providing that opportunity to MoMA to acquire a work that speaks to its workforce and acknowledges its workforce. The fact that they had the courage and the sensibility and sensitivity to acquire it, and not only acquire it, mount an entire survey exhibition around it to reveal it to the general public. You couldn't ask for more as an artist. I mean that really is the work doing the work, right? 

Charlotte Burns: So if we take that one step further, if you manifested that reality then, I wonder what reality you want to manifest with this show now.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it as it's getting closer to the show opening because that remains to be seen, but I am aware of that. If MoMA was able to hear my plea to bring this worker's monument into its permanent collection—and did it— yeah, I think the sky's the limit. Yeah, it remains to be seen.

Charlotte Burns: But what if you could put it in the universe? What if you could manifest that? What would it be for you? 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I really need to think about that for a second. You came in pretty fired up. That was your first two questions was exactly where this now leads us to. 

I believe having this exhibition open here with the backdrop of a very tumultuous, political election occurring is not a coincidence. I think that the timing of this exhibition being revealed right now when America is in so much turmoil and conflict really does shed light on the importance of artists being a mirror to our society, as well as artists being the soul of our nation, and as well as why we need art in our school systems and why we need to value artists.   

One thing that this exhibition certainly is going do is it's going to impact people personally and emotionally. I don't think that anyone that experiences Monuments of Solidarity, by the time they walk through all 10,000 square feet of this space, of all ten rooms, they will not come out the same. This exhibition spiritually uplifts people. It inspires people to be the change they need but it also inspires them to be better human beings, to look beyond the self, to look beyond individualistic desires, to think about the fact that you are connected to an ecosystem and a world around you. People won't be the same. This is a transformative exhibition. It is an exhibition to be experienced, to be transformed at your core. And I believe it's not necessary to argue with people. Sometimes you don't need to say anything with words. It's how you show love through creative expression. 

I definitely intend to touch the hearts and minds of the people that experienced this and to inspire and encourage them so they know, like, it starts with you, right? It's those little things that you do every day for your neighbor. It's how you show up and protest and speak up for someone else that might not be able to because of a law or policy where they can't defend themselves. If you're in the position of entitlement or privilege, where perhaps neither a Republican or a Democrat is impacting your livelihood, perhaps you cast your vote thinking about the safety and the life and longevity of somebody else, right? 

To me, that's what American democracy can be. I am not simply thinking about myself when I cast my vote. I'm thinking about other people who are much more vulnerable than me. So the time is always now to act. The time is always now to look beyond yourself. We do need in this country a real—back to Frederick Douglass, and being a reformer—we need to reform how we mediate and tell stories. We need to reform how we disseminate information to Americans. We need to reform our education system. We need to reform how we value photographers in this society, how we value photographers in the art world, how we value the very people who are at the bottom, right? We need a real reform of all of these value systems. And this exhibition offers a blueprint, a pathway, and a bridge to achieving that and to doing it.

Charlotte Burns: We often talk about the subjects of your work and the collaborations that you do, but this idea of the impact that the work has, I know you have that people come up to you and they confide things in you. There's this sense of the work never ending and how it moves through the world beyond you and then maybe comes back to you, and changes where you go next. And I wonder, it's such a lot to carry, you carry so many stories. Were you always able to hold that space or is that something that's developed as you've got older, that ability to stand in your own clarity of vision?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I think it was always there. I think it's undeniable. Your name and the location and place you're born does shape your characteristics and personality. 

What I didn't know is exactly what it was that I was attracted to in doing. I was always preaching the word to my mom and her friends. I would go in the bar preaching to people, because my mom and my father were bartenders. I would sit in the bar and listen to people talk about their livelihood or how they feel. Like I've always been someone that believes in empathically listening to others and trying to understand and see the world through their perspective. So my approach comes from that. 

In Belgium, where it all started to crystallize for me, I was there with those coal miners, that's when it hit me. They said to me, “Why are you here?” And this is a residency that I was invited to, where they took The Notion of Family out to these coal miners and their families and they agreed to meet me. But yet, when I got there, they still wanted to know, “Why are you here? Why do you care about us? You're an American, you're a woman, you're Black. We've never even met a Black woman before.” And then they say to me, “By the way, contemporary art is useless.” And so as soon as they came to me with those grievances and curiosity—and this of course stemmed from the fact that the MAC Museum [Wallonia-Brussels Federation Museum of Contemporary Arts] is a contemporary art museum in a former coal mine site, and yet it makes no exhibitions that reflect the very people that are living around it. So this is where this gripe came from and why I was being brought in in the first place. And that's when it hit me. I said, “Wow, I'm here to stand in the gap between working class and creative sectors. I'm bridging that gap for them.” I'm from a city of bridges. Pittsburgh is the city of bridges, so I'm naturally a bridge-builder. I am someone who closes gaps and creates opportunity. I am someone that, through art, redistributes power and equity back to the people.

Charlotte Burns: I love that. The way that you describe things, like some of your images. You talked earlier about when you saw Migrant Mother, you had a schema over the top of it and in your images, you often have overlays or it would be a person projected with something around them or on top of them. Or even early photos of you and your mom, there's a sense of shadow and projection in the work. Even the way you talk about Braddock as a historical battleground, where its namesake comes from the British general who was killed. But it's still a battleground, and with the health implications of the toxic, chemical emissions from the steel industry. But overlaid on that is this spiritual battleground that you're talking about too, and that care, and that love.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Mm-hmmm. 

Charlotte Burns: Underlayed is the history that came before that. The Braddock that was before any of the steel mills and the Indigenous people and the Black community was there before Carnegie bought the steel mill. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: I know that part living in Braddock is that you and your family have all shared illnesses as an effect of the toxic chemicals. Are you living with that okay?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yeah, these days I'm okay. Like anyone else with an autoimmune disorder living in a post-Covid America, knowing that we're all part of our ecosystem, there are some good days and some bad days. There's a real truth and reality to all of the work. I have deployed my body into harsh environments and so being on the other side of finally installing this work and sharing it with the world, it allows me to get that respite and recovery that I need. After putting my body through everything that it's been through to carry this work forward. 

I think every day you get up and you do what you can with your body and your health. I certainly am more mindful of taking care of my health, and my mental health, and my physical health but, autoimmune disorders don't have a rhyme or reason. They kind of shape and shift and you have to go with them. So that is a real reality, and a consequence of my work and the environments that I've been in. But this will allow me to get the respite and to take a little pause and a break that I finally need.

Charlotte Burns: Do you take breaks often? I'm not sure you do.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: I've never taken a break or a vacation.

Charlotte Burns: Wow. Wow!

LaToya Ruby Frazier: When I open this show, this summer will be probably one of the first times that I really do take a vacation. I think I've earned the right to finally take my first vacation where I just sit down and do nothing. I'm not good at doing nothing but it'll be nice to take a real official vacation and try to relax.

Charlotte Burns: Talking of deploying a body into difficult spaces, can you tell us more about your projects looking at community health workers?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Yes. [The More Than Conquerors: A] Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland [2021-2022] came into existence when I deployed myself into Baltimore on the front lines of Covid with community health workers. They are an invisible workforce, and I learned about them through Dr. Lisa Cooper, the founder of the Johns Hopkins Health Equity Center. She and I had been brought in in 2015 at a program where we were asked what could happen if a doctor and a scientist and an artist work together? How could you make a work together that could be useful to society? Several years later, in the midst of the pandemic, is where the collaboration happens. And she introduces me to this wonderful community of community health workers. And I decided to go out there and make portraits of them and interview them on the front lines of Covid. 

One of the things that I think is important that was achieved in this monument is what it was able to do, how it was able to impact the art world. I want to uplift Evelyn Nicholson in particular, a community health worker who was working at the University of Maryland Institute of Human Virology. She specialized in working with patients and clients with HIV. She herself had HIV, was a participant in AIDS Act Up. She devoted her whole work and life to advocacy, to standing up for people with HIV and AIDS—especially those that lived into being elders. Because remember, there was a bias: people didn't believe that someone with HIV and AIDS could live that long. You had a disproportionate number of them during Covid that were susceptible, but also, dealing with homelessness. So in the midst of that, Evelyn Nicholson is out there meeting with them, empowering them, listening to them, helping them get access to their medication, helping them get access to food. Baltimore faces these high levels of food deserts, and all the different inequalities that happen there that impact social determinants of health. 

So Evelyn herself is wearing a t-shirt in the portrait and you'll see this in Monuments of Solidarity. There is a dedication to her and her portrait comes up. And in this exhibition, I want people to know these monuments are monuments for people who gave their lives and died by serving their communities. 

Evelyn passed away. What's important about learning about her testimony and her story and how she showed up for people in the midst of dealing with her own illness, the fact that she came to all of the openings at the Carnegie International, and then she came to the one Gladstone Gallery in New York. And here's this beautiful moment where all of this comes full circle for how we all show up for each other in the art world. 

The collector, Mitch Rales comes into the exhibition. Evelyn is standing next to her portrait, and I introduce her to Mitch and she's talking to him about her life, and her activism, and her work. I took a portrait of them, and I kept it. A few months later, she passed away. 

I believe that it was through making this monument where it brought two unlikely people together, Evelyn Nicholson and a collector like Mitch Rales, who are standing at this exhibition in the gallery. And they're getting to know each other and they impact each other. Clearly, Emily and Mitch Rales’ through, Glenstone, care a lot about art and community and we created a relationship and a friendship through them experiencing this monument for CHWs.

I believe that it was their encounter with Evelyn Nicholson in particular that suddenly planted the seed that allowed for the Rales to come forward to collect and acquire the Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland and do what I had hoped could be done; to ensure that those CHWs would be honored in their local community. That monument would return to Baltimore itself so that those workers, their families, they themselves can see themselves honored on a national level of their local museum. The Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland will remain a permanent fixture of Baltimore. And this is a rare opportunity in a rare time where you see a contemporary artist working with a gallery, working with powerful collectors and dealers in a gallery to ensure that everyday working people would be honored and respected and elevated to the level that they deserve. And I think this is the power of art and the role that artists play.

The fact that this is a worker's monument that will now remain a permanent fixture where they could be celebrated for the rest of their lives and someone like Evelyn Nicholson will never be forgotten.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Okay, so what's the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and what's the one that gets you out of bed in the morning?

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Oh man. So how do I want to answer this? I think the question for me is… yeah, what if Monuments of Solidarity really did become an institution and a pedagogy that really could impact cultural change? What if the values that a Monuments of Solidarity puts forth really does become activated in a way that it can bring change to our culture and society and how we relate to each other. What would happen if we valued photographers better in the art world? What would happen, the impact that I could have on the art world and the general public if the type of artwork that I make was really financially supported so that I could really get back out there in the world and on the ground to keep helping impact people's lives? Like what would that look like if people valued my artwork and my photography and storytelling at the highest level? What would happen? What I could do all the things that I could achieve if I had the real support at the highest level? I know that I could bring about tremendous cultural change if people really did support the practice financially and so, what if the art world really did get behind valuing work like mine so that I can get back out there on the ground with people and bring real change? That's what I think about.

Charlotte Burns: LaToya, what a great question to end on. I have so enjoyed talking to you. Thank you so much for making the time to talk to us today. It has been an enormous privilege and pleasure to talk to you about your art and everything that you are doing. It is so powerful and so meaningful and I cannot wait to see the exhibition.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Well, Charlotte, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you and speaking with the audience for The Art World: What If…?! Thank you for taking out the time to speak with me and disseminate some of these ideas and thoughts into the world. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Charlotte Burns: It has been such a pleasure LaToya. Good luck with the install.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Thank you. I can't wait for you to see it and experience it.

Charlotte Burns: I cannot wait. I cannot wait.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What an artist! My huge thanks to LaToya Ruby Frazier who so generously gave us so much time during install.

And if you’d like to hear more about Glenstone and the work of Emily and Mitch Rales— as LaToya mentioned—you can find that episode in our first season, in our back catalogue.

Next time we have a special museum show, focusing on the change that comes after the storm. 

“It’s also about treating people like actual human beings and I think that lone-wolf leadership model doesn’t work anymore. People know that but they don’t know how to get out of it. The part about the collaboration that is so critical is that for leaders that are effective, they know how to work with a diverse range of people on a diverse range of issues and bring people together in difference which is pretty fundamental.”

“I think different kinds of institutions can be fixed in various degrees. One of the challenges of talking about the cultural field is that you have so many different kinds of players in it so a small organization like Recess in Brooklyn is going to be able to make different kinds of changes than say the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre or the British Museum. These are monumental institutions. They’re like changing a cruise ship or an aircraft carrier’s direction rather than a small sunfish.” 

Charlotte Burns: Such a thoughtful and interesting conversation to come. That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 13: Bryan Stevenson

In this episode, we visit the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, including the newly opened Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site on the banks of the Alabama River. We interview their founder, the lawyer and civil rights hero, Bryan Stevenson, who says that a founding narrative of racial difference was created in America that “was like an infection. I believe the infection has spread. We've never treated that infection and the consequences of it are still with us today.” The US has never created cultural sites that have “motivated people to say, ‘Never again can we tolerate racial bigotry, can we tolerate racial violence, can we tolerate the kind of indifference to these basic human rights’. So, that's what we're trying to achieve.” Hope and resilience inform the Legacy Sites. “I've always argued that hopelessness is the enemy of justice and that hope is an essential feature of what we do. I have to believe things I haven't seen,” Stevenson says. “I think we need an era of truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair,” Stevenson adds. “But we can't skip the truth-telling part.”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This time we’re in Montgomery Alabama, visiting the Legacy Sites. These three distinct spaces include The Legacy Museum, which focuses on 400 years of American history from enslavement to mass incarceration; The National Monument for Peace and Justice, which is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynchings; and the newly opened Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site on the banks of the Alabama River. 

We are hugely honored to be joined by Bryan Stevenson, who founded the site and the nonprofit law office, the Equal Justice Initiative. Bryan is known to many as the author of the memoir Just Mercy[: A Story of Justice and Redemption], which later became a Hollywood movie focusing on his tireless work to save a wrongly convicted death row inmate. 

Bryan is a civil rights hero and it means such a lot to me to be able to have this conversation with him. His impact and significance cannot be overestimated in the legal field but he says he realized during the Obama administration that we needed to move beyond the courts, and into the space of culture.

Let’s get going on this journey. 

[Musical interlude]

[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]

“Hello and welcome to Montgomery, Alabama. It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the sky is brilliant blue, and there's a bit of a crisp spring chill in the morning air. I'm standing across the street from the hotel, there's a white wall with words painted in black, quoting the American poet Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

I got here late last night. It's been something of an epic journey. I traveled to London on Thursday, flew 10 hours to Atlanta on Friday, drove three hours to Alabama, and here we are this morning. The day is getting going here in Montgomery. You can hear the traffic all around me. The birds are singing. What a great way to start the show and the day. It's a short walk to the Legacy Museum. Let's go.”

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for joining me today, Bryan. 

Bryan Stevenson: I'm delighted to be with you. 

Charlotte Burns: I've just got back from a visit to the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, and it's not a hyperbole to say that it was a life-changing experience. 

Bryan Stevenson: Oh, well, thank you. It's great to hear that. We intend for them to have an impact on the lives of people and it's gratifying when people say what you just said. 

So thank you. 

Charlotte Burns: I bet you hear that from many people. 

Bryan Stevenson: It's been affirming, but we do hear that from a lot of people. And in this country, of course, the education about this history has been so marginalized that most people don't know a lot about what they learn at the Legacy Sites and I think that contributes to the impact that it has on people. But we're also trying to make these spaces narrative spaces, and we don't have a lot of narrative cultural sites in America. Most of the museums are presented as showrooms or exhibits and you see something that can be beautiful and awe-inspiring, but they're not trying to tell a story that helps you understand where you are and how we got here, and we're trying to do that and because they’re journeys in many ways, I do think it inspires people to conclude that they end someplace that they haven't been before.

Charlotte Burns:  I was reading something you said, the North wins the Civil War and the South wins the narrative war, because “not only did they not apologize, they actually doubled down and say what we did by enslaving people and forming this confederacy was noble and glorious and honorable.” That's really played through my mind as I've been thinking about the experience of the Legacy Sites and what you must have been dealing with as you were forming this vision of what you were trying to counteract with what you've been building. 

You've got a monumental, quite literally, rebuke to this willful amnesia that is happening and in some instances, it's a silence, but like you say, it's more than that. There's an aggressive counternarrative of glory. Actually, if you visit the South, you tend to see the sort of beauties of the plantations and where the plantation owners lived. You don't see the degradation of what it was like to be an enslaved person. The history itself has remained so marginalized that as I walked around the Sculpture Park, it was like my brain was having a sort of psychic break on this gorgeous spring day, listening to the birds singing. It's this very beautiful pastoral moment. And you look at the Alabama River that's been a death conduit for so many people. As you look at that beauty it's hard to experience those two things at once, physically, as you're absorbing those stories: there are first-person testimonies, there's artworks and there's artifacts in the new Sculpture Park and to counteract that in the land itself is so profound. 

Bryan Stevenson: I do think the great challenge we have in America is that we have inherited this long history of racial injustice, but we haven't addressed it. We haven't acknowledged it. And I think it has been consequential. 

I don't think there's any place you can go in this country where you're not going to encounter the consequences of this long history of racial injustice. I think it's created toxins, pollutants that are in the air, and it's made our society less healthy than it needs to be to be fully committed to freedom and equality and justice. And it doesn't matter whether you're in California or the Northwest or the Midwest or the South or the East, you're in a space where for centuries this practice of racial bigotry, this narrative of racial difference, has defined the experience. And for a long time, we have been largely silent about it. Our foreparents didn't talk about it. The generations before us didn't address it. So we're now burdened by that history. And I think it creates much of the conflict, much of the division, much of the inequality, much of the injustice that dominates a lot of the institutional arrangements and policies that exist in this country.

For us, it's become a priority to confront that history, to talk about these things. I think it's essential that we talk about what happened to Indigenous peoples before Europeans arrived. There was a whole community of people here. Most estimates put the number at eight million Indigenous peoples on the land that we now call the United States before Europeans arrived. By the time we finish the 19th century, there are fewer than 300,000 Indigenous peoples left in this country and that's because they've died or been killed through famine and war and disease. They've been displaced. They've been moved off of lands. Treaties have been broken. They've been attacked, they've been abused. And we created a constitution that talked about equality and justice in the 18th century, but we didn't apply those concepts of equality and justice and liberty to Native people. We said instead, “Oh no, those Indigenous peoples, they're savages.”  We created a narrative of racial difference instead and that narrative of racial difference was like an infection. And I believe the infection has spread and we've never treated that infection and the consequences of it are still with us today.

It was that infection, that narrative of racial difference, that caused us to tolerate two and a half centuries of slavery. And I do think the great evil of slavery in America wasn't the forced labor, the bondage, the humiliation, the degradation—all of those things were terrible—but I think the greatest evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify enslavement. Because enslavers didn't want to feel immoral or unjust or unchristian when they enslaved other people and so they needed a narrative to help them reconcile to the optics, the visuals, the pain and suffering that they saw all around them. When mothers were being separated from their children who were about to be sold, when family members were being torn apart, when siblings and parents and all of these communities were being devastated by the auction block, they needed something to help them accept the pain and suffering they saw around them, so they created a false narrative. And this false narrative was essentially this myth that Black people are not as good as white people. That Black people are less capable, less worthy, less deserving, less human, less evolved. And that narrative gave rise to this ideology of white supremacy, this narrative of racial hierarchy.

And I do believe that it was so powerful that it survived the Civil War. That's why I say that the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. That idea of racial hierarchy survived and even many abolitionists who didn't believe in slavery didn't necessarily believe in racial equality. That narrative actually was in the North as well. 

And so after emancipation, you have four million formerly enslaved people. Congress passes a 14th Amendment to protect them through the Equal Protection Clause, and then a 15th Amendment to provide them the right to vote. But Reconstruction crumbles, and we're unwilling to enforce those rights. And so within 12 years of emancipation, Black people are disenfranchised. They're being terrorized. And for the next century, you have racial terror violence employed to maintain this racial hierarchy. Thousands of people are pulled out of their homes, burned, drowned, tortured, lynched on courthouse lawns. And that's why we created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. 

They do what they're doing in this country because we haven't told that narrative. And so, yes, part of what we're trying to do with this park is to correct that. And, I initially looked at acquiring a plantation. I was really intrigued by the authenticity of the place. But when I go there, there was just no way around the built environment that the home of the enslaver is always going to be the center. The environment is always going to be organized around highlighting the lives of those who enslaved, rather than the lives of those who were enslaved. And that's why we felt the need to create a space like Freedom Monument Sculpture Park that has that authenticity. 

As you noted, we’re proximate to the Alabama River, which was the trafficking portal for thousands of people who were sold and separated during the 19th century, and the rail lines which brought tens of thousands of people into bondage in the deep South. And so we had to build from the ground up a new narrative about what it was like to be enslaved and this one is focused on the lives of enslaved people. And that's the importance of using first-person narrative and telling these stories through the perspectives of people who have been enslaved and those are perspectives that most people have never heard. And they just are unfamiliar with that kind of presentation. 

Charlotte Burns: That's what occurred to me walking around the space. I read something you wrote that you said: “Museums have had 150 years to tell this story and they haven't. Historians have had 150 years to present this in a way that's accessible. So we just took over. It felt like we had to resist the conventions.” 

And walking around the sites, I was thinking that I don't think I've ever been in a museum where there's so few objects. And as you go around the museum, you begin, you do your usual kind of kerfuffle that you do at any museum of turning your phone off, have you been to the bathroom, put your water away. And then you're immediately in the Atlantic Ocean. You're immediately devastated and stripped away of any sense of distraction, of anything other than sorrow and staggering loss. You're confronted immediately with numbers: 12 million people were kidnapped. Two million of them died in watery graves at the bottom of a cold, unforgiving Atlantic that you're watching and you're listening to the noise of this immersive, horrifying ocean. And the rest of them, and you feel like you're about to walk into what they experienced, as you indeed do, have horrors ahead of them. So to survive is not necessarily a fortune. 

[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]

“So you're joining me now after the Legacy Museum. And it's really hard to describe the effect of the museum. I've been there for around three, three and a half hours. It's a very intense experience and it's a museum unlike any other. There's very few objects. It's a narrative museum, essentially. And it strikes me that it's a museum presenting the case for the prosecution, giving us evidence and testimony to give a new and unflinching narrative that there is no room to look away from. This is the brutal history of slavery in America.”

Charlotte Burns: I was thinking, obviously your background: you've argued in front of the Supreme Court on six occasions, you've changed laws in America. You've saved people's lives, quite frankly, and you bring that prosecutorial vision, it seemed to me, to museums. From the second you walk into the museum, you're a witness. You can't get away from these numbers: 12 million people kidnapped; nine million people terrorized during racial violence of lynching; 10 million people segregated; eight million people incarcerated during the mass prison system of the current day. You look at the brutalities of racial violence in America, beginning with slavery, but moving through where we are today. It's never really ended. 

And I thought, I've never been in a museum like this in my life. It's a prosecution and it's so compelling. This is evidence and this is testimony and there are numbers and they're so massive. It's millions and millions of people, but then it's broken down with these first person narratives. I'm not sure how you had the vision to do this. It obviously comes from your experience as a lawyer, but how did you go from the Equal Justice Initiative to representing people in courts to conceiving of an entirely new kind of cultural institution?

Bryan Stevenson: First of all, I appreciate your description of going through the museum. That is very much what we intended. The transformation, the idea to get involved in what we call narrative work, really grew out of my own experience. I'm a product of the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racial segregation in education.

I grew up in a community where Black children could not attend public schools. So I started my education in a colored school. There were no high schools for Black people in our county when my dad was a teenager, so he couldn't go to high school. I grew up in a poor, racially segregated community where most of the adults didn't have high school degrees, not because they weren't smart or hardworking, but because there were literally no high schools for Black people.

And then these lawyers came into our community and made them open up the public schools. And these lawyers were able to enforce the rule of law, even against a majority of the people not wanting that. So the county was 80% white, if you had a vote on whether kids like Bryan Stevenson could go to the public school, we would have lost the vote. But these lawyers had the power to insist on our rights, even against a majority and that's how I got to go to high school. That's how I got to go to college. And I went to law school interested in accessing that power those lawyers used when I was a little boy to help other disfavored people. 

And when I graduated from Harvard Law School in the 1980s, it was clear to me the community of people who were most at risk in American society was this growing population of people being sent to our jails and prisons. The prison population had been largely stable in America throughout most of the 20th century, but that began to change in the 1970s, when you had politicians from both political parties arguing that people who are drug addicted or drug dependent are criminals and should be punished for that.

And we began sending hundreds of thousands of people to our jails and prisons. And then there was this competition on who could be the toughest on crime, and the politics of fear and anger emerged in a way that we started tolerating things we wouldn't otherwise tolerate, accepting things we wouldn't otherwise accept. And before you knew it, the imprisoned population in the United States had grown from less than 300,000 to 2.3 million. And we became the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We're still the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. And it had horrific consequences for communities all across this country.

There are 80 million people in America that have criminal arrest histories, which means that they can't get jobs as easily, they don't get loans as easily. 800% increase in the number of women being sent to jails and prisons, even though 80% of these women are single parents with minor children, impacting a whole new generation. The Bureau of Justice projected in 2001, that one in three Black children is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime, and all of these data were the consequences of this new world.

And so we've been fighting, I've been fighting, my whole career to provide aid to those wrongly convicted, unfairly sentenced, illegally condemned, and we continue to do that work. But about 13 or 14 years ago, I began to fear that we couldn't win Brown v. Board of Education today. I began to worry that our courts today wouldn't do something to protect the rights of disfavored people, marginalized people without power. And that made me realize that we were going to have to get outside the courts and engage in this narrative struggle that we had largely just been watching. And when we chose to do that, it became clear to me that race was the most critical narrative issue still looming in America. Our unwillingness to confront this history. And that's what pushed us into doing the scholarship, the research. We now have the most comprehensive data on lynching in the country, uncovering these narratives that are presented in the sites.

To be honest, I wasn't sure it was going to have the impact until we decided to put up some markers in Montgomery.

So, when I moved here in the ‘80s, you couldn't find the word “slave,” “slavery,” or “enslavement,” anywhere in the city of Montgomery. We have 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy. All of these icons that you described that elevate and celebrate those who perpetuated this idea of racial hierarchy, the authors of white supremacy. Those who sought to, fought to defend slavery are all celebrated. And you couldn't find the word “slave,” or “slavery,” anywhere in the city, and so we put up markers in 2013 and I was really surprised by the impact it had on the community. This is a majority Black city and people came out and they were very emotional because they are the descendants of the people we were talking about and no one had talked about them before. And that's when I began to see the power of public history and public memorial. 

And so we started a project to put markers at lynching sites across the country, and I was very moved by what happened when you went into a community and just erected a marker that talked about what happened to a person, that reminded people, that educated people, about the history of terror violence in that community. And then the idea emerged that we're going to have to do this, comprehensively for the nation. I just knew that no one else was really doing this. 

I went to South Africa and saw the Apartheid Museum. I was very moved by what I saw there. I saw what they had done in Berlin to reckon with the Holocaust. In Berlin, you can't go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones that have been placed near the homes of Jewish families. The Holocaust Memorial [Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe] sits in the center of the city. There are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. There's this reckoning which makes it comfortable for someone like me, an African American, to be walking through those streets. And we haven't done that in America. And that's what motivated this idea of creating these sites. 

[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]

“The museum gives us numbers that are staggering to show the evolution of terror. From the terrorizing of nine million Black people, by the threat of lynching violence, to the segregation of 10 million people, to mass incarceration now with more than eight million Black Americans now under criminal control.

The numbers are so massive—millions and millions of lives—that it's hard to grasp their meaning, but the museum tells their stories in heartbreakingly effective ways. For instance, in a section detailing Reconstruction, we see the collapse of that initial optimism. Within a decade Congress has abandoned any promise of assistance. A timeline wall shows Black Americans’ struggle for rights alongside unchecked racial terror. There's another wall that's a sickening array of newspaper headlines such as mob howls in delight as he dies, skinned him alive in Kentucky. There's a video room where we sat weeping as we watched videos of families of lynched men tell their stories a hundred years later. We see photos including of mass mobs watching a man being murdered on a ten-foot platform, onto which are painted in large white letters the word “justice.” 

It makes me think about the slippery nature of words, about justice, about being on the right side of things. And here in Montgomery, Alabama, history and the fight to be on the right side of things is all around us.” 

Bryan Stevenson: My hope is that we can change the relationship to the history. We don't want people to just learn about it. We want them to think about it differently, feel it differently, understand it differently, and then be motivated to act differently. The powerful thing about Holocaust museums, and there are scores all over the world, is that whatever your background is, when they're done effectively when you get to the end, you're motivated to say, “Never again.” And we haven't created cultural sites that have motivated people to say, “Never again can we tolerate racial bigotry, can we tolerate racial violence, can we tolerate the kind of indifference to these basic human rights.” So that's what we're trying to achieve. 

[Musical interlude]

Bryan Stevenson: Just one quick story. That wall of water is in response to my own experience in a changed relationship with the Atlantic Ocean because I went to Africa for the first time when I was in my late 40s, early 50s. I'd never been to the continent. I flew to Nigeria. I was supposed to speak in Abuja, at a human rights conference. I misconnected in Lagos. A young lawyer picked me up and just decided to show me all of Lagos, even though it was 11 o'clock at night and he was wonderful. And he would take me into communities and he would say, “Hey, there's a Black American lawyer. Come out and meet the Black American lawyer.” And eventually I said, “Look, I got to get a little rest. I got to get a little rest.” He said, “Okay, just one more place.” And that young lawyer took me to the beach in Lagos, in Nigeria. Not a particularly pretty space, the concrete slabs, it wasn't beautiful, but we climbed over the slabs. He asked me to come down to the ocean with him. It was dark and the moon was shining across the ocean and I didn't understand why we're there. And he'd been so gregarious and talkative the whole night, but when we got on that oceanfront, he got very quiet. I noticed that he had a tear running down his face. And then he turned to me, and he said, “I brought you here to say I'm sorry, this is where we lost you.” 

And I realized, for the first time in my life, that I was standing on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, this body of water that separated me from my ancestors, from my families, from my languages, from my people, permanently.

I grew up on the Atlantic Ocean in this country and never thought about the ocean as this body that separated me from a legacy, a history that was not born by slavery. And it just changed everything. I began thinking differently about the ocean. I started thinking about the millions we have spent looking for trinkets from the Titanic and the absence of any spending to reckon with the two million bodies buried at the bottom of the ocean.

And then I realized, standing on that beach, that this young lawyer in Nigeria, who had said, “I'm sorry, this is where we lost you,” I realized it was the first time in my life that anyone had ever said “I'm sorry,” about the history of enslavement. First time. And so for me, it became necessary for people to begin to think differently about that ocean, what it means to kidnap and abduct people, to take away people from their lands. 

I'm one of the lost children of the African continent. The stolen children and we don't use that language, but it is accurate and descriptive. And so this new relationship becomes really important. We have all of that data about the ports in the United States, including many in New England and in Boston, and Connecticut, and Rhode Island. All of those coastal communities where the trafficking of human beings built an economic base that still thrives today and people don't know it. They don't understand that where they grew up in New Jersey was a place where the trafficking of enslaved people took place. And so that knowledge has to match the broader narrative. And I'm hoping it creates a new relationship. I hope everyone who leaves our sites is prepared to say, “Never again.” And we tolerate the kind of bigotry that allowed us to be so indifferent, so tolerant, so supportive of the kind of horrific violence that this history represents. 

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for sharing that story with us. It's so horrible that that's the first time anybody had ever said sorry to you. And I think there's something about the Legacy Sites that reflects the generosity of your wanting other people. There's an emotional generosity to the sites as well. 

I want to ask you about how it felt for you, for somebody to say sorry to you, that it seems that you want to extend that grace to other people. And I know that there's an emotional resonance for you beyond that: you talked about the Simone Leigh sculpture at the beginning of the Sculpture Park. When you saw that in Venice, you wanted to run up and hug it and it reminded you of your grandmother and you've spoken about how she would give you these hugs and say, “Do you feel this?” Which was the strength and love that she would give you. And this strength in yourself. She always had this faith in you that you seem to have carried with you. And so to have that all those years later at the beginning of this site as this gesture that you're giving this hug to other people is personal and, you know, the personal is always political and is always profound.

Bryan Stevenson: Thank you. I appreciate that observation a lot. I am genuinely motivated by a desire to create a healthier society, to create a healthier country, a healthier world.

I don't talk about slavery and lynching and segregation because I want to punish America. I want to liberate us. I want us to get to something better. I genuinely believe that there is something that feels more like freedom, more like equality, more like justice. I think it's waiting for us, but I don't think we can get there until we reckon with the burdens, the harnesses, the shackles that have been created by this history that have created real harms and real injuries. 

And in many ways, it is also the inheritance that I have received from people like my grandmother. When you think about this history, we try to tell the powerful truth about the harms created by slavery, about the bondage, about the violence, about being separated, about the cruelty. The laws of slavery were violent and horrific. We have that whipping post there, which was actually from the community where I grew up. And you could see it when you went into the town square. You see the dwellings, you see all of the labor, the cotton, the brick making. So we want all of the anguish and the suffering created by enslavement to be fully understood—the holding pen. 

But we also want people to understand that despite that brutality, enslaved people found a way to love in the midst of sorrow. That's the real legacy of this community of people. That they could find ways to create relationships without love, without children to love, and spouses to hold on to, and parents to honor. It would have been impossible to survive the humiliation and degradation of enslavement. But through these relationships, there was this bigger idea, this greater idea, that one's humanity could not be taken away. And I inherited that capacity, that endurance, that strength, that resolve, that resistance, that beauty, as well as all of these other things.

And enslaved people had every right, after emancipation, to want retribution and revenge against those who had enslaved them. But instead, they chose citizenship. They chose education. They chose faith. And even though they made that very generous choice, they continued to be dishonored and disfavored and then disenfranchised and then abused and then violated and terrorized.

And in the 1950s and 60s, people in this community still believed enough in America to risk their lives, to push this country to own up to the constitutional obligations that were created a century earlier. And they went to places and they would be on their knees praying and get battered and beaten and bloodied by law enforcement officers just because they were trying to get a right that had been given to them a century earlier because they were arguing against segregation. And yet they had that commitment. 

And so in many ways, it's hard for me to not honor that orientation, that disposition. And it's because I've been persuaded and it's just based on my work with people who are in custody, people in jails and prisons, people who have done some terrible things, that if you don't find your way to love, if you don't find your way to redemption, if you don't find your way to grace, if you don't find your way to mercy, you live a life of anguish and torment that can make you think life is not worth living. But when you experience redemption, when you experience grace, when you experience mercy, when you experience love, you have this capacity to overcome any of the hardships, any of the challenges. And that's a part of the story we can learn, that we need to learn when we study this history.

I think we need an era of truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair. But we can't skip the truth-telling part if we want those beautiful “R” words. You can't have repair without truth-telling about what's the injury. You can't have redemption without a willingness to acknowledge, to confess, to repent for the wrongdoing. You can't have restitution or restoration if you're unwilling to understand what the harm was, what the challenge, what the burden is. And a lot of people want to skip that truth-telling part and we believe that these sites have a critical role to play to insist that that not happen. 

What we're trying to do in the US is very different than what happened in South Africa, where there was a shift in power after the collapse of apartheid. A Black majority took over governance. In Germany, the Nazis lost the war and the Allies insisted on a different world order. In Rwanda even, there was a military intervention, and those who had been victimized were then empowered to create a remedy, to create a way forward.

In the United States, those who benefited from enslavement, those who participated in lynching, those who gained power through racial segregation and disenfranchisement never lost power. They still have power. And so our task is in many ways harder, more challenging despite the reputation of the US and the rhetoric of our laws. We're trying to persuade people who are still empowered to maintain a certain kind of status quo to change. And that makes our task harder but no less necessary than it was in all of these other spaces where you see transitional justice, where you see reckoning with horrific human rights abuses in the past.

Charlotte Burns: When I read Just Mercy all those years ago, and I reread it recently—your memoir from 2014, which tells the story of your defense of an innocent man, Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to die for a crime he didn't commit—not only do you tell his story and your story and the story much more broadly of the American criminal justice system, you also show the impact on the community, because this is a man who was sentenced to die and lived on death row for decades, despite the fact that there were so many people with him, witness to the fact that he was not anywhere near the murder scene on the morning of the crime. 

And so for all of those people, there's this sense that you capture in the book of, it would have been easier if none of us had known where he was, if we could suspect him too. And the impact of the intimidation of the violence, of the randomness, of the unfairness of the fact that a successful business person can ‘get above their station’ in the eyes of people in power and that they can be punished for it, is so harmful to everybody around them. And that harm and that violence is detailed so well in that book. And then so much more specifically in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama] 

“I've just left the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. There are rows upon rows upon rows of caskets suspended from a dark ceiling above ground that climbs at first  and then gives the way to a slope. There's a kind of sweeping impression of a wave of silent coffins that now face the bright sun in the bright blue sky. 

Upon each metal casket is inscribed the names of people who were lynched and the dates of their death. For example, 29 people were lynched just in Jefferson County, Alabama. And you wonder when you see names, whether they were father and son, mother and child, husband and wife, such as Minnie and William Ivory, both massacred on the 18th of November, 1920 in Coffey County, Georgia. As the signs make clear, this type of violence was accommodated by the courts, law enforcement, and white officials.  

But at the end, we see some hope. We see reconciliation. There are plaques where we see the details of certain towns and cities that are commemorating people who were lynched. And they tell their stories now and their families finally have a chance to gather what was theirs, what was taken and pay their respects.”

 Charlotte Burns: For people who haven't visited, it's a six-acre park. There's over 600 large corten steel monuments that naturally rust. When it rains, they run red onto the ground and each one represents an individual American county where racial terror took place. And they're inscribed with the names of individual people who were lynched and the dates upon which they were murdered.

And sometimes there are so many people that the font is tiny. It's like an undulating wave. At first you're on the same level and then these tower above you. There are examples given of why people were lynched: they were standing too long, they walked past the window, they didn't call someone “Sir.” This sort of absurdity of the violence. It's so stark as well. It's slightly abstracted. It's vast and it's colossal, but it's also so individual and you show the impact on community.

And again, in the Sculpture Park, and we see that also in the videos, for instance, in the museum, there are people who go to these sites and they talk about the patriarch of a family who was murdered 100 years before. People having this moment of reconciliation. And as I walked around Montgomery the next morning, I was thinking about history and people and thinking about how it's changed the town itself. 

When you go around the museum, there's a map of downtown Montgomery in the 19th century and you see the thriving slave trade. And then, when you stand in downtown Montgomery, that's where the auction block was. And there's where the first shots of the Civil War were fired from a Confederate building. And there's where Rosa Parks began the bus boycott. And there's the church where Martin Luther King [Jr.] was a pastor. And there's where the March for Voters Rights from Selma happened. And this is just a street in America, there's no one else on it. And I was thinking, “Oh my goodness, like this is one street.” 

And I think what these sites do so well is show the bigness of history, the millions of people, but the smallness, like these are people just being so persistently awful, or so persistently committed to narratives, or so persistently courageous. But it's just people on a street, and it's one street in America, and it's Montgomery, which you know better than anywhere else. But Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.] said the climactic conflicts always were fought and won on Alabama soil. And you're fighting them now.

And I thought, how is that impacting people in Montgomery, Alabama? You're reclaiming so much of the land physically and telling this story. You can't really understand it from photographs or the website, but when you walk around it, even just seeing that map in the museum and then applying that in my mind as I walked around downtown, it changes the sort of psychic landscape.

Bryan Stevenson: It does. And I, again, I appreciate that observation. A lot of people have asked me as well, why didn't you put these sites in Washington? They'd get so much more visibility there. It'd be a lot easier for people to find them there. And I think it's because these streets are the streets where thousands of enslaved people were paraded in couples and chains to warehouses where they were then held until the auctions. And you can see the space where the auctions took place. It is because these streets are burdened by that history of enslavement and the commerce of enslavement.

And we are so proximate to the violence that dominated America during the first half of the 20th century; Six million people fled the American South in response to the racial violence that's so tormented and traumatized people. And your description of the memorial is so accurate. We wanted people to have that intimate understanding that these monuments represent people who lost their lives and as they rise, we want people to understand that this violence, this terror, wasn't just directed at the people who were killed. It was directed at the entire African American community. They could have buried all of the lynching victims underground to keep it hidden, but they wanted to lift them up. Black people would be found hanged from bridges and trees and high places. And so in the memorial, we lift up those monuments to help people understand that the whole community was being taunted and tormented and terrorized by this violence, which is why we talked about the victims of lynchings being in the millions, not the thousands. Because if it's your brother, your sister, your neighbor, your cousin, the man down the street, the grocer, the person who speaks at church, if it's any of those people, then it has an impact on your own sense of safety and security, on your own sense of worth and value. And you have to understand that to appreciate the harm and so there is a real power in the place. 

And I'll be honest, it wasn't the intention to have such a big impact on the community economically and culturally, it just became a consequence of what we were doing. We were really focused on the storytelling and making the spaces as honest and as compelling as possible. And then we were a little surprised when so many people came that the sales tax revenue jumped 24% in the first year. And when people didn't have enough places to stay, hotels started getting built—there've been six hotels built since we've opened. Restaurants opened. Businesses began because transportation and tourism and all of these other things created jobs for hundreds of people, and I'm really thrilled about that—even proud of that—although it wasn't the objective. The objective was the truth-telling. 

We knew that to make the choice to come here, we had to do something that was a little different. It's not an easy place to get to, but I do think it's important. And for me, what gives me a lot of confidence about this project, about how these sites can be important in advancing this era of truth and justice, and truth and repair, what gives me confidence about that is that, by doing this in Montgomery, no one can say in America, “They could do that in Montgomery, but we can't do that in Oregon. We can't do that in California. We can't do that in Missouri. We can't do that in Kansas.” Because of Montgomery's history, because of all of those things that you observe when you walk around the streets, no one can say, “They can do that there, but we can't do it here.” 

And my hope is that, when it's all said and done, they'll say the opposite: “If they can do that in Montgomery, then why can't we do it here? We must be able to do something here. It'll be a lot easier. It'll be a lot less complicated here.” 

And I hope that motivates people to see the opportunities we all have to engage in truth-telling. This is often argued that learning is an action item. It's something to do. And when you learn, you empower yourself to be a different citizen, a different voter, a different thinker, a different teacher, a different advocate, a different everything. And that's what's needed, to get to a healthier place in this country. And I'm hoping that we can continue to play some small role in advancing that. 

[Charlotte Burns audio from Montgomery, Alabama]

“That's an old American military airplane flying overhead: there's an air show in town,  there's thousands of people here to witness the sort of might of the American military.  And the entire weekend there's been modern and historic aircraft flying overhead. And I'm recording this opposite a steamboat. You realize through the museum that these feats of technological prowess, the train lines that were built by slaves, enabled the slave trade to flourish. These steamboats carried, I think at one point, 200 slaves a day into Georgia, and they allowed the slave trade to boom. I walked down downtown Montgomery, Alabama. The number of slave businesses in the area: cotton brokers, slave investors, cotton warehouses, cotton brokers, slave auctioneers, slave markets, slave depots. It was an entire economy run off the back of people. And between 1820 and 1860, Montgomery developed into one of the most active human trafficking sites in the country. And the Legacy Museum makes this very clear. It says, “Montgomery is a city shaped by slavery and the legacy of this horrific era is all around you.” 

Charlotte Burns: Do you wish there were other museums like that? That's what occurred to me, that it's a shame that there's just one.

Bryan Stevenson: I certainly have felt the absence of these kinds of spaces. I do. I have. I think going to Johannesburg was so impactful because it was so unfamiliar, because that's a narrative museum that tells a powerful story.

I've been to Berlin two or three times now because it's such an unusual city in terms of cultural spaces. It's not just the Holocaust Memorial and that powerful museum. There's the topology of terror. The whole city is filled with spaces that are designed to help visitors and citizens reckon with that history. It's very deliberate, it's very intentional, and it's unavoidable. And we don't have that in the US. 

So yes, I have missed that, and I continue to worry that our efforts at truth-telling in cultural sites have been insufficient. It's not enough just to have an exhibit with Black artists for a few weeks. I don't think that's sufficient. I don't think it's enough to kind of acknowledge some gaps. I think we have to do more than that because I do think culture represents what's important to a society. And if we think that racial justice is important, if we think that overcoming histories of violence and bigotry and segregation and enslavement is important, then there have to be cultural spaces that advance that cause. 

I think one of the things that helped us—it was also the thing that made what we did so hard—is that we never took a penny of state or federal funding to build any of our Legacy Sites. And I always say it like that, but the truth is we were never offered a penny of state or federal dollars to build these sites, but it sounds better when I said we never accepted any state or federal funding. But that was in part because we wanted the latitude to tell the story the way we believe that the research and the scholarship demands, not based on what's comfortable for people, what's easy for people. And I hope that there's more of that, not just in the United States, all over the world.

I think there's a need for a deep reckoning with this history on the African continent. I think there's a need for a deeper reckoning with this history in Spain, in Portugal, in France, in Great Britain, and in all of the countries of Europe that were actively participating in the trafficking of enslaved people or benefiting from the cotton exports that were coming out of the plantations in the American South.

I think there's a need for that kind of deeper exploration, deeper reckoning. And so I do hope it inspires more of what we've tried to do. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: The museum is so narrative-focused and the Sculpture Park obviously brings much more art into it. Do you feel more comfortable as you've progressed through those years of opening with telling the story with art? 

Bryan Stevenson: Yeah, that's a great question. Yes. The museum now has an art gallery. An earlier version of the museum that was much, much smaller that didn't have the art gallery and so when we opened the new museum, we really wanted to create that relief and we wanted to involve these amazing people, these storytellers. Artists have a powerful ability, an extraordinary ability to communicate these complex emotions. And we saw that at the National Memorial. 

The very first sculpture was created by an artist, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, who we've worked with at all of our sites. It was really important to make the connection between lynching and enslavement and his sculpture did that so beautifully. And one of the most frequent comments we heard was, “I've lived in this country my whole life and I've never seen a sculpture that depicts the brutality of slavery, but the humanity of the enslaved,” and we need to see that to have the relationship with that institution that I think we need to have. 

Hank Willis Thomas—who is also represented in all of our sites—and that powerful sculpture of these men with their arms up sinking into this slab, it's so evocative of the continuing legacy that's been created by this history where there's a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that gets assigned to Black and brown people. 

So yeah, the art has become an increasingly important part of it. And we knew that a deep dive into the history of slavery, an immersive engagement with that history was going to be hard for people. And we wanted the beauty of art to help people navigate all the difficulty of that narrative. 

And that's why Simone's piece, Brick House, is so perfect because it represents so much about the experience of Black women for centuries. A lot of the thinking behind it was shaped by her study of West African societies and architecture there and all of those kinds of things. But that's why it's such a perfect beginning because it tells about hardship and labor, but it also tells about beauty and strength. And, we are really thrilled to have a section that focuses on Indigenous peoples at the park and to have all of these wonderful Indigenous artists creating a visual to help people understand that story in such a powerful way.

[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]

“And here as you walk around as contemporary artists, we begin with this beautiful sculpture by Simone Leigh,  Rose B. Simpson’s here,  Rashid Johnson, and they present us with a different take on history. If the museum's about narrative, this is about narrative and objects. And it's a kind of poignant interaction of objects within the landscape, but also makes a case for the true arc of loss stretching back through civilizations, positing Africa as the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of humankind 5 million years ago, and talking about the loss when all those people were kidnapped, what was really truly taken, what was really truly lost.

Bryan Stevenson: And then, of course, the thing I'm especially proud of at the park is that, even though it's a hard story, even though the art and sculptures are helping us, there's never a moment when you can't look over and see the National Monument to Freedom, which is your reassurance that as hard as things are, as challenging as things are, freedom is coming. There will be emancipation, and there will be a legacy that survives this bondage and brutality. A legacy that is beautiful, a legacy that is vibrant, a legacy that is extraordinary, which is represented by all of us who are the descendants of enslaved people. Our foreparents didn't have that optic to look at. They didn't know that freedom was coming and yet they did it, which is why, I think it's possible for anyone and everyone to have the courage to walk through that space we've created and to reckon with all of the difficult aspects of this history and still have the courage, still have the comfort of knowing that freedom is coming.

And I think that's a really important component to the work I do. I've always argued that hopelessness is the enemy of justice and that hope is an essential feature of what we do. I have to believe things I haven't seen. Even creating these spaces, people were like, “You guys are lawyers. You don't know anything about museums and memorials. You should stay out of this.” And there were times when we had real doubts because we did most of this in-house, but I felt like we knew how to tell a story. I knew that we had done a lot of work and research and scholarship that we felt empowered us and positioned us to do something unique. And it's gratifying to have people coming and experiencing the sites in a way that motivates them to say, “Hey, this was really powerful.” 

Charlotte Burns: I also love with the huge enormous book that you're referring to is that it's in a landscape that's littered by lots of people on horses. It's where the kind of literal approach of a lawyer becomes so interesting because it's this very stark, monumental, gorgeous object that's abstract, but also incredibly useful. It's like a living archive. You go, there are all the names. 

After the Civil War, around four million newly freed Black people were able for the first time to formally record a surname in the 1870 census, rather than be recorded by a number for the first time. And 122,000 of those surnames are inscribed on the National Monument to Freedom. It's a 43-feet tall, 150-foot long wall, essentially that's an open book. Visitors can search for their names using QR codes. People have found their lineage and so it's a living archive. It's a really moving sort of triumphant rebuttal to these little men on horses around the place.

And then you end again pass that with Kehinde Wiley's An Archaeology of Silence, which is a person on a horse, and it's really interesting because I've seen that sculpture before in other spaces, but I think it's the most effective place I've ever seen that, which is this thing about context and place. It's a much different man on a horse and yeah, it's really wonderful. You said something about as a student, you were reading Russian literature and thinking about artists in specific contexts. And I was thinking about that when I saw Kehinde.

[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]

“We end with Kehinde Wiley, who takes the sort of triumphal man on horseback that is so familiar, the myth of the hero and that confederacy monument that we see all around or the war hero that populates so many towns and cities and instead presents a fallen, beaten Black American and this sort of grief-stricken image across a petrified looking horse. And it's a contemporary image showing that the suffering hasn't ended yet. It's a really poignant note to end on.”

Bryan Stevenson: I do think these are such extraordinary artists, and the quality and the skill in their work merits context. We want people to see all of the power, all of the brilliance, all of the genius that is in some of these objects. And sometimes they can be placed in spaces where that's obstructed by a lot of distracting things.

I love being able to create an environment where the beauty and the skill and the genius of these artists can be experienced fully. Rose. B Simpson's Counterculture, these majestic figures, eight feet tall, serving as guardians of the land, guardians of the river, guardians of the space. To put them in a natural environment like that, where there's so much to be on guard for, so much to be looking out for, I think just gives them a power that I find really moving, and really important. 

We are adding even more sculptures. We still have 11 more sculptures that will be added to the park in the coming weeks and months and I'm excited for each and every one of them. Each contributes something new and important to the experience of folks who visit. 

And again, I love your description of the National Monument. One of the things that we're now working through, we want people to have the opportunity to find their names, to find their lineage. And now we're allowing people to put flowers in the stream in front of it, to do something active, to do something tangible that expresses just acknowledgement, honoring, remembrance, admiration for those who survived, for those who endured. I think anyone who went through something as horrific as enslavement in a land that declares itself to value freedom above all things, deserves to be honored. I do think there's something powerful about it having the dynamism of telling you a little bit about your own history. 

I was working on it for two years straight, and was involved in all of these details, and after we got the monument up and we started putting the names on, it was there on a Wednesday, where they hadn't gotten to the space where they were going to be adding my family name. I went back on the Thursday. I knew it was going to happen. I knew it was going to be there. But when I saw my name, Stevenson, on the monument, it still had a really profound impact on me. And I love that we can offer something like that to people who are the descendants of the enslaved and for others who have a relationship to this history, to this country who want to understand things more intimately, more personally. You don't have to be a descendant to have a powerful relationship and understanding of this history. 

Charlotte Burns: How was it working with artists? 

Bryan Stevenson: Yeah, it's been wonderful. We commissioned half of the pieces.

Many of the pieces existed, like Simone Leigh's and Kehinde's, and so we were able to talk to them about putting it in location. Most have been fantastic. Simone came down, was incredibly generous. I walked her through the space before there was much to see, and she saw the vision and contributed. Kwame is someone we've been working with for years and Alison Saar and so many of the other artists were just super excited about this. And so it's been fantastic. That's been one of the high points of the whole experience, is to get to work more closely and intimately with these amazingly talented people. Hank Willis Thomas came down recently, it was so wonderful to have him experience the space. We're going to be doing a big celebration on Juneteenth here in Montgomery and we're inviting all of the artists to be with us. So I'm looking forward to that. 

[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]

So I'm at the end of the time here. I really don't think anything I say now is going to cover what it is to have visited because it's just too big. It's so devastating, but it's also kind of hopeful. And mostly you just get the sense this is unfinished business and it's just the beginning. I don't feel like these three sites are the only sites that are going to be here. This feels like the beginning of a total reclamation of the narrative of America. It's a much, much bigger project than the sculpture project. It's a much, much bigger project than this podcast, than my trip, than my feelings. So what I would say is come and visit and think about it. 

Charlotte Burns: I have a feeling that there's much more planned. How much more can you tell us about your plans for the sites? 

Bryan Stevenson: As I said, we have 11 pieces in the works, including a major piece by Charles Gaines we're very excited about that will come in later in the year. The next thing we're trying to do is to facilitate more conversation, places to process all of this. And so we're actually building something, a cultural center and an overnight space that’s called Elevation, that will open in early 2025, and there'll be a hotel rooms, but more importantly, meeting spaces for people to dialogue and discourse because we want groups to come. We want schools to come. We want companies to come and really engage and then process. Then we're going to continue to find ways to make the information we've developed more and more accessible to more and more people. We have a calendar that we put out something every day to educate people about the history of racial injustice. Folks can go to our website EJI.org to sign up for that. And we're now doing animations to bring that history to life in new ways. And we're very excited about that. 

And I'm quite interested in talking about this narrative, this challenge, this burden in more global settings. And so I would like to see something happen in Africa. I would like to see more happening in Europe. I'd like to see a greater commitment from the global community implicated by this history. All of that is on the agenda. We've got a lot of other things that we're trying to do. I'm still representing people facing execution, still representing young people prosecuted as adults, still contending with the legal system that too often treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. So those are standing, continuing challenges. Our narrative agendas is still quite full and still quite ambitious. 

Charlotte Burns: How do you find the time for all of this, Bryan? How do you fit it all in the day? 

Bryan Stevenson: It's hard. It's really hard. The day starts very early and it tends to end very late. But I feel really privileged to do what I do. As a kid growing up, the people who sometimes had really challenging weeks and challenging days would come into the church and after the end of their testimony, they'd start singing this song where they'd say, “I wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.” And that's how I feel these days. 

I'm very excited about the opportunity we have to contribute to this narrative work, to contribute to the cultural landscape. It's something I never imagined would be something I could do. And yet here we are. And so that makes it exciting, even though it is at times exhausting.

Charlotte Burns: Your path has evolved so much. You've obviously had an ability to follow that path as it's moved before you. How have you known to shift as things have moved, to have that faith in following? To go from representing people in court, to becoming more of a public figure, to writing a memoir, to opening cultural narrative spaces? That part of you that was thinking of the, “What if I was to open a museum?” If you were going to give advice to anyone thinking of following their “What if that was an idea?”, what would it be? 

Bryan Stevenson: It's a really great question. I think the upside to my legal work is because we've always been in hostile environments, we've always been in spaces where people are quite resistant to what we're trying to do. We've had to think really critically about what's the best way to do this? What's the most effective way to do this? And so being strategic and tactical is something we've had to be from the very beginning because we knew where we were going and who we were representing was not going to be welcome, was not going to be favored.

And I think that's just allowed us to really step back and think in a very critical way, “Should we do this? Is this going to be effective? Is this going to work? What's going to be the obstacles? What's going to be the challenge?” And when you go through that kind of process, and you're persuaded that you should do something, you do it with the confidence that you've at least given a lot of thought to what the problems might be.

And that approach has certainly been part of what has pushed us. There's still that moment where you have to just choose to believe something you haven't seen. To do something you haven't done, to be uncomfortable. And that would be my advice, is you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. You have to be willing to do things that are inconvenient. You have to risk sometimes to achieve things that I think a community needs, a world needs, a client needs, and you shouldn't be fearful about that. I've stood with people who were pulled away and executed, and I have no regrets about being with them in that moment, affirming their humanity and dignity, even in a place that was inhumane and completely undignified. I have no regrets about that. And if anything, it was important for me that before someone was killed in that horrific way, that they knew that their life was valued at least by one person and I think I represent more than one. And so that challenge can be a real challenge. But I think when you understand your purpose, it becomes possible to do the things that might seem impossible to other people.

Charlotte Burns: You talked about how maybe 13 or so years ago, you thought Brown v. Board of Education ruling may not be upheld. I know you've said that justice is just this constant struggle. How do you feel from where you stand? You just talked about identifying the complexities. What are the challenges right now that you would advise people to think about, to guard against? If you were one of those sculptures, what are the things that we should be on guard for together? 

Bryan Stevenson: Yeah. I do think this is a really difficult moment globally because there is this rise in what I call the politics of fear and anger. And you've got people all over the world that are trying to govern through fear and anger. And what they know and what we've seen historically is that when people allow themselves to be governed by fear or anger, they do start tolerating things they should never tolerate. Across the globe, I think we have to challenge the politics of fear and anger. We cannot be governed by fear. We cannot be governed by anger, and those who want to govern that way, I think we have to push back against.

We need to govern from hope and from compassion and from belief that we're capable of doing more, being more. This is the first time in my life that I'm living when we have a US Supreme Court that is quite hostile to expanding rights for the poor and the disfavored, and that means our work is going to get harder. There's a counternarrative that has emerged after a lot of the protests in 2020 that's trying to again ban books and ban teaching but I don't see that as the defining aspect of this society. Those counternarratives are responses to the forward progress of narrative. And that's always been true. 

In the American South, they banned the existence of abolitionist literature in the American South. You could get killed for having a pamphlet or any of these things. That was the response. The Congress refused to pass a federal law to stop lynching because they were using everything they had to block that. During the civil rights era, you saw the white citizens councils and the reinforcement of these politicians committing deeply to segregation forever. 

So the counternarratives that we're seeing in this moment are just, for me, evidence that there is this storm gathering, this momentum pushing societies in new and different ways that are unnerving people, but that's what it's going to take. And this is not a tsunami that will kill and destroy. This is a wave that will liberate and uplift and, in many ways, nurture the kind of, I think, healthy society, healthy community, healthy world that most of us want to live in. And that's what we have to keep persuading people, is that there is this better thing coming.

But I do think we have to be attentive to these politics of fear and anger because I see so much of that in the world right now.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Bryan, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Bryan Stevenson: The ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is that we are actually going to see some really challenging retreat from these basic rights that we thought we had established. There's this kind of new desperate effort at using retreat, ignorance, denial of access to information that will be effective in some communities. We've already seen it in states across this country, and we're going to have to be attentive to that, combat that with more than what we typically like to expend. We typically like you to say, “We'll just see what happens.” We can't do that anymore. 

The thing that gets me up in the morning is to know that we're now living at a time where there are narrative forces that have never existed before. There are art columnists and podcasters that are going around the world and telling important stories and talking to people that would have never been heard a generation ago. There are lawyers, there are journalists, there are teachers. These artists in our sculpture park, there wasn't a generation of artists creating art like this 60 years ago that had the freedom to do what these artists are doing. So all of that speaks to me of this new era that we can marshal and we can mobilize to do things that we've never been able to do before.

That's the exciting part of the time we're living in now. 

Charlotte Burns: Bryan, I cannot thank you enough. You are truly a hero of mine and so many people. I'm an unabashed fan and so thank you so much for making this time. It's such important work and it's been a true privilege to be able to talk to you about it. And anybody who hasn't been should absolutely go. Make the time, go to Montgomery, Alabama. Take a walk. 

Bryan Stevenson: Well, thank you, Charlotte. I appreciate that. I've enjoyed talking with you and appreciate the opportunity. 

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much, Bryan. 

Bryan Stevenson: Welcome.

[Charlotte Burns audio in Montgomery, Alabama]

“Okay, I'm back where I started, under the words of Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”  It feels different to read that now than it did 25 hours ago, or whenever it was I started here in Montgomery, Alabama because as you walk around this place, history is so big and so small. And it's just people doing these extraordinary, hateful or amazing things. And some of that's happening right now here in the work that's happening on these Legacy Sites,  and more than any museum experience or art experience, coming here, you're really coming to witness something, which is the reclaiming of history and the reclaiming of the narrative and a big narrative. America. The American economy. The American people. Freedom. Rights. And it's an amazing thing to witness. And I'm really, really glad I came.  

It's a bright blue day once again. And that's what's so amazing. The horrors of history. The sun does not set, the sun shines, no matter what cruelties go on. 

I have to run, I have a plane to catch.”

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What more can I say? My huge thanks to Bryan Stevenson and what a trip if you ever get the chance to go. If you’re enjoying this season’s ‘what ifs,’ you can delve into our back catalogue—we have fantastic conversations including Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation; the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, Koyo Kouoh; and the wonderful Kemi Ilesanmi. 

Next time we’ll be talking to the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier ahead of her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The time is always now to act. The time is always now to look beyond yourself. We need to reform how we mediate and tell stories. We need to reform how we disseminate information to Americans. We need to reform our education system. We need to reform how we value photographers in this society, how we value photographers in the art world, how we value the very people who are at the bottom. We need a real reform of all these value systems. And this exhibition offers a blueprint, a pathway, and a bridge to achieving that.

Charlotte Burns: That’s such a brilliant conversation to come. Do join us next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 12: Karen Patterson

This time we welcome Karen Patterson, the Executive Director of the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. The organization immediately became a major player when it launched in 2022, announcing plans to give away up to $20 million a year to arts organizations, thanks to a $440 million bequest from Ruth DeYoung Kohler. We delve into the what-ifs of philanthropy, the foundation's ethos, and its ambitious initiatives. Through a focus on generosity, experimentation, and consideration, Ruth Arts aims to transform the philanthropic landscape. “What if we made a big difference? What if people saw themselves as valuable?” Karen asks. “What if people saw themselves as cared for?”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This time we welcome Karen Patterson, the Executive Director of the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. 

The organization immediately became a major player when it launched in 2022, announcing plans to give away up to $20 million a year to arts organizations, thanks to a $440 million bequest from Ruth DeYoung Kohler [II]. 

We dive into the ‘what ifs’ of philanthropy, the foundation's ethos, and its ambitious initiatives. Through a focus on generosity, experimentation, and consideration, Ruth Arts aims to transform the philanthropic landscape. “What if we made a big difference? What if people saw themselves as valuable? What if people saw themselves as cared for?” Karen asks.  

All this and much, much more. Let’s dive in. 

[Musical interlude] 

Karen, thank you so much for joining me today. It's such a pleasure to have you here.

Karen Patterson: Pleasure's all mine. I'm excited to be in conversation with you.

Charlotte Burns: I thought we could begin with a ‘what if.’ What if you were suddenly responsible for spending $16 million to $20 million dollars annually? How might you begin to think about that? What do you do when you're in that position? It's such an amazing thing to have to do and be charged with. Talk me through what happened.

Karen Patterson: The first ‘what if’ for me was what if I was asked to honor the legacy of Ruth Kohler, who was my boss when I served as a curator at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, and that had a wide variety of options in my mind. She was such a big force in my life and a visionary in her own right. But then you're right, the ‘what if’ became, how do you translate that task into philanthropic work? What if you were asked to translate this legacy into generosity and into the distribution of $16 million. I'll admit that the legacy component was more important than the funding for me because she had recently passed in 2020. I took the job in 2022. Her presence still and was still so omnipotent in Wisconsin and generally through the art world. Because we are still in such a startup mode, your ‘what if’ question has so many ‘what ifs’ embedded inside of it. But the first thing I felt comfortable doing was setting aside the dollar amount and talking to trustees and family members about Ruth so that I could get a sense of what was most important to them because I knew in the back of my head that I would have to translate what they're saying to me into a philanthropic gesture. And then $16 million came right after that. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: So how do you translate a person and their legacy? This is at the heart of so much philanthropy and so many foundations and estates, and you didn't have a totally strict stringent set of rules, which is actually what the advice that most people give when setting up a foundation in the state because things shift over time and so foundations and estates need to be able to do that too. But still, that's a lot to have to do quite quickly and no doubt with a lot of emotions running high. How do you approach that? What do you do first? A lot of listening, I'm imagining.

Karen Patterson: Yeah, much to my parents' surprise, my folklore degree came into handy here. [Laughs] I have an undergrad in folklore and one of the most important lessons I learned in those studies was people tell you what's important to them no matter what you ask them. I will say many people were really eager to share with me because they knew what was coming. They knew that this was going to become a major player in terms of arts philanthropy. I think the first task was trying to understand what my role was. There were family members, trustees, community members, organizations, artists, there were many people who had a stake in the future of this foundation and I had to understand what I would represent and in many ways, although I didn't know at the time, I can now see my work as just representing the present day. Always. The present-day for arts philanthropy, the present day for organizations, for artists, for decisions to make because there would be so many people who would be thinking about who Ruth was, or who Ruth might have been, or the future of museums, or the future of the idea of regionality. I knew that I had to be the one to take things to the present, and I think about that quite a bit still.

Charlotte Burns: So what made you realize that? Something in you realized there was a need to be present quite literally.

Karen Patterson: I think it came from the curatorial experience. That is your job as a mediator. That is your job to see and to translate and to care for. And so when you think about some of the biggest gestures of caring, it's feeling present with someone. 

Why I didn't know it at the time was because of just the sheer nature of our startup mode. I think there wasn't a lot of time to reflect or even to have any vantage point at all, other than do what you're doing right now. And so the idea of being present was by sheer necessity then and now in hindsight, I see it as of great value while other people had to be in different time frames and different modes and different eras. I found myself being the one that was present.

Charlotte Burns: Were you the only person who worked with Ruth?

Karen Patterson: On staff, yes. On our trustees, we have Ruth's best friend from kindergarten, and we also have Ruth's lawyer who worked with her to set up the trust documents, and then, of course, the fiduciary agent, the bank. But, they all knew Ruth in various different ways, but I'm the only staff member that knew Ruth personally.

Charlotte Burns: And from what I understand, she was larger than life in some ways. Can you describe some of that? I heard she set up a kindergarten on campus at one point, did lots of things that were in some ways quite radical.

Karen Patterson: She was, and she has often been described as a visionary, and I think that's because her vision was so large, and she was always looking to what the possibilities were. Did not like to do things twice, did not like to follow the rules—although she wouldn't consider herself a rule breaker, she just understood that some structures advance some people and hold other people back. And so she was always looking for the way through. 

And you're right. She started the first arts-based preschool in the country that's still ongoing at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She started a national preservation program that strictly focuses on artist-built environments and vernacular art environments. This week, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Arts/Industry residency program that places artists in the Kohler factory alongside all your sinks and toilets. So these ideas of doing something that may feel challenging structurally, but actually in the end benefits both parties that felt challenged by it.

Charlotte Burns: When you're trying to translate that into, “What would Ruth do,” what's your benchmark?

Karen Patterson: She was my boss for seven years and she was the director and I was a curator so all my ideas went through her exhibition ideas—artists to work with, ideas to explore. So I felt in my heart that I could think about the moments of what it was like to present an idea to Ruth. She had this saying that she would not necessarily say explicitly, but it was a premise that I had in my mind every time I presented to her. Keep in mind she did not use computers or was not comfortable using computers and did not think that this was the best way to look at art and so you had to go into her office with your ideas ready to articulate and ready with a plan B, C, D just in case that wasn't what was going to move her that day. I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to come out of the gates with something that was going to be ahead of the game. And not in a competitive way but maybe doing something that felt exciting, that felt thrilling, that felt that all eyes were going to be on it to see what was going to happen. And that was what it was like to work with Ruth on exhibitions. She really believed in a sense of discovery not just in the artist but exhibition design. She really cared about how shows came together and she also really cared about my instinct and my intuition. She really wanted to make sure that I was speaking from the heart, that I was talking about this artist because I felt strongly about something about their work in my gut. She could tell if I didn't. And in a more abstract way, that is how I've been approaching my work, in a gut, instinctual, intuitive way that feels both passionate and personal, but in some ways, it feels very structural.

Charlotte Burns: How do you embed that into the team? How do you embed that into the structure of the organization?

Karen Patterson: We have one big table that we sit around very practically speaking. A lot of our ideas feel curatorial in nature. We think about how to bring something together. What components feed off of each other? How do things respond to each other? I personally believe we've hired well. We've hired people who have also made careers out of instincts and intuition and work ethic. We have people here who believe in hard work and believe in the joy that comes from turning over every stone to make sure that this is at its best. We talk a lot about the privilege of starting and we talk a lot about the privilege of having resources. When you have these resources you really feel a responsibility to go above and beyond. 

And one of the things that we talk also about is coming from the nonprofit to the philanthropic world, you really have to be caring about everybody all the time. What is hospitality? What does it mean to show up for someone and anticipate their needs? Not asking them to perform, but just know that there's a promise here, that there's hope here. And I think we've hired people who know that naturally.

Charlotte Burns: When we were discussing the show in advance, you said that you were thinking about transforming a legacy, which we've discussed. But some of the words that you used stood out to me; a statement on generosity, and experimentation, and consideration, and in this current climate of the art world. Do you want to talk me through those three things, which are really specific choices to make, and then the contrast of this current climate?

Karen Patterson: I think my experience has told me that you can't always be generous, experimental, and considerate in the current climate in the art world. I think you might have to pick one or you might not even get to do all of those things because of the structure of where you work or just feeling underappreciated. It's very hard to feel generous when you feel underappreciated. It's also hard to feel supported when you want to be experimental. It's hard to test new ideas and being considerate takes time. Being considerate means that you might have to let your first idea go. It might mean that the idea you're fighting for isn't the idea that gets across the finish line, and that takes collaboration, that takes listening to each other, and that can feel messy. I think people who think that collaboration is a logical path have never actually done collaboration. It's very complex and it takes a lot longer. And I don't know that the current art world has that time or pace. And so I wanted to make sure that those were words that felt appropriate for Ruth in my experience, but also in the experience from the people that loved her. And I also felt that having been in the nonprofit world, I've seen some of the best and some of the worst and those three words really make me feel at my best when I want to feel creative and when I want to feel impactful. 

The “and, and, and” speaks to the exponential possibility of this role and our role in arts philanthropy right now. There's always going to be another idea. There are more good ideas than we could possibly fund in our lifetime. So there's one more thing to think about. And it also speaks to the exponential quality of how we find out about organizations. This has been an incredible learning experience for me through the Artist Choice awards where the artists have pointed us to organizations all across this country from small towns to larger cities to grassroots organizations to residencies and so you find out not only about these wonderful places, but also their very specific needs. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So let’s talk a little bit about art philanthropy because I was looking up some numbers before this. The culture of philanthropy in America is the envy of other nations. It's driven by the country's enormous wealth. The US is the world's largest wealth market by a significant margin. It accounts for a remarkable 32 percent of global wealth, 36 percent of the world's millionaires, according to a recent study. A lot of that's finding its way into private philanthropy. There is more giving in the US than in other countries like in the UK. So there's always been philanthropy, but there is this sort of boom in artist estates and foundations. How do you think about that as someone who is very much part of a wave of powerful organizations?

When you launched, you were right up there at the top, as Joel Wachs told The New York Times and The [Andy] Warhol Foundation [for the Visual Arts] ostensibly is one of the most powerful organizations in terms of the support it gives. It's a lifeline for so many organizations around the country. It gives around $17 million away a year Joel told The New York Times—which is less than you guys give away. Put that into context for me, how you think about that? And you have other peers moving into the field as well who are giving away significant sums.

Karen Patterson: One of the things I was thinking about when you said that was that I wasn't thinking about this in 2015. And although that's true, I have been thinking about artists’ legacies as part of my curatorial process. One of the first projects that I did—and actually it was the subject of my thesis—was Ray Yoshida's home collection. He was a painter and a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And it's actually how I was able to apply for a job at the Kohler Art Center because his collection was in transit from storage to the museum. And I felt that the job of how to translate someone's specific home and his legacy into an exhibition for those who may know him and those who may not know him, including family members, what would that allow for? And I thought about that when you said that because what artists’-endowed foundations and what artists’ legacy work allows for is specificity and togetherness, which I think is really important when it comes to philanthropy now. I know that the idea of doing things together and of course, there's words like “participatory grant-making” and “trust-based philanthropy” and things like this. But the idea that I am here because of Ruth's generosity only infuses a layer of togetherness and collaboration in what we do. Ruth's legacy means that I'm not trying to be everything for everyone. I'm trying to be very specific and work with my colleagues on collaborating with other foundations in filling a need. 

So there's people that are doing things very well—our peers in philanthropy, and especially in artist foundations. And so how do we add to the conversation?

How can we be additive to this? And I think that is a very important gift that artists’-endowed foundations allow for, this idea of a continuum. This didn't start with me, will not end with me. This idea that there was creativity and experimentation at the very core of artists. They are in a position of having a legacy because they received some level of success and what were they known for? What challenges did they break through and how do you translate that into a philosophy of giving? I have always been interested, maybe that does go back to my folklore degree. I didn't know there was a path that I was on, but now I can say that I’ve always been interested in making sure that you can honor elements of the past by contributing to its relevancy in the present. If that makes sense. You can bring things forward. You can allow for new possibilities with elements of the past. It's not, you don't start here with ground zero in that way. There are things that we need to understand in order for us to be better in the future. And I think an artists’-endowed foundation and legacy work allows you to do that work. 

I think there's also very real elements of our work that contributed to our early reception and that is that we are new. Although this foundation existed for Ruth in her lifetime, she started the RDK foundation—which are her initials—in 1984. We are able to start fresh in 2022. And we learned a lot being in the nonprofit world through our time. But when you start something new in 2022, you have a lot to consider but there are very glaring issues that need to be addressed. And we did not have the real burden that other foundations may have, which is turning a barge around making change happen at a very large scale is very difficult to do. And often at the expense of staff and that sheer exhaustion that they may feel to try to make change happen. We were able to start.

Charlotte Burns: So when you and I first spoke, you were at the beginning of thinking through that process, and you're much further into it now, obviously. The foundation has rolled out an artist-led grant-making program. It gives unrestricted multi-year support. It convenes leaders to discuss timely topics. It's building a new art space. What if artists led the discussions, which is something you spoke about at the very beginning, you were very clear on that right from the off—seek advice for where the need was. It was grounded in your initial conversations with talking to artists.

Karen Patterson: I think that's a really great place to start. And I also really appreciate the prompt of ‘what if.’ It's something that I've thought about as a curator and most of the exhibitions that I love the most are a question, offer more questions. The idea of starting with artists was based on what I heard the most about Ruth. That talking with artists brought about change through the decades and through the generations, whether that's in a residency program, a preschool program, preservation program, a new way of thinking about exhibitions of legacy work, it always for her started with an artist and that was something that was in the water at Kohler. And so I knew that I wanted to start with a conversation about artists. I also knew from my own experience and the experience of my colleagues that artists have pointed us to the most exciting places and I wanted to make sure that we were initially funding places that artists love because there's one thing to say that you support artists. And it's another thing for artists to say that they felt supported. And I really wanted to start with organizations that artists told me if they felt supported and that's where Artist Choice came to be. And it was very straightforward with a Google form and a little bit of a chain mail situation where I asked one artist to ask another artist and we came up with a wonderful list that we then started to build our other programs around. 

As you said, we knew that we wanted to do multi-year unrestricted grants because working in the museum world, what a gift. What a gift for you to have multi-year granting, and for it to be given to you with a level of trust and care that you knew what to do with the funds. And this was about your promising future as an organization, not our level of control over it. And so through the Artist Choice, we noticed a few organizations that were nominated several times by artists. And that just felt intuitively a great place to start. Across the nation, several artists named this one place. So what is it? Why? And through that, we found organizations that are not only dealing with exciting community-based programming, but they are also not neglecting the organizational needs of their institution at the same time. We realize that where we need to be is in smaller organizations. I wouldn't say that in terms of budget size, but in terms of programming. People have a direct relationship with the communities that they serve. 

Then we developed these multi-year programs with different themes. One being thought leaders. I was aware of maybe a leadership crisis that the museum world was facing and I wanted to support the leaders that need the support to do good work. And I also wanted them to find colleagues. Being an executive director can be very isolating. And how can you work across fields to gain support from your peers? And that's where the thought leader program came about. They don't work necessarily in the same realms. We have artist-endowed foundations, we have community spaces, we have residencies, but I thought actually their difference would bring them closer together. And I feel like that's true. 

We also started a program called Sites & Stewardship, which is again, multi-year, about the relationship to locality and art making. We didn't want to neglect the idea that Ruth was a champion of your biggest ideas and that big ideas should be everywhere. And the care that it takes, which is both capital projects and community building when it comes to placemaking. 

And then Future Studies is our program that is our artist-led initiatives that might have originated in a larger structure, whether that's art publishing or studio visits or residencies. And now they're trying to get out from out of that bigger structure to be smaller and more nimble. And we want to help them do that. It's a little bit more complex, but it's also about the risk-taking. How do you fund something at the very beginning without expecting results or prescribing the results? And that's the idea of Future Studies. We're building something for the future.

Charlotte Burns: Talk me through that a little bit, because one of the things I wanted to ask you is about what if we reconsidered risk? Because you'd said something in an interview that I didn't, I wanted to ask you about. I don't know if this is related or different, you said, “We knew multi-year general operating support was needed because we used to be the ones asking for it, but what has been surprising is that now it's being celebrated as something that's considered risky. What does that tell you?” What did you mean? So, operating support is considered risky now. Is that what you meant?

Karen Patterson: I think it was a bit of a punchy answer, but I was surprised to learn what we would be celebrated for. I really thought it was going to be for the design of these programs. Maybe that’s just my curatorial ego shining through, but I was surprised to hear that what we were being celebrated for was asking a pool of people, artists, who to give money to and then giving unrestricted grants to that organization. And that felt risky for a lot of people. How will you know? How will you know if it's a good organization? How will you know if they'll spend the money wisely? Will you ask for reporting? All these big questions that came from us, which are very legitimate questions. I didn't think that that was as risky as it has been perceived. We're showing that maybe it's because we came from the field that this all has to happen together. We can't set ourselves outside of what's happening in nonprofit organizations. You have to be alongside them. We have the biggest ability to engender trust because we have the resources to offer. And so you have to start that way, in my opinion. 

Charlotte Burns: No, it's really interesting. It's a very paternalistic approach to be like, we'll only trust you if you give us constant feedback and we might not give you the money again once you've proven it. It's really interesting that to just say to people, “We trust you. We'll give you the money off you go,” is considered radical. 

Karen Patterson: And also that we trust artists in the right direction too. And they're trusting us with their name. It's their reputation. They're putting names for it as well. So I think what it feels like is everyone's on the line here and everyone is doing their part.

Charlotte Burns: And so what for you are the metrics of success? Like how do you define them? Whether your programs succeed or fail, what is it for you that makes you think, okay, that one was a good one? Is it just getting the money out the door every year?

Karen Patterson: I think our success is based on the variety of organizations in our pool and the scale of them. Truthfully, I have learned about 75 percent of these organizations through Artist Choice. And so the success for us, I think, is being pointed to new directions and being shown new ways of working.

I honestly have not thought about success in the way that you're asking it. Last year, success was doing something twice. Okay. We're doing it again. And then maybe the convenings have been a wonderful sign of success for us, bringing strangers together in Marfa, or Milwaukee and seeing an immediate connection and an immediate need to want to connect. They were sharing ideas knowing that they were in a room full of like-minded creative people. That felt like a success that people showed up for us just as much as we showed up for them.

Charlotte Burns: I remember you describing the concept of those convenings to me a while ago, and I've spoken since to people who've attended who've said, and I quote, “The best thing I've ever attended in the art world, ever. No competition.” That there was careful, caring, really great thinkers, incredibly thoughtful events that were designed carefully to engender creativity.

Karen Patterson: We wanted to make sure that…well, we love a care package. That's just generally who we are. We wanted to make sure the tote bags were perfect, wanted to make sure that everyone felt an element of surprise and joy. No worries. All you had to do was show up. And if you liken that to showing up one of your best parties or your friend who's amazing at hosting, everything is taken care of and they are able to relax and be present with you. That was something that we took with us and we just wanted to show them how much we care because through the process of Artist Choice, you don't always get to meet everybody that you're funding in a lot of ways. Maybe it's a zoom, maybe it's an email, but when you bring, in this case, the thought leaders together, you're nervous. It's like a first date. And so we wanted to put our best foot forward and we wanted them to like us just as much as we liked them. And, it was vulnerable and it was thought-provoking. But there were no metrics there. There were no goals to accomplish. We knew that it was going to help us inform future programs and we knew that it was going to help share information to other funders who might be interested in kind of what does capacity building really mean, or what is capital investment, or some of those kind of buzzwords that you hear all the time. And we knew that we would have that information but in the moment, what everyone really needed was care and rest. And they needed to not make another decision, which I think you can relate to when you're in the art world. You're just faced with a barrage of decisions to make all the time. And you can feel the fatigue of worrying about making the right choice of the livelihoods that you're caring about the decisions that you're going to make, and if there's going to be backlash, and all these kinds of things. And so we knew that from our own personal experiences, that they might be feeling decision fatigue. They might be feeling the weight of their programming, they might be feeling the sheer pressure of their role, whatever it may be. And we just wanted to say, this is a place where your shoulders might drop a little bit and that you're human. And these are people doing this work and I think we all felt that way. 

Charlotte Burns:  A lot of that feels tied to the fields that you've come from. There's a lot of unhappiness within workers in the field, in the cultural field. There's a lot of disconnect between the sources of funding usually and the staff and the cultural workers. It was interesting what you said earlier about institutions that say they support artists and artists saying they feel supported and it's an interesting distinction. You said in a previous interview, “The biggest challenge we've encountered was to build a healthy workplace and let people undo some of the behaviors they've had on the nonprofit side.” And the convening's focus on healthy work environments is an apparent success. How do you take those learnings and the workplaces you're hoping to foster internally and fund them more broadly? Is that something you're focused on as well? Because I know that the programs right now don’t address that but is that something you’d like to address? 

Karen Patterson: I think thought leader program is about capacity building and structural change. So for example, there are artists’-endowed foundations, like I said, who are working on legacy work. There are people thinking about succession planning, about accessible residencies, about educational models that are no longer viable and how do they build these relationships, institutional partnerships, board change? They are all thinking about those things and for me, a lot of those things contributed to either a wonderful work environment or a very stressful work environment. And when your grant programming only funds programming, all of those other things like succession planning, like board management, like benefits, HR issues are not fundable in that way. And so you never really get an opportunity to address them. And they never really feel like they can be a priority because the funding only goes to one lane of all the things that you do. And so what we hoped with our unrestricted grants was that we could have a conversation of where are they putting the money? What is their priority? If it isn't programming, where would they put it? And that has been very telling to us in terms of where the needs are and where the funding may not be yet. 

Charlotte Burns: In what way? What’s been revealing so far? 

Karen Patterson: I think a lot of organizations are facing capital concerns, the

brick and mortar, very clearly, that there's a lot of capital campaigns that may also then take away from the programming. It also doubles the work amount for staff. That's a real cause of burnout. There were some really successful models about how to build succession planning into your everyday life so that you are understanding the continuum that you are on as a staff member, as a colleague, so that you don't become territorial. You might be more open to sharing. All these things can contribute to a different type of workplace. And I think what we learned even in just offering a caring environment is that it may not feel natural to care for your colleagues right now. And that is heartbreaking to hear. Certainly, some of us have lived that and that's not a funding request. That is just the reality of maybe funders may need, like us should continue to be sensitive to the people that are writing these grants and the people that are coming to you. They're coming to you maybe not feeling generally cared for or valued.

Charlotte Burns: What if you could wave a magic wand? Obviously, resources is part of it. You can do some of that. What if you could fix it? What could you do? You’re thinking about this, I’m sure obviously. 

Karen Patterson: I think a lot about intuition and instinct and how I don't know that I would have even thought about the curatorial career had it not been for Ruth, who insisted on it being a primary responsibility of my job. I wish that we could value instinct and intuition as a structural decision-making tool and maybe move a little bit away from more bureaucratic processes for the sake of having a process. I don't know if that's a popular opinion, but I feel that our team especially, loves to give a hot take and loves to give ‘what ifs’ all the time, and it makes for a wonderful conversation and it makes you realize that things are possible and that the thing that's possible may not have been done before, but that we could do that. 

And so my dream maybe would be to all the wonderful people that I work in the art world, when I have conversations and thinking about my network of curators, where we travel together and you have that glass of wine after you see some shows and just like that gut talk about, “That was a great show. My gosh, that was so good. What'd you like?” like that kind of feeling, energy, about that passion for artists, that passion for art making and maybe not worrying about it going wrong, and I know that's a fairly big ask. Maybe I would say it in a different way. Maybe I would say we could help each other feel more experimental. We could help each other feeling like intuition might be enough here. And instinct might be all we're looking for. It brings a specificity, it brings a point of view. It brings something that you might not have known before. So my wish would be that we support more instinct and intuition. 

Generally speaking, that's where good ideas come from. I think about our pool. I think about how many of these organizations started as artists’ collectives or artists’ ideas. I think our percentage is, my gosh, at least 60 percent of our organizations started by an idea of artists who weren't getting the support where they needed it and started their own thing. And that's gut, that's instinct, and that's intuition, and that's perseverance, and saying that we can do this, and this current model isn't working, so let's do something else. The three of us, the four of us, the five of us. I would say the Ruth Arts pool is made up of a lot of those histories, and it fits so well with Ruth's history of not accepting the status quo, of saying, “If we did it this way, more people would feel excited, more people would feel inspired.” And it's not just about seeing art, it's about seeing what's possible. And I think access to that is really important and I wish that for everyone, that people could see more possibilities.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What if funding wasn't already focused on the status quo, which you've led me into here? The foundation calls itself Midwestern at heart, national in scope, but you're doing something slightly different as well in the way that you approach things. It's not necessarily going towards giving in an established realm, necessarily. And that's what's so interesting about it. Talk to me about that. You’re giving in a different way, you’re giving in different places, you’re giving in different scales. 

Karen Patterson: Yeah, we are able to learn about places through the way that we're giving and the places that artists have pointed us to. Had they all pointed us to New York and LA, it would have also gone that way. It just turns out that people are very interested in all the places across the country. If someone says, “Hey, I'm going to Baltimore, what should I do?” I typically would ask an artist to find out what I'm going to do. And so I think that's how things turned out and we weren't surprised. 

I think we also really wanted to be a part of that national conversation from a different vantage point. And so there are amazing funders in LA, amazing funders in New York, in Chicago, even. And so we just wanted to take advantage of our new role from a different perspective and offer a different perspective, even if to show that it's possible.

Charlotte Burns: That what’s possible? To be national?

Karen Patterson: To be national and not in LA and New York. To be national and be in small spaces. To be national and to be experimental. To be national and be specific. All those things seem very possible to us now. We are a national in scope, and I think we're very specific in the organizations that we're supporting in terms of their unique qualities and their programming.

Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting because that's what artists are seeking. 

Karen Patterson: Yeah. 

And then we can see trends. So the first year, we noticed a lot of residencies in smaller spaces or smaller towns. Bemis [Center for Contemporary Art residency], Headlands [Center for the Arts Artist in Residence (AIR) program], this is where artists discovered this place, through their residency and found community. And so we started to think about the support structures for how an artist lives, how an artist makes, and how an artist is remembered. That became the kind of general theme that we saw through that first year of Artist Choice. 

And then last year, we started to see coalitions and more collaboratives and collectives coming to be nominated. So then we also saw that in the water. Okay, now there's more collaboration, alliances that they're pointing us to. And so we start thinking about how do you offer support in that way too? And how do we mirror that ethos? 

So who knows what we're going to find out this year but it hasn't always been the same. And so we know this is a dynamic way of staying excited and staying in that learning place. 

Charlotte Burns: I love a trend. The journalist in me...

Karen Patterson: I know!

Charlotte Burns: …will never not love a trend. [Laughs]

I wanted to ask you about leadership. You said earlier there's this leadership crisis. How do you define that? We're discussing it too. We're hearing it on the show. I'm hearing it with people I talk to. How do you support leaders?

Karen Patterson: I think when I was a curator, I took for granted the natural community that comes from curators. We travel together, we see each other, we share ideas. And I think for me personally moving into a different role, I'm aware of how isolating leadership can be. You feel varying degrees of support, but not 100 percent support.

Everyone needs something from you and that can be isolating. So, I think the leadership crisis comes from that feeling of isolation and feeling like you're doing it on your own in a lot of ways. 

Charlotte Burns: Do you have other peer groups of leaders? 

Karen Patterson: I do now. Yeah, I do now and I rely heavily. My biggest peer group, of course, is my colleague and program director but I think it is a different way of traveling.

Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Karen Patterson: “What if I got it wrong?” keeps me up at night. Yeah, what if it doesn't work? What if I'm not reaching the right people? What if this doesn't stay creative? What if this doesn't stay as exciting as it does right now? I don't think I've ever had a career that has been such a marriage of continuous learning and crippling self-doubt at the same time. [Laughs] 

And then there's also the very practical ‘what ifs.’ I want to make sure that the distribution of funds is very new to me. There's the IRS and there's trust documents and there's things that I really, you know, that we have to adhere to. And we do but those are new words for me. And I think about those, as I should, every night.

What gets me up in the morning is probably the polar opposite of that. What if we made a big difference? What if people saw themselves as valuable? What if people saw themselves as cared for? What if we help people give it a shot? What if this has a ripple effect?

Charlotte Burns: I think there's more than a ripple effect when it's that seismic a program. It's such a massive amount of funds. It's such a huge ambition of program. It has to be more than a ripple effect. It’s just much more enormous than that. 

Karen Patterson: You asked me at the beginning the ‘what if’ about the $16 million. Money is a tool that the US speaks and it is very effective. But there are so many other tools at our disposal, and so I think about the ripple effect of the funding, absolutely. But I think about the ripple effect of the ethos and the ethics in a more creative way, because I think about how people mostly remember Ruth, will eventually be her ethics and her ethos over the generations. And I think I will play a part in doing that but I think about the ripple effect of maybe the ethos of what we're doing. And of course the funding, but what if we could infuse a little bit of imagination and experimentation into this field?

Charlotte Burns: That's what I mean. I'm sure there are ripple effects, but I feel like it's a bit bigger than that too. When the programs are so ambitious, the scale of it. I feel a ripple is one pebble in a pond. This is lots of ponds and lots of pebbles and lots of stones and some big boulders so it feels like that's more than a ripple, just by the scale of the projects, even. With everything you discussed, with all of the artist projects, with all of the organizations, with all of the convenings, with the thought leadership, with the sites and specifics, with the future risk with…you know, that’s a lot of programs even if you’re talking about ethos. 

Karen Patterson: What a gift we've been given. What a gift to be able to do this. I truly won't know when to stop. It is such a gift and what do you do with a gift like this? You do it. You go all in. You go all in.

Charlotte Burns: It feels like such a profound thing to be in charge of.

Karen Patterson: It is. 

Charlotte Burns: You know, such generosity. Does it change you personally? 

Karen Patterson: Yes, absolutely. I am a different person than I was two years ago. I don't know that anyone that was close to me would ever accuse me of being patient, but I have time. I make time and I take deep breaths and I try to really feel, yeah, I don't even know how to answer that question. It is one of the most profound things that's ever happened to me in my life. And if that's the case, I'm approaching it as though this is one of the most profound things that ever happened in my life. I’m taking full advantage of it. And because of its model, that it is distribution and reciprocity, it gives more than I could ever imagine to me personally, but also to a country that needs it. I don't know. That's so cheesy, but yeah, I feel the sheer act of the first question of what does it feel like to, what if you could distribute $16 million, like what, my goodness. You would go for it. You would really go for it.

Charlotte Burns: Karen, what a great note to end on. I feel like I have to let you go because I feel like you have a lot to go for. [Laughs] 

Thank you so much for making the time. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you over the last couple of years as all of this been building up and I’m sure there will be so much to talk about over the coming years too.

Karen Patterson: Wow. You make it so easy, Charlotte. I really appreciate you. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Really big thanks to Karen Patterson. If you enjoyed our chat, please listen to some of this season’s other brilliant guests including Hoor Al Qasimi, the president and director of Sharjah Art Foundation; Phillip Ihenacho, the director of the Museum of West African Art; and to Salome Asega, the artist and director of NEW INC in New York. All so worth a listen. They’re doing amazing things.

Next time on The Art World: What If…?!, a very special episode. I’m traveling all the way to Alabama to talk to the Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. 

Bryan Stevenson: We created a narrative of racial difference instead. And that narrative of racial difference was like an infection. And I believe the infection has spread. And we've never treated that infection and the consequences of it are still with us today.

Charlotte Burns: I can’t wait for you to hear the show. It’s a very special one.

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 
Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 11: Allan Schwartzman

“The market is poised for a big fall, so it's more ‘when’, than ‘what if’,” says Allan Schwartzman, founder of the podcast. He’s back on the show to talk all about the state of the art market and the broader implications of its changing dynamics for the artists and for the cultural landscape at large. "Greatness doesn't grow at the same rate as a population does," says Allan. "Greatness is extremely rare. And right now we're at a moment where I think there's greater confusion than ever about what actually is going on in art and what will be seen as significant 20 or 30 years from now."

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

Well, what if indeed? That’s what Allan Schwartzman suggested we ask people and what led to this podcast series. Allan is back on the show in this episode, talking about the art market, about collecting, and about the broader implications of the changing dynamics of the industry for artists and the cultural landscape at large. Let’s dive in. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Hi Allan, good morning.

Allan Schwartzman: Good morning, Charlotte.

Charlotte Burns:  So what if we meet again? Have another podcast interview? 

[Laughter]

I think we're going to start with the market because we haven't had a lot of market chat in this season so far. So just a small question to start us off. What if the market is poised for a big fall? What do you think?

Allan Schwartzman: I think the market is poised for a big fall so it's more “what, when” than “what if.” How you measure, how you define a big fall is often misleading. In the years I've been involved in the art world, there have been very few moments but a few of them, where the market as a whole slowed down if it didn't virtually stop. Whether that happens or not, I choose not to speculate because that tends to happen only when there's a confluence of conditions both within art and business and the world. And by the way, I guess we are facing the possibility of such things but nonetheless, there are many different art markets, there are different artists, there are artists who perform badly at auction but whose exhibitions sell out at very healthy prices, so the art market is not necessarily revealed by published statistics. 

We're in this very weird moment where you have a tremendous number of artists, probably more than ever, that have emerged over the last, let's say five or six years. Greatness doesn't grow at the same rate as a population does. Greatness is extremely rare. And right now we're at a moment where I think there's greater confusion than ever about what actually is going on in art and what is significant or what will be seen as significant 20, 30 years from now. So there is more of an appetite for acquiring, for consuming, than there is for really distinguishing individual artists. 

And by the way, I think that's appropriate. I think we're at this very strange moment, which is, I would suspect, is the beginning of a great epochal shift. What art ends up being and how it functions in the world could be substantially different 50 years from now than it is today. So I think this is a period of spreading out rather than focusing in. Every type of art that is potentially compelling today, as soon as one interesting artist emerges, there are 50 interesting artists that emerge. The volume of producers is truly unprecedented. Since a great number of those people don't know of the ups and downs of an art market, but just know the ups of the last few years, I think that as things slow down, as certain artists who went from $20,000 to $2.5 million slip back, you'll see the commitment of collectors, in general, devolving even more rapidly than our confidence in art itself.

I think the contemporary market is inevitably poised for that kind of reduction. It grew at such an extensive rate because we were all successful in building this place as an industry. And in the process, what I've come to realize—and to me, this is like a big warning sign—is that as more money wants to collect art, the people involved become more thoughtful, more cautious, more conservative. So the market ends up concentrating on a few figures and others who had in previous years had very healthy, active careers fall off. The idea that something has first and foremost financial value is one of the consequences of this growth. 

Charlotte Burns: What if there's just too many artists in the market? And a stat jumped out to me from Artnet's latest art Intelligence Report that 1,666 artists made their auction debuts last year at Christie's, Phillips, and Sotheby's and only 2.2 percent of them failed to find buyers. That just seems like so many artists to go into a market in a year in which people were talking a lot about slowing down. Can the system sustain that many artists coming in? And that's into auction. That's not even talking about the galleries around the world.

Allan Schwartzman: I think the market can sustain it if the market evolves into several different sub-communities of collectors. So if the market for attractive works that are credible but not really compelling or challenging grows and sustains itself, then there's a place for that. Thus far, there hasn't been a place for that.

Charlotte Burns: When you say credible, but not really challenging, you mean like for lack of a better term, like merchandise art?

Allan Schwartzman: I would say proficient art. We have a lot of proficient art around us. There's an oversaturation and sometimes if one of those artists happens to be especially remarkable, their work will always stand out. But oftentimes, it gets muddled. 

Charlotte Burns: When we talk about the art funds, what you're talking about is a kind of abundance of money finding its way into art.

Allan Schwartzman: Yes. 

Charlotte Burns: Is that something that's going to slow down? That's not necessarily about art, that's about broader economic structures. 

Allan Schwartzman: Most will fail. The bottom line is that there simply isn't enough great art to go around. And if they raise a decent amount of money, and I don't think money is the challenge, I think there are billions and billions of dollars that are available for such kinds of investments, or playing with x percent of one's net worth. It creates total confusion about what's valuable and what's not and eventually when what an investor is buying does not match up in some way in significance and value with that which collectors and institutions are buying, then you have a real gap. And that gap is where a collapse is likely to happen.

The grammar version of it is that art itself gets degenerated. That art itself becomes less significant. It becomes a place for decor far more than for the brilliance of an individual to see things in a way that none of us could have imagined. That surprise us and always keep us going back for more because we can never fully understand it.

Charlotte Burns: Which version are you leaning towards yourself?

Allan Schwartzman: I'm always leaning toward the latter. That's why I'm involved in art. [Laughs] I maintain my faith in art and artists. I think it's always there. It's not lost on me that it may not entirely be there at the moment, but it emerges. As the world goes through its changes, I think you will see artists responding in kind and you'll see people who are motivated to become artists who might not have been at another time and where the greatness of the future of the present comes from as we see it in the future. I have no crystal ball.

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about value. In her podcast recently, Barbara Gladstone said you can't really work out value yet, maybe for the eighties or maybe for the nineties, but it's too early for anything that came after that. So as an advisor, how do you think about what holds the test of time? If things are so confusing. What if we've gotten value wrong for the last 24 years? How do you think about that as you give advice to people?

Allan Schwartzman: In every decade that I've been involved in the art world, you could tell in the moment that artists were emerging, which ones were the most compelling of the time. In these last years, that's no longer the case. And that's where that endless population and endless optionality has become truly confusing. I could tell you, I shouldn't say I could tell you, I'm not going to tell you, but I could tell my clients which work I think is particularly interesting by younger artists emerging today. I could tell you which artists who emerged at the beginning of this century I find more compelling than others. 

But what we've chosen to do is, I always believe in collecting young, regardless of one's budget, one's area of collecting. Take a small percentage of your budget and buy because supporting artists makes a huge difference. First of all, too often in recent years, the art market has become focused more on artworks than on the works of artists, and that can kill the whole cycle of creativity. So I think it's important if you're a member of this community in some way to be supporting artists period. 

Some collectors who I work with are very interested in the new, but the majority of mature collectors that I've been working with are focusing more on re-examining their collections, identifying areas that they missed or they feel like they need to collect in greater depth because they're thinking about their collections as a whole and not as an assembly of many things.

Charlotte Burns: How about you? How do you think about your own collection?

Allan Schwartzman: Oh, I'm totally indiscreet in my own collection. I would never follow what I do as a collector if I were a client of mine. Certainly during Covid I became as acquisitive as everyone else just to the scale that I could afford to and I'm happy that I was. [Laughs] But there's a certain point in time where even I said, “I own too much, I need to slow down right now.” But I would say, I have no idea. I've probably, let me guess, that I've probably collected the work of 25 to 30 artists who have emerged in the last five or six years. If I look at any other decades since I've been involved in art, if I had the money then that I had now, I would never have bought that many artists. I just wouldn't have thought there were that many that were worthy. I think I would have collected three in a decade, five in a decade.

Charlotte Burns: So what's different?

Allan Schwartzman: The volume.

Charlotte Burns: There's more interesting artists?

Allan Schwartzman: At a certain point the market kept rising and the ante for entering into the market of a somewhat promising artist jumped quite quickly from a few thousand dollars to $40,000 and $50,000. That slowed down rapidly. So in the last number of years, prices have come down substantially. Some of that is an unfortunate consequence of the inability or the discomfort of certain younger galleries to ride a wave away with their artists within the market. But sometimes it means that there are more options out there. And so I think the market got more real in terms of young emerging artists. I think in the same way that nobody wants to be a museum director today, I don't think any young art dealer, at least one that I can identify, wants to be a Larry Gagosian of the future.

Charlotte Burns: That's such an interesting way of putting it. What do you think they want to do instead? 

Allan Schwartzman: Not to denigrate Larry but to say that the idea of being a monolithic business, one that dominates a field, is just not in the DNA of this generation. At least so far, what I see are a lot of people who believe in art and they do what they do, but I don't see business plans. There's a different way of going about it.

Charlotte Burns: Less strategic? Less focused on the financial?

Allan Schwartzman: I see more of an inconsistency in the stables of many younger galleries. When Paula Cooper emerged, virtually every artist in her gallery was truly compelling in their own ways. Nowadays it's far more common that you see a few artists in a gallery that, at least that I find, truly compelling. So there's an unevenness in terms of the work, which in turn, results in a great vulnerability to the business itself.

There's always the threat that a very strong artist in a very young gallery gets sucked up by a major gallery. And oftentimes, the selectivity of a gallery, the connoisseurship of the gallery itself has a big impact on who the clients are who are coming in, to what extent a dealer is able to jump a price when it seems appropriate to demand to higher numbers than they had ever gone before.

Charlotte Burns: It seems like we've been in this moment of consolidation with the big galleries at the top, and their acquisitiveness as well in terms of taking on other artists and that massive growth of their stables. But there's a slight shift away from that now. There's a slightly gentler approach with some of those mega dealers to say, “We're not going to insist on being the only. Let's do things in tandem with smaller galleries.” Do you think that's sustainable, or do you think the natural dominance of those mega dealers will show through in the end?

Allan Schwartzman: I greatly hope that sustains. It's something that's been plaguing me for years now. How it is that artists get sucked up and get removed from the context of their own generation. If that's what the artist desires, then so be it. But, I think galleries at every financial level are important to this ecosystem if they're doing compelling work. One thing that happens when the market narrows down and consolidates into a few massive players is that on the one hand, the way of doing business becomes more corporate. On the other hand, the ability of one person of significance in that gallery to begin to see the benefit of doing things slightly differently is very possible. And that's exactly where we are at. How scalable is that? Not that scalable. What I'm interested to see is if the instances in which a “mega gallery” partners with a younger gallery for the representation of individual artists, if the artists they focus on indeed become the most compelling of their generation, or if it's just a somewhat random process.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wonder the extent to which artists feel their needs are being served. Obviously, some feel they are. We've been witnessing lots of artists creating their own models. There's been a lot of money in the market and some highly successful artists have been using the platform of their own success to create new vehicles often focused on helping other artists and so they've seen the gaps and they want to try and help create infrastructure to fill those gaps for other artists. You can name artists like Simone Leigh, Tavares Strachan...

Allan Schwartzman: Michael Armitage, Titus Kaphar, Kehinde Wiley. 

Charlotte Burns: Julie Mehretu.

Allan Schwartzman: There are many other names and what you’re identifying is virtually all of these artists are artists of color, primarily Black, who early on in their success want to give back and it's very natural to artists who have struggled to enter into a world that seems inhospitable to them on their own terms, to then want to build opportunities for others. I remember visiting Titus several years ago at NXTHVN and he said that when he was at Yale [School of Art] taking various classes, he asked, “When am I going to learn about how to support myself as an artist?” And they said, “Oh, we don't teach that.” And he said, “I can't be an artist if I can't support myself.” 

So here is an artist who in no way, ever compromised the art that he was making, but at the same time, he had to have an eye toward supporting himself because he had no other option. And so he chose to stay in New Haven. He chose the moment that he had money to create a community center that is probably one of the most vital artist residency and community business development models out there. This is truly compelling. I think the changes in power are a consequence of that and not the goal of that.

Charlotte Burns: What do you mean?

Allan Schwartzman: What I mean is this: simply for each of these artists, a very natural thing to do, to reach out into the community, whether it's into the community of the neighborhood, or the community of artists, in order to make things easier for them than it was for others.

Charlotte Burns: Do you think some of that's about the way that culture is seen? I'm thinking here of an interview, with another guest this season, Laura Raicovich. She wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, I think it was called, “If you want to save culture, think of it like highways, [To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways]” arguing that earmarking even 0.5 percent of a bipartisan federal bill in 2021 that allocated $1.2 trillion to national infrastructure projects over five years would mean sending $6 billion towards cultural organizations across America. And so it's a financial argument that she's making, but it's also a philosophical one saying culture shouldn't be seen as a rarefied thing over there, it's part of an infrastructure.

Allan Schwartzman: So art has never been central to this country, the United States. In fact, it was often seen more as a threat than an enrichment. It certainly has been very easy to demonize art politically. We saw this throughout the ‘80s with the AIDS crisis and politicians seizing opportunities to slash budgets for the arts because I think because there's just simply too much freedom there. I believe that artists know best what artists need. Ultimately, knowing that artists can support what they believe in and hopefully that that money can over time could be mobilized in more effective ways is one of the great powers moving forward. It's certainly where I've been focusing my work. I continue, of course, to work with collectors and that part of the business grows, but the area that I'm focusing on the most is on advisory work for artists’ foundations, for artists in creating legacy building, and artists at different stages of their careers. Not in competition with galleries at all, but as a complement to it. I would say that part of that is a consequence of corporate growth. It's inevitable that when there is a strong market for certain kinds of art that the galleries become far more transactional. But also, as there's been more money earned by artists, there are more needs of artists and that really hadn't been addressed by the system. So looking to the future and recognizing that the population of artists multiplied in the ‘60s with the baby boomer generation and also recognizing that the oldest of the baby boomers are in their seventies and eighties. There's a lot of meaningful art out there and substantial wealth that has not been planned as well as it could be, if at all, and that certainly has not been looked at as a population rather than a world of individuals.

Charlotte Burns:  It's really interesting what you say because I remember a million years ago when I was the US news editor at The Art Newspaper writing about this new and growing industry called artists’ estates, and foundations. And there'd been a report by the Aspen Institute and I was recently looking at the figures for that. It was published in 2015 so almost a decade ago. The value then was around $7.5 billion which is around $10 billion today if adjusted for inflation. And obviously, the number of artist-endowed philanthropies, as in the number of organizations, has grown exponentially since then, and the value of the assets they hold has grown. There is no equivalent cultural artist-endowed philanthropy in any other country in the world like that. It's really an American phenomenon. It's to do with the privately held wealth. It's to do with the culture of philanthropy in America. And it's tied totally to what you're talking about the boomer generation and the phenomenon of that market moment coming together. 

Allan Schwartzman: Setting aside the last decade in which we've indicated there's been a massive growth in the artist population, and we're not quite sure where that shakes out, but even for artists prior to that, there aren't enough museums in the world or collectors in the current market to absorb all of that art. And so legacy planning isn't just thinking about what your ambitions and goals are. It's also about envisioning how to create alternatives that can that can absorb a lot of great art that isn't necessarily what the market is actively seeking or what museums are actively showing. It's about recognizing that artists are stronger together than apart.

Charlotte Burns: So what if philanthropy weren't so feudal? 

Allan Schwartzman: I think that will change. There are so many weird inefficiencies when you look at art. I think what we need are more people to be steering such wealth into recognizing you can be on the board of the Museum of Modern Art and you can give it as much money as you want, but you can also put 10 percent of that amount and give it to other kinds of organizations and cultural startups that are the promise of the future. So I think it's about connecting more than anything.

Charlotte Burns: There was a recent report by UBS that predicts that $5.2 trillion is expected to be passed from around a thousand American baby boomer billionaires to their children over the next 20 years. It's known as the “great wealth transfer,” but all the signs are that the next generation is not that interested in cultural philanthropy. And so there's also a question of this generational disconnect. So it's not just a philanthropy.  Dealers talk about this a lot. They say that the next gen just isn't collecting in the same way. Are you experiencing that within your business. Do you see things differently?

Allan Schwartzman: I don't see that differently amongst my clientele. I think that's a particularly American phenomenon. The vast majority of new collectors, which are indeed the bulk of the population of collectors in this country, tend to collect contemporary art. And when they collect contemporary art, it becomes this passion that takes up all day Saturday and sometimes parts of Sunday. And so you have lots of children who were raised feeling second to the art. [Laughs] And so you see that acted out when parents die. However, there are many families of multigenerational collecting where the art is seen as central to the family and the family's identity and legacy. I've been approached recently by such families where the children are looking to find their way within culture because whether or not what their parents collected was meaningful to them, the idea of culture and supporting it is central. So again, I think it's about access. A lot of very wealthy people who have to give away money and there are a few outlets through which they can begin to think in an innovative way about that. We certainly have seen a few people emerge from the worlds of massive wealth who are thinking differently about it. And that hopefully has influence over others. There's a lot more room in which to grow, but it's needed. If museums, who are the repositories of these things, are starting to become much more select about what it is that they accept, then, you need alternatives.

Charlotte Burns: There was always this sense too that there might be an endless boom. If you think back to the beginning of this century, there were areas of new wealth emerging and optimism around what that might look like, and this sense that culture could be a sort of ambassador for democratic values around the globe. And I don't think anybody believes that anymore. It's been this global expansion in the market and museums and biennials, this entire international thing going on for the last couple of decades. And it feels like that's already coming to a different phase in the cycle. There aren't going to be museums all over China that can take all the art. That feels clear already. Do you agree that phase is over? Where do you think we are in that cycle?

Allan Schwartzman: I think we are still in a cycle where countries of newer wealth, so to speak, are building the most ambitious infrastructures for the arts. You see this a lot in the Middle East. And there, art is seen as central to globalization, toward building bridges between cultures that otherwise have been untrusting of one another. And  already you can see it having made a difference. And it will continue to make a difference. There are just so many countries that can emerge that are going to pour massive amounts of wealth into building great museums and the most innovative buildings of our time. But there are individuals who have the wealth of small nations. And I do see case by case an openness to find something that someone can do culturally that can last and that is a reflection of their values. I think we're going to be finding more such models where an individual more often than not an artist, recognizes that they can make a difference in their communities in the same way that someone else made a difference for them when they were younger, but through the arts. It's the part of the museum crisis we face here today that wasn't considered more thoroughly until it's starting to be considered now, which is the extent to which a museum is a central civic center. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Allan, that brings us perfectly on to Yoko Ono. The idea that one person can be the change in the world. I know you wanted to talk about Yoko. Shall we? 

Allan Schwartzman: Yes. Absolutely. I was in London a few weeks ago for the opening [of a Yoko Ono retrospective at the Tate.] Yoko Ono is a complicated figure within culture of the last, let's say, 60, 70 years. She is extremely well known to the extent that very few artists are. This is a woman of significant power and presence in the world that grew massively when she developed a relationship with John Lennon. So here's a woman who arrives in New York in the late 1950s, early 1960s, she's going back and forth to Japan. If one looks at the art this is a woman who was central to the Fluxus movement and to the avant-garde in New York and what I would think of as the last generation of the avant-garde in New York. And she was one of the critical figures. She had no money, but she supported performances of some of the most innovative musicians of our time. If you look at the early work from let's say the early ‘60s, through just about 1970, you see a massive amount of work that's innovative in almost every way. I mean, she made conceptual paintings before there was a term for conceptual art. She envisioned an entire ecosystem or world of imagination when she created Grapefruit, which is a book in which she wrote out instructions, many of which have been realized in actual artworks and many of which have not. But in that, you see a kind of treatise of a universe of imagination. 

And part of what I have come to realize and respect about the work is that the work's very rigorous on the one hand, but it's very open and generous and expansive in the most abstract ways, but ways that are very accessible and not encumbered by complicated language. 

Then she moves to London, marries John Lennon, gets derided for, “destroying the Beatles,” which isn't an accurate description of that part of history. She becomes the catalyst for some of the largest cultural events in the world. And this is such activities as the bed-ins or work related to music that's related to work that she herself created with the word “imagine.” And it's all in response to the Vietnam War, and it's a call for peace, and it has a power that I don't know any artist has had since. 

So here's an artist who spans from the most rigorous but generously spirited part of the avant-garde into the most accessible, highest-level link within pop culture, and that's a massive arc of involvement that I don't think has ever been recognized. This exhibition at the Tate—which is in London—this is the first exhibition I've seen that spans her entire production from early to most recent, while at the same time showing a clear throughline in her spirit and how she rose to speak to a larger world through the audience that she had greater access to. She's certainly the most under-celebrated artist of massive impact of the post-war period, as far as I'm concerned. 

One of the beauties of that show is that it ends with a recording of a performance at the Sydney Opera House on her 80th birthday, which is one of the most radical performances I've ever seen. Very difficult to envision the avant-garde which one associates with youth with someone of such advanced years. 

Charlotte Burns: What if you rethink someone who's just been in the background of your life forever? Everybody feels like they know Yoko Ono, and then the more you dig into it, the more you feel she's an artist whose innovations have just been in plain sight and either misunderstood or credited otherwise, whether it's the concept as a material or advertising as a medium or light and space or performances, carrying scissors, inviting the world to interact with her and all of this before she even met Lennon, let alone imagination manifestation and everything that speaks so much to a TikTok generation.

Allan Schwartzman: It’s this confluence of the radical and of a most generous spirit in the most expansive form. So there's this beautiful accessibility and openness to her work. It's work that you feel can be meaningful anytime, anywhere. And we'll take on meaning within the context in which it's displayed.

Charlotte Burns: It's interesting because it's been so reduced and flattened often. If I'd encountered her work in an art context before, it was almost sentimental and twee, and it's annoying, actually, to understand that I'd grasped it in that way, that I'd absorbed it in that way. When you understand actually how complex the simplicity is what's so radical about it. The instruction to Imagine is what's so generous and amazing about it. What if our best artists are in plain sight? What if we can imagine the world? 

Allan Schwartzman: Exactly. And also, not feeling the need to respond to criticism, the market, or anything. She just stayed very contained within herself and continued to do what she did. But when you start to learn about her biography, some of this becomes that much more touching and meaningful. The idea of imagining the sky was something that came to her when she was very young, right after World War II when Japan was destroyed. Some of it comes out of brutal realities that she had a natural way to transform or to contain or understand, through her imagination. And an imagination that was always in words. 

Charlotte Burns: She was born into nobility and wealth and then woke in the middle of the night to firebombing of the Allied forces when Tokyo was firebombed. And went to a shelter, they left, they were evacuated, and that was exactly what you're referring to when her and her brother would lie and imagine. She said they would read menus in the sky of the food they would eat. And to go from that to the life she leads is so miraculous and strange. But also, she did mostly rise above it, but there are a few funny notes in there correcting people when credit was always given to other people and there are a few moments where there are letters in the archives of, “Actually when I did this avant-garde performance, I would like you to know that I did it five years before this other person.” 

Allan Schwartzman: Well, she was subject to a massive amount of sexism and racism. But she could live with it. Somehow it didn't define who she was. It didn't direct her in particular ways. She just remained steadfast to her own sensibility. 

Charlotte Burns: I’m sure it impacted her.

Allan Schwartzman: Going back to your question about are we living in a great time for young artists? I think that a vast amount of the work that I've been seeing of younger artists suggests to me that they don't know what their sensibilities are. I think they're making ahead of conceiving or envisioning. And maybe that's our time. Maybe this is a time in which imagination is less vital. I hope not.

Charlotte Burns: What art is, what you said at the beginning of this, I think is shifting but again to your point about Yoko, that's exactly what she was saying, way back when, that it wasn't necessarily a material thing. As John Lennon climbed up on a ladder, looked through a magnifying glass, and saw the word “yes” on a ceiling. What if we could see old artists in new ways? 

Allan Schwartzman: What if we could occupy our imaginations with what art can be that it isn't currently? What if we can begin to create a framework for understanding that can make sense of and embrace that which by which we might not otherwise be moved? 

[Musical Interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Allan, do you have any ‘what ifs’ of your own?

Allan Schwartzman: What if, and I don't think this is an “if” so much as a “when,” but what if curators become more empowered by the institutions they work with to develop their own views of art and culture and what is vital today, rather than to present best examples of artists who have gained the financial support that it takes to drive their exhibitions forward?

Charlotte Burns: Do you think that's possible? Do you think that can happen?

Allan Schwartzman: Yes. Yes, I think it's inevitable. Actually, I do. I think, first of all, the cost of blockbusters has gone up so dramatically that sometimes they're not the revenue generators that they were deemed to be. But I think all the critique that's gone on over the last number of years about institutions and gaps between, let's say audience and institution amongst many other gaps. I think we're seeing it. 

Look at Crystal Bridges [Museum of American Art]. This is a museum that could have been one very rich person's folly. And yet, they have been more innovative and more responsive to areas of need within the world of culture than most museums could ever think of being. I have great hopes for The Lucas Museum [Museum of Narrative Art]. That initially sounded like it was going to be a place where the Norman Rockwell’s of the world were collected and now you have one of the most thoughtful people in our field as director and also one as curator who are really delving very deeply and profoundly into what innovation means. 

So I do think that you just need one or two people to believe in your idea in order to fund it. But there's a lot more people out there who maybe they don't start their own institutions, but they sit on the boards of others. I think it's about shifting values and therefore finding equal or greater meaning than that measured primarily by the financial side. 

But do I have a ‘what if?’ You've asked me this before. And I came up with this phrase, “what if” for this series and I do not have a what if. I didn't have it then and I don’t have it now.

Charlotte Burns: But that's the one. That was your one. That’s a big enough one. [Laughs]

Allan Schwartzman: I'm too pragmatic to have a ‘what if.’ I just go ahead and start doing things. And little stays in the realm of ‘what if.’

Charlotte Burns: Do you have a ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night? I like asking people this question because I'm fascinated by who's “No, I'm, I never get a bad nights’ sleep.”

Allan Schwartzman: Oh, this is probably very mundane, but what keeps me up at night is all the things that I didn't do that day that I was supposed to do. It's all about the backlog.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. What's the ‘what if’ that gets you up in the morning, Allan?

Allan Schwartzman: I have to say, since I was 19 I've been working full-time in the art field and it began at a time when there was no market for young artists. I get up every day to continue doing what I'm doing because it's fulfilling to me. It's fulfilling and inspiring and it keeps me going. Again, it's a rather mundane answer to a very big question.

Charlotte Burns: I don't think so. I think it's great. 

So we meet again, Allan, on the podcast. I'm sure it won't be the last. 

Allan Schwartzman: Thank you.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks as always to Allan. And, if you enjoyed our conversation please check out some of this season’s other highlights including the amazing singer/songwriter Alice Smith, the artist Alvaro Barrington, the philanthropist Jarl Mohn, and the art dealer Barbara Gladstone. They’re all in our back catalogue. 

Next time we’ll be talking to Karen Patterson, the executive director of the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.

Karen Patterson: Money is a tool that the US speaks, and it is very effective. But there are so many other tools at our disposal, and so I think about the ripple effect of the funding, absolutely. But I think about the ripple effect of the ethos and the ethics in a more creative way, cause I think about how people mostly remember Ruth will eventually be her ethics and her ethos over the generations.

Charlotte Burns: Such a great conversation to come. Join us next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 10: Kemi Ilesanmi

We welcome back Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of The Laundromat Project and one of the standout stars of our first season. In season one, Kemi was just about to head off on the trip of a lifetime around 13 countries, including 10 in Africa. She promised to come back and tell us how the trip changed her ‘what ifs.’ “I'm looking for freedom of movement, freedom of ideas, and freedom of manifestation of those ideas. Right now, it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.” 

Kemi talks about creating a “beautiful, joyful, sustainable, cultural infrastructure for Black and brown people across the globe,” and asks, “What if that were possible? And what if I could help with that? And who else could help with that?”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns and this is a podcast all about imagining different ways of doing things.

[Audio of guests] 

I’m delighted to say that we are welcoming back Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of The Laundromat Project and one of the standout stars of our first season. When we last spoke, Kemi was just about to head off on a gap year around 13 countries including 10 in Africa: Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. And Mexico, India, and Italy. What an adventure.

But Kemi promised to come back and tell us all about how the trip changed her ‘what ifs.’ We talk about histories, about cultural leadership, about freedom, and about time. All this and much more. 

Let’s do it. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, I'm so thrilled to say here we are in person in New York. In our last interview, we said we were going to hold you to coming back to tell us all about how your amazing gap year went. And here you are, you have held up your end of the bargain, and you are back this time live in the studio. How did everything go? 

Kemi Ilesanmi: First of all, thank you, I'm honored to be a returnee guest. That was a public commitment we made to each other, so really happy to be back. And it was exactly what it needed to be. It was a dreamy, exploratory, joyful, surprising, and just absolutely amazing gap year. I think about it as a gift to myself—I was traveling with my husband, so it was a gift to us.

Charlotte Burns: When we did that show, we were talking about that year that you took as a kind of ‘what if,’ like what if we took that time, what if we gave ourselves that space to dream. And so I was curious about whether you had epiphanies along the way. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: A lot of what I kept reminding myself and giving myself permission was to just be and let things wash over and accumulate. We visited 13 countries over the course of a year. Anything from a day in Lesotho all the way to six weeks in Italy, five weeks in India. 

India echoed through the rest of the trip. I grew up in Nigeria, also a British colony, so connections to India showed up there. Ethiopia and India have a number of similarities, so that was interesting because India was the second place we visited in February, March and they continue to be on my brain all the way through Kenya as I'm eating chapati dishes. 

Charlotte Burns: We just aired an interview with Phillip Ihenacho and we talked a lot about history in that—what objects mean, what it means when history is disrupted and history is taken away. And I guess you thought a lot about lineages of history and the brutalities of history, as you were traveling around.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely. Every place we travel to has something that shook us out of our sense of self in some way, and that's the beauty of travel. And at the same time, I'm West African, so being along that particular coast was incredible. Nigeria was certainly the heart of the trip for me. We went from Nigeria to Ghana, Benin, and Togo. One of the things we did was the slave route. Each of those countries had a major slave port—several in some cases—sites of memory and return for a lot of folks from diaspora and particularly New World. I'm Black American. My mother is a descendant of enslaved people in the United States, Maryland, and my father's Nigerian. I grew up there and I have a home at Elysia in Nigeria. One of the things that really captured me in thinking about history was seeing how that was narrated on the other side and being able to spend time at various doors of return, doors of no return—there are a lot of plays on this idea of return and not returning. Understanding the roles that different people played in the slave trade as a business, a business of horror and terror, but a business. And the different physical spaces, literally forests, rivers, oceans, dungeons, the architectures of aesthetically beautiful spaces like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana was really deeply shifting. A place of just deep feeling, and trying to navigate that with two histories coming together for me was just one of the things that I didn't know how to imagine, I didn't put together what we're doing until we were in it. That was something that I'll continue to think about and unravel. I don't know all the things I think about that so I'm going to stop here because it was such a…what I'm trying to get at here because it was so, um…

Charlotte Burns: Take a minute. Take a sip of tea.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes, I'll take a sip of tea. It's something that I'm still thinking about. I'm not sure I have enough to make it.

Charlotte Burns: You don't have the distance.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I don't have the…I haven’t had a chance to write about it because it is so crumpled in my head. And I do think that was interesting, just being on both sides of the Atlantic and having that story accumulate over a three-week period that we did that slave route.

Charlotte Burns: I guess you're trying to sift through. Maybe that's the point as you think about those histories. Is that still where things are for you? Are you trying to land on a narrative of what that meant for you?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I think it will take me decades longer to land on a narrative of all of what that meant because it introduced new threads to the story. 

One of the things that was also really fascinating that happened particularly on that same route was migration. Because people had moved around. We all know that colonial borders landed on people who were already there, often cut through communities of people, ethnic groups, and folks who had been in trade, conversation, intermarriage, wars, et cetera, for sometimes centuries. Showing up in Ghana and learning that the Ga people which would be people in the Accra region, actually came from Ife, half an hour from my hometown of Elysia. Connections between the Ashanti and the Yoruba, the Fon people of Benin and the Yoruba—which is what I am—Igbo migration routes. I'm familiar with several of the incredible ethnic groups in Nigeria. Some of those histories would show up in other places. Being on the ground and having history narrated to me that continued to make those links was really actually fascinating. 

Also, we visited a lot of palaces and royal homes because it turns out humans love royalty—wherever you go and have created those kinds of hierarchies within communities, since the beginning of time it seems. While I don't subscribe to the, “And we all came from Kings and Queens” version of history—that's not how I need to connect to my African heritage. But there was something really incredible about visiting Abomey in Benin, and the Ashanti Kingdom in Ghana, and Ife in Nigeria, the ancestral seat of the Yoruba, and seeing written lists of who ruled and what kinds of wars that they often led in trying to defend themselves and remain independent of the British, or the French, or the German—there were lots of layers of colonial histories. That was fascinating and would get me every time because they would go back to the year 10,000, the year 1500. Seeing it written was part of my own re-education. A calendar that started in 1200 and brought me all the way to a current Oba in the year 2023 was really powerful to think about those lineages and the continuity because there's so much fragmentation in the histories of Black people. So seeing a line that didn't feel broken was actually really powerful.

Charlotte Burns: How does that feel for you? And what impact that has on the stories you tell yourself because I know you think about the stories you tell and the seeds that they plant. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: It really grounded me in a sense of a longer history that I could point to as opposed to simply feel.

So one of the greatest gifts of the year to me is linked to these lineages—and similar things happen in other parts of the continent—was a sense of my own internal geography shifting. I've lived in the United States for almost 40 years, moving here when I was 15 and prior, birth to six. One of the gifts of the last year was feeling like I moved into the ocean, across the ocean, and I hover somewhere between Nigeria and Ethiopia and South Africa. I read the newspaper. I think about art and artists I want to follow with a different lens. I wake up with questions that concern the African continent, the diaspora, connect to them differently because I got to understand the breadth of the continent. I had lived experiences. My perspective on the world, what feels most relevant and interesting, and the things I want to learn more about. Something about my own inner geography really shifted. That was not something I knew what it would feel like. I don't think I'd have used those words to describe it a year and a half ago. 

Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting because there were questions I had for you last time that I didn't get around to asking you. I wanted to ask you what home is and how we think about home. And I realized probably it has a totally different resonance now. But this is something that's in your career. The way I'd wanted to ask you about that last time was to do with the artist Nari Ward, one of the earliest artists that you'd worked with in your career. What if we can think about home and what it is and how we think about it through art and diaspora and through cultural networks?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Home is such a big container. It took me many years, but for a number of years now, I describe myself as Nigerian and American. I do not hyphenate because they're equal footing to me. One of the things I wanted to explore over this year was to give myself deeper roots to my sense of home in Nigeria, which is a place that I claim, and it's very important to me. However, I hadn't been to my hometown in 20 years because my family lives in a different part of the country and it's actually logistically complicated. Some of that was about wanting to reconnect to it as a place that has an active contemporary art scene. So I timed my whole Nigeria trip specifically to be there for ART X LAGOS and art season—which basically is most of October through early December. Many different festivals, literary, film, carnival. It was incredible because contemporary art is where I've made my life, my own professional life, and being able to thread that back with what was happening in Lagos and in different parts of the continent was so important and so enriching and so fun.

That became incredibly grounding to a sense of home because I already had a deep personal connection to Nigeria, to the continent, but being able to knit that was something that is so defining for me in my life in the United States, which is my career, which is in the contemporary art and has been now for over 25 years—I started at the Walker [Art Center] in 1998. That was really thrilling. 

I participated in a first-time performance art festival called Continuum in Ibadan, which is a couple of hours from Lagos. A woman named Amber Sijuwade—who grew up here in the States, but is bicultural—had moved to Ibadan and worked with Jelili Atiku, a performance artist, a Nigerian Yoruba man. Amber found me on Instagram, and said, “Oh, I see you're traveling to Nigeria and coming through Ibadan. Will you be here around this festival?” The dates she offered were the dates I was planning to be in Ibadan. Of all the times and all the years and all the months of the year, it was that week. So I said, “Yes, I'm there and I'd love to participate.” And getting to go…Ibadan has a long importance in the modern, the story of modern Nigerian art in the 50s and 60s. Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence were so enamored of a short visit they had to Ibadan for a show that they came home to the United States, sold all their stuff, and moved and spent almost a year in Nigeria with Ibadan at the center. That's how important it was. Amber and Jelili really wanted to remind Ibadan of what it had been and what it could be and of the art and the history that lived right there. 

Artists came out. I got to meet all kinds of young, exciting artists doing performance, which performance, Egungun, masquerade, performance is a part of Nigeria and West Africa's incredible cultural history, but not necessarily through a contemporary art lens, right? It just has other ways it shows up. So being able to pull from that, being able to deal with issues of migration, queerness, gender, and all the things that these incredible, oftentimes much younger artists, like 20s, 30s, was really fantastic. And I could not have imagined that six months prior when Amber, DM'd me and I was like, “Yeah, I'd love to come.” [Laughs] And that's the sort of thing, being open to that and knowing that those kinds of things were happening in a very beautiful, homegrown way and that I could contribute and be part of it and experience it was what I tried to always remain open to while we were traveling. People were so incredibly generous to me and would invite us to things and open their studios and it was just incredible. And that just happened over and over again. 

That was just one particular story about Continuum. But that was part of what made the whole continent home for me. Koyo Kouoh who runs Zeitz MOCAA [Museum of Contemporary Art Africa]—which was a place we got to visit—and spent time with a curator, Thato Mogotsi who again, sends a note “Great! Why don't you come to the museum? We can have lunch and I'll take you around.” Amazing. Beautiful. But Koyo, I read a quote of hers where she talked about, and I'm not getting it exactly right, but I exist in the continent and the continent exists in her, right? She is a child and a woman of Africa and the whole continent is hers. It's a very Pan-African viewpoint, which I share. And I've come back with a sense of the whole continent being mine. Nigeria is a place I can point to and it's my home base. I love it, but I also have a deep connection now to Akron, the beautiful art, and other ways I got to experience that city and the way that Ethiopia has its own sense of the world. They have their own calendar, they have their own time clock. We all know they have their own food. [Laughs] That was really incredible to be able to immerse myself in that. 

I've always thought about the Atlantic Ocean because I had ancestors who crossed that on purpose—my father migrated to the United States—and of course, I have ancestors, I'll never even know their names, who did not cross on purpose but did indeed cross. The Atlantic has always had deep spiritual meaning for me out of that. Spending time in India, particularly in Kerala, which is the very south of India, and getting to visit the Kochi[-Muziris] Biennial. They had a lot of artists from the Swahili coast and from different countries that are in the Indian Ocean. And then we spent time in South Africa. So when we hit Durban and that section where Indian Ocean, we spent time in Kenya and ended up in Lamu, which is on the Indian Ocean, and just trade and connection to countries, particularly India—I told you it echoed through the trip. It again reoriented me to a sense of a different ocean that also has had an impact on me, my continent, in ways that were important. And I just never thought about the Indian Ocean in that way, and those trade routes and how it shows up in the food we eat and the architecture I was sometimes seeing, and the ways that land, migration, exchange, and conflict have just been part of the human experience and journey since we could walk and go out and discover and allow our curiosities to lead the way, which can then tip into greed and a lot of other ways that humans show up in the world. But it again just really shifted my sense of the world and how it connects and opened up different homes to me.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I can't imagine having had a year how you can absorb those really profound experiences that it sounds like you've had into your life. You left after a big change for you professionally. You stepped down from running The Laundromat Project. It was a big turning point in your career. You went on this gap year. You've come back. How do you absorb everything, all of those different experiences, and take it into your practice going forward?

Kemi Ilesanmi: That's a very good question. I just assume that's going to be the rest of my life, that this experience will reverberate sometimes in ways I might expect and control and sometimes that I won't. 

And so here's a secret. So, I was leaving a job that had been such a deep part of my identity for 10 years, and I was on the board of the LP for 5 years prior to that, but part of it is that I wanted to give myself a new identity. I knew it would be important for me to not just leave and then what am I going to do? But actually give myself a break, yes. But also give myself an avenue to just think about the world differently and think about myself differently and also invite other people to think about me differently. Not just, “Oh, you're the former executive director of this organization,” but also that, “Oh, you're the person who took that trip and saw these things and shared them,” which I love doing and was really important to me to be able to do that. 

So I do feel like I have a different identity that I feel and that I had a say in creating a sense of a different entry point for conversations for myself. And that sense of the world just opening up and different links and connections opening up are the ways that I think a lot of this will show up. I have followed so many new ideas that were introduced to me.

Charlotte Burns: Were you feeling in danger of burning out?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I generally don't think of myself as having been burnt out. I think it was really tough the last few years because of Covid. It meant the last two to three years were the equivalent of ten years, in the sense of the level of stress and complexity of the job in that time. I was very tired and so were we all. It's hard not to be tired but because I already had a sense of when things were ending, it allowed me to pace myself differently. I already knew how long my job was. And I was like, “Woah, this section of it is a lot harder and tougher than I thought it was going to be.” But I had a sense of internal pacing.

Charlotte Burns: You knew it was a 10-year.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I knew it was a 10-year job. So I was like, I guess the last three years are going to have a marathon quality, which is not what I was expecting. But I always had a minimum of a week, sometimes two weeks off every freaking quarter for the entire 10 years. It was part of my self-pacing. So there was always an escape valve. So then the year was a different unit but it was related to, “Oh, you just worked really hard building something for 10 years, so maybe two weeks isn't going to be enough.” A year!

Charlotte Burns: Makes sense. [Laughter]

You talked about The Laundromat Project being a 10-year job. You're someone who is good at numbers. You're a data person. You like to measure things. As you look ahead, how are you thinking about this next phase of your career? As much as you want to talk publicly about what you want to do.

Kemi Ilesanmi: One of the things I don't currently have about the next phase is an exact horizon, timeline on it, which I find interesting. I've usually thought in five-year increments through my career. When I was at the Walker, it was my first time working in an art institution. I don't have any art degrees except that I learned everything on the job. 

I realized, “Oh if I want to make this art career, I have to stay for a minimum of five years to make this legible to somebody else.” And ever since I've thought in five-year increments career-wise. 

Charlotte Burns: That's interesting because it's traceable back to fitting into an idea of having the right credentials. So in a way, are you freeing yourself from that now?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yeah, there's some sense of freedom for that. So I know that I am not looking for another institutional job. That's not what this next phase will be. I'm looking for life-freedom, time-freedom, geography-freedom, the freedom to follow different passions. 

I worked at the Walker, the whole world was my oyster to put a show together. And that was beautiful, and I got to learn and connect and travel, and all of that. Fabulous. Then I moved to New York and got a job at Creative Capital Foundation, and we worked with American artists or artists in America, so very much a national viewpoint. And I thought that was really interesting. And while I was at Creative Capital, I joined the board of the Laundromat Project. Very local concerns. It was about neighborhoods, it was about the city of New York—which was a new city for me and I loved it. And then I actually became the executive director and continued to learn about and fall in love with all kinds of nooks and crannies all across New York City. And now I'm really interested in going back outwards globally. And I think by the time I got to Creative Capital and was shifting to LP, I actually did choose to work locally. I wanted to be able to catch the subway to see the thing I was working on and not a plane or a train. So that's exciting to me. 

I know that I'm really interested in the African diaspora. I'm very interested in the continent. New York is still home, so that still feels very true and relevant to me.

But being able to spend more time, being able to be professionally of use on the continent, there's a lot of room to try new things. 

So I don't know all the ways that I can be relevant. It needs to be something that feels useful on the continent. And I think there's possibilities there, which I will continue to investigate and discover. But being able to create those kinds of ties, I think of myself very much as a builder and a connector. But that's again that sense of a shift in geography, wanting to find a new space to be useful in some way. 

I spent particularly my 10 years at the LP really trying to build connections, and Hue Arts [NYC] was the culmination of that. The counting and Brown Paper of all the POC founded and led arts organizations in New York City, that was about building connective tissue, showing us to ourselves, and naming our own strengths and our own challenges on our own terms. So it was about that kind of connective tissue building but being able to do some of that work across the continent feels like there's something there. Because I so deeply believe in the collective process and the ability to go far together. 

Charlotte Burns: How exciting. I think if anyone can do it, I think you will show everybody the way. How are you beginning that? I'm imagining you've begun it. How are you thinking about that?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Some of it was literally just writing the list of who I met because I was just going. We would come home in between but mostly we were on the road so some of it was just making something legible myself. We're spreadsheet queens. We share that, Charlotte. So I have a lot of spreadsheets about who I met, organizations I got to visit, some that I didn't get to visit but would love to. Different people doing different kinds of things. So some of it's just list-making. Initially, right? Just “Oh, okay.”

Charlotte Burns: You've got to love a spreadsheet. You've got to love a spreadsheet.

[Laughter]

Kemi Ilesanmi: Just being able to start making those linkages and connections, “Great. Let me figure out how to be helpful.”

Charlotte Burns: And I guess that's giving you a lot of energy and propelling things forward. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yeah. 

Charlotte Burns: For you, it's always been about those kinds of seeds. You'd said in our last show, your personal dream was, wouldn't it be beautiful if a young Black woman who's entering the arts right now, if she could make a 50-year career? You're just expanding that vision, essentially looking at building out careers, more geographically, essentially, building out that network.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I'm very interested in building institutions and building infrastructure. That is something that I feel most excited doing in Black and brown spaces in the United States, which is still of interest to me, and on the continent. And that's the thing, when I think about what the equivalent now that I have of the 50-year career, as I'm trying to build it for myself. I'm 25 years in. When I link that idea of building that 50-year career for this young Black woman in POC organizations here in the States, even as I try to do a version of that for myself, I'm similarly interested in what does it look like to build infrastructure that works, a net that works on the African continent so that our culture be preserved. It can also experiment and build new things connected to or not connected to what came before. I'm really interested in spaces like [Professor] Lesley Lokko's Africa[n] Futures Institute which she just started in Ghana, which is about that, Africa is the future. What does that look like? And she's doing it, looking at that through an architectural lens, and Koyo is looking at it through—in a totally different part of the continent—the lens of contemporary art, and [Museum of West African Art] MOWAA in Benin City is looking at that through what does West Africa have to offer to this conversation about what culture is? And Zoma Museum, which is in Addis Ababa and is a really beautiful place looking at issues of the environment. They have a farm and a cultural center, and a school—one space. They have built a compound using traditional architecture techniques. All those ideas being able to bubble up, but how do we do this in a way that they get to be part of this cultural scene for as long as they are relevant? I don't necessarily believe that everything needs to last forever, but sometimes people end up having to close down their dreams a lot sooner than they plan to. And yes, some of them do need to last as close to forever as we can get to but they need different kinds of supports to make that happen and different kinds of infrastructure. 

What if that were possible, and what if I could help with that, and who else could help with that, and what do we need to be able to create a beautiful, joyful, sustainable, cultural infrastructure for Black and brown people across the globe?

Charlotte Burns: What if that were possible? What if? Where is that working? Where do you see, “Okay, that's where part of that works. That's where we need this support. That's where that infrastructure is thriving.” What are the elements that you can pull in your mind and see that those aspects are potentially working well?

Kemi Ilesanmi: So one of the things that I'm really excited about learning is that Hue Arts has actually getting to expand from New York City to New York State, and now they're starting the slow process of making that a national initiative, right? So that kind of infrastructure, building of data connectivity because at least for the initial Hue Arts it was partially about making connections between the groups, right?

Charlotte Burns: Being visible.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Being visible to each other as much as to funders, supporters, and people who love the arts. It was all of those things at once. Similarly, some of the places I just mentioned, all of those are those infrastructure moments and people are working against some really serious challenges to make all of those things happen. And a place like Zeitz MOCAA, one of the things they have is a global advisory council. People who can support all over the globe and not just one's geographically local audience. So being able to spread that out, both to allow ideas in and support in, as well as people who can take the ideas that are happening and move them outside, feels really important. That's some of that seed, taking things and seeding them in different places and inviting that in. 

One of the things that also became really clear is how much artists are building their own infrastructure. Yinka Shonibare [CBE RA] has a gorgeous residency space. He has two, one is on a farm about an hour and a half from Lagos, and one is in central Lagos—and actually, artists and residents who come spend half of their time in the urban setting and half in a rural setting. Of course, we know about Black Rock [Senegal] and Kehinde Wiley, who's also building a space in Calaba, which is his homeland in Nigeria, building Black Rock Part 2. Elias Sime, who is one of the co-founders of the Zoma Museum in Addis. El Anatsui is building something in Accra, and there's a whole section of Ghana being built out by artists. There's a photo center, decant center, dot.atelier, which is a gallery. All of these are being started by artists who have success in the market, have Western profiles. That's a part of their currency and an asset that they have and are using that to build infrastructure at home.

Charlotte Burns: It's a really interesting renegotiation of power because artists have never had more money and power and yet in a way, the market couldn't care less about the artists, and yet the artists have taken that moment, some artists, and siphoned off their own power and some of them to fill the gaps as they've experienced them and it's a really interesting renegotiation of power within a system that doesn't care, really, about that. It's really fascinating. It's a totally new phenomenon, which is entirely propelled by the money and the system but the money would never have created it.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely. And we know that's happening here. Titus Kaphar with NXTHVN. And it's Black and brown artists—at least that's what I'm tracking and caring about and paying attention to—who are really taking matters into their own hands and taking the assets that they have, which is their own sense of purpose mixed with their own creativity and turning, yeah, the power of the market on its head to do the thing they most want to do. And in a lot of cases, they drag their galleries into it.

Everywhere on the continent somebody is doing something. Sometimes they're really young artists and sometimes they're long-established. Of course, El Anatsui really, the art market discovered him in his 60s and 70s and he's “Okay, great. Guess what I'm going to do with this sense of “discovery,” in quotes. I'm going to make space for other artists.” Oftentimes I felt like artists wanted to do something for themselves from 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago. 

So ART X LAGOS Art Fair. So commercial, right? It's an art fair. They have a prize. They give, one living in Nigeria and one from anywhere in diaspora. They then partner with [Guest Artists Space] G.A.S. Foundation, which is Yinka Shonibare's space. And the diaspora artist comes and gets to spend a period of time in residency in Nigeria. And the Nigerian artist gets a residency in his UK space. So everybody gets to move around and connect to each other. That particular model was really exciting to me because one of the things that I heard a lot from a lot of different artists was, and I know this from my own family, restrictions on movement, visa access. Being able to even travel on the African continent. 

One of the biggest news stories while I was there was in the fall, Kenya is planning to allow anyone with an African passport to come into Kenya without a visa. It was huge news on the continent. Huge. Because that is just not, still not the norm on the continent, talkless of trying to get into the UK and United States and anywhere in the EU. There's really that sense of restricted movement and the stress of that. People get invited to shows, don't know if they can go because what if I don't get that visa or what if this happens? So for G.A.S. Foundation to say, “We're going to figure that out. We'll get you to London,” that's actually a gift worth far more, including the residency, because it's about this cultural exchange, but being able to facilitate continued movement is huge.

Charlotte Burns: It’s like a residency plus, like if a typical residency takes away the stress of thinking about the economics and the logistics of daily life. What the G.A.S. Foundation is doing is also taking away the stress of movement, and in the process, becoming an expert in that, which will therefore become another continuum in the community.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely. That kind of knowledge-building through experience is incredibly important and can make life so much easier for artists who want to be able to move around. That is one of the things that—if you're in the US or the UK or EU, you take for granted—that ability to move and seek new information and take your curiosity. And our governments, and our visa processes, and our immigration policies shut people out on many levels, not just for artists, but this is how it shows up in the cultural sector.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to just ask you another question about leadership. You started at the Walker, you've been an executive director, you're such a believer in the collective. I'm curious, would you want to run an organization? Would you want to be a singular leader? We're in a moment where lots of people of your generation who could be stepping up don't want those jobs. A lot of people that I'm talking to, they don't wanna do those jobs. Do you wanna do those jobs? Would you want to be that big director of that big thing? It seems that there's a kind of crisis around singular leadership, singular director roles.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I absolutely 100% do not want to do that job. Full stop. I really hope that there are enough good people, visionary, bold folks who do want to do those jobs. And I will do my best to support them because I do, I really honestly do hope we will continue to have incredible leaders in the field. And some of this for me, just personal, I just want a different lifestyle and I want to be able to follow my passions in a different way than an institution allows. And I loved my 10 years at the helm of The Laundromat Project. I have no complaints. It wasn't a reaction to that. That was a particular chapter and that chapter is done. And now, one of the things I love about getting older is now in my 50s, I couldn't follow that little thread of interest 20 years ago, but could I create a life where I could now decide I want to spend a month in Ibadan, there's no one that says, “No, you can't do that,” because you're expected to ‘fill in the blank’ is actually what's most important to me and my gift to myself in this time period of life. Like, I have however many decades left to continue to do work. I'm committed to artists. I'm committed to culture and cultural infrastructure. I have commitments that feel very real to me and they don't have to be lived or come to fruition through institutions directly, or at least not me being at the helm. I think I would probably work with and in partnership and support of a whole variety of individuals, organizations, entities, institutions. But I'm actually looking for freedom of movement and freedom of ideas and freedom of manifestation of those ideas, and right now, it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.

Charlotte Burns: I think that's part of the crisis around leadership is that it doesn't feel as possible to do that within an institution and even if you could, that you may not have the support of the institution in implementing some of that or that there's a backlash or a vulnerable moment. 

How do you support the leaders who want to do that then in that moment? The people I'm talking to are saying that they feel a little more vulnerable in this moment. How do we better support the leaders who do want to do those things?

Kemi Ilesanmi: For me, the answer always goes back to building a net that works. So it's connecting, helping them be with each other and connect to each other because some of that problem-solving just happens with more brains and more souls and more ideas in the room. Yes, the other parts of the ecosystem have to step up, so I think about brain trust and networks. And how to set up spaces that there can be that connectivity. So again, the reason that we made sure we had community conversations as part of our Hue Arts process was so that people could connect to one another. Sometimes it's just learning from each other but just again, creating a space and a time out kind of space where you can bring dreams and challenges becomes important.

I just feel like we can only save ourselves. And then we can decide together how to leverage other kinds of things. 

So referring back to the Brown Paper that we did, we started with, “Hey, the city needs to figure out how to bring a hundred million dollars to the table,” which is still a dream, but it's something that's now named. There are several different points in the report, but the one we cared about collectively was about spaces. So a lot of organizations that are Black and brown don't have physical spaces and want them. Wanting it just wasn't getting people any closer to the reality and capital in New York City, of course, is always going to be challenging. But Hue Arts last year did a multi-part teach-in helping bring conversations together about examples of where this had happened, what they did, how people were thinking about it. So again, it was pulling together, “Hey, this is something we all want to do and all want to figure out. Let's start having the conversations. Let's make sure we invite the funders in the room to listen in.” I don't think any of this is overnight work, but it's work that has to be done together. It has to be made some level of public and then together you figure out which levers to pull when and how, because I'm not saying do it yourself and bring your capital together. There may not be enough in that way but if you can then collectively figure out who else—government, private, et cetera, including things that you may not have thought of—to bring to that conversation. I just think it happens together, and it's just far more powerful and speaks to the next generations of cultural workers in a way that doing it singularly just does not. So I believe very deeply—I think John Lewis, among others, may have talked about this—you do your part to move the conversation and the structure forward. I don't have to do all of the work, but I do need to do my part, and collectively is where that doing my part can happen.

Charlotte Burns: Last time you said, “What if we named our dreams?” And so maybe this time we could say, “What if we named our dreams together?”

Kemi Ilesanmi: I love that. I love that.

Charlotte Burns: I love that too. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: It's so much fun talking to you. It's always so interesting. Thank you for giving us this time. 

What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night, Kemi?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I knew this question was coming. And I thought I had an answer. 

Charlotte Burns: Did it keep you up at night?

[Laughter]

Kemi Ilesanmi: [Laughs] It probably did. It probably did. I was like, “How can I be profound?” 

[Laughter]

I think the ‘what if’ in my most honest version of this question, the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night right now is what if I don't figure out how to be useful. I just want to figure out how to be useful. It's a very important thing to me and my sense of self.

Charlotte Burns: Why is that so important to you? Has that always been important to you?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Enough of the time because I think for me it's about the commitment to doing my part. I feel like I can identify some of the things I've done. And the future is always a little misty and mysterious and I'm still in an exploratory phase of exactly what that looks like. But I want, it's so important to me to live in a sense of purpose. So it's about identifying a way to be useful because I can't be the only person who identifies it as useful.

Charlotte Burns: Is it something that you identify? Is it like, “I feel I was useful?” Or is it if someone says to you, “That was useful, thank you.” How do you measure…

Kemi Ilesanmi: I think it does need to be two-way for me. Part of it is not being self-led. “Hey, I did that thing, don't you think it was useful?” No, it actually is about it being a two-way street of, “Wow, I felt good, that was good and interesting to do,” which doesn't mean not hard and having it reflected back that, “Yes, that was. It made a difference in moving us forward collectively.”

Charlotte Burns: That must be a little harder now that you're not in an organization, because there must be fewer immediate external metrics, less feedback on those things. So, you must be in a process. I imagine, that's a slightly more ambiguous process of figuring out what use is, what that means.

Kemi Ilesanmi: 100 percent correct.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: What's the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I think the ‘what if’ that probably gets me up in the morning—and I did just come from a month in Maine—is the beauty of the world, despite all of the ugliness. There's always still beauty.

Charlotte Burns: As someone who's just spent a year traveling, I think you've probably seen a lot of the beauty and some of the underlying horror as well, and juggling all of that.

Kemi, thank you so much for being our guest. Our first repeat on these ‘what ifs’. Thank you very much for joining us today. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Thank you.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you, Kemi.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Thank you for your patience.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Such an inspiring conversation as always. Thank you so much to Kemi Ilesanmi for sharing the story of her travels. Next time we’ll be joined by Allan Schwartzman.

Allan Schwartzman: I think the market is poised for a big fall. So it's more ‘what, when’ than ‘what if.’ Is that a right way to say it? It's more ‘when’ than ‘what if.’

Charlotte Burns: Do join us. All that and more on The Art World: What If…?!

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, 9 Part 2: Koyo Kouoh

For the second part of our interview with Koyo Kouoh, the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, we hear about how she has worked to overhaul the infrastructure of the institution internally as well as better connect the museum externally within Cape Town. Koyo talks about how “colonialism as an enterprise, as a model of global relating, has done a lot of harm that we are still mending and attending to.” She says: “That is a field of thinking, a space of emotion and knowledge that I am deeply passionate about. And that is why my investment in the space of Black geographies is so profound.”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This is part two of our conversation with the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA [Museum of Contemporary Art Africa], Koyo Kouoh. She talks about how she has worked to overhaul the infrastructure of the institution internally as well as to better connect the museum externally within Cape Town, and she shared her commitment to art education and nurturing future art professionals. And Koyo talks about how, as she says “the whole colonial enterprise continues to shape the world in such a profound way,’ causing “a lot of harm that we are still mending and attending to.” 

For Koyo, time itself is one of the most important materials we have and we need to take the time, she says “to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary.” And “for me,” she says, “building out institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency.” So, let’s get back to Koyo and I as we talk about the beginning of her journey with Zeitz MOCAA and some big decisions.

Charlotte Burns: So when you were appointed, you overhauled how Zeitz MOCAA was run, and then of course you went straight into the pandemic. You used the lockdown when the museum was closed for seven months to restructure its governance. You also built out a global council as part of that governance. Can you talk us through the changes that you made immediately—some of them internal, some of them external—how you went about doing that, that kind of overhaul and where you are in the process now?

Koyo Kouoh: It's a long process. The process is not over. Of course, it's still going on. As you said, the museum started to talk with big fanfare, advertising itself as the museum with 100 galleries—I never understood what that meant. And the striking architecture of Thomas Hetherwick who transforms the grand silo is of course absolutely breathtaking. I have to say, no museum or gallery can only live off of its architectural beauty. It's important because it generates interest, it generates conversation but at the end of day, a museum's work is museum's work. It's about curatorial, it's about research, it's about publication, it's about writing new chapters of art histories. 

And my very urgent kind of was to bring in a curatorial program that is credible. The second part was, of course, to reorganize the spaces of the museum for them to be more accommodating to the kind of art that we wanted to bring. So, I broke a lot of walls because the museum was extremely intricated and the third part of course was governance. You know, because this is all the invisible work. 

So the work on governance took about two years to transform the whole board of trustees, to transform the different reporting systems, to transform the stakeholders, patronage, relationships and of course to bring more resources to the institution. There is this very weird kind of association that is made most of the time, particularly with museums that carry a name—people or assume that the name giver bankrolls the museum which is never the case. I mean, you have the case in the US with the Pérez [Art] Museum in Miami. I mean, Jorge [M.] Pérez doesn't completely bankroll Pérez Museum so why do people expect that or think that Jochen Zeitz is bankrolling the whole museum and on top of it, you know, I mean Jochen Zeitz is the name give of the museum and our seed collection was a gift from his family collection. But the museum is a real association between the [Victoria & Alfred] V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz. And the V&A Waterfront is, as everybody knows, a real estate company that is in charge the transformation of the Cape Town harbour, so where the grand silos are and where the museum is. So the governance work and the curatorial exhibition program were really the first two urgencies.

But of course now, after five years, two of which, during Covid and a very difficult Covid time and lockdown in South Africa, I mean, how do you make a museum when you are closed for like nine months? You know? Because museum work is the quintessential work of, you know, convening and gathering and bringing people together. So, it was a very, very difficult time to think through the museum, but I'm Cameroonian, every challenge is like an opportunity. 

So, during that time that I could really spend a lot of time with my senior managers, the head of departments to really take the time to think about what kind of museum we want to make. 

Charlotte Burns: What if we had the time to think about the museum we wanted, what did you decide? What kind of museum did you want? How did you decide you wanted it to be run? What have you adopted from other museums? What are you doing differently?

Koyo Kouoh: I mean, there is no rocket science, in a lot of things. You cannot reinvent the wheel every time. There are certain practices that work and we thought very, very carefully about audience, audience development. What is audience? Do we owe something to the audience or not? And how in a city like Cape Town, which is a very, very particular city from its history, from geographic location from its, being, you know, at a southernmost tip of the continent, where two oceans come together, and also be the kind of point of entry for Dutch and Portuguese and British colonization into the continent in many ways. And of course, the more contemporary history of South Africa that is quite complex, problematic, and difficult, up to today. 

So I was very much interested in understanding how the museum relates to Cape Town itself, not even to South Africa as such but to Cape Town itself because when I came in 2019, I had the sense that the museum hadn't landed yet with Cape Town or in Cape Town. It is there but was not there yet. It was physically there, but it was not emotionally and intellectually there with the people who live and work in and around Cape Town and I really wanted to connect the museum to the people because I think that any arts organization is only as valid as its relationship with its immediate environment.

Charlotte Burns: So you established a couple of things, a local residency. You had the exhibition Home Is Where the Art Is, Art is Where the Home Is coming out of the lockdown. That's not the kind of exhibition that you are so known for doing. How did that change the way you think about the museum and exhibition-making?

Koyo Kouoh: When I came here, I wanted to bring process and experimentation to the museum. It was key to me that we bring this level of unfinished, this level of messiness, and this level of exploration, experimentation as a matter to engage with by the audience. And we launched the Atelier, the museum residency program to provide artists with space to experiment, to engage with the public while they are experimenting, to provide the visitors some form of insight into the process of art making. 

The Atelier project is very dear to me because I think that there is this kind of disconnect that a lot of visual arts spaces globally have with the audience or with the public that a lot of people say, “I don't understand it. I don't get it. It's too complicated” and the language that we use in it's so hermetic. People don't get it and nobody wants to look stupid, right? Because of all the concepts and ideas that we play with in our work. I always find it extremely…how can I say? Not sad, but unfinished, so to speak. When you don't see the process of art making in the museum, you already see the finished product. And I love commissions. I love developing ideas with artists. So I wanted to bring that to a way that provides the artist or the artist collective that we invite with possibilities and opportunities and space and time. But at the same time also providing the visitors with some form of understanding and insight into an artistic process.

So the Atelier is a dedicated space of some 500, 600 square meters. It's an entire wing of level two galleries at the museum where we invite an artist—at this point that focused on artists who live and work in Cape Town. And it's a massive studio that you get for six to nine months to develop new ideas, to experiment with other forms, to produce new work, to engage with the public in a way that you wouldn't necessarily in a non-public space and we have had an insane, incredible resonance for that program from the artists, from the visitors. 

The first artist who we invited Kemang Wa Lehulere who's an incredible Cape Town artist whose work is very much around the kind of transformation and translation of the educational history of South Africa. Unfortunately, Kemang, his Atelier period was supposed to be December 2019 to June 2020 and Covid came in and his residency transformed very radically, followed by Haroon Gunn-Salie, who's also of course a Cape Town artist whose work is very much also around memory, history, politics, and followed by Igshaan Adams, an incredibly talented artist who is gaining a lot of acclaim recently, deservedly so.

The connections that you can build by providing that space for artists. A lot of other museums have some form of residency program, but they are usually somewhere in the 15th floor, in the basement, or somewhere. It's not in the space. Like, we are putting it in the space like that. So I think that that is transformation, that is different.

[Musical interlude] 

The other thing that I'm very, very, invested in doing is also bringing art education to underserved communities, communities that don't necessarily have access to art education. We are starting a mobile museum very soon that will go to a whole network of community art centers and normal schools. With the stratification of South Africa and the legacy of segregation, of course, that is still very fresh in South Africa, there are various levels of access. The curriculum that is always scrapped everywhere so our Center for Art Education that is led by I think arguably one of the best education director that any museum can dream of is works very, very closely with, for instance, the Western Cape Education Board to supplement material to our teachers. All our exhibitions are always translated into kind of a compendium for art education in schools. 

I'm very committed to transmission. I'm very committed to, you know, passing the batton, as you say, passing the knowledge, producing the knowledge, and passing that knowledge. And I always say that I feel extremely privileged, lucky, honored to be from a continent that has created humanity, but also a continent that basically has created forms and aesthetics for the world in many ways. So we will never be short of brilliant artists, but we are short of mediators, and I see exhibition-making as a mediating practice. It's a translating practice. It's a generative practice. It's a space of transition to something else. 

So, young art professionals on the continent need more opportunities to learn, to grow professionally. And this is why we started the museum fellowship program in collaboration with the University of the Western Cape, which is the traditionally Black university of Cape Town. Young professionals are selected for a 12-month fellowship at the museum. It's like a postdoc and postgrad, get an degree from the center humanities research and they work towards a thesis. It's unique on the continent to have something like that at the museum. And we want to develop it on a Pan-African. It's already Pan-African, now we are in our third year and we take five to seven fellows every year. And the program is supported by the amazing [Andrew W.] Mellon Foundation that there so many miracles for so many institutions across the globe. And the idea is to expand it, of course to a pan-diasporic programs. So, eventually we will also welcome young fellows from the US, from Brazil, from Cuba, from the complex, the multitudes of Black geographies. 

Charlotte Burns: You've said that Zeitz is unapologetically and decisively a Pan-African pan-diasporic museum’ “I'm adamant about it. We are building our own voice, our own language,” and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about geography. I'm really interested in your sense of geography, I was really interested, for instance, in your curation of Ireland’s contemporary art biennial [EVA International], and you talked about Ireland as being a post-colonial country and how it could be read as a laboratory for the consequences of imperialism. My family's Irish, I'm born in Britain, I lived in America. So I obviously am interested in what you have to say about that, and I was interested in that biennial. I know you recently took a long trip through the American South, and I was curious how that changed your perspective or informed your perspective about thinking about the African continent and its history with the US. You've obviously spent a lot of time in Europe, and when you did the Ireland biennial, you talked about the links between Europe and Africa and thinking about that. 

So geography is obviously something you are so specifically in dialogue with through your practice, and through your life and where you've lived. And this idea of in your work of where you live now, you've said your status in South Africa as a foreigner, a condition central to your identity ever since you left Cameroon might be useful in terms of the conversations you are able to have and think about and introduce to locals. And so your sense of geography seems so specific to your work, to your practice, and to your identity. So I wanted to talk to you about geography in terms of your practice and the way you think about it and then moving from there to this idea of diaspora and a kind of Pan-Africa identity that you bring that I know is so inspiring so many other people. 

Koyo Kouoh: I, of course I am curious about the world. I…how can I put it? I wonder…It's a very interesting question actually. I wonder whether my interest is really geography as opposed to race and colonialism that is very much entangled with geography as well. And I think that it is more colonialism that of course, feeds into the different kind of understanding of locations, geographical kind of movements, and the whole colonial enterprise, how it has shaped the world and continues to shape the world in such a profound way. And at the same time, the sort of discrepancy between the effects of colonialism on different geographies and how the former colonizing spaces, so adamantly reluctant to recognize what the colonial enterprise is, was, and continues to be and what and how it's so profoundly affecting the lives of people. We see it currently live on TV for three months. 

So that's just one example. And this is also how when I was invited to create an Irish biennial in a year that was celebrating the centenary of Easter Rising, I was just like, how many people know about Easter rising and how it relates to the world and how it relates to the entire British colonial enterprise? How many people are really actively conscious that Ireland was the first laboratory of everything that the British Empire did in the world to people? And this is also why I conceptualize the biennial exactly around Ireland as a post-colonial space, Ireland as a kind of primary laboratory of colonial experience and how Ireland as a country is interestingly, completely somehow erased from the global post-colonial discourse, whereas the global post-colonial discourse should always start in Ireland somehow. 

This was my take on this. And I believe, I believe in movement of… how can I put it? Of spirits and of emotions and of energies, let me call it energies. And these are spaces and frames of references that very often are not taken seriously, very often are relegated to lesser important kind of thematic or ideas. But if you look at the Atlantic space for instance, that is so important to the narrative of Blackness of the continent and not just of Blackness, but I mean the Atlantic in general, which is so important to all the countries that are related to that space. I believe the very fact that 500 years later, after all the atrocities, we are still grappling with the very essence of who we are as Black people in the world. Even after Barack Obama being president of the United States for eight years says a lot about the very fact that colonialism as an enterprise, as a model of global relating or global relationships has done a lot of harm that we are still mending and attending to. And that is something that I'm passionate about, that is a field of thinking, a space of emotion and knowledge that I am deeply passionate about and that is why my interest…is not the right word, but my investment actually in the space of Black geographies is so profound, and it's so continuous because I strongly believe that of course, Blackness is different everywhere. That it exists and manifests. The history of African Americans is not a history of Afro-Cubans. It's not a history of Afro-Brazilians. It's not a history of Afro-Colombians is not a history of Senegalese and Nigerian, the Kenyan or South African. But at the end of the day, we are all Black and we are subjected more or less to the same conditioning that colonialism and whiteness has established. And we are all struggling to unpacking and disentangling all of that in many ways. 

So, my sense of geography stems actually from that. And the more I think about it, the more I work in that space, the more I also understand it as a structure of, of course, of oppression as a structure of exploitation, as a structure of traction that continues today, and how it has related not only and has it has played that not only on the continent of Africa, but also in Southeast Asia. You know, I work with a lot with artists in Vietnam and Bangladesh and in India, and of course in the Middle East as well. And when you start having a comparative look of the multiple manifestations of colonialism, geography is central to that. 

So, to make a long landing to the American South, I've always loved the south of the US as a place. I love the air in the South. I love the low country. I love the food. I love, I love the light. I love everything about the South of the United States and it's a place that I always visited, but I haven't been there for a while. And this recent kind of research trip that I did with my dear colleague from the New York Times, Siddhartha Mitter, it was really for us a way to, how can I say it? To reconnect with those relationships and flows of Blackness that are not necessarily tangible. You cannot necessarily put your finger on it. You can only feel it. You can only see it when you know all the other spaces. So for instance, arriving in South Carolina, visiting the low countries, driving and visiting throughout the entire Gullah Geechee corridor and each time you felt like I'm somewhere in Senegal, or you felt like I'm somewhere in Cameroon, or arriving in the middle of Alabama, going to visit the Gee’s Bend ladies and realizing that they all look like your aunt or your cousin from Cameroon. These are things that we don't take enough time to deal with and this is a pity. We need to deal with that. We need to deal with that immaterial, intangible space of connection that is intersectingly and even somehow inherent to Black culture everywhere. And that's my interest in that.

Charlotte Burns: So I wanted to ask you, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you awake at night? And what is the ‘what if’ that gets you out of bed in the morning?

Koyo Kouoh: I think everything keeps me awake. I'm not a big sleeper. I sleep very badly anyway. [Laughs] So there is no ‘what if,’ whatever, I'm just an insomniac. 

I think what gets me out of bed every morning is the joy of of serving art and artists because, I think that fundamentally that is what I do. I like to see myself as someone who serves artists first and foremost, and art of course. And I think that it is of course, extremely urgent. We all need more art, more poetry, more music, more dance, more food, more time in our lives and I am honestly extremely, extremely concerned and even worry about how the system has developed, even though we are all part of it in some way. And I think that what if everybody would really understand the importance and the urgency and the value of art in our lives to make it integral and not accessory and only integral for the professional. And when you think of it from a Negro African perspective of artistic practice, it has always been total and always multidisciplinary, and always part of daily life in a cyclical way, in an intentional way in terms of artistic practice and transmission and so on. 

So, I really would love a place where art or artistic practice is less commodified. And I know that museums participate very much in the commodification, but I think that the kinds of museum formats that can be developed, here and there, can contribute to this less understanding of art as a commodity, because it's not, it shouldn't necessarily be. And I really wishfully, hope that more people will come to the party in ways that sustained arts institutions, in ways that sustained artistic practice, in ways that encourages a young person somewhere on the continent—or anywhere else for the matter—to pursue an artistic or a creative career without thinking that it's kind of useless or that there are too fewer opportunities out there for that and become a marketing and a communication specialist and a manager. I mean, how many managers are out there who have been brilliant artists? We don't know, but they are out there. So I think that that is my ‘what if.’

Charlotte Burns: Thank you enormously. I could keep you all day selfishly. But I won't. I'm so thrilled you made the time for us. Thank you very, very much. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Koyo Kouoh: Thank you.​

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My huge thanks to Koyo Kouoh. What an interesting and inspiring conversation. Next time we’ll be talking to our very first repeat guest, Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of The Laundromat Project—who’s just returned from a year spent travelling the world and who’s holding her promise to come back and tell us all about how it’s changed her ‘what if’s.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I'm actually looking for freedom of movement and freedom of ideas and freedom of manifestation of those ideas, and right now, it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.

Such a frank and revealing conversation to come. That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, 9 Part 1: Koyo Kouoh

Joining us from Cape Town in South Africa is Koyo Kouoh, the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA for the first in a two-part special. Originally destined for a career in finance, Koyo talks about her journey into the art world, and from Basel in Switzerland to Dakar in Senegal, where she founded RAW Material Company in 2008. She tells us about her move to South Africa in 2019 to take over at Zeitz MOCAA, a new institution, but one in crisis. “We need to take the time to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary,” Koyo says. “And, for me, building out institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency.”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, a podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns. 

[Audio of guests]

This time, we’re talking to the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, Koyo Kouoh. The conversation is so good we’re bringing it to you in two parts. In this episode Koyo—originally destined for a career in finance—talks about her journey into the art world, and from Basel in Switzerland to Dakar in Senegal, where she founded RAW Material Company in 2008, and then to her move to South Africa in 2019 to take over at Zeitz MOCAA, a new institution, but one already in crisis. 

Art is something we only know that we don't have when it has gone, Koyo says, like health. Humanity is essentially about connection, and what’s the connector, she asks? Art and all the forms of creative expression. Koyo is building something real and urgent, and I hope you all listen. Here’s part one. 

Charlotte Burns: Koyo. Thank you so much. I have a question for you to start us with, a ‘what if.’ The artist, Tracey Rose has said of you, “There are so few people around that understand the power of art, not financial power, but the resonance it has.” What if people understood the resonance that art has? What do you think that could do?

Koyo Kouoh: Oh, then the art would really be able to change the world. [Laughs] But unfortunately, not as many people who actually should be concerned with art, are concerned with art. What if everybody would really get the resonance of art? I think we would have less wars, [Laughs] obviously, and the kind of living models that humanity created across the globe will be more mindful of the human being, more mindful in terms of, spiritual growth, intellectual growth as opposed to financial and capitalistic growth. Because I strongly believe that art is something that we only know we don't have when we don't have it. It's like health, so to speak. You know it's value when you don't have it anymore. I have a relationship with art that is more or less on the same kind of lines. It's essential to my life personally. It's essential to basically everything I do and how I carry myself through the world. I became the person I am today thanks to the relationships that I built with artists. So the resonance of art is completely underrated regardless of the huge machinery that the art system—I don't like the term art world—but that the global art system has developed and has developed into. I definitely believe that if everybody would really get that resonance and really understand that value, and not financial value, but really spiritual value—because art is a spiritual, social science basically. And I strongly believe that the more we connect to that space of feeling and thinking and writing, the more we will really understand that humanity, it's essentially about connection. And what is the connector? The super global connector is art and all the forms of creative expressions.

So, I wish more people would get that resonance. However, professionals in the art system, we often live in this kind of bubble where we believe that since we are invested in this field, since we are so committed to art and artists, that everybody feels the same or thinks the same, and we've developed such a hermetic language, particularly in the curatorial space of the last 30 years, that is quite daunting for people who are not from the field most of the time. Right? So, I think that it is also our duty and responsibility as art professionals to create spaces and opportunities that allow people who are curious, who are interested, to amplify that resonance that we professionals are so familiar with.

Charlotte Burns: How do you do that? I mean, you've been working in art spaces for decades now, since the 1990s but you didn't begin your career in the arts. You began your career studying banking administration in Switzerland, and you said you were predestined for a career as a trader at Credit Suisse back in the late 1980s before a friendship with a Swiss artist duo opened a different world for you. How did you through that encounter have your life changed, and how were you open to having your life changed in that way?

Koyo Kouoh: The artist duo is Dominique Rust and Clarissa Herbst, a German and Swiss duo of conceptual artists that work in performance and theater and in installation and these two people are at the real origin of my complete transition from finance to arts and culture in the mid-eighties. They just opened a space for me that I didn't know in that way. Of course, I've always been interested in art. Literature was kind of my go-to place. As a kid, I was an avid reader because I loved fiction novels, every novel is a was a space for me to escape. And later cinema, which like most people is a very strong driver. And music of course. So visual arts was kind of less so much it was there, but it was not the great kind of excitement. And it's really beginning with my interest in impressionism, and fascination with Vincent van Gogh somehow, funny enough, yeah, that I really started understanding more what is there and also, as a young 20-something African woman in Western Europe, I was also looking at finding myself in the space. You know, when I say finding myself, it's kind of meta-metaphorical and parabolical but I was trying to see myself in the environment that I was living in. And of course, very sadly, there was very, very few instances and occasions where Black cultural folk or Black artistic expression was presented in Switzerland. It's not just in Switzerland, even in France and in the UK in the eighties and nineties, it was really, it was a desert in terms of, you know, and I don't like to say inclusivity, it's a stupid word, but in terms of consideration. So, by trying to find myself in those environments, I came to visual arts very quickly because of friendships, apprentices. 

I was living in Zurich back then in the mid-eighties in an environment that was extremely regulated. I mean, Switzerland as most people know, is a very organized country, but at the same time also very policed, you know, lots of restrictions and so on in terms of,  even the very sense of notion of relationship to enjoyment and pleasure, you know, the Calvinistic kind of puritanism. We were a group of people who sort of felt like, “No, life cannot be this,” you know? We need more zest, we need more spices in our lives. So we started organizing all sorts of different things, but of course, a lot of things was organized around the bar and the party. I think the bar is the best convener and still the best convener ever in terms of bringing people and ideas together. 

So, and that's how it started. And then it became a kind of a loose, unclear collective of different people from graphic designers to dancers to bankers to lawyers to, I mean, really a very eclectic group of people who were determined to bring more zest to the city. And how do you bring more zest to the city? You have a popular culture, of course. You have convening, eventing, you have, of course, exhibitions and all of that. So this is really how it all started for me. 

In the late eighties in Switzerland, you couldn't go out later than midnight because everything was closing at midnight. Night owls, like myself and my friends back then, it was not acceptable. So we managed with to our activities, we managed to change the law…

Charlotte Burns: Wow. 

Koyo Kouoh: …of how long do bars and restaurants open, for instance. So during that time, when I started being involved with artists and exhibition making and writing, I was constantly looking for myself. Where is the young woman who has Koyo’s identity and background in this mix, except for Koyo herself? And that's when, of course, representation, visibility, all these questions started to really form in a way that, fast forward, just sent me back to the continent.

Charlotte Burns: So just to stay in that moment in Switzerland, that switch when you started thinking that you were still in a career in finance, was it that you started to sense a sort of freedom in this ability to change laws and come together in a collective way?  Obviously, from there you start going to the continent and your life takes you in a new direction in the nineties, but you were still on a different career path. What was the catalyst? What was the feeling you had that you wanted to hold onto?

Koyo Kouoh: I think, you said the key word, I think is ‘freedom.’ I think the space of art offers a level of freedom and ideation and conceptualization that is quite unique in any line of work. And a level of liberty in terms of, you know, self-starting and caring into a field that really nourishes yourself as much as it nourishes whoever benefits from your work or whoever engages with your work. So I think it's that combination of freedom or liberty and nourishment that really got me hooked. And poetry. The poetry of the outspace, of course. The incredible people and minds that you come in contact with and incredible practices that you get the privilege to be associated with. And, of course later now, after 30 years, the relationships that you build, people will become family, like real family and the work that you produce, at the end of the day and what it says around a specific environment, a specific topic, and so on.

That's what a lot of art professionals do. I mean particularly exhibition makers. This is really our work. We want to not only show a practice and mediate it, but we also want to win new people into the field. It's really the unearthing, the space of art is a space of proposals. It's a space of endless propositions that are possible. So it's a space of possibility that I didn't see in banking in the same way and that I didn't see in social work either in the same way—because I also had this thing for a couple of years as a social worker working with migrant women in Switzerland. For me, curatorial practice provided that, and that was, I was really very much more interested in this nourishing aspect. How do we feed each other? How do we feed ourselves and what do we feed ourselves with?

Charlotte Burns: I think we should go to the visit to Dakar you took in the mid-1990s, which is a sort of life-changing trip that you took but you ended up packing and moving the following year.

Koyo Kouoh: Mhmm. Exactly.

Charlotte Burns: And you later said, “I didn't wanna continue to look at a play in which I had no real part in which I was just a fixer.” You said you chose Dakar because of its care for arts and culture, its openness, its Sufi Pacific and Islamic traditions and you would go on to found RAW Material Company first as a mobile site, and then later in 2011 establishing a permanent space. Dakar continues to be a space, a geographic space, of endless possibilities, which has nourished you and which you have nourished back in return. Can you talk a little bit about what it was about that trip in the mid-1990s that proved to be so generative?

Koyo Kouoh: Oh yes. Thank you for that question. I mean, I can speak endlessly about this Dakar trip that completely changed my life. I was a cultural journalist back then writing for a few magazines in Switzerland and I was commissioned an article on Ousmane [Sembène,] the very famous Senegalese filmmaker, because I was engaged back then in Zurich with an organization that was promoting cinema from the continent. And every two years there would be a focus on a major filmmaker. And that year it was Sembène and I went to visit but Sembène was notoriously unfriendly, a non-friendly man, and notoriously wouldn't give interviews. I landed in Senegal, went to Sembène’s office, and he just couldn't care less about me. Interestingly, I had met a few artists before and one of them literally the very day that I arrived, took me to a performance of Issa Samb at his studio, courtyard, home, gallery, arts institution site in the center of Dakar. And meeting Issa has been a profound, transformational encounter for me in a way that I think I was ready to receive that kind of inspiration. And Issa and I hit it off immediately as interlocutors, people who speak to each other, we exchange ideas. I spent over 10 years just speaking and exchanging with Issa before the very first project that we did together. And, to go back to that year in late ‘94, ‘95, I decided right then that I'll move to Senegal and that my time in Europe is up. And that's what I did. And I never regretted that. And after the birth of my son is the most profound transformation I've ever made for myself by living Europe and moving back to the continent in ‘96.

Charlotte Burns: Can you talk a little bit about that? It sounds like a gift you gave yourself.

Koyo Kouoh: Yeah, it's the most profound. Back then, I didn't know I was giving myself a gift. It was not conscious. It's only in retrospect that you can see the profundity of certain actions that you do. But I didn't just get up and go. I'm a Capricorn. We are very organized people. We are not that spontaneous. We plan. I think that I was ready. My son was born in ‘92 and it was very clear for me that I didn't want to raise a Black boy in Western Europe in the late 20th century because of all the odds that he will be confronted with as a young Black boy and I always thought that my strength comes from my upbringing on the continent. My upbringing in Cameroon. That is where culturally I am. I was grounded and I was kind of formed in ways that gives me the strength to be the Black woman in the world that I am. As a young mother, I felt like, “No, there is no way I can give my son the tools and the weapons that he needs as a future Black man in this space, in the world,” and particularly in Western Europe. That was not the place. So I moved back on the continent not only, of course, because of the call of curatorial practice but also for really educational purposes of my son.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So let's talk about RAW Material Company. It started life as a mobile site in 2008 and then you established a permanent space in 2011. It's a center for knowledge, art, and society and it's been called a connection point across the world. You've said, “I work pretty much out of necessity, meaning that I do things that need to be done and that I haven't been done.” Why did you found it and what did you hope?

Koyo Kouoh: Well, I started RAW Material company because I felt very lonely as a curator or exhibition maker, and particularly with the kinds of practices that I was interested in back then, I'm still interested. I'm a faithful disciple of Issa Samb and, so conceptual art, process-based art is very much part of what fed me as a young curator, young exhibition maker. And I started RAW because I basically just felt hungry for criticality that brings back artistic practice into a solid, independent, valued social science that it is. 

So let me explain. I'm saying this because the hunger that I felt for that criticality, for that engagement with process-based, social practices because I was in Senegal with its beautiful history, you know, with Sango and the arts and all the narratives that we all know now with the 40% budget for education and culture, that [Léopold Ségdar] Senghor himself a poet, himself a super exhibition making curator of the national collection. And there was still, for me, not really a place for intense criticality and theoretical discursive work, except for it's a sound studio again that was looking and speaking to artistic practice from the perspective of society making, as opposed to just art for art's sake. So, RAW started to form in me in the early-2000 it took many years for it to materialize. We started with making theory and analysis and criticality available and a very simple contemporary art library that was open to the public. I collaborated a lot with the art school in Dakar and with young cultural journalists, so this is how RAW developed as a site for thinking, reading, writing, discussing art from a political and historical and critical perspective as opposed to, you know, the very poetic and lyricism which is very beautiful, but which is just not enough for me in terms of translating and mediating art.  And then we added a residency. We added a publication publishing program. We added a small exhibition program. And now I think that like any process of institution building, it takes time for any young arts organization to come to embody what they are meant to be for the society.  And RAW has come to its identity now, which is really to educate the next generations of young art professionals across the globe, of course, with a very particular focus on African diaspora. But I believe in global conversations. We've decidedly, you know, very clearly Pan-African stand but it's about the world and it's about us in the world. When I say ‘us,’ it's about humanity in the world.

Charlotte Burns: It's a really interesting model because it came out of need, your personal hunger, and then that translated into a much broader need, obviously, and is a much broader need. And I think there's a kind of ‘what if’ there, which is what if one person's need has a resonance that's much, much broader and deeper. And what if we have the patience and time to allow those complex conversations to unfold and turn into much larger institutions that can hold that space? If you could take anything from RAW, if someone is listening to the show and they feel that hunger. What advice would you give them? If they're thinking there's a ‘what if’ out there for them, what if they have a hunger that they wanna fill?

Koyo Kouoh: I would say that your desires are valid, that you are the other, the other is you. That the personal is public and the public is personal. So it's really what matters to you, matters to others as well and to believe in time. I learned many things with Issa Samb, but the most important matter that I dealt with in my life and work is time. To allow ourselves time to build those institutions, to allow ourselves time to dream those dreams, to allow ourselves time to make those projects that can take time sometimes, to allow ourselves room and time to spend time together. Advice that I give young practitioners, be them artists, aspiring curators, writers, the whole gamut, take the time. It's easier to say as to do but really, and the other thing that I also think is, we don't say enough in our field and we spend stupid energies competing and what have you, is that you're never too late. You're never too early. Whatever you do, you are always on time when it comes to art. Even if whatever you bring to the table has already been brought to the table by others, but the very fact that you bring it to the table at the moment that you bring it, makes it different, makes it unique, makes it on time. And this is something that nobody teaches anyone at art school or at whatever humanities, faculties. Time.

Charlotte Burns: As a Capricorn, I feel like you're probably quite good with time. You plan your time well. You mentioned the birth of your son as a transformative event. Was being a parent something that changed your approach to time and your career in that way?

Koyo Kouoh: Oh, completely, of course. Becoming a parent, it's a profoundly transformative phenomenon that can happen in someone's life. Definitely, it gives you completely sense of time because the very fact that you have to care for young humans, people who are completely dependent on you for such a long time until they can fly away themselves. So, yeah, time management, it's a skill that you need to learn, but I don't see it as rigorous as I am speaking now because the beauty about time as a matter of practice, like Issa used it is also the fact that it can be elastic. African philosophies have understood from since a very, very long time, times immemorial, that time is something elastic. As much as it's precious in terms of having it and using it wisely, but it's also something extremely malleable. It's also something extremely relatable, you know, relational. Now of course, that I'm getting older and can kind of look back, looking back is longer than looking forward. 

What I want to say is really that we need to take the time to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary. And for me, building out institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency. And as much as it's urgent, it's also a space and a time space that provides so many possibilities.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So when people say that Zeitz MOCAA is the first major museum on the continent, what does that mean?

Koyo Kouoh: I call it the first and only syndrome. When it comes a lot to non-Western geographies, there is always the first and only African this, the first and only Brazilian this. You know, you never hear that about Western Euro America, so I always find it a little bit problematic. There is a problem there, but at the same time, Zeitz MOCAA is a groundbreaking initiative. It's one of the most important art initiatives on the continent over the past seven years. And I was saying that even before I became museum director. I mean, I didn't even think that that would become museum director because it was absolutely not in my plans and to go back to why Zeitz MOCAA is important—beyond, all these kind of PR kind of phrasing that we all read all the time—I think that Zeitz MOCAA is the result of 20 years of very intense, savvy, smart, systematic dynamic, curatorial practice and exhibition making and arts institution building work that has been done on the continent over the last 20 years before Zeitz MOCAA opened. So Zeitz MOCAA didn't come about, like my grandmother used to like to say, it didn't fall from the sky. Nobody falls from the sky. We all come from somewhere be it institution, be it people. We are all engendered in a specific way and I like to think of institution arts organizations as living bodies. So this cry for this museum has been there for a long time. If you look at, for instance, the work of an artist like Mescha Gaba. Mescha, a Beninese artist from Cotonou, in 1997 to 2001 has developed a project that was called The Museum of Contemporary African Art. It's a sprawling artwork made of multiple pieces. It's a huge installation piece that is a museum and that was his cry for a museum of contemporary art on the continent somehow. 

So yes, of course, Zeitz MOCAA is important. It's groundbreaking and unique, but it didn't fall from the sky. It came about because the time was ripe. The resources came together and the conversation was already felt and fueled by artists, writers, curators, a lot of different people from across the continent. People don't have this kind of insight around the landscape of art institutions on the continent and how they generate each other.

Charlotte Burns: You are taking the job is almost a kind of ‘what if’ too. A what if it can't fail? I read that you decided to take the job after conversations with Black colleagues. There was a feeling that we cannot let this fail. You said the scale and ambition is unique on the continent. Somebody had to take responsibility and make this museum live up to its rightful ambitions. And when you took it, you were interviewed and you said, “The challenges are high. I'm not naive,” and the reason it was in a crisis when you joined it, it opened to great fanfare. It was enormous support. People were very excited. And it was open to show the holdings of a private collector in a former grain silo in the city's harbor district. But just months later, faced crisis when the first director, Mark Coetzee was suspended for alleged misconduct in 2018, he was ultimately sacked.

He recently died. By the time you joined in 2019, the institution was suffering. There was a lack of funding, a lack of morale, a lack of staff, a lack of urgency, and a sense of goodwill that had been squandered and you made a joke saying, “Even though I was born on Christmas Day, I'm not a messiah.” [Laughs]  And so you joined this job that you didn't know you wanted, but that people had wanted you to take. And it was a sort of what if it cannot fail? It needed not to fail, and you needed to take this on. Talk me through what you were thinking at that time. It sounds like a lot.

Koyo Kouoh: Oh, it's a lot. And it's still a lot. I never had the ambition to be a museum director. I always saw myself as a very independent person pursuing ideas, and practices. I never wanted to be confined to these huge organizations or museums and, the bureaucracy and the heavy fundraising. I mean, I was really not attracted to that. I've received many proposals to run institutions and I always turn them down. However, Zeitz MOCAA was different, and this goes back to what I say, I do things that are urgent and necessary. 

The difference with Zeitz MOCAA was that its ambition, its scale, its location, its political surrounding and the fact that it was 2019. We are not talking 1975, we are not talking 1966 or any other time where the critical mass of art professionals, curators, writers, exhibition makers, critics, art historians, was not there on the continent, but it's here now. For me, it became a duty to salvage this institution. I was convinced that the failure of Zeitz MOCAA, if it had failed would've been the failure of all of us African art professionals in the field, somehow indirectly. So, that's one aspect. The other aspect was also that we cannot be thinking and talking about, you know, museum-making and wanting a contemporary art museums on the continent and not be part of the hard effort of making these institutions. After the early birthing pains, to use the term that my dear friend used around the early two years of Zeitz MOCAA and during birthing pains, people do all sort of erratic stuff. And I really felt that it is our responsibility. And I was asked, I thought about it very carefully because it meant a lot for me. Did I really want to move from Dakar to Cape Town? I loved Senegal, I loved Dakar, and I had a great life in Senegal. Do I want to live in South Africa, a very complex, country in our geography? So it meant a lot of transformation. Leave RAW? As a director and as a board member but all of that sort of came together in a very beautiful way for me because first of all, I always consider myself as an institution builder. The other point was that I had already started thinking is what is after all?  I'm really interested in setting infrastructure, setting organizations, art organizations on the continent that outlive the different generations of people and professionals that can work there. It was also for me very much a way to work against the project culture that was very prevalent in the African space when it comes to art. “Oh, I have a project here. I have a project. I have a project here.” It's kind of, you know, advantageous. And I really wanted to break that and to really open up the space more towards a more sustained activity towards arts and artists in a way that eventually, you know, lives or live beyond the idea of a project. We could not let this fail. We could not let the idea of that Zeitz MOCAA fail because we need this institution in our landscape. We need more Zeitz MOCAA. They don't necessarily have to have the same format but we need more of these institutions. So having one Zeitz MOCAA on the continent with 54 countries, over a billion people, it's like people are celebrating it as it's extraordinary. Yes, it's extraordinary, but it's still not enough. It's one, you know, so I have a very complex relationship to this idea of the only, the first. I say no, we need more. 

If we could have many more museums like this on the continent in every country, that's when we would start speaking a different language. But for now, I'm invested in making sites more the civic space that it ought to be.

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much to Koyo. Join us next time for the second part of this episode where we delve much, much deeper.

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 8: Barbara Gladstone

Legendary art dealer Barbara Gladstone joins us for a very rare interview from the studio in New York. What would she do differently if she started a gallery today? “I probably wouldn't do it,” she says. 

Barbara has been at the top of the business since the 1980s and now represents more than 70 artists and estates. She tells us how she started out with a small print business, and how things developed from there. We talk about art now, the future of the gallery, and what she would change about the art market, including the “idea that collecting is shopping, because I think that there is something that art adds to life,” she says. “What is really interesting is that it's not over,” she says. “It's not even over when the artist dies because there's constant evaluation and re-thinking going on. And when you put one work in proximity to another work 50 years later, something new can happen. I mean, I think that's why it's important.”

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! A podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.

[Audio of guests]

This time we’re bringing you a rare interview with the legendary art dealer, Barbara Gladstone. It was fantastic to be able to get together in the studio in New York. 

Barbara has been at the top of the business since the 1980s and now represents more than 70 artists and estates including Matthew Barney, Maureen Gallace, Philippe Parreno, Ed Atkins, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jannis Kounellis, and more recently David Salle and Carrie Mae Weems. She tells us how she started out with a small print business and how things developed from there. We’ll talk about art, the future of the gallery, and what Barbara would change about the art world if she could. 

After so many years reporting on the art market, I really enjoyed recording this conversation because, for me, it gets at what drives a true art dealer—the passion and obsession, the absolute unwavering focus on the art, the artist, and a life spent in pursuit of solutions and the discovery of extraordinary artistic secrets. 

Let’s go. 

Charlotte Burns: Barbara, thank you so much for being here. I'm really, really thrilled that we're here together in New York today. Thank you very much for joining me.

Barbara Gladstone: At long last. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: At long last. I thought I'd start with a ‘what if.’ What if you were starting a gallery today? Would you do it differently?

Barbara Gladstone: I probably wouldn't do it. I probably am a creature of my beginnings and what it meant to me then and how much everything has changed. I'm still very traditional and I have traditional values, which once you introduce social media and the internet and all of the technical advances that have taken place, the business has completely changed as it would, but I never foresaw that and I never thought about that. I always thought about a person coming in and looking at something and being engaged or not engaged by it. And that it was my job to introduce it as best I could to work with the artists who exemplified, as best they could, whatever it was they were depicting. And that one-on-one relationship was very essential and important. And that is something which exists far less now.

Charlotte Burns: Do you think that is because of technology, that that's just got further away?

Barbara Gladstone: I think it starts with that because I think that there was no way to look at art without looking at art. You had to actually go and stand in front of something. You had to do the travel. You had to be faced with the scale, with the surface; if it was sculpture, walk around it. You don't have to do any of that. And I am constantly amazed that people actually spend very real money on things that they're not seeing directly. 

Charlotte Burns: Does that change the way that the artists make the art?

Barbara Gladstone: I think it changes the way young artists make the art. I don't think it changes the way artists that have always been making art do. But you can't not be affected by the technology that's available to you. So when we were starting out, we used to have the photographers come and they would make these very glamorous 8x10 transparencies. And they were beautiful because they were backlit. You'd put them on a light table, and the light would come through the back, and everything looks translucent and beautiful. But everything is backlit on a screen so you don't have to do that. Therefore, I think that some things are enhanced so much by the presentation on a screen that you're not seeing the true quality of what it is to be in front of it.

Charlotte Burns: It looks better than it does in reality?

Barbara Gladstone: Well, it certainly looks different. It looks…it's somewhat enhanced. It's like putting makeup on or something. I think it makes objects look more desirable. 

Charlotte Burns: And to some extent, are we living in a world where that matters less? That the reality of the object matters less than the image of the object?

Barbara Gladstone: I think that's what we're getting to, yes. Yes, I think it's inevitable because one becomes the substitute for the other. I remember that I heard a lecture by Jean Baudrillard one time, and somebody had asked him to define postmodernism, and he said, “Let's see. Picture Central Park, picture a bench in Central Park, picture an older woman sitting on the bench, minding her grandchild. And a spectator walks by and said, ‘What a beautiful child.’ And the grandmother says, ‘You should see the pictures.’ And I think that was probably 1984 when he said that. But this is the reality.

Charlotte Burns: So often when you talk to dealers, they say you become a dealer with your generation, you find the artists of your generation, you find the collectors of your generation, and then you kind of all grow up together. And you are often described as being a dealer that's part of a generation of dealers. But if you look at the stable of artists you represent, you're not really defined by the artist that you came up with. You work with all of those artists and they're still there, but you also  represent for instance artists working at the cutting edge of AI. So even though technology shifted around you and that's changed the way that the experience of showing and dealing art has changed, your curiosity for artists working in that technology seems to have shifted the program of the gallery significantly. How do you stay so connected to the art of today?

Barbara Gladstone: What has always interested me is that whatever we see from a historical view was very new at the time it was done, otherwise it would not have stood the test of time. And I have always been fascinated to observe that artists should be the ones who are holding a mirror up to our culture and showing us so that we learn about ourselves from artists, I believe. I think that's always been true. I think artists presage the camera, artists presage a lot of things because their minds run ahead. Therefore, if Dan Flavin found beauty in a fluorescent light bulb, nobody did that before. It was a purely utilitarian object, therefore, that's interesting because he's of his time. If Bruce Nauman does neon, he's of his time. Also [Lucio] Fontana, who was not young at the time, was of his time when he did neon. So people, artists who find beauty in what's around them, not necessarily sable brushes and oil paints, but whatever the material of that culture is—that's why animation is somewhat prominent today, that's why a lot of the things that we see are tools that were never thought of as art tools. But to the artist's brain, it's something that they can work with and that makes it into something else. And that something else is art. So that's always interested me because I think it was always true.

Charlotte Burns: What was the first work of art that did that for you? That you looked at and thought, “Oh, that's made me see something in the world around me that I couldn't have got to myself.”

Barbara Gladstone: Hard to say. It's hard to say because I was interested historically…could I say Giotto? Could I say that I would say Quattrocento Italy because they were figuring out perspective. They were figuring out 3D space. And you can see in every decade of that century that they get a little closer and a little closer and a little closer until they get to the high Renaissance. And I think that was what always interested me. If you studied that period, you could look at a painting that you've never seen before, and I would say you would know within 10 years what decade it was painted in. Because before that they didn't have the ability to do it, and then suddenly somebody did. And everybody did. 

So I think it's progressive, it's a series of discoveries. I think, in other words, using AI now is going to turn into something artistically, there's no question in my mind. It has to because artists look at a tool. Painters are using AI now. We have one painter who's using AI, and it's really successful. And I can't wait to show them because I think they're really eye-opening because if I think of AI, I am horrified because I think it will take over the world, it will change everything, and it will change everything, and not necessarily for the better, but some artist is going to use it only as a tool to make their art and somehow turn the intention of it into something else. And that something else is, I think, what's interesting. And that's always happening. 

So there's always something to get turned on by because there's always somebody who's doing something for the first time that you never thought of or I never thought of.

Charlotte Burns: So there's a kind of through line for you of this connection to progress, this connection to some kind of advancement, that's an interest.

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, hate to say it, but I think it's called the avant-garde. It's like before the rest of us. It's artists see with eyes that are ahead of my eyes. 

Charlotte Burns: What are the right ingredients in developing artists? What criteria help you reach clarity about someone who can make it, someone who can sustain it in terms of their vision and their art practice?

Barbara Gladstone: It's not so much my clarity. There are different ways to judge art. There are artists who I think deserve more than society is willing to give them because I think they have a very serious program and I think that they're doing something and I think that what we see right now are a lot of resuscitations of careers that were ignored because for some reason they just were not at the cutting edge or in the limelight. But when you look at certain painters and it happens throughout history, like El Greco was not popular for a long time because they look too modern. But then modernism caught up and then he became very acceptable. And I think that happens regularly with artists, that there are some artists who just do what they do and deserve more from the time that they live in than they may ever get. And there are some who get too much. Because they're exactly pleasing the public. 

Charlotte Burns: How do you balance that in How do you balance that in a commercial program?

Barbara Gladstone: I don't know. I don't know. You try. You try. You do the best you can. I can't influence someone else to do something, to see something if they really don't want to see it. Or sometimes you have to wait a long time until that happens.

Charlotte Burns:  Patience. 

Barbara Gladstone: Salvo, for instance, who changed from arte povera to these slightly kitschy landscape paintings in the 70s, was more or less laughed at. And then you get to the past 10 years, and there are a lot of things that are looking at him. A lot of painters who are young and very prominent are clearly influenced. So it wasn't for nothing. Artists are always looking at other artists. It just has to fit into a kind of social construct as well as an aesthetic one.

Charlotte Burns: You also produce artists’ work at a level of complexity and production that most galleries just don't these days. And this commitment as a producer stands out as complex against a market that often feels conservative. How do you think about that in terms of the gallery's program, in terms of the business, in terms of supporting the artists, when you're taking on complex production? How do you think it through?

Barbara Gladstone: I usually don't. I usually just do it. Hang on to your seat and do it. I believe it will all work out in the end but it's certainly more chancy than selling beautiful paintings. But I like beautiful paintings too, so there’s a balance and there's also a desire to support that kind of work because I think that the artists who do that kind of work, that requires production and uses technology, are teaching us something about ourselves that I find worthwhile. 

Charlotte Burns: Are there shows that artist stage that, at the time you're like, “Eh” and then afterward you think, “Oh yeah, maybe.” Does that ever happen that you didn't take much from it at the time, but maybe a few years later you saw more in it.

Barbara Gladstone: I don't know how to answer that because I think that somehow for me it has to make some sense historically. I mean it has to fit into something that I understand or come to understand, that maybe perhaps I didn't in the beginning or when I first saw it. And there are things that do grow on me, and I like those things a lot, sometimes best of all. And sometimes I see something which has the germ of something which turns out in the fullness of time to really be something else but something fabulous. 

I'm thinking now because our next show on 24th Street is a painting show by Victor Mann. I saw Victor Mann at the Romanian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 18 years ago, perhaps. And he wasn't even doing paintings. He had a little radio, he had a little figure, he had this little vignette. And I don't know why but there was something about it that was interesting, really. I met him, I started to talk to him. He turned away from installation and really, really, really toward painting. In terms of technique and the way it's painted, the way it's under painted, the whole history of painting, the whole study that he made of historic painting, and he's completely a painter at this point. And when he first appealed to me, it wasn't anything like what he does now, but there was something about it that had a kind of personality. 

Charlotte Burns: So maybe that's what it is. Some something that just stands out to you. 

Barbara Gladstone: Something, yeah. There's just something that makes you notice it. And it's the thing itself that makes you notice it. And sometimes, I've had the experience where I've been on a trip to Europe and doing something every minute of every day and seeing several museum shows and I see a lot of things, and it all looks good, but it all dissolves into the stuff of the entire experience. And six months later, I'll wake up one morning and in my mind's eye is this photograph that I had seen six months before, and it's like in my head. And then I have to go and look where I saw it, what it was, who it was. It happens. It happens that the image works on my brain in a way that it comes back to me. And I always pay attention to that because it's very often the strongest impulse because if it won't let me alone, then I should pay attention to it.

Charlotte Burns: Do you catalog things? Do you take photographs? Or is it just your mind's archive? 

Barbara Gladstone: I hardly ever take photographs because I'm a terrible photographer. I'm terrible with digitization. I'm terrible. I can talk on the phone. That's the level of my technology. And anything that I can't do that way, someone else has to do for me.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Okay. I'm going to ask you a personal question. So, you opened your gallery when you were 40, twice divorced with three sons—which I find immensely inspiring. You'd been interested in the law when you were young, you were an art history professor when you started the gallery, and you'd once said that very few of your friends had career ideas for themselves when you were growing up. What made you open your own gallery? What made you think, “I'm going to do this now?”

Barbara Gladstone: I don't, I can't actually answer it because I don't know that it was so much a conscious decision because I think in those days I didn't really take responsibilities for making decisions on my own behalf. I had a friend who was a print dealer who introduced me to someone else who ran the print department of a larger gallery. As a collector with my limited funds at that time, if you, well, you don't remember the seventies, but, there were a few very important artists. Period. And then those artists made prints. So if you couldn't have a Frank Stella painting, you could have a Frank Stella print. Or you couldn't have a Jasper Johns painting, you could have a print. There were very active, very good prints that were made. They were a few thousand dollars. And so I collected prints because that was what I could do. And so I started to work with this other person and sell prints. But there was something called the Print Newsletter that someone named Jackie Brody ran and I used to subscribe to it. And you could list in the back the prints that you had and people would buy them. And so I bought a print, I listed it, someone bought it, I rolled it up, I put it in a tube, I sent it, I bought another. Very boring. And at a certain moment, I thought, “There have to be other artists, there just have to be.” And at that time, Artists Space was very nascent and the Drawing Center and they used to have slide registries. So I would go and look and see artists who were unaffiliated and just came to New York and in those days artists could afford to come to New York and every September you'd have an influx of artists who had just graduated from various colleges all over the place, and they would go to Tribeca or someplace like that, and take some rotten place and turn it into something livable, and work, and sleep. And I would go visit them, become friendly with them, talk with them, eat with them, and started to have a works on paper gallery, which, I never thought beyond that because I didn't think of myself as being in business. I just thought “This is what I can do.” And it just developed that way, out of curiosity and seeing more and knowing more and meeting this person and making a studio visit and the world was much smaller then, it was much more available. Everyone was more or less together.

Charlotte Burns: When did that shift for you? Because you said you didn't think at first you could run a business yourself. So you started it with this other woman. When did you start conceiving of yourself as a person who was running a business?

Barbara Gladstone: Well, we didn't last very long because I was so opinionated and I realized very quickly that I wanted my own way. We broke up and I started a slightly larger gallery where we showed unique work. Life was much more intimate in those days. I liked the work of Nancy Grossman and I went to visit her and she allowed me to show some heads that she had made, clad in black leather. They had a kind of S and M feeling but they were very classical at the same time and I was always fascinated by them before but didn't know how to know her or meet her, but somehow once I was in the swim, so to speak, it was easy. 

And Nancy said to me, “Would you mind staying late one night because my friend is a photographer, and he's the one I would like to have take the photographs,” and I said, “Sure, I'll stay.” I had a staff of two, by the way, so I was the one who stayed. And the door opened and the photographer was Robert Mapplethorpe. He was in full leather. He worked at night. He worked until about, I would say, midnight. And then he said to me, “Do you want to get something to eat?” So we went out and we talked until probably two or three in the morning—and I am not a night person. And the next afternoon he called me and he said, “I think we're going to be friends.” And he introduced me to a lot of people. So, life was very accessible then. 

Charlotte Burns: And so you started to think, “I can do this,” then. And how did your vision for the gallery grow from there?

Barbara Gladstone: There was no organized plan. It was at a certain moment. So my first gallery was on 57th Street and we used to have to get the photographers to come photograph the show. And they couldn't park their car between 4 and seven, everything was difficult. And so I just said, “It's better to go downtown because, first of all, the artists live downtown.” I lived uptown. The artists live downtown. Everything seemed to be happening there. The galleries that I like to go to were there. So I found a space downtown. In no time at all, I ended up moving downtown because it was a commute to go from 83rd Street, where I lived to Soho. So everything happened in a kind of organic way that wasn't planned but was serendipitous. Doors opened and you walk through them. I think.

Charlotte Burns: You followed the opportunities. 

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah. 

Charlotte Burns: And you made them.

Barbara Gladstone: I don't think I made them. I think that I took advantage of them when they presented themselves.

Charlotte Burns: But something in you must have wanted that life, to pursue it in that way. There must have been something in you that felt that you wanted more. To have even gone and looked at those slide libraries, to gone and have contacted those people. Other people around you weren't doing that.

Barbara Gladstone: Yes, I think, on the other hand, it wasn't like a wild ambition. It was more a kind of curiosity because I don't think I would have taken credit for actually saying that was what I wanted to do.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, it's an instinct. Are you still following that same instinct now?

That same curiosity?

Barbara Gladstone: More or less, but now I have a fabulous staff and a lot of young people who are very tuned in to everything that's happening and I hear a lot from them. I mean it's quite different now because it's the whole world. There are artists everywhere and there are opportunities everywhere. Globalism has taken over. If you think back to the 80s, there were very, it was a lot of white men and I do remember that the 80s female artists, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, a lot of them were the beneficiaries of the struggles of the 70s feminists who really had a battle. But they weren't necessarily making work that was about being a woman. They were just making work.

Charlotte Burns: There was an article about women art dealers in W Magazine that you were featured in and there was a quote by Marian Goodman in that article that I thought was quite interesting. In the article, it said that all these legendary female dealers, including you, “That for all their contributions, clout, and staying power… female gallerists have historically been under-recognized and overshadowed.” And Marian Goodman said, “Men are more impressed by men than by women when it comes right down to it.” Do you agree with that?

Barbara Gladstone: Not, not completely, not completely. I think along came Mary Boone and that was the end of that because she felt entitled to the attention, entitled to the ambition. And she was the first woman that I could think of who admitted it. Because it was a very polite thing to do. When I was just in graduate school, I would look at Eleanor [Ward] at the Stable Gallery, I would look at Virginia Zabriskie, I would look at Ileana Sonnabend, I would look at people like that with huge respect, but they were all very genteel, and I think that for a lot of very well educated women, having a gallery was something that was not seen as a business, per se. It was like a salon more than anything else. It was harmless and lovely for a dilettante, but not a serious thing. When we look back now, when you think about somebody like Peggy Guggenheim, they were powerhouses, these women.

Charlotte Burns: But you could get away with it.

Barbara Gladstone: You could get away with it because there wasn't a lot of money involved. It wasn't banking. But when Mary Boone came I remember what a huge effect that had because I think that brought out the ambition in many women who wouldn't have owned up to it before. It was almost unseemly to be that ambitious.

Charlotte Burns: You've said something about there wouldn't have been a Larry Gagosian in the same way if Mary Boone hadn't have been around because she was a kind of brand. She made art dealing sexy. She was unabashed. She…

Barbara Gladstone: She wore the most expensive shoes and the most expensive clothes, and she rode in the back of a limousine, and everything that happened later, I think she started because she was brazen about it.

Charlotte Burns: When you saw that happening, what did you think? How did you feel? 

Barbara Gladstone: I was looking at it from a distance because it's not me, it's not the way I ever would be. But I like the fact that she startled people and I like the fact that somebody had the guts to do that.

Charlotte Burns: Do you think it's easier for women in the art world now than it was when you started?

Barbara Gladstone: Absolutely. Look how many women there are. Look how many women artists are very well represented. Look how many galleries are run by women. Yeah, I think that the opportunity is there. I don't know if there are as many women who want empires as there are men. But that could be something else.

Charlotte Burns: What do you mean?

Barbara Gladstone: The idea of a mega gallery is not my goal. It's not my desire. But I think if a woman wanted to do that right now she could.

Charlotte Burns: You have a huge gallery. You have more than 70 artists, estates, and foundations that you represent—which is an enormous stable of artists from where you started and you have galleries in different countries around the world. But it's not like you say a mega gallery, but how do you define a mega gallery? For you, what's the difference?

Barbara Gladstone: I can define it more by what it isn't. I think that we still follow the traditional model of representation. I think we represent artists the way artists have always been represented, individually, and I think with a mega gallery, there has to be such a division of labor that whoever's gallery it is can't possibly be talking to all of the artists. That's impossible. I'm talking to the artists. That's what I want to do. And so are the senior partners and directors. It's still a very personal connection that we have and that I would not ever want to change.

Charlotte Burns: 70 artists is still a lot of people to manage. How do you manage that scale?

Barbara Gladstone: They're all very busy by the way. My first gallery had probably 12 artists and they would have a show every two years so you knew exactly what was happening. Now we're lucky if we have certain shows every five years because the artists are very busy. They have a gallery in Germany and they have a gallery in California and they have a gallery someplace else. So that they have a lot of obligations and we have five locations. So we have a lot of opportunities for shows happening simultaneously. And sometimes someone wants to use one space or they have an idea for another space because the spaces are all very different. So it's a question of, I think, having good backup, having good staff, being efficient, being responsible, and being available.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: You recently opened in Seoul. Why did you decide to open in Asia?

Barbara Gladstone: Seoul presented itself as a possibility because one of the partners of the gallery is Chinese American and introduced us to Asia because she worked at UCCA [Center for Contemporary Art] in Beijing, a museum, for six years and was very familiar with the Asian territory, which we knew was interesting from art fairs and from information, but we were not completely familiar with say 10 years ago. And she really opened up that area by traveling with us and pointing out important places, important people, and artists were becoming more prominent from Asia as they were globally. And it became interesting to go to Korea because Seoul is on the cutting edge of everything, whether it's clothing, whether it's music, Seoul is culturally very active, in a way that's very visible in the art world. Japan is heavenly but more reticent. You have to go to it, really, to feel it. China, in the same way. But Korea comes to us, comes to art fairs. There's many museums, many collectors, many artists, many, lots of everything. And it's a young culture and very open to new ideas and new concepts and it is exciting. 

Charlotte Burns: How does it work with the partners? There are four partners at the gallery, but they're not all, some are equity partners, some are partners in a different way. Can you talk about how that works and how you structure the gallery in terms of how it's run and how you think about the management of the gallery going forwards?

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, I think it's about teamwork. For us, all of them have been with the gallery at least 10 years and have distinguished themselves all along as being willing to contribute more than the job description. It wasn't only sales or it wasn't only artist relationships, as it was always, “What if we did this, did you ever think of that?” And I thought, “This is new blood. This is exciting. This is interesting. This is feeding me and helping the artists.” So there are people who brought themselves to the position by their own participation and curiosity and all work well together, all like each other. So it's a very, I think, a really good situation.

Charlotte Burns: More recently Gavin Brown joined—that was a kind of merger with his gallery that closed—and he bought 11 artists and one estate from his former gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise. There's lots of talk about what that meant for the industry at large because it was a kind of consolidation and possibly a new way of working. We're a few years on from that now. That's a big thing to manage that kind of merger that kind of and for artists, LaToya Ruby Frazier spoke about at the time. She has a big show coming up at MoMA. She's gonna be a guest on the show—we're very excited about that. She said she was a beneficiary of that. She got these two dealers. 

For you managing that, can you talk about it a couple of years on? The kind of challenges and opportunities of bringing those businesses together?

Barbara Gladstone: It was a very good thing to do. If I look at the landscape of galleries as I know them from the time that I've been working, one of the people that I always respected, always, was Gavin for his innovation, for his originality, for his eye, for his just existence in the art world. I don't really feel that about anybody else, but I just think that he is so active and alive that it's like, who wouldn't want that? It was a fortunate thing, for me certainly. And I think it was fortunate for the artists too, because at Gladstone, we have a kind of very sensible and clear approach to how do things. And Gavin, bless him, is all over the place. He's an idea person and he's got an idea a minute. You can't buy that, you just can't buy that. So it added enormously. Obviously, we couldn't take all the artists, but we did the best we could to do the ones that would fit together with what existed. And I think that we filled in some corners and some of these were artists that I always wanted to get my hands on. And he was there first.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. What did you learn from that experience?

Barbara Gladstone: From, of merging? What I learned is it's good to work together. And that two heads are better than one. And it's more than two heads because the opportunity to work with some of those artists is so interesting. And you, everyone has artists that they wish they could work with. Everyone. And there's still artists that we wish we could work with, and maybe we can sometimes. Maybe we can't. We don't know. But Gavin is an original and there aren't that many originals.

Charlotte Burns: Would you consider more kind of collaborations like that? Do you think that's a future model for the business? For the industry? 

Barbara Gladstone: Not necessarily for us. I think there's a limit to it. I don't think you can have too many committees doing things like this because I think it'll all get neutralized and not retain the kind of individual spirit that you want.

Charlotte Burns: So it has to be the kind of people that you bring together? Of course.

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, we're as different as two people could be, but I think that we work well together.

Charlotte Burns: And how do you think about the future of the gallery? Do you think about how the gallery will continue with you taking further steps back? 

Barbara Gladstone: I think it will be fine because I think that these people are all working together now very well. I don't go to art fairs anymore. They do perfectly beautifully without me. Everybody has developed their own relationships with artists, their own relationships with collectors. These things are bigger than one person. Way bigger. I would never decide at this point to take on an artist that the others didn't think was a good idea. If they all said, you're the only one who has any feeling for this, I wouldn't do it because that wouldn't be fair to the artist. So I think there's a lot of discussion that goes on before taking on an artist and feeling whether it fits with the construct that we already have, whether it's competitive, whether it's favorable, whether it's advantageous.

Charlotte Burns: So it's now a sort of, it's a different thing, it's a different vision.

Barbara Gladstone: It's, it is and it isn't because I think that…Gavin and I agree on just about everything. It's not like I never, it's not like his program was alien to my program. It wasn't and I think like I was interested in LaToya, I was just too late. He was interested in Philippe Parreno, he was too late. We were barking up the same trees in a way. 

I tend to be a relationship person that I dig in with a few people very deeply because I'm fascinated and it's the way I am. But I think that we, everybody, we talk all the time. There are meetings all the time and there's a lot of camaraderie. And I think we have a really cohesive and good team.

Charlotte Burns: Do you like to think of the gallery having a legacy?

Barbara Gladstone: Only I think at a certain moment, if I don't make sense anymore, I should step back from it. So while I still have my mind, I think I'm there. I think that, I would certainly like to believe that yes, it has a legacy because it's built into the way we've done things and I think as long as everyone is participating now, and the artists are familiar with them. I think that some people have made mistakes by being the dominant person and, therefore, everybody has to scramble when they can no longer work or want no longer to work where I'm perfectly happy for other people to do whatever it is they can do. I'm not hogging the spotlight. I don't care. I just want things to happen in the best way possible and whoever has an idea and they should go with it.

Charlotte Burns: There's something you said when we spoke in preparation for this show, which I really liked and I wonder if this is the closest thing to a business plan. You said, “I ask myself, what if this fails? Could I survive that? And if I could, then I'd do it as an experiment.” Is that, do you think, the closest thing you've sort of had as a business mantra for yourself?

Barbara Gladstone: It's interesting because my ex-husband, who, we got divorced almost immediately when I had a gallery because I started spending too much time there. But he was a very good businessman. And when I was thinking of opening a print business, he said, “I will give you a piece of advice and if you follow it, you'll be okay.” His piece of advice was, he said that most businesses fail because they think about the upside. But they don't think about the downside. They think this is going to be great, I'm going to have this idea, everybody's going to love it. He said, “If you think every time you have to make a decision, what if it doesn't work? What will I do then? Can I survive? If you can survive, then you do it.” And I've just gone by that my whole life.

Charlotte Burns: You’ve preferred to be in the background and you've been wary of presenting yourself in a public way. Why is that? And what's compelled you to talk to me today? 

Barbara Gladstone: You were so persistent. That's why.

[Laughter]

Because I don't like to speak in public. I don't think I necessarily add to the discussion because I think the discussion is about the artists. My job is to showcase them, not myself. 

Charlotte Burns: Are there things that you would say now that you wouldn't have said a few years ago?

Barbara Gladstone: Too many yeah. Way that's too many. That's what happens with age. You become, you just start saying things because…

Charlotte Burns: Why not?

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, why not?

Charlotte Burns: Why not, why not. What would you say? What are the things that you've observed over these years of working in the art business? What if you could change the business? What would you change?

Barbara Gladstone: I would change the idea that collecting is shopping because I think that there is something that art adds to life, which is much more than acquisition, which is much more than, just having things, or being able to have things, which a lot of collecting has become. It used to be, when I started, that there really wasn't a huge resale value to art, therefore, it wasn't resold. People bought things and they had them their entire lives. And if there was a death or divorce, there would be a sale at one of the auction houses and these treasures would come up that had been sealed off for fifty years in somebody's house. And that was the intrigue of it in a way, is that they were private things, they were private pleasures. Everything is very public now. Everything is very driven by notoriety, by fame, by money, by all of these things. I miss the kind of eccentricities of the people who used to collect because they were successful, no question, but they also felt a little bit incomplete and they were searchers. They wanted to find something that gave them answers and they found it in art. Some people find it in music, some people find it in science and something else. But it was a merry little band and it was compelling and obsessive for many of them, very obsessive. And that was beautiful.

Charlotte Burns: Are you an obsessive?

Barbara Gladstone: It depends. I guess so. I'm not obsessive about many things, but I'm obsessive about certain things.

Charlotte Burns: With art, are you obsessive?

Barbara Gladstone: I'm, yeah, I'm obsessive about the things I own that I could never have be anywhere else but with me. 

Charlotte Burns: That’s a yes then. 

[ Laughter] 

You have a collection obviously, actually I was reading, you just took on the representation of David Salle and you were saying that one of the things that you'd acquired in 1979 was a painting of his.

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, for a thousand dollars, and I bought it from Larry Gagosian who was operating out of a loft on West Broadway—a borrowed loft, I believe.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: No.

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, and I still have it.

Charlotte Burns: That's so funny. 

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah. 

Charlotte Burns: So what do you do with your collection? Do you live with everything? 

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, I live with as much as I can, but I still buy things.

Charlotte Burns: Do you have plans for your collection?

Barbara Gladstone: That means thinking about the future, doesn't it? [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: It's a show about the future.

Barbara Gladstone: I know. 

I have to make plans for my future.

Charlotte Burns: It's hard to think about the future.

Barbara Gladstone: It's just, I'm such a very present-thinking person. I'm a very today kind of person. I'm not sentimental, particularly about yesterday, and I'm not particularly thinking about the future. I'm always, I'm as much in the present as I can be.

Charlotte Burns: Have you always been that way? 

Barbara Gladstone: Yeah, I've always been that way.

Charlotte Burns: I guess that's a helpful way to be when you're surrounded by art.

Barbara Gladstone: I can't actually have help it. Like if somebody talks about a show that's happening five years from now, I think…

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Barbara Gladstone: …I want to know what's happening now. 

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: If you're a person who's thinking about the present, what's the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning? What's the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?

Barbara Gladstone: Nothing keeps me up at night. I'm a good sleeper. I think just the day ahead. I approach most days seeing what will happen, seeing what problems will come up, what problems we can solve, what problems we can be mystified by. I mean I read the New York Times paper version every morning from cover to cover. And that's how I start my day.

Charlotte Burns: Are you a rational thinker? Are you a problem solver? 

Barbara Gladstone: I like to be a problem solver. I like to think of myself as a problem solver. 

My father used to say there are two kinds of people, those who solve problems and those who make problems.

Charlotte Burns: And you like to try and be in the former camp.

Barbara Gladstone: [Laughs] Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: That's interesting that's the career you've found yourself in. Do you think you solve artists' problems, in a way?

Barbara Gladstone: Artists solve problems, too. That's one of the most interesting aspects of doing this, is that I get to speak to the artist when the idea is a germ. And they start talking about it and then you see it start to take form and then you see it change form and then you see them adapt and then you see the final result and it's a beautiful process because I'm not an artist. I can't make art, but I could be as close to the process as possible. And I have the artists. They have my ear, and I can listen, and someone will talk about an idea that's just a little idea, and then two years later, it's this incredible thing, and I think, “Ah, I heard about it first.”

Charlotte Burns: When an artist talks to you about their idea, what sort of listening stance do you take? Do you always encourage? Do you ever edit?

Barbara Gladstone: It depends because every artist is different, every conversation is different. Some people want a lot of input, some people don't like any. It's up to me to be sensitive to what that person needs. Some artists want to talk about every aspect, the very beginning of an idea, and work through it and talk a lot during an idea—especially people who are production-oriented because in a way they have to work out very physical problems. Painters, maybe not so much, but to visit a painter's studio at a certain moment and then to go a couple of months later and then a couple of months after that is extremely interesting because something that I almost thought was finished, I realized was just the beginning of something. So to understand from the origin to the finish is a very interesting process for me.

Charlotte Burns: And how do you think about the career over the long term? Because you've talked about younger artists, saying a lot of artists get over-exploited at too young an age. And they reach a crisis four or five shows in, and they get sucked dry by the demand. Obviously, for each artist, it's different, but you've obviously had to sit down for each artist and think through the strategy of how to build that career.

Barbara Gladstone: I think the strategy unfolds as the work unfolds because sometimes, sometimes you don't know until it happens or sometimes, I don't think there's one answer to that because I think it's as different as the artists are different. And I like a lot of different kinds of art. The problems are different, and the solutions are different. And some artists need to talk so they can externalize the idea, but they don't need help at all. They'll figure it out themselves, but they need a sounding board. They need to run an idea past somebody and they'll say, “Oh, that doesn't work.” 

Charlotte Burns: Do you ever need sounding boards yourself? 

Barbara Gladstone: Sure, of course. Of course. I think I work in a world of opinions. A lot of things are opinion-oriented. You know that one person's opinion is worth somebody else's opinion, is worth more than somebody else's opinion. So that if a certain critic blesses something, people look at it slightly differently. Or a certain gallery blesses something, they look at it differently. The thing did not change. I think that everything is in process all the time and what is really interesting is that it's not over. It's not even over when the artist dies. It's not over. Because there's constantly evaluation and re-thinking going on and when you put one work in proximity to another work 50 years later, something new can happen. I mean, I think that's why it's important.

Charlotte Burns: I'm imagining in 1980 critics had more sway over who was important than now. In 2024, who gets to decide what's valuable?

Barbara Gladstone: If I'm really cynical, I would say social media gets to decide a lot of things just by weight of how many people it reaches and how many people are counting followers and all of that. Although I think at the end of the day, we'll see if it matters at all, but it's bound to affect something.

Charlotte Burns: How does that change the conversations you have for the artists that you have?

Barbara Gladstone: It doesn't.

Charlotte Burns: With the collectors?

Barbara Gladstone: With the collectors? 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. 

Barbara Gladstone: I try to ignore it because I don't think it's germane to the art. I just think it's noise. But I think it's powerful noise. Nothing is a secret anymore. Nothing. And so if you value something because of the amount of attention it gets, you will be very affected by that. But it's necessary, I think, to look beyond that. But it's more difficult because there are still secrets. There are still beautiful secrets to be discovered. 

If one is not…how can I say, is not overly influenced by the opinion of others. Because it's the opinion of others that prevails right now. The sheer number of followers that something has, the sheer amount of publicity—and it can be self-publicity. Anybody can post anything and have a lot of followers, and what exactly does that add up to?

Charlotte Burns: Do you think that's changing? We're in a market moment where the market seems to be slowing down when we look at new buyers. China's slowing down. We're in a generational shift in the US. Some of the heat is dissipating. Is that changing things, in terms of buyer behavior?

Barbara Gladstone: I think it certainly will. I don't know how much it has yet, but I think it certainly will because a lot of collectors were created during that period, and a lot of collectors were persuaded to follow the wave, in a way. And it could be that if you're following that kind of philosophy or that kind of impulse, that you find yourself four years later with a lot of things that you're no longer looking at because they don't actually have the content that the real meaty thing has. 

I've learned power can be this big. It can be a very small thing. If you think of an On Kawara, it's very powerful. It's as powerful as a Richard Serra in its own way. It's as insistent and as important because it has an inevitability to it that marks important art, and that you don't know for a very long time. I think it takes at least 20 years before you can evaluate. You can evaluate the 80s now, you can probably evaluate the 90s, but you can't evaluate what happened after that in terms of what will remain. Because I remember in the 80s when painting came back after a long period of conceptual and minimal and different kinds of work that were prevalent in the 70s, non-object works, when painting came back, there were a lot of painters who were very prominent who are not prominent now. And it was because in the fever of discovery of all of these new things, a lot of people bought a lot of things, and not everything lasts. And you don't know which ones will last. You don't. Time alone is, I think, the judge.

Charlotte Burns: Where do you think we are in the market cycle right now?

Barbara Gladstone: I don’t know, because I'm not such a, I don't follow the market in that way. It's not, I'm not a secondary dealer. I'm dedicated to what I'm dedicated to, and I'm going to work for it as I do. And I think that for us, there are people who are interested in certain things, which are not necessarily market artists, and there are some who are, but I'm not going to change the way I behave because of the market. I can't do that. So I'm a little bit less conscious of it than maybe somebody else, but I'll survive. 

Charlotte Burns: Are you competitive? Do you feel competitive with other galleries?

Barbara Gladstone: I certainly observe them. It depends what you mean by competitive. Sometimes there's an artist that I would love to have that somebody else has, and I'm competitive for a minute about that, but not the whole thing.

I don't want to be anybody else. I don't want to have anyone else's gallery. I guess we're all competitive in a certain way because we're all in the same marketplace and the same curatorial opportunities exist for all of us. And there are so many pieces of the pie and they're going to be distributed as they're distributed. But I think a lot of different people can exist very happily together. I don't believe in anything cutthroat because it's not interesting to me, because it's not my personality. But I understand it. I mean there's certainly individual artists who I admire and wish I had my hands on, but not whole programs or not, there's nobody directly. I mean, I do have colleagues who I like a lot and like to work with and that's nice.

Charlotte Burns: What if you could show any artist, who would you show?

Barbara Gladstone: Oh, I'm not going to answer that. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: Okay, we can talk about, we can talk about artists who are not alive if that makes it a bit easier. Artists from history. Your top three. 

Barbara Gladstone: Oh, from history? 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah.

Barbara Gladstone: How far back? 

Charlotte Burns: As far as you want to go.

Barbara Gladstone: I would show Sigmar Polke, happily. He knew it. [Laughs]

I would show, I don't know, I would show Stuart Davis, that has nothing to do with anything, American Cubist, but I always loved Stuart Davis.

How many do I have to name? [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: One more, maybe? 

Barbara Gladstone: One more. [Charles] Scheeler. That's a mixed bag, right?

Charlotte Burns: That's a mixed bag. What if you ran the art market, what would you change?

Barbara Gladstone: You can’t run the art market. 

Charlotte Burns: This is our imagination. You just did for a day. You were in charge of the art market, what would you do?

Barbara Gladstone: I would ban the internet. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: Everyone had to speak on the phone.

[Laughter]

What if you could advise collectors listening to this show on how to think about buying and living with art? What would you tell them?

Barbara Gladstone: I would say what I say anyway, which is to learn, to read, to look, to study, to not buy it on impulse, unless you're prepared to act on impulse, if you really have, know a lot about a work about an artist and you see just the right work, grab it. But don't follow what other people say, follow your own heart and your own knowledge and your feelings, what it tells you, what it speaks to you about, what you want from art, what it does for you, not just what everybody else is doing. 

Charlotte Burns: And what would you say to artists? If there was a piece of advice you were giving to a young artist now, what advice would you give them?

Barbara Gladstone: I'll tell you what Cecily Brown said a couple of weeks ago because I thought it was really interesting. She was on a panel that was full of young artists and it was a panel of women. She said, “I know that you could sell your work. I know that there's a very active market. What you should do is get another job, be a waitress, be anything, be a taxi driver, live off of that income, and do your work.

And don't sell your work now. Do your work. Just do it and do it. And you'll be ready when you're ready.” And I think I would say slow down and don't expect to have a career the minute you get out of graduate school. Don't expect to be a star right away, because you could be a star for three seasons and completely discarded. Take it easy and go slow is very difficult to do these days. You have to have very strong character and a very strong belief in yourself, which is what every artist should have. But it's very hard to resist the pressure of society and of notoriety and of fame and of glamour that exists in the art world. But I think she was 100 percent right and that would always be my advice, is to just slow down and do your work.

Charlotte Burns: And for you, Barbara, looking back, you said you probably wouldn't start a gallery if you knew then what you know now but knowing now, what you do, what piece of advice would you give to young dealers?

Barbara Gladstone: Opening a gallery? To be personal about it. To own it in the sense that it expresses their own views about art and not what's popular, not what sells—this is of course slightly ridiculous because you also have to exist in this world and to find some balance between what is easy to do because it's what people want and what you want may be a bridge too far. But I think it's very easy to start something and it's much harder to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. Unless it really means something to you, which is very deep and embedded and fulfilling because it's not that easy.

Charlotte Burns: Can I ask you in these years of running your gallery, what has been the most challenging time in these decades?

Barbara Gladstone: I think for me the most challenging time was the early years because I was making myself up as I went along. I was inventing myself in a way, I had no model, I had never worked in a gallery. I didn't have the experience. I never worked for anybody else, which I regretted my whole life. I wish I had worked for Virginia Zabriskie or somebody like that who was an example of a kind of morality and a kind of vision and a kind of commitment, that I had to learn on my feet.

Charlotte Burns: Did you have any other regrets looking back?

Barbara Gladstone: No. I have been lucky. [Laughs] Very lucky. 

Charlotte Burns: I think that's a great note to end on. Barbara Gladstone, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much, Barbara. 

Barbara Gladstone: Thank you, Charlotte.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: My enormous thanks to Barbara Gladstone for finally accepting our invitation to talk. Proof that persistence pays off. 

Next time on The Art World: What If…?!, we’ll be talking to the chief curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA [Museum of Contemporary Art Africa], Koyo Kouoh. 

Koyo Kouoh: We need to take the time to do the things that are urgent, that are essential, that are necessary and for me, building art institutions on the continent is a matter of urgency.

Charlotte Burns: I loved the conversation with Koyo and I can’t wait for you all to hear it.

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 7: Phillip Ihenacho

“West African culture is starting to become the future,” says Phillip Ihenacho, the director of the newly established Museum of West African Art. What if you built a new museum in West Africa, where a glorious ancient history contrasts with a brutal colonial one? What if we really considered the full meaning of restitution and repair? Can a cultural organization build a stable financial future by becoming its own landlord? Phillip and his team are building not just a new museum — but an entire neighborhood set within the ancient walls of Benin City in Edo. Phillip talks to us about how talent and creativity are thriving in West Africa, where 70% of the population is under 30 and he talks frankly about the challenges of developing opportunities and infrastructure. This is an “incredibly important moment”, Phillip says. “We need to try and grab it with both hands and take full advantage of it.”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!, I’m your host Charlotte Burns and this is the podcast all about imagining different futures. 

[Audio of guests]

In this episode, we’re joined by Phillip Ihenacho, the director of the Museum of West African Art in Benin City in Nigeria. We’ll talk to Phillip about planning an archaeological project on a site where a glorious ancient history contrasts with a brutal recent colonial one. He talks to us about how talent and creativity are thriving in West Africa—where 70% of the population is under 30—and he talks frankly about the challenges of developing opportunities and infrastructure. Phillip’s unusual background, a trained lawyer with twenty years’ experience negotiating investments in Africa stands him in good stead for this project, which is enormously ambitious. This is not just a museum but an entire neighborhood. Because at the heart of the business model is the need for the institution to be its own landlord. We discuss important partnerships within and outside of Nigeria, working with international museums and governments, and plans for exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. 

Phillip’s interview, for me, is a really wonderful, generous, and gracious example of how a person can approach the future hopefully by engaging with the past in thoughtful and elegant ways—for example, the real meaning of restitution and repair. 

The show has a bit of everything from balancing the budgets to emotional moments. Let’s dive in. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: So this podcast is called The Art World. What If…?!, and you are building one. What if you built a new museum in West Africa? What does it need to be? What do you think a museum in West Africa needs to be and do?

Phillip Ihenacho: I think the challenges that we have in Africa generally, is that because of the situation where there's still huge gaps in terms of education, healthcare, the challenge you face when you are looking at things like museums or arts and culture, infrastructure is that if you're not careful, you come across as being involved with something that is not essential or that ignores the more essential things around you. So why should you spend money on a museum when you've got hospitals without proper equipment? 

So to be relevant in an African context, a museum needs to address issues and concerns of Africans today, and in Nigeria, we have a huge growing young population, how they can achieve their ambitions in today's world. We want to create a space that allows them opportunities, gives them relevant experience, and provides a platform also for showcasing their talent, and at the same time connects them to history that hopefully will inspire and connect with the things that they're thinking about today. 

Charlotte Burns: In Nigeria, around 70% of the population of more than 200 million people are under the age of 30.

Phillip Ihenacho: That's correct.

Charlotte Burns: Which is a staggering number of people. 

Museums that kind of have a crisis of relevance around the world. Are young people in Nigeria interested in museums, do you think?

Phillip Ihenacho: Generally not. Government has underinvested in museum infrastructure. Most young Nigerians experience with the museum is a place that they go as part of a classroom experience, to a building that holds some old objects in glass vitrines and they're told not to touch anything. And then they're released after half an hour back into freedom. They're not places of great interest and in many ways when I first got involved with this project, one of the big debates we had was whether to even call ourselves a museum. 

One of my concerns was that the word museum had certain connotations and would immediately put us into a position that to be perceived in a way that we don't want to be perceived. But there's some good connotations about museums, which I think are very important, especially in Nigeria today. The arts and culture space is starting to thrive. There are art fairs and galleries, in Lagos in particular, that really have begun to generate huge interest around West African art. But there's still a missing piece. There's a lack of investment in curators, historians, institutional collectors and that is the traditional role of a museum and that is something that I think is really important, that the term “museum” implies a certain level of seriousness and a certain level of investment that goes beyond commercial. So we decided to keep “museum” in our name but try to redefine the term to be relevant in an African context.

Charlotte Burns: So Nigeria's the most populous nation in Africa. It's predicted to be the third most populous country in the world by 2050. Predicted to reach a population of 411 million according to the United Nations. Like you say, the infrastructure isn't growing in tandem. How do you use your finance background to think through those problems now in your cultural context? 

Phillip Ihenacho: One of the biggest challenges that Nigeria face is jobs and creation of futures for young Nigerians. And one of the great things is that arts and culture space can create a significant number of jobs. So one of the things that's quite striking is we have an investment in my private world, in a power plant in Benin. It's a $750 million investment. That probably employs about 150 people and if you compare that to let's say, putting in place a museum infrastructure, which let's say worst case costs $75 million, one-tenth the cost. But we reckon we will create around 20,000 jobs directly and indirectly. So for one-tenth the investment, you can create many times more jobs. And that is because arts and culture creates magnets to attract people into a space, creates opportunities for restaurants, for hotels, for taxi drivers, for artisans, for whole range of people and Nigerians already have a strong tradition of arts and culture. We already have, whether it's filmmaking or music or arts, a strong reputation. It's one of Nigeria's competitive advantages despite the fact that there is so little infrastructure to support creatives. So we believe if we can create infrastructure, more opportunities, more platforms for creators, we can really work to accelerate some of the growth and opportunities.

Charlotte Burns: Phillip, I like the way you do the comparison there of the power plant to the art museum and break those numbers down. Obviously, you worked in finance, I think for around 20 years. You did your BA [Bachelor of Arts] at Yale [University] before graduating from Harvard Law [School]. You worked for McKinsey [& Company] in various places around the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that background? 

Phillip Ihenacho: I'm a lawyer by training, but I never practiced law. I've been one of these people who never really knew what they wanted to do, have various passions—mainly in environmental conservation issues. So this art world is relatively recent for me. I think in another life I would've been an archeologist or a historian. I studied histories as my first degree. I've always been very interested in ancient African kingdoms and that is probably part of the reason I was asked to raise money for this project. 

In my business world, we invested in a power plant just outside of Benin City, and during the construction phase, we had the fortune, or at the time seemed to be a misfortune of stumbling across some of the Benin earthworks. So when we were clearing the land, we came across these old walls and moats, which actually date from the 12th century and it was a disaster because you are about to do construction work and you come across something that you really wish didn't exist the way it was. But it was very interesting. So we had archeologists come in, we had to reconfigure the location of the project. But it got me much more interested in the Benin kingdom in particular. 

So one thing led to another. I was then asked to help raise money for museum infrastructure in Benin. And that's how I got involved with this.

Charlotte Burns: And that's led you to this podcast called The Art World: What If…?!. Strange where things lead you.

How is it being a finance person working in the art world? What are the things that you find freeing about moving into a cultural space and what are the things that you find frustrating? 

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I hate to be termed a finance person because I, yes, I did work in finance, but I've never regarded myself as a finance person. 

Charlotte Burns: Sorry, I shouldn't do that. Then tell me why? What is it, what does a finance person imply that you don't like?

Phillip Ihenacho: So a finance person sometimes implies that you are interested in money and I've never really been interested in money. I've been interested in trying to attract investment into Africa, and to demonstrate that it is possible to make a return on your investment in places like Africa, that Africa is not a place that is sitting, waiting for handouts all the time. That has been a big motivator for me for a long period of time. In order to do that, you have to be in the world of finance and I'm reasonably good at raising money for large projects in Africa. That's what I've done for a long time, being the sort of the bridge between international capital and opportunities in Africa. That's what I have enjoyed.

Charlotte Burns: Can I ask you a little bit more about that? Along the way of bringing those opportunities to bear? Where were the most sort of satisfying moments?

Phillip Ihenacho: The most satisfying is if you are involved in something from the very beginning. So you look at something that is on a piece of paper, a plan about doing something, and five years later you've got whatever it is built and hundreds of people employed and generating income and you're making a return for investors. To start with a blank sheet of paper saying you are going to do something that doesn't exist, that is probably the most satisfying. 

In many ways, when I was asked to get involved with this museum I thought, okay, it's a sort of similar thing. You just put together a sort of business plan and then you talk to people who give you the money and then you're off to the races. And the easy bit is that they don't even need a return. So they're giving you money and you don't even have to give it back. That seems pretty easy actually. What you have to deliver is a different type of return, an impact on communities, an impact in terms of infrastructure. So in some ways, it is similar. 

The thing that I struggled the most with in the, not just the arts and culture world, but in the philanthropic world, is that compared to the sorts of investors that I deal with large foundations and so on, they're harder institutions to get to make decisions in a timely fashion. The other thing that's difficult for me is an element of fundraising is approaching individuals, some of whom are friends and I'm always nervous that they're gonna start crossing to the other side of the street when they see me coming because they're thinking that I'm gonna try and hit them up for money. Approaching individuals for philanthropic causes is a delicate process, let's put it that way. 

The third thing that is difficult in the philanthropic world is building an organization where you are going to be dependent on future philanthropy in order to keep the organization alive, for me, is a very, it's a precarious way of setting up an enterprise and I think over the long run, particularly in Africa, thinking creatively about how that entity generates some income that allows it to cover some of its costs, ideally all of its costs, so that you're not having to raise money in order to pay salaries is extremely important.

Charlotte Burns: I don't know that's unique to Africa. It's a big conversation in America, which relies so much on private philanthropy. About what that means when you are then so reliant on a handful of private philanthropists in the UK and in parts of Europe you're reliant on state funding. And there are obviously conditions that come with that. We've seen recently in China, there's been a spate of closures of private museums because there were not plans made for leaner times. So it’s sensible to be thinking of what happens when you’re opening the museum.

What kind of models are you looking at? Because I'm sure that these are models for the future that could conceivably be adopted far more widely. 

Phillip Ihenacho: So one of the things that I did very early on—because I was obviously very underqualified to be trying to raise money for a museum—is talk to lots of museums around the world. And one of the questions I asked them always was, “What would you do if you were us?” And, “If you could change something about your own museum, what would you change?” And one of the strong themes that came out of, from many of the museums across the world, even from museums that I imagined to be successful commercially, there's always a long queue and it seems quite expensive to get into the museum, you imagine that they must make some money, and you then find out that they're losing massive amounts of money.

What a lot of them said was, “Museums lose money but they create an enormous amount of value for their neighborhoods,” and “If we were you, we would try to own as much of the neighborhood as possible before building the museum.” So it's the cafes, the restaurants, the hotels, the retail outlets around the museum that make money. And the museum essentially subsidizes that. So it's the loss leader and the value is captured outside the museum. 

So one of the things that we have done is we have acquired a relatively significant amount of land, far more than we need for the, let's say the core museum, and we are creating a campus that includes a boutique hotel. We'll include retail space. We'll include commercial space, and we'll include a series of different exhibition spaces, studios, and so on. Some of those spaces will be not-for-profit spaces. Some will be for-profit and the idea is that the income generated essentially as a landlord is used to meet some of the running costs of the museum. I'm not saying it's easy. I know a lot of museums have tried bits of this already, but if you're starting from scratch, you have an opportunity to think about that and build that into your strategy from day one. So my personal goal would be that in five years from now, the basic running costs, the core operational costs of the museum are met through income that is generated by the foundation that owns the museum and the infrastructure around it. 

The great thing about it also is that it ties to another thing a lot of museums said. A lot of museums said, “We're like little islands. We're not connected enough to our neighborhoods,” and particularly museums that are very successful in terms of international tourism. You get this horrible effect where all the people coming into the museum are from the outside and there are very few people who are actually in the immediate neighborhood coming in. And I think it's incredibly important that it's almost the other way around. You want to be as connected as possible to your immediate neighborhood and then you want the kind of outside visitors to be the icing on the cake as opposed to the cake itself because otherwise you do become a little island. And again, if you have the ability to curate your neighborhood a little bit because you are a kind of landlord, that allows you to do some of that and make more connections, explicit connections with your neighborhood, try to create public space as well as private space that invites people to walk across your campus, that invites school children and others who may not want to actually come into the main museum building, but you can pull them into your neighborhood and find something for them to do that is around, and that has a link to your cause but isn't necessarily museum in the strict definition of the word. 

Charlotte Burns: So it's more about the kind of core cultural values.

Phillip Ihenacho: Yes. And one of the things that was interesting to me was a lot of them when I asked them, “What are the things that you do that connect you with your neighborhoods? What are the things that are most successful?” One of the things that came out, which I wasn't expecting, is sports infrastructure; football field, skateboard park, basketball park, things like that where people in the neighborhood who are looking for a place to get together can come together in an informal and relatively disorganized fashion so they don't have to buy tickets and do all this kind of stuff. And my first reaction, “Well, okay, but that's sports, that's not really arts and culture.” But why do you have to have these strict lines between sports and art?

Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting too because actually if you look at some of the very real estate-led cultural districts that have failed, that feel very synthetic, there's quite a few of these particularly in parts of Asia…

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah. 

Charlotte Burns: …I think it might be something to do with what you're getting towards this informality of sports, and it reminds me of investment in the tech world right now in sports and in culture and it's this idea of the algorithmic world, and sports and culture being a kind of antidote to the increasingly predictable nature of algorithms. And so if you think of the deal that Apple struck with [Lionel] Messi, that he's a revenue generator for Apple because you don't know if a sports player is gonna strike a goal. It's a human endeavor. You can't really write the script for it. There's a kind of coalescence around sporting events and art events as human things. And so I think it's interesting that you would mention that the cultural districts have been connected through sports and art.

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah. We're not there yet. We're still in the very, very early days where, hopefully, November we will have our first building open. But this is a 10-year journey. And in many ways, a lot of things which are apparent weaknesses that we have—I think over time will be strengths—we don't have all the money we need to finish a whole district so it forces us to go slowly and gives us time therefore to experiment, see how things go, change things, talk to communities more intensively. 

And the other huge advantage we have obviously is that we have no collection. Our mandate isn't to showcase some fantastic collection that some very wealthy person or government wishes to show the world. We can start with nothing and we can therefore be very deliberate about what we want in our collection, how large a collection we want, how much we want on loans versus to own. We can be very deliberate about collection strategy.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: The thinking about the museum is obviously, as you're saying, it's really evolved because when the museum first came to international attention, it was called something different. And it started life as an organization that was focused on bringing back the Benin bronzes but its mission is changing. It had a different architect, it was meant to be a different thing. So it's changing over time. How much do you wanna talk about that? How much do you wanna move past that quickly? 

Phillip Ihenacho: I'm happy to talk about it, happy to talk about it. So let's start with the mission of the museum. One of the things that is very frustrating is if you were to go back and look at what our original mission was, that mission has not changed. But because we were formed effectively from a dialogue that was happening around the Benin bronzes, and because the West has been so focused on the story about the restitution of Benin bronzes, no matter what we said, we were always described as the museum where the Benin bronzes are going. 

Charlotte Burns: That museum.

Phillip Ihenacho: Yes. We were hoping that we could provide some infrastructure that would allow us to host some of the return objects, and yes, we hoped that we would have the ability to showcase a significant number of restituted Benin bronzes, but from the beginning, to come to our name, we were the “Edo Museum of West African Art” not the “Edo Museum of Benin Bronzes.” So we have always said we want to be West African in scope, and we also want to cover ancient to contemporary and that has not changed. 

In many ways, it's absurd to think that you would build something on the basis of things that you are hoping you might one day be given back. How do you plan for that? And also you come to Nigeria, the one thing that you see very quickly is that the problem we have in the arts and culture space both in the contemporary modern as well as the ancient, is not a lack of art. That is not our problem. Our problem isn't that we don't have objects and they have all been taken out of Nigeria. The problem is we don't have infrastructure to showcase, preserve and research, and provide a platform for the great cultural objects that we have. So even if there's not one single restituted object from the West that comes to Nigeria, Nigeria still has incredible objects that are languishing in store rooms, that have inadequate exhibition space, and that deserve a place in the sun. And that is immediately apparent to anybody who spends any time amongst museums in Nigeria. There's a huge need for what we're doing irrespective of restitution. 

So we very quickly came to the conclusion, number one is being termed the “Benin Bronze Museum” was a really bad idea. And then to make things worse, we got off to a reasonably rough start with the Royal Palace [of the Oba of Benin]. There was a perception on their side that we were somehow the other trying to compete for ownership of objects and so on and that was exacerbated by some of the Western press that kept talking about how all of the Benin bronzes were coming to us, which was never the case. We said from the beginning, we can hold objects only with the permission of the relevant, kind of authorities. We learned very quickly that it's important that if we were to achieve our true mission—which is a West African museum—is that we need to go out of our way to focus on delivering that message because otherwise we will be labeled as the “Benin Bronze Museum.”

Our name change, we dropped “Edo” out of our name. That is to do more with local things in Nigeria. Quite often a lot of people assume that we were owned by the Edo State government, so that was really the reason why we dropped that. And also, again, emphasizing our West Africa scope. 

So we are building from where we started as opposed to abandoning where we started. I think we're very privileged to be in Benin City, which is the heart of the ancient kingdom of Benin. And if you were to talk to the governor of Edo State, he would immediately say, “Yes, we are the Florence or the Venice of West Africa.” At its height, the palace supported over 40 guilds, wood carvers, ivory carvers, bronze casters. So there was a great tradition of supporting arts and artisans in Benin. Our location is the appropriate location for what we're trying to do, which is to support arts and culture today. 

Charlotte Burns: When I read the article that you wrote for The Art Newspaper in 2023, you talked about restitution, which is always one of art journalists’ favorite subjects to read or write about. What I found so interesting was that the way you talked about the Benin bronzes—which is a subject I, for instance, have been reading or writing about for years and years—was you so successfully said, “What if you all just accepted that you're writing about restitution in completely the wrong way?” That's what it made me think. What if everybody's just talking about restitution in completely the wrong way? Because what was stolen is much bigger than the Benin bronzes, and can't ever really be restituted properly. 

You also said something that was so important, of the nuances and the responsibilities and the overlapping delicate balances between federal, state, and community leaderships that aren't recognized by the Western press. You said, “There will be debate and disagreement about appropriate outcomes and that will take a long time to resolve. And this is only natural.” And then you said that, “It seems fine for the West to take more than a hundred years to even begin to act on restitution, but unforgivable that Nigeria does not resolve complex domestic and historical issues instantaneously.” And I thought this was perfectly put because of course the West is just beginning to discuss, possibly returning possibly some things, and the idea that there may be discussion about what to do with those objects. It was like, you guys haven't got your stuff together, we're not even gonna give it back then. 

I love the idea that the conversation around restitution, that we should have now on this show should be a different conversation around restitution and that in fact, restitution might even mean something different and that you could shape it in a different way.

That the term is not just about artifacts, but networks, skill sets, opportunities, place, an exchange, and all these other things that you've written so brilliantly about in some of the things you've said in the past. Not to put you on the spot.  

Phillip Ihenacho: So when I got involved with all this stuff, one of the things I did was I actually went and looked at the definition of what restitution is. There's two different meanings. One meaning has to do with the repair of a wrong. So it is about making something good that you somehow they have made bad. The other definition of restitution is about the return of something. So the giving back of something that was taken. I'm much more interested in the former than the latter.

Nigeria has a huge wealth of objects, so returning objects alone is not making good what the damage was and the damage that was caused. The analogy for me is, okay, let's say Benin bronzes were manufactured in a factory and you came along and you bombed the factory and you took some of the bronzes that were in the factory out and you carted them off and you sold them and whatever. The bigger tragedy is not the objects that were taken from the factory. The bigger tragedy is the destruction of the factory that enables people to create those objects. And what happened in colonial days was a replacement of traditional ways of organizing society, taxation, traditional rulers, replacing that with a quote-unquote modern means of governance with parliaments and state governments and federal governments, and so on. And in the case of Benin, the traditional ruler was exiled, the palace was destroyed, so there was a destruction of a governance system and a very complex system of patronage that was supporting artists and the production of arts and the production of cultural objects. That destruction was not complete so if you go to Benin today, there are still bronze casters that are casting bronze in the traditional way but it damaged very significantly a lot of the infrastructure that traditionally supported artists, artisans, craftsmen, and so on. And the problem is that what came in its place, which is governments that we have today, they have not replaced those systems of patronage. So the arts and culture space in Nigeria has been underinvested massively. 

And for me, that's the core of what needs to be restituted. It's a repair of systems that allows the creative sector to flourish. That is the piece, it's the factory that needs to be repaired. It's not the products that the factories were making. So that's one way of thinking about it. 

Now that is not to belittle the return of objects, and there are people far better qualified than me who sit within the Royal Court of Benin or who are advisors who can talk about the significance from a religious and cultural side about the objects that were taken. There was an enormous number of objects which have very strong meaning, which have strong histories, that were taken that have enormous value and importance to the people of Edo State, and that should not be underestimated.

So what I don't want to say is that the return of objects is meaningless because obviously, it isn't, it is very meaningful indeed. And I think one of the things that's incredibly important is that if you grew up in Nigeria today, and I look at my life, if I look at the state of let's say the schools that I went to when I was a child, and I compare that to the state of the same schools today, they're worse today than they were in the past.

Across many measures, Nigeria is worse than what it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And sometimes when I talk to friends of mine in Nigeria, there's almost a sense of questioning whether there's an inevitability of where we are and are we condemned to be so far behind what our potential actually is. And I think one of the things that the Benin bronzes and artifacts and objects from great periods of African history represent is evidence that we were great. We had real periods of greatness and so therefore we don't deserve, nor should we accept, our current situation. And I think for young people, that is incredibly important. It's incredibly important to have a sense of pride about who you were in the past because that influences greatly your ambitions.

Charlotte Burns: My goodness. That's so moving. That's very moving. 

Phillip Ihenacho:  It's what all societies recognize, is that you want to have places where you can take people and say, “Look how great we are.” And some of that has to be around your history. Every culture creates a history and a mythology about greatness.  The Romans were the best at this. They imported everything from the Greeks and claimed it all as theirs. And then Renaissance Europe did the same thing. And China's good at it as well. You've gotta have places where if there are foreigners who are visiting your country, you take them to, and you can say, “Look how great we are,” and there were periods of greatness that people have forgotten about. And I think that is a combination of objects, but it also a combination, but it also needs to be an infrastructure that is showcasing those objects. You need both. You need places where school children come to and say, “Wow, this is incredible. This is fantastic. This is how we were in the past and this is why I am the way I am today. And this gives me an indication of what I can become. And there is no reason at all for us to accept compromise.”

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: It seems like a lot of the contemporary art scene in West Africa is driven by a sense of community and collectivity. There's a lot of contemporary artists who have residency programs, there's exciting galleries on the ground in Accra and Lagos, for example. Do you feel that sense of collectivity and community?

Phillip Ihenacho: Yes. Yes, absolutely because this project's not been an easy project. We've had thrown stones thrown at us from several places that we weren't expecting stones to be thrown from us. And it's not easy. It's not easy raising money, it's not easy. Construction is not easy in Nigeria. There's a whole range of things that are not easy. One of the most encouraging things in fact, I would say probably the single most encouraging thing from my perspective is the support that we have received from contemporary creatives, from the successful predominantly diaspora-based artists who have understood what we're trying to do and who are very committed to building platforms for West African-based creatives. If you look at what Kehinde [Wiley] is doing, what a lot of the artists who, Yinka [Shonibare], what they're doing, they're investing in infrastructure, in support systems, for the express purpose of trying to help people who have the talent, but perhaps not the opportunity in Nigeria. Yeah, they’ve been incredibly supportive. 

We did an auction of art that was donated to us last year. I was amazed at how supportive artists were, artists that weren't even from West Africa. People in the creative industry know how tough it is for creators generally, and particularly for creatives that are based in West Africa. Creating platforms that showcase their talent, that allow them to interact with the global arts community, is something that they really want to support, and that has made very clear to me, and our team in the interactions we've had with a lot of these artists.

Charlotte Burns: And you have the “Nigeria Imaginary” at the Nigeria Pavilion this year, the second time participating in the Venice Biennale in April.

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah. Yeah. That's super exciting. What we wanted to do as a museum is we wanted to emphasize the fact that we are not just about Benin bronzes and that the modern and the contemporary is a core part of what we want to do. And basically when we were recruiting a modern and contemporary curator in the form of Aindrea Emelife, we started talking about initiatives and things that we could do that would demonstrate our commitment to the contemporary. And in terms of government spending priorities, doing something in Venice is not top of the list of priorities as a country. So we said, “Look, we'll organize it, we'll fundraise for it, we'll execute it,” very naively underestimating the level of difficulties but it has been fantastic. So we've raised a significant amount of money, we've got an incredible venue, Aindrea has assembled a great group of artists, and we're all really looking forward to it.

The thing that we decided to do, which is very different I think from a lot of the Venice exhibitions, is it has been deliberately designed as an exhibition that not only will be in Venice but will eventually travel back and be in Nigeria. We want to showcase it in our creative campus so that Nigerians can see what was showcased in Venice. So it becomes not just a temporary exhibition in Venice, but an exhibition that will actually have a homecoming. 

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, I love that idea. 

I know I don't have you for much longer and you've gotta go deal with those builders next door but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the actual campus itself. And then, of course, a couple of ‘what ifs’ to round us out. 

So the campus itself is going to be a 20-acre creative campus in the heart of Benin City in the Edo State in Nigeria. There's going to be the 4,300 square meter research and collection center. The rather excitingly titled Rainforest Gallery, which is 1,400 square meter sustainable gallery space set within a lush garden. The Artisans Hall, which is a re-imagining of the 16th century building of the Benin Kingdom, the boutique hotel, the cafe and restaurant, and then studios, performance spaces, public gardens. We talked about the fact that there was a different museum planned at the beginning. David Adjaye was the lead architect on that project. I know you and he have had a long history together. Is he still involved in this project? He's been the subject of various allegations. Is that something you can talk about?

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about. So David had three roles. If you go back to 2019, David's firm did the design concept. As I mentioned before, after having discussions with lots of museums and thinking through our own internal strategy, we decided not to proceed with that main museum. We decided instead to focus on a series of buildings and those buildings are being built by several different architectural firms. So we wanted African architects in general, as much as possible, to be involved. So we have the Rainforest Gallery is being designed by a Senegalese architectural firm, the boutique hotel, an Nigerian architectural firm. David's firm was responsible for the research and collections building that is under construction now. 

So we have been fortunate in one sense in that the building was already under construction when allegations came out. So we weren't in a situation where you are trying to fundraise, the building's already under construction. That building is a collaboration between David and a Nigerian architectural practice. And the Nigerian architectural practice are the ones doing the construction supervision work. 

The third area that David has been involved is in the master plan for the whole area.

That work is essentially complete. We want it to be somewhat organic in terms of development so we want to do a little bit and then see how it goes. The next piece that we are really focused on, the research and collections building which we're calling the Institute that will be finished in November, is the Rainforest Gallery. So we already have a nursery established on site. We have indigenous plants from a forest that is actually only about an hour drive from outside of Benin City—so a lot of Benin was a rainforest. If you look at Benin art, you'll see motifs of leopards and mud fish and pythons and Benin was deeply connected with nature. One of the things we wanted to do was to see if we could bring some of that environment into the heart of our little district so that people have a sense as to what influenced people when they were creating objects in the 16th century. So that building is designed by very talented Senegalese architect. That's one of our core focuses in the next, over the next few months. 

We have deliberately not made comments about David or allegations around David and so on. At the end of the day, what we know about it is essentially the same as what everybody else knows about it is what's in the newspaper. We are not in a position to say much about the facts of it. We don't condone allegations like that but we are not the judge and the jury on things that we don't have a lot of information about.

Charlotte Burns: Okay, so moving on. Some of the people that have helped support the project are other museums. You've singled out the German government, you've said have shown considerable courage. You haven't necessarily received objects back from the British Museum, but you partner with the British Museum and the institution actually, David Adjaye, in one of his interviews with the New York Times in 2020 said that the institution was helping excavate old walls as part of a $4 million archeology project. So that's interesting to be working with those institutions. Can you talk a bit more about those relationships, who's showing courage, you know who you wanna single out?

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I think, how should I say? For me, one of the key things in order to make something successful in Africa, there's an element of pragmatism that you always have to have. I knew bringing this project—partly because of my experience with building a power plant—is that if you are going to do construction in a historic part of Benin, whether you like it or not, you have an archeological project ab initio, and if you don't organize around it, you are gonna have serious problems. So the last few years, the main activity we've had across the site has been archeological. We didn't want to be in a situation where we are destroying things as we're trying to construct something new and also what we have been hoping, which is the case, is that if we are able to find things, we might be able to incorporate some of what we find into the design of what we're doing so that there is a real sense of history in place. 

So in order to do that, we obviously needed funding. We had very early on discussions with the British Museum. We joined the British Museum to apply for funding for this archeological project and we were successful. And that is the project that has been ongoing for the last few years. We have a good relationship with the British Museum. 

Obviously British Museum has its constraints about the return of objects but we are not the agitator for the return of objects. I would say we are the facilitator for the return of objects. So we want, there are some people who are concerned about how objects might be looked after when they're returned. We want to demonstrate that there are places that are capable of looking after precious objects. The archeological project has been supplemented with a team that we've worked with from the German Archeological Institute as well. So we've got the Germans and the British working side by side—which is always interesting—and we've managed to build an archeological team of our own. So what we wanted to do in, within the first building this research and collections building, there will be a materials lab is essentially an archeological lab that allows for a lot of the testing and the research that ordinarily would be done outside of Nigeria to be done in Nigeria. Our ambition is to have a center for archeological studies within this first building. And there's obviously huge overlap between the skillset that you need in the archeological world and the materials lab and in the conservation world. So there's a conservation lab and a materials lab within this, the collections building. 

We got very early support from the Germans. The Germans approach this very much from a restitution perspective, but they have been helpful across the board. The first building that we're building, that the German government has provided a reasonably substantial amount of money that has gone into that building but more importantly, I think both with the British Museum and the German government is it has allowed us to be able to talk to more institutions. They are obviously credible organizations that give comfort to other Western institutions that one might be talking to. So we've started to receive funding from some of the American foundations, and we're broadening fundraising to include other institutions. 

Charlotte Burns: Do you get support from within West Africa?

Phillip Ihenacho: Yes, we do. The Edo State government has provided some support and that has been absolutely vital to us. Again, from a sort of credibility perspective, we are starting to get some funding from Nigerian individuals and some corporates. My own belief is it's much easier to raise money when you've got tangible stuff on the ground that you can show people, so what I'm really hoping is once we've opened this first building, we should be able to raise more funding domestically. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: The late curator Okwui Enwezor said, “The future belongs to Africa because it seems to have happened everywhere else.” So what if that's true? What does that look like?

Phillip Ihenacho: Yeah, I think in many ways we are living in a very exciting time. I look around and as a Nigerian who has spent a lot of time outside of Nigeria, what has recently changed is, before when people ask where you are from, you say you're from Nigeria, there's always a sort of a look of mild suspicion, and sort of Nigeria, I dunno, 20 years ago was all about corruption and fraud. And there was these terrible letters that used to go, I think they probably still do, but, “Give me your bank details and I'll send you lots of money stuff.” And what is interesting for me now is that you say you're from Nigeria and people start talking about music, about art, arts and culture, a lot of people talk about the fact that they would love to visit Nigeria. That was just unheard of before. 

We live in this world where West African culture is starting to become the future and I think what we need to do, I'm trying to think how to say it, we need to try and grab it with both hands and take full advantage of it because this moment, I think is an incredibly important moment. And that means that we need really to work together in Nigeria and in West Africa—because it's not just a Nigerian thing, it's a West African thing, it's an African thing actually—and capitalize on an opportunity where the world is actually starting to look at us in a different light and to recognize talent and creativity, whether it's fashion or film or music or art. And that is about starting to create institutions that build the link between Africa and the West. Support the creatives. I think Okwui is right, there's an incredible future ahead for African creativity in particular and we need to grab it with both hands.

Charlotte Burns: Phillip, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the one that motivates you to get up in the morning?

Phillip Ihenacho:  Well, I guess the thing that, the thing that motivates me is that when you are working for something that you really believe in, it's not work. It's, yeah, it's a privilege you feel every day. I wake up and I think how lucky I am. Yeah, how lucky I am to be involved in this project that is, yeah, it's a huge privilege. So that is the sort of positive energy, is you wake up and you think, okay, I've got all these interesting things that I could do. Organizing the Nigerian Pavilion at Venice, like that's a dream. So that, that's the carrot. 

The stick, the thing that worries me, that is the money. The arts and culture space requires a lot of capital and, yeah, and I know that our journey requires attracting reasonably significant amounts of money from sources that, some of which I've yet to even talk to, so you are in a journey where you know that what you're doing is not fully in your control. You need the support of others. You need to maintain that support and trust of others and you need to be able to do that on a consistent basis. And that's a huge motivator. I wake up every day and I worry about money for this project. 

Charlotte Burns: What if you knew what you were getting into when someone asked you if you could help with this project?

[Laughter]

Phillip Ihenacho:  Yeah. My God, I'm not sure. If I'm very honest with you, I imagined it taking up 20% of my time. I still have some business interests that I'm involved with and then in addition to that, I have a very strong interest in nature conservation work—I plan to spend a lot more time in that space than I have the last couple of years. So I thought, okay, this will be 20% of my time. We will get a little team together and then raise some money and then be off to the races. It is really taking up 90% of my time. It's overwhelmed everything else and honestly, if somebody had asked me we'd like you to spend 90% of your time on a new museum in Nigeria, I would've probably said, no, I can't do that. 

What I keep thinking to myself is, okay, I'm gonna get to a point where I can extract myself from this. There are people far better qualified than me who will take over and then I will fade away and that is still my plan. I do intend that, it's just taking a bit longer than I thought and it's a lot more fun than I thought. It has been the most intense experience I've had from a work perspective, I think ever, and I have learned a huge amount in the process so I feel very lucky to, yeah, to be learning, and to be intensively involved in something that is so interesting.

Charlotte Burns:  What if people wanted to support you on this journey, Phillip? How would they get involved?

Phillip Ihenacho: It'd be great if people get to get involved financially. We now have got a good team of people. We've got good infrastructure in terms of comms. I think for us, building supporters outside of Nigeria as well as within is extremely important. We're still discovering the way forward. We are still interested in talking to people who have ideas. I think one of the most important things is to remain very flexible, and to approach things in a non-traditional way. And that means really being open-minded about how you do things. We're interested in talking to people who have ideas about what we're doing, and we're also interested in talking to people or institutions that want long-term partnerships. I think we will be a success if we can form good partnerships, both within Nigeria and abroad. That's core to what we're trying to do.

Charlotte Burns: Phillip, thank you so much. I'm so glad we made this work. I appreciate the time.

Phillip Ihenacho: No problem.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you to Phillip Ihenacho, what a great interview.

Next time we’ll be talking to the legendary, peerless art dealer Barbara Gladstone.

Barbara Gladstone: I think that everything is in process all the time and what is really interesting is that it’s not over. It’s not even over when the artist dies. It’s not over. Because there’s constantly evaluation and rethinking going on and when you put one work in proximity to another work 50 years later, something new can happen. That’s why it’s important. 

Charlotte Burns: Tune in for much, much more next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 6: Jarl Mohn

In this episode, we welcome Jarl Mohn, the LA art collector and philanthropist who founded the E! Entertainment network in his professional life, among other impressive media and business ventures. Mohn became a DJ at a young age, partly in an attempt to escape the realities of life in a state foster home. Success in his professional career led him to the art world - which he initially distrusted as an industry “designed to take advantage of idiots like us”. Mohn talks to us about what changed his mind, and how he ended up building two distinct art collections. An ardent Angeleno, Mohn tells us how LA is the future of art and reveals his secret dream of pulling off a very slow heist involving Walter de Maria’s ‘The Lightning Field’.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!. I’m your host Charlotte Burns and this is the podcast all about imagining different futures.

[Audio of guests]

This episode we have the pleasure of welcoming the art collector and philanthropist, Jarl Mohn—who has one of the most melodious voices we’ve had on the podcast so far which may not surprise American listeners familiar with DJ Lee Masters, a name and career Jarl picked as a young teen, partly he says, in a bid to escape a difficult time in a state foster home. Jarl excelled on the airwaves, leading a wildly interesting and successful career. He helped shape modern media culture first as an exec at MTV and VH1 during their heydays; then when he created E! Entertainment and then, when he came out of retirement to become CEO of NPR. But art wasn’t something on Jarl’s radar initially. In fact, when his wife Pamela suggested buying something, he was against the idea, saying, “The entire art world is designed to take advantage of idiots like us.” 

We’ll talk about what changed—Jarl has since built two distinct collections, one focusing on Minimalism, California light and space, and Earth art; and a second supporting younger, emerging artists in Los Angeles. Jarl is an unabashed cheerleader for his adopted hometown of LA and its “gravitational pull of creativity,” as he puts it. A natural team builder in his business life, Jarl hints at a possible collaboration amongst the cultural organizations he supports philanthropically. We talk about all of this and more—including Jarl’s secret dream of pulling off a very slow heist involving Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for joining me today on the show, Jarl. Thank you so much. It's a very early morning in Los Angeles, so thank you for being here.

Jarl Mohn: Well, I'm honored to be here. Thank you, Charlotte.

Charlotte Burns: I would say it's the first time we've had a DJ on the show, but it's actually the second because you appeared in our first season in our LA specials. We grabbed you walking around Frieze LA.

Jarl Mohn: That's right. I remember that.

Charlotte Burns: You may be known to many of our listeners under your pseudonym. Do you want to introduce yourself? We have a professional DJ on the show, I feel like we shouldn't waste that opportunity.

Jarl Mohn: Oh, that's so funny. My nom de guerre…

Charlotte Burns: Yep, your nom de guerre.

Jarl Mohn: …was Lee Masters because my name Jarl Mohn is really not optimal for being on the radio. It's hard to say. It's hard to remember. It's hard to spell. And so when I was 13 years old, I created my alter ego Lee Masters, which I used on the air for many years until I actually started going on the board of public companies and then I saw in the proxy statements and SEC filings it said, “Lee Masters also known as Jarl Mohn,” and that didn't look too good. I thought it looked a little shady. So I decided to start using my legal name.

Charlotte Burns: I've been listening as part of the prep for this to Lee Masters and WMB… hang on, can you do it for me? Go on. Do it. Bring us back. Bring us back to those heydays.

Jarl Mohn: Oh, no, that was on WNBC.

Charlotte Burns: WNBC. Yep, WNBC.

Jarl Mohn: WNBC in New York.

Charlotte Burns: It’s so good. I love those radio and you were saying, “It's New York's own Billy Joel.”  

[Laughter]

It was great. Do you miss those days? Did you like being a radio DJ?

Jarl Mohn: I loved being a radio DJ but I got, ultimately, tired of it. It wasn't intellectually challenging to me but I had a blast, I had a lot of fun, I had a lot of great life adventures, but no, I don't miss it. I wouldn't go back and do that at all, ever.

Charlotte Burns: I like the emphatic “ever”. It's decisive.

Jarl Mohn: I do love the music. And on my Instagram account, every day I post a different song that I'm intrigued by and a couple of lyrics from it. And it's been a fun way to connect with people.

Charlotte Burns: What do you get the best response to? Because you post a lot of art, you post a lot of music. 

Jarl Mohn: It really depends. I'm less concerned with how much response than I am with the quality of the response. And I'll give you an example. During the month of April, which is National Poetry Month, I post a short poem every day. I would get the most beautiful comments and people posting back to me short poems that came to mind for them. So that gets very small in terms of numbers but probably the most engagement. But I post my comments about movies, television shows, a lot of cultural stuff, music. On [Instagram] stories, I post a different song every day with some of the music and lyrics. It's a 15-second thing. I get a lot of responses to that. Music touches a lot of people.

Charlotte Burns: I really like the numbers that you look at here. People listening to this show who are in the art world, they may know you through your association with the Hammer Museum, your support of the Made in LA Biennial, for the Mohn Awards, and your role as an art patron and philanthropist. But you also have had a wildly interesting and successful career in which you've shaped nearly every aspect of modern media culture.  

You were a former executive vice president and general manager of MTV and VH1 in the heydays. You created and were the CEO of the E! Entertainment Networks. And that's why I'm chuckling when you talk about numbers because you had such small ratings when you began the E! Network. It barely registered when you started that you would buy [ratings] once a week because you couldn’t even afford to buy…

Jarl Mohn: The ratings. Yeah. We couldn't we were so poor, we could only afford the ratings once a week, not every day.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah. [Laughs]

Jarl Mohn: It was that bad.

Charlotte Burns: But you made your first fortune by selling [E!] and then you started and ran Liberty Digital, which was a pioneer in interactive TV and internet enterprises before selling that. You retired once and then you came out of retirement to become the CEO of NPR in 2014, where you were for just over five years and you helped reverse years of net losses there during your tenure. And Ed Henson, who once hired you at the Rock Station, WLRS said that you had enough money to live on the beach for the rest of your life and for several lives, but that running NPR was a mission for you. And so I wanted to get into this idea of mission because it seems that same sense of purpose that pulled you out of retirement to NPR also pulled you towards arts, philanthropy, this idea of mission, audience, connection, and how you measure that. What metrics you use when you're bridging these ideas of entrepreneurialism and passion?

Jarl Mohn: It makes it sound like I actually put a lot more thought into it than I have which is is not the case.

[Laughter] 

Charlotte Burns: It always does when people lay it out in a couple of paragraphs. 

Jarl Mohn: And I could tell the story that way, but it really wouldn't be being honest. A lot of it's just been accidental and my exploration and my involvement in the art world was accidental. It started very, very humbly and very simply. We had walls we wanted to put art [on]. We'd just gotten a new house and I don't think this is that unusual. And my wife said, “We need to get out there and start buying art,” and I said, “I think that's a terrible idea. The entire art world is designed to take advantage of idiots like us.” And one thing led to another and we are where we are I guess.

When it comes to public radio and not-for-profit stuff, in a lot of ways, my wife was responsible for that too. After we had a number of really successful years, she said to me, “We have not been generous. We have not been philanthropic. We have more than we need. We really should be supporting things that we're interested in.” And each of us picked three and we wrote checks and that was it.

And from that led to being invited on the board of some not-for-profits, and then getting much more engaged. Because of my involvement early in my career in radio, I was approached about getting on the board of a new NPR station here in Los Angeles, KPCC—this is many years ago—and ultimately went on the board, became chair, and got deeply immersed in the world of  local public radio and that's where I made my contacts with the national organization. And then they approached me about coming out of retirement to be CEO of NPR. So there was no grand scheme or plan. There were just things that were really of interest to me and I pursued them and it worked out.

Charlotte Burns: So this show obviously is a ‘what if.’ And I guess you've been following that thread. What was the, ‘what if’ in your collecting then? The initial was a, “What if we're taken advantage of?” When did that switch into, “What if we're not, what if we can do something with this?”

Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] 

I don't know, I don't know when it changed, dear. I think the changes are so slow and so subtle. We don't, I certainly wasn't attuned enough to notice it, but I think my collecting came in three different phases. The first phase was the exploration, and when people ask me—and this happens pretty regularly—about, “How can I begin collecting?” And I had those conversations myself. I had lunch with Dean Valentine. Dean, I knew from the television business. I knew he was an art collector. I asked him to lunch and said, “I want to begin collecting. What do you recommend?” And of course, he had his suggestions. When I talk to people, I tell them, “The taste you have when you begin is not going to be the taste you have in five or 10 years. It's gonna change. You're gonna have a more sophisticated eye. The more time you spend in the galleries, the more time you spend looking at art, getting educated, your taste is gonna change.” And then you're gonna find that you have things in your collection that maybe you're not as excited about anymore. So my first, I don't know, seven-to-10 years were exploring and trying to figure it out. And then I bought one work of art that changed everything. And that was the end of 1999, beginning of 2000, and I bought a John McCracken stainless steel outdoor sculpture, three-sided, highly polished, like that, that funny hoax that went on. And I don’t know if it was in Utah of people thinking it was a McCracken sculpture drop down in the, in the rocks. And I bought that at the time it was Zwirner Wirth on the Upper East Side. I went in, I had never spent anywhere close to that amount of money on a work of art. And I was so stunned by it, that I bought it. It was almost an impulse buy and that changed everything. Once it was installed, I said, “That is what I want to collect.” And then I really got deep into Minimalism, California Light and Space, and Earth art. Those were the kind of the three-stool legs.

Charlotte Burns: So let's go back to that moment. You're on the Upper East Side, you're at Zwirner and Wirth. You see this sculpture, like what happens? It's you spend a significant sum of money on something that blows your mind. Take us back. What happens to you? Why are you so taken with this work?

Jarl Mohn: I don't know the answer. It just stunned me. I thought it was so beautiful. It was mesmerizing me, it was hypnotic and just put some kind of scale around it. Not that we need to use dollar figures as our metric here, but I think I paid, I don't know, $250,000 or something for it. And I think what I'd been buying up to that point, just to give you a sense of relativity here, maybe $25,000 was what I was paying for art. Very small amounts of money, relatively speaking. And I didn't think about it. I didn't think, “I'm gonna think about it and come back.” I just bought it and then I had buyer's remorse. It was like, “What was I thinking? This is not a pack of gum at 7-11. This is a significant, and where am I gonna put it?” And I came very close to making that terrible mistake that some people do—calling the gallery and saying, “I've changed my mind.”

Charlotte Burns: Right.

Jarl Mohn: But I was so embarrassed about doing that. That would be a terrible thing. So I didn't do it. The work got delivered. We got it installed, and it was magical. It was magical. As soon as it was in, I said, “Now I know exactly what I want to collect.” And everything came from that.

Charlotte Burns: So this is the early 2000s. Your collection then, it was this very personal vision. If you think of the art market at that point, this is really taking us into that first period of the art market boom. The art market starts getting into this big brash painting. You were doing something really different. What gave you the courage of your convictions to carry out that personal vision? Which is not always the easiest thing to do as a collector, to understand that what you want to do has value.

Jarl Mohn: And I really didn't to be frank. I didn't know that it had value. I didn't know. I wasn't making a market decision at all. It was a love of the work. I think the only maybe strategic thinking at all, if there was any, and I don't wanna emphasize—that was top of mind for me, in my world of radio and media and television, and the internet stuff I've done, I really believe in positioning and standing for something—that whatever it is you're doing, make sure it's true to what you want to be, and then eliminate everything around it or clear at the periphery and go for it. Stand for something. And so for me as a collector, as I began on this path, I wanted to have a collection that stood for something. And it wasn't just an aggregation of objects and paintings that I liked. I felt if I had a focus and I focused on one area, I would probably have a collection that would be more meaningful to me. And that's how it happened. It didn't really require any courage because I frankly didn't think of it. If you had talked to me then, Charlotte, and said, “This is very courageous of you to do,” I probably would've gotten scared and might not have done it. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns: So you pieced it all together.

Jarl Mohn: Yeah, one at a time. There was no grand strategy other than let's try to get some really beautiful pieces from these different schools. So the collection that we have here is New York East Coast Minimalism, and this California Light and Space Minimalist response.

Charlotte Burns: And you have James Turrell, the renowned Light and Space artist. You have a Skyspace but it's one of the Skyspaces with, as I understand it, the comfiest seats as the Skyspaces go because…

[Laughter]

Jarl Mohn: Because it's a screening room. It, and it began as a screening room. And then I was having a work of art installed and the director at Pace Gallery at the time, Jennifer Kellen was by for the installation and she asked if she could see the space where we were building a screening room so we could run first-run movies that were in theaters. I'm a movie junkie, and when she was looking at the space, she said, “What do you think about having Turrell design it?” And it was one of those ideas—I think the power of a great idea can really be intoxicating. I said that's brilliant because Turrell’s first works were the projection of light, whether they were the holes and papers on the windows of the Hotel Mendota in Venice, California capturing the light that came through from cars going up and down Main Street projections of light shapes in corners. His work was really all about the projection of light initially and so he designed the entire screening room. It is a skyscape, it is a screening room. The one rule, back to what you had mentioned, Charlotte, I said, “I have one request. Every Skyspace I've been in has either had wood benches or stone benches,” and I said, “We're gonna be showing a lot of international films, independent films, documentaries. I can't have my friends sit on something like that.” Can you imagine watching the Killers of the Flower Moon for three hours and 20 minutes on a stone bench? Not gonna happen. So we ended up with these beautiful seats he designed and we had made by a German cinema seating company, but he designed. 

Charlotte Burns: We had the artist Cauleen Smith on our LA special, and she said, “You can't make people uncomfortable if they're gonna be experiencing art.” This is one of her fundamental rules. This speaks a lot to your approach to art and creativity as well—this idea of community. But I want to take us back in time and how we got here. You've said that, “It was almost in a weird way escapism that got me into what I'm doing today. Music was really the catalyst and I think escapism, escaping from home and this horrible place that I hated was the genesis of what I got into.” You've had this energy through your life to keep working, to keep moving forward. I'm fascinated by those twin threads through your career of escape and connection through culture constantly, culture and business.

Jarl Mohn: Yeah, I see it. Back then the escapism, I don't know that I do that as much now, I don't know. A good psychotherapist could get us to the answer of that. But what you're referring to was my two sisters and I spent a number of years in a group foster home. My parents were institutionalized. My father was in jail for non-support of the family. He was an alcoholic. He couldn't keep a job. My mother divorced him. She was a very creative type. I think a lot of my interest in art came from her but she had mental health issues and she had what was then called a mental breakdown and was committed to a state mental institution in Pennsylvania. So the courts put my two sisters and I in a group home, and I hated it. It was obviously very institutionalized. It was a terrible thing to go through. I was 11, 12, 13, 14 years old and I had not listened to radio before that but they had a radio in the dorm and I was listening to the top 40 rock and roll radio station in Philadelphia, WIBG, and in New York, WABC and listening to the disc jockeys and the music was a total escape. And so I've always said from that, the beginnings of my career were just, were actually escaping from my reality. And that's how it got started. I don't know that I do that now. I might but I certainly like community and so many of the activities and things I do are about connecting with people and wanting to be with people that I enjoy spending the time with, whether it's my family or whether it's my close friends or the community of art, the community of artists and the community of people that work in the art world here. And so that's important to me, but I don't know that's escapism per se.

Charlotte Burns: You said that your mother was a graphic designer and your father was very passionate about art but, and he talked a lot about art, but never took you to museums. 

Jarl Mohn: Never.

Charlotte Burns: Now you support so many institutions. When did you start going yourself?

Jarl Mohn: My father didn't. He would go to museums all the time. I don't recall ever being in a museum with him. My mother would take me to, not necessarily art museums, but I would love the Franklin Institute when I was a kid before I went into the group foster home. But it wasn't an art museum. It was a science museum. 

I don't think I started going to art museums regularly until maybe I was in my twenties when I lived in Louisville, Kentucky and I was on the radio there, and I would go to the Speed Museum in Louisville. It was very slow start. I can't tell you. It was one of those things that I immediately felt attracted to. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: When you were a kid, you felt this sense, obviously that music was something you could escape to. I'm curious, when you started feeling the art was for you?

Jarl Mohn:  I think music is probably the easiest entry point for everybody. And we start really young listening to music, whether it's pop music, top 40 and as we get a little older, we become a little more sophisticated, started listening to albums and then we get immersed in our television series and our movies, whether they're high art or low art, but they're easy entry. And the more we watch, the more I think sophisticated we can become. Although, we all have our guilty pleasures and there's nothing wrong with that. I think the art world and I'm, what I'm seeing now is there's a real movement. I'm not an expert by any means on the institutions at all but I do think it looks to me like institutions are really doing a much better job of inviting people in. Everything from the wall text that isn't off-putting, that it could be written in plain English so that people understand what they're trying to tell them about the art, the history of the art, the artist, what they're trying to communicate. And the Hammer, one of the reasons I really love partnering with them is—and this year was probably the best example, every year I think they get better and better at it—there was such a democratization of the art this year. I went to that show, I took 12 groups through, and every time I went in—it could be a Tuesday afternoon—the place was packed. And it was all ages and all colors and every stratum of LA society was there. It was a beautiful thing. And as a person that loves art, I love other people having the opportunity to be exposed to it. It was a very inviting show and I'm encouraged that so many museums are thinking about and talking about it that way.

Charlotte Burns: What do you think art does for people? What does it do for you?

Jarl Mohn: To me, I think it's a shortcut to our souls. When I take people through, and this is one of the reasons that I really like museums taking this approach of being very inviting. The reason I took so many different groups through is I would have friends say to me, “I want to go to the show. I want you to take me through it,” and I always told them in advance, “You're gonna see some things. These are newer artists.” This is the thing that's amazing about it to me. When you think about it, there's not one really well-known artist or even moderately known artist in Made in LA. Not one. 139 artists, I think in the show and people are packing the galleries to see artists no one has ever heard of before because the Hammer has created this wonderful experience of what's happening on the streets of Los Angeles right now. And so I tell people, “You're gonna see things that are very unusual.” Some people that don't even like any contemporary art. And I said, “Turn off the left side of your brain. Turn on the right side of your brain. Don't try to intellectualize it. How do you feel about it? What does it mean? What does it bring up? What does it evoke for you?” 

I've always found that if I'm struggling with a question, in business or something, I love to go to see art that I don't know, art that I'm not familiar with. It's like a kick in the head and it helps me open my eyes. So I try to ask people to go into it with that as opposed to, “Oh, I like that. I'd like that in my living room.” [Laughs] I want them to look at an assemblage and go, “That is truly weird.” How does it make you feel?

Charlotte Burns: So it's more about creativity for you.

Jarl Mohn: Yeah, I try not to intellectualize it. It's different ways of looking at the world and that's why I love this move to introducing more diverse artists. There were so many Indigenous artists in Made In LA and they have a different experience, they have a different view, and it's expressed through their art. So I get to see things that I've never seen before, and that's really interesting to me. Do I like it all? Of course not. There's some that I love more than others, but I think it's good for all of us to expose ourselves to art and culture that we're not used to. 

Charlotte Burns:  With your wife, Pamela, you helped start the tastemaking Made in LA Biennial with the Hammer Museum, which began in 2012, and was written about as having overtones of reality TV because the prize is, which is the Mohn Prize, is selected by popular vote. So the finalists are selected by jurors and then people who visit the show can vote on who wins the prize—which is a life-changing amount of money. And it's been a turning point for artists, including Lauren Halsey in 2018, Meleko Mokgosi in 2012. And you initially said you'd do it for five years but in 2023, you established three endowments. One to underwrite the Made In LA exhibition, one to finance the award, and one to help fund the catalogs. And you've said, “We love being part of the LA art community helping establish the careers of emerging artists and helping to honor talented under-recognized artists who've worked for decades and who haven't enjoyed commercial success.” It's a meaningful part of your life at this point. Can you talk about why you decided to focus on artists who are not known and why you wanted to do it in this way?

Jarl Mohn: When we began in 2012, the way you were describing the award is correct. People that went to the show could vote. We had some pushback from the community of artists. The Hammer has an artist council—which I think is smart—so I met with the artist council and we had a very candid, at times, a little heated conversation, but they prevailed in convincing me that we needed to do more. And so we decided that the big Mohn Award, which was the $100,000 unrestricted gift, would be selected by jurors totally, and not from a popular vote. We still had, we call it a public engagement because we don't want it to have the strand of reality TV. We want people to be engaged when we go through the museum and look at the work and to be thinking, what do I like the most? And so we want them to be conscious as of that so that they're much more engaged in the work. And that's a $25,000 gift. 

And then we have jurors also selecting an artist who's been making work for decades, but it's never really broken through commercially. These are the under-recognized artists, the, if you, will a legacy award. So that's where it ended up. 

How we got there, and how I started the collection, and why I started doing it, there were twofold. First, I love this city. It's an adopted city. I've been here since 1990. We're looking at, what, 34 years. It's got a gravitational pull of creativity. First, the motion picture business moved out here, in the ‘40s, and ‘50s, the creative part. Then ultimately the business came out, television in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. The music industry, ‘70s and ‘80s. We now have, the visual arts. All these incredible art schools here, fashion designers are moving out. And now the gaming—I was very involved in Riot Games and League of Legends which is a monstrous online game. I think it's a hot bit of creativity.

And so I love my Minimalist art collection and my Light and Space, but after a number of years and all the research and trying to learn about it, and who are the second- and the third-tier artists, and how can I put exclamation points in the collection to make it more interesting? I really wanted that sense of discovery and there's this incredible thing going on in LA. Such a vibrant community, not just the artists and the work that they're making—which is incredibly imaginative and new. The galleries are fascinating here and all the institutions are being run by, I think, visionary leaders now. So for me, you mentioned the community earlier, Charlotte. I love being a part of that. It's exciting. It's a lot of fun. And I get to expand my mind a little bit by meeting the artists, talking to them, and trying to support them by buying their work.

Charlotte Burns: So it's a different kind of process for you in essence?

Jarl Mohn: Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: Because what if you can be part of an art scene as it's building up in this moment? 

Jarl Mohn: You're talking to a guy that's very biased. You know, I sound like I'm incredibly provincial and it's not to disparage anywhere else at all. I just love what's happening here and not just the big institutions, but, we're supporting LAXART Hamza Walker, who I met as one of the curators for Made in LA when he was at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. He's doing some remarkably innovative things that LAXART. We’re supporting that program. A small initiative called LAND ([Los Angeles] Nomadic Division), which does public art. Laura Hyatt, who came from the Hammer is over there. We do Mohn LAND Grants every year for these brand new young baby artists pre-Made in LA even and for public art. And two of the four we gave grants to last year were in Made in LA this year. And one of them, Jackie Amézquita, won the public engagement award this year, $25,000. 

There's just a lot going on and we have a few other things we're working on something with ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art] LA right now. Ann Ellegood, who came from the Hammer, she's a director there. I just think the, not just the art schools, not just the artists, not just the institutions, all the galleries moving to town. There's a lot of energy here and I just love looking at it and playing a small role in it.

Charlotte Burns: What if LA is the future of art? Then what does that look like?

Jarl Mohn: I happen to believe it is, but I also realize I'm not an independent third party looking at it. I think it is the future of art. It is one of the most diverse cities in the country and I think that generates a lot of really interesting new ideas. It is the future in the sense that I think it will set the way, it'll lead the way, but it's not the future in terms of it's going to be the only thing of course. Artists from all over the world have always inspired each other and that is going to continue and I think many people will be looking to the creators and the makers here.

Charlotte Burns: You support a lot of institutions. you support LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum], the Hammer, LAXART, the ICA LA, [J. Paul] Getty [Museum]... 

Jarl Mohn: MoCA. 

Charlotte Burns: …MoCA. From where you sit, what do you think museums need right now?

Jarl Mohn: Just more support. I think there's great leadership at all of them. All of them are doing really amazing work. I'm always stunned. And I think you mentioned, Pacific Standard Time (PST ART), which I think is a brilliant initiative. It is brought to the city of Los Angeles a real love of collaborating and we are working on a project. I can’t reveal it right now. We hope we can announce it sometime soon—collaborating with a number of institutions. From what I understand from my friends at all these museums, the teams really love working with each other on Pacific Standard Time. They really see themselves as advocates for the city and the area and the community here. I want to encourage more of that and we have an idea that we’re working on that I think will, hopefully, help that.

Charlotte Burns: When you say you have an idea, you mean for PST specifically?

Jarl Mohn: No. I was inspired many years ago when the first Pacific Standard Time was done and that actually gave me the idea to do an award for an emerging LA artist, which I took around to the number of the institutions. Ultimately, Annie Philbin decided she wanted to do a biennial and part of her thinking was that we should work together on this. And of course, she pitched it and I thought that was the right thing to do but no, this is a separate project and hopefully will be a collaboration that gets everybody in the art community excited.

Charlotte Burns: Can you tell us a little more about it? Is there anything to do with your collection?

Jarl Mohn: It's a secret, Charlotte. It's a secret. 

Charlotte Burns: Secrets are no fun. No fun on podcasts, Jarl. Can’t have secrets… 

Jarl Mohn: If you had given me a couple of shots of tequila, it might be a little more forthcoming, but…

Charlotte Burns: I've heard about you and the tequila, setting fire to your beard. Come on.

[Laughter]

Jarl Mohn: Oh yes, I did. I set fire to myself one time. It was, it was a beautiful thing.

Charlotte Burns: It sounds like it. Can we not embody that spirit now and just share a few little details?

Jarl Mohn: Nah, nah. Can’t.

Charlotte Burns: Directional, directional hints.

Jarl Mohn: I would just say, let's say broadly collaboration with a number of institutions in the city working together to really uplift the community and the community of artists in LA for the artists, for the community.

Charlotte Burns: So that could be exhibitions, that could be projects, that could be funds, could be… 

Jarl Mohn: Could be a lot of things, but I ain't saying anything more. Ain’t saying anything more.

Charlotte Burns: We're gonna have to keep working on this, aren't we? 

Okay. It sounds great. I love collaboration. And actually, to bear out your suspicion that Los Angeles is perhaps more collaborative, with Julia Halperin, we do the Burns Halperin Report and we see that in the data—we track data across 30-plus museums across America—we see that there is a conversation that is LA specific. We can see that the LA institutions’ figures are all within a few digits of each other. We don't see the same thing in New York. Even though those institutions are very different, we can see in the data that there is a conversation around equity and diversity that is unique to Los Angeles compared to the rest of the country. And it's really interesting.

Jarl Mohn: I did not know that data. My experience has been purely just observational and anecdotal, but I'm glad to hear it’s in the data. 

Charlotte Burns: They're all above the national average and even including the encyclopedic institutions. 

What if you were running a museum in Los Angeles, what would you do?

Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] First, I don't think anybody should entrust me with that. And I'm very nervous of the question because I really don't know the museum world. I know it as a patron. I know it as somebody that likes to support it in the institutions. But I don't have a background in art history. I don't have the education. I don't know what it takes to run an organization like that. And I'm lucky. I'm very lucky that I live in a city that has so many really terrific leaders in the art world like Michael Govan, Annie Philbin. I think Johanna Burton is doing great things at MoCA. Hamza at LAXART, Anne Ellegood at ICA, Laura Hyatt at LAND. And I'm forgetting a lot of people but it would be not only presumptuous, it would be wrong of me to say what I would do differently. They're all setting the standard for what the museum world should be doing. The only part of it that I would be any good at, based on my experience, is maybe I’d do a little better job marketing. I'm a marketing guy and even that's a kind of a, that's a humble endeavor.

Charlotte Burns: How would you do that? What would you do?

Jarl Mohn: It varies by institution because each institution is doing a different job in any endeavor—and it includes art, music, media—if you're making widgets, you really have to stand for something. And I encourage each of the institutions to really understand what they're doing. They each are doing something very different. I don't think there is a lot of confusion in people's minds about what they do. And I think the crisper and cleaner any of those perceptions are for any institution, that's a good thing.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: You have more experience in journalism than anybody I've ever interviewed and what I wanted to ask you is, what if you were running an art media company now, what would you do? Because there are so few art media companies now. 

Jarl Mohn: I know a fair amount about journalism. I've spent time in it. I'm not a journalist, I've just helped run journalistic organizations. But I want to be clear that I'm not a journalist. One of my other not-for-profit activities, I was chairman of the board of the advisors for the Annenberg School at USC. I was on that board for many years and I think chair for eight. So have an academic lens on it too in my time at KPCC and as chair and then of course at NPR. But my role was always being a business person that is helping support the organization, not making any editorial decisions. There's a great firewall between management and journalism as there should be. That said, the most prescriptive thing I would say was the more inviting our journalism would be, the better it is for everybody because we need to get more people interested. 

I gave a speech a number of years ago at the College Art Association, which was not well received. My thesis was about storytelling at NPR. One of the reasons NPR I think has done, since its inception over 50 years ago, is this incredible ability to tell very complicated stories in very engaging, simple ways, to bring people in. And I think so much of the art world can be academic and off-putting, everything from wall text to journalism. I hate that. I hate it with a passion. I think people are highly interested in art. Everybody's interested in art if they open a magazine or they go to a museum and they start reading wall text and they see the word “pedagogy”, I think it turns them off.

Charlotte Burns: You've given more than 20 copies of Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being away. What resonates with you so much about that book? 

Jarl Mohn: Oh, I hope I don't hurt somebody's career from that. It was really funny. I'm a meditator. In a few weeks, I'll celebrate my 51st anniversary of… 

Charlotte Burns: Wow. 

Jarl Mohn: …meditation. And it's had an amazing impact on my life, and so many artists have approached me over the years, and asked me about meditation, and have begun meditating.

Rick Rubin is also a meditator. I think he's been meditating since he was 14. I think it's a beautiful book. I've given it to a lot of artists. To give them something to think about. And it's twofold. 

Purpose one is to give them the confidence to do what they really want to do and to give them confidence to follow their inner voice and really listen to it. One of the things Rubin says to paraphrase them—and I might have this awful little bit, but I think directionally it's is his message. He said sometimes direction, inspiration, ideas come in whispers. And the only way we can hear those whispers is if we quiet our minds. And he's very much a proponent of don't do it for the market, do it for yourself and I don't know whether that's good business advice. I do think it's very good creative advice. I like that. I think that's a great thing. 

I also give people the David Lynch book, Catching the Big Fish[: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity], about meditation and the ability to fish for big ideas, farther down in our consciousness.

Charlotte Burns: You're jump-starting your own writing again. How much do you focus on your own creative output and how much do you see your business career as a creative endeavor and vice versa?

Jarl Mohn: I do think my business career has been creative. I got into the business side of it so that I could have more freedom. I don't like sitting in a conference room. One of the reasons I'm not on any boards anymore is I spent too much time in conference rooms thinking about really wanting to be on my mountain bike in the hills and not there. And I told my friends, “If I'm gonna write you checks anyway, I'm giving you money so you don't need to put me on the board to give you money. I'm gonna give you money. If you really want my opinion, you don't have to pretend like you want it. If you actually want it, call me. We'll go to lunch or we'll talk on the phone and I'm happy to give you my opinion if you really want it.” But I got into the business side of it so I could have more freedom. But my approach has always been from the creative side, whether it was programming radio stations or programming cable networks. When I was at MTV, VH1, or E!, even on venture capital, it was really about the ideas, the people and the ideas, the business part of it, the financial metrics. Although I'm reasonably okay at it, it's not something I particularly enjoy. 

Charlotte Burns: When you say you got into it for the freedom, you mean, the money was a way of buying your time? 

Jarl Mohn: No, this is gonna sound really juvenile. I've always had a problem with authority, and that goes back to my time at the foster home. I hate people that use power indiscriminately and force people to do things. And I found in my career, I've been lucky in some cases to work with people that I really liked and I've been unfortunate in a few cases to work with people I didn't like. And I found that if I really wanted the freedom, I needed to have a bit more control. And I got into management so I could have more control. But I didn't do it because I really felt the need to be an executive or a manager. There's so much of that I just don't like.

Charlotte Burns: That makes sense. 

I was listening to how you created E! and that seems to have come from that place that, an exit that you didn't want had led to a beginning that you hadn't been seeking.

Jarl Mohn: Yeah. No, I was fired from MTV and it was traumatic. I put Andrew “Dice” Clay on the Video Music Awards. We had the highest ratings we'd ever had but the advertisers and the cable operators got very upset. And the guy I was working for used it as an opportunity to push me out the door—which was heartbreaking to me because so much of my identity at the time was wrapped around being at MTV. It was the ‘80s. It was a…you hear my dog in the background? I apologize. He…

Charlotte Burns: Outraged on your behalf.

Jarl Mohn: Yes. Outraged on my behalf. Very protective, he is. It was a very traumatic moment, but it also was an open door for me because, 48 hours after I was fired, HBO called me and they said, would you be interested in moving to LA to create this channel for us? And it gave me my first opportunity to really have serious equity and make some money. So as they say, it all worked out.

[Musical interlude] 

Charlotte Burns: I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions. I think I might know the answer to one of these. What is the, ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning?

Jarl Mohn:  This is gonna sound really cornball, but it is true. I love spending my time with interesting people. So what if one of the reasons I love the world of art, I find artists, and so many of the people in the art world that are really, truly passionate about it. Fascinating and interesting people. I like to share the art with people. I do a lot of art tours of the collection at the house. I've met some remarkable people. I've had some amazing friendships that have come from that. What gets me up in the morning is really my relationship with people, whether it's my family, or my close friends and these little communities I have. Whether it's my little mountain biking community, my reading community, my art community. That's what gets me up, people.

Charlotte Burns: I was gonna ask you about the importance of relationships, but from a different angle, which was your rival in El Paso called Jim Phillips… 

Jarl Mohn: Yes.

Charlotte Burns: …was constantly outselling you on ads. You want to tell the story?

Jarl Mohn: It's funny that you brought that up. I bought this FM radio station in El Paso, Texas. I moved from New York City to El Paso, Texas when I was 26 years old. I was single. People said you'd go anywhere for a dollar. The interesting surprise was that I actually had more fun and a much richer social life and better friends in El Paso, Texas than I did in New York at the time. I had a ball. We'd close the bars at two o'clock, crawl over the bridge to Juarez and party until the sun came up again. Can't do that today, but we put the station on, this would've been in the early ‘80s. It was at the time of the urban cowboy thing and became the number one station. And I thought, “Okay, now I'll just go around to the advertisers and get the money.” And my competitor who had an AM country station was one of these incredible people. Everywhere I went a retailer, or an advertiser would say, “Oh, Jim Phillips is the godfather of my child. Jim Phillips is my best friend. Jim Phillips was the best man at my wedding, Jim Phillips.” And I was like, “You've got to be kidding me.” And I could not get advertisers even though I was the number-one station in the market at the time, I was having a very hard time getting advertisers. People say, “I just can't, do that against my good friend Jim.” And so ultimately I would say, “Why don't you just give me 10% of your advertising budget, give the rest to him, give me 10%.” And then people started to realize that it was working for them and they want their own business to be successful. And I ultimately got a little more money, but I had to learn how important one-on-one relationships are. And selling is really a very personal business, I think. And even in a world today of programmatic sales on the internet, face-to-face selling is so important. And so I started going to people's birthday parties and to weddings and I never, of course, never approached how good my competitor was at that. But I really learned how important that is in life, particularly in a technologically advanced world. Years ago, the book Megatrends [Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives] talked about the beauty of handwritten notes. I love writing handwritten notes. I love getting them. And I think the author, John Nesbitt called it high tech, high touch. As we become more high tech, high touch becomes all that much more important. And I learned that lesson of all places in El Paso, Texas.

Charlotte Burns: I love that story, Jarl. 

Okay. What's the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night?

Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] Did I have too much coffee? I don't, uh, nothing keeps me up. My I worry about the world, I worry about politics, but I also know, there's certainly so much we can do, and I don't let that affect me. It doesn't affect my sleep. I do worry about it when I'm awake, though.

Charlotte Burns: Your collection is held in a trust. What if, what is the future of that?

Jarl Mohn: There are two collections. I think they're gonna be different futures for each. The emerging LA [collection] I will most likely gift. 

Charlotte Burns: To one institution or to several, do you think?

Jarl Mohn: It's under consideration as we speak and we will figure that out. But it will be in LA because it is a collection of LA artists and that's gonna, I think, be relatively soon. 

The minimalist collection has just become such a valuable asset, that I'll probably ultimately sell that. Although, I've never sold anything—I have a very strict no-sale policy—but I will sell that collection and that will fund our other philanthropic efforts, which we haven't talked about today, but things like supporting foster care, transition aids foster care, young adults in Los Angeles County literacy programs, social justice—like the ACLU here in Southern California—and our commitment to public radio here and nationally. So that collection will ultimately be sold to fund our other philanthropic interests.

Charlotte Burns: Wow. Even though you once said that nine times out of ten art will not be a good investment, that it certainly seems like a great return.

[Laughs]

Jarl Mohn: It was, but I never intended, and I just, sometimes you get lucky and we just got lucky on that.

Charlotte Burns: How do you feel when you talk about that? Do you feel proud? I guess you feel a mix of emotions, maybe a little sad.

Jarl Mohn: No, I mean of selling it? My kids are sadder about it than I am, not because of the financial aspect of it, but because they're going to be the ones that ultimately give away all the money, not me. But there's no element of sadness.

I was really happy that it happened, but I was very fortunate. I just, in my life, whether it's been my career or whether it's collecting, it gets back to the whole people thing. So many of the great things that have happened to me have been because of the intervention of really remarkable good people in my life that have given me opportunities and people that have come into my life just seemingly magically. So I don't have any regrets about that.

Charlotte Burns: I think it's so amazing, the idea that giving back so much. It sounds like it will change a lot of people's lives, supporting other children and changing their lives in that way is really quite profound. 

Jarl Mohn: Thank you. I was unfortunate in that I ended up in that situation. I was fortunate that it made me discover radio and music, which was my way out. I was fortunate that a lot of people gave me opportunities. 

Most of the time, things I was totally unprepared for and one of the, with things we haven't talked about it, I never graduated from college. I was asked to leave Temple University because I was such a terrible student. I would never show up. So I've had this remarkable career as a college dropout and I'm fortunate that people looked past it and gave me the great opportunities that they've had. And I hope I have given those opportunities to a lot of other people, particularly these foster youth that we're trying to help right now.

Charlotte Burns: It seems that you had something to prove too, that to some extent you, you seized upon those opportunities yourself and ran at them.

Jarl Mohn: Yeah. I don't know that I thought about it that way as much as, frequently being 

naive enough to think I could do that and then after I got engaged in them, realized how difficult it was, and then ultimately putting great teams together, really good people to help me get from point A to point B over and over again. That's been what I'm grateful for.

Charlotte Burns: You'd said with E! for instance, that you didn't have the money to hire great people, but you knew that to get anything going, you really needed a great team because that was how you'd had success previously at MTV and VH1. So your strategy was to hire the second-best people, but you knew that out there, there would be a lot of people in the number two slot who were waiting for the number one slot and frustrated.

Jarl Mohn: Yeah. I had limited resources and you know, the number one ad salesperson at a cable network or the number one person in affiliate sales, or the number one person in programming costs an awful lot of money. It wasn't a matter of getting the second best, it was a matter of getting somebody in the number two position. That person might actually have been better than their boss. And I particularly looked at organizations where the number one leadership in any one of these disciplines was relatively young and didn't look like they were likely to go anywhere for a while. Then approaching the number two people and giving them an opportunity, an upside. It didn't always work, but we assembled a team mostly of people that were number two’s at other organizations and blocked and they really wanted their opportunity to grow and shine and that did work. That worked really well for us.

Charlotte Burns: So Jarl, I think our time has come to an end. I know your dog wants to go for a walk. I've so enjoyed this conversation with you.

Jarl Mohn: [Laughs] Thank you, Charlotte. 

Charlotte Burns: The ‘what if’ is what if you were going to steal a piece of work? You said you were gonna steal Walter de Maria's Earth Work, the 1977 piece, The Lightning Field. You were gonna steal the 400 stainless steel rods one by one. 

I'm just so curious, why were you gonna steal it so slowly?

Jarl Mohn: So that no one would notice that it was going.

Charlotte Burns: But wouldn't you stand a greater chance of being caught? [Laughs]

Jarl Mohn: Of course, but we're fantasizing here. This is, we're speculating wildly on something as absurd as stealing this one mile by one kilometer wide set of these 400-plus stainless steel 20-foot poles. I just thought it was funny that I would take them one at a time, that no one would really notice it until it was too late.

Charlotte Burns: Yeah, it's like Wile E. Coyote. I just had these visions of you driving off in a truck. Every day, returning.

[Laughs]

Jarl Mohn: But that work of art affected me more than any work of art. And I've seen some really great stuff, and I love Land Art and Rodent Crater is an amazing work, and it's stunning and it's mesmerizing. I like City from Michael Heiser. I like Star Axis, which a lot of people Charles Ross's work don't know as well in New Mexico. But I have to tell you my experience, spending whatever it is, 18 hours at Lightning Fields a number of times, it's just the most profound and sublime art experience. What would I do with the poles? I'm not really quite sure that I could find a place to put them, but that's the work of art I would steal.

Charlotte Burns: That would be collection number three, you know, starting you on a whole new phase. 

Jarl Mohn: Stainless steel, 20-foot poles.

Charlotte Burns: Penitentiary probably. 

[Laughter]

Thank you so much, Jarl. This has been an enormous pleasure. I could talk to you all afternoon. Thank you so much for being our guest today on The Art World: What If…?! 

Jarl Mohn: Thank you.

Thanks so much to Jarl Mohn—such great anecdotes and advice. Next time, we’ll be talking to the director of the new Museum of West African Art in Nigeria, Phillip Ihenacho.

Phillip Ihenacho: We live in this world where West African culture is starting to become the future. We need to try and grab it with both hands and take full advantage of it because this moment, I think is an incredibly important moment. 

Charlotte Burns: Don’t miss it. The episode is really quite special. 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 5: Hoor Al Qasimi

What if we could create spaces of solidarity, communication, and support? This time we explore the passions and multiple projects of the President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, Hoor Al Qasimi. She established the Foundation in 2009 as a catalyst and advocate for the arts, not only in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates but also in the wider region and around the world.  She was originally on her way to becoming an artist, but now says she doesn’t think she’d have succeeded because she has trouble “focusing on one thing. Hence the multiple jobs.” We talk about the round of generic art fairs - which, in Hoor’s words “hurt her eyes” - and what it would be like if we were liberated enough NOT to have to follow the market. What if we trusted our intuition and spent more time with - and getting to know - emerging artists? Enjoy!

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this is the podcast all about imagining different ways of doing things.

[Audio of guests]

In this episode, we talk to Hoor Al Qasimi, who—unusually—seems equally able to imagine new futures as she does to actually build them. What if we write our own histories? What if we create the change we seek?  

Under her watch, Sharjah has become one of the most influential centers for cultural creation and research in the Global South. From revamping art biennials to creating new universities, overseeing architectural triennials, running a fashion house, sitting on international museum boards, curating large and small-scale artist projects on every continent, Hoor Al Qasimi is perhaps one of the busiest people we have ever interviewed. A self-confessed workaholic who seems to move through the world aware that one lifetime won’t be enough to get everything done.

At the heart of all of this is art, and Hoor’s profound belief in its essential ability to change us as people, and her insistence that this needs to be done by working together.  

I really appreciate how open Hoor is and I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do too. 

Charlotte Burns: Thank you so much for joining us. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Thank you for inviting me.

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to take you back to 2003. You, as the youngest daughter of the Sheikh [Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi], took over the Sharjah Biennial and staged something of a kind of artistic coup d'etat, age just 22. And you said to your father, “I just want to look around. I'm not going to interfere.” And then you of course did. And a lot of people quit. There were a lot of naysayers. You said, “A lot of the older male artists didn't like my ideas and they promptly left.” And you totally had a different vision. And I just thought it was really fascinating that this young woman would have this confidence really to come into an organization and say, “I'm going to just do this differently.”

Did you know what you were getting yourself in for? And where did that come from?

Hoor Al Qasimi: No, I had no clue. I've had some journalists ask me before, “Oh, what is it like being an Arab woman curator,” and I've said, “My father never told me that as a woman, I couldn't do this or, as a boy, they could do that.” It wasn't like that. We didn't have those kinds of limitations in terms of our profession or ambition. My father is a great model. He works a lot and has been supporting culture for the longest time. 

I grew up with Sharjah Biennial. It meant so much to me. It's really what made me want to be an artist. I was going to study architecture and my art teacher in school said, “You're going to end up building towers in Dubai. You're an artist, and you should go to art school.” So I always put myself in the position of what an artist would look for as a young artist growing up.

I went to documenta with my father [who was] on a cultural visit in Germany and he said, “I'm going to go to mines. It's not so interesting for you. You stay in Berlin. It's more fun.” I was talking to Britta Schmidt, who was chief curator at Hamburger Bahnhof [- Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart], and she said you should go to documenta, and I'd never heard of documenta. I'd never been to any biennial outside of Sharjah, but it really influenced me. It made me realize that suddenly I could see myself in these exhibitions. 

Going to art school at the Slade [School of Fine Art] in the UK in the late 90s, you still didn't see things that represented you. There was one tutor who would say, “Oh, your work is not very Islamic.” So already you're getting a stereotype just for being brown or just for being Arab, I know a lot of the Chinese and Japanese students also got that…

Charlotte Burns: Wow.

Hoor Al Qasimi: …and as women as well. So it was a double thing. I didn't feel it growing up here as a woman that I had limitations, but I felt it in the West. So it was very interesting and opened my eyes. 

So when I visited documenta and I saw that there were works about apartheid South Africa and Palestine, and it was more about a thematic, a concept, artists weren't divided by their countries. I just started, thinking about it and I said, I was just interested because I was on a gap year. I was going back to do my painting degree at the Royal Academy [of Arts]. So obviously I wasn't planning on working at that stage. And the artists who were involved, some of them, may they rest in peace, they were just so used to the program the way it was. Everybody would invite their friends and it was always the same crowd and I just feel like they couldn't be bothered with the changes. And I remember a lot of artists were a little bit angry with me. I got attacked a little bit in the press for making such a big change. But I've worked with all of them again and I think they understand what I was trying to do and how I was trying to make those changes. And it's been 20 years now, so it's good to see how far we've come. Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: A little bit of vindication, in 20 years. 

I want to unpick that a little bit because you were never taught that you had to think of yourself as being limited. And then when you went to London to art school, which thinks of itself as a progressive part of the world, that's when you were taught that you needed to be limited, which I don't think is how the Western art world thinks of itself.

So I wondered if you could go into those two things. What if art can be both extremely limiting—in the ways that maybe parts of it think of itself, define itself—and what if it can be the opposite? What if it can be an epiphany?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I wouldn't say that we were without limitations. There were certain things that we weren't allowed to do, but it was more because of your place in society. My parents were very much about education so we had school and then we had tutors after school and tutors on the weekend. That's the childhood that we had. It was just my parents trying to push the best education for us so that we could be successful. Of course, that meant that there wasn't enough time to go out and party, which is fine. That's probably why people know me now that I don't really like to party, I prefer to work. 

But in terms of the West, there wasn't as much diversity as there is now. We didn't see ourselves represented as largely as we do now. You could see it in terms of the history of exhibitions during that time; all of the professors, probably 99% white male artists. It was very important to put myself in that position and realize, what if there are possibilities to change things? And when I was in documenta, it was the same kind of thing. Why does one have to go to a place in Germany that's not even that well known, to see this art about the world? What about people in my part of the world who don't have the means to travel? How could we bridge this conversation and look at things from our point of view?

My father's known to be a historian and writer, trying to write history from our point of view because we've gotten so used to our history being written by the British. My father's first dissertation, he has two PhDs, the first one was the myth of Arab piracy in the Gulf. When the British wanted to gain control of the region, they called our family pirates. So my father's first book was really to disprove that, with all the evidence and facts and footnotes, et cetera. It's again about writing your history or maybe expressing yourselves from your point of view. And as you put yourself in a position of a brown or Arab woman, you're already on that side where you need to write your history because it's not written for you.

Charlotte Burns: Did it feel for you like a sense of closure or a sense of full cycle, having done that last biennale, having curated it, in the sense of Okwui Enwezor handing over to you? Having begun being so inspired by documenta, did that feel like a sense of a chapter ending?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, it was interesting because when I thought of Okwui, I couldn't get him out of my head. I invited him pretty early, in 2018. Okwui was so supportive and he was an inspiration. But he didn't have that much put in place at the time because he was in hospital a lot. And I remember the last conversation I had with him in the hospital and I just said, “I really need to know what to do.” And he said, “You do it.” And I thought that he wanted me to do his show. So I quickly put together a working group. Then I realized when he said you do it, he always spoke about how I know our audience, I know our place and I felt it was this trust to say, you do it. 

So what I wanted to do is bring artists who I work with, artists that Okwui's worked with, and try to do something that could be more of a collaboration. There was only one artist that Okwui actually had invited and another name that was written down. So it was really my decision to navigate and see what made sense. 

For the longest period, I wanted to de-center the biennial. That's why I kept using different towns and villages around Sharjah. I went for five cities. I wanted six. The team were like, “No way.”  I'm still trying for the next one. It's this town, they need us because we have little art centers in each town that teach drawing and sculpture, ceramics. So it was very important for me to not do a token project, but actually have a substantial amount of work.

I wouldn't call it a cycle, but it was certainly a moment. There's a lot that you feel after 20 years. I saw how far we've come in terms of a foundation. I couldn't have done it without the team, from the hospitality team to the guys organizing the buses for everyone. They're so calm. We had over 11,500 people on the opening day. And I don't know how everyone managed, but it's such a great energy because it's a collective project, the biennial and you feel it. Yeah, so I don't know if it's about closing a chapter.  I think it's just opening a second chapter.

Charlotte Burns: That's what I mean. Just marking the end of a moment, moving into another one. But to have an epiphany at a young age and then be told by the curator of that exhibition, you go and do this, having already done it for 20 years, and then curate an exhibition that is raved about by people up and down the art world is pretty monumental, in terms of an achievement.

Hoor Al Qasimi: I always say that if you want to make change, then you have to be part of that change. You can't sit and wait for things. So for the world to change, you have to make an effort because nobody is going to know what you need if you don't try, if you don't open your mouth, if you don't say, “Actually, this is the kind of thing that we are interested in doing.” 

Putting yourself in that position is very important. And a lot of artists, Michael Armitage, Ibrahim Mahama, Yinka Shonibare, all of them going home and opening up spaces. I just said to them, it's the same idea. It's just, I didn't wait to be a successful artist. I just jumped on the first opportunity I got but we all have the same ambition. Theaster Gates, everybody, we want to create space for other artists, and we want to do that at home, and I feel it more and more seeing artists creating their spaces.

I had that conversation with Doris Salcedo about her space in Bogotá as well as Maria Magdalena [Campos-Pons] about her creating this project in Matanzas. That's the beauty of people making the change and opening opportunities.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I guess there was something in you that knew that you wanted to do that. Let's focus on where you are, which is Sharjah. For people who haven't been, it's the third largest of the seven United Arab Emirates and the only one bridging the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. 

Your father, the ruler since 1972, taking over since his brother was assassinated. He's been a huge supporter of culture himself saying it is essential for the spirit. In a speech he gave in 1979, he told an audience that it was time to stop a concrete revolution of civil construction and replace it with a cultural revolution. 

Very early in his reign, he began supporting an artistic avant-garde, opening museums and launching the Sharjah Biennial—which you would then take over the reins of—and you would pay homage to the artists that he fostered when you gave a presentation in the 2015 Venice Biennale of some of those artists. So it's a long family lineage of building an artistic tradition. 

So let's talk a little bit about that because the consistency is so key and we're seeing that through the lineage of father, daughter, moving forward through these generations. So, what if we do write our own histories as a longstanding practice?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think my father likes it when I interfere. It's just like a running joke. Everybody thinks that it's a private foundation, but it's a government foundation. So I'm actually just a staff member, so I have no rights to anything at the foundation except that I've left my blood, sweat, and tears in it for 20 years of my life.

So for me, it is personal, but at the same time, I have to keep stressing that it's a public foundation. It's not private money, it's public money. So it's for the public and it's really important for us to put the public at the forefront. In this biennial, after 20 years, I'm really seeing the difference of people who used to come and participate in workshops with us as children who are now working with us as staff members or our artists or audience members. So it takes time to see that growth. It's not a part of the UAE, it's just the Sharjah government, so it's much easier to navigate and be creative. 

I have to say that my father has given me a lot of space to experiment.

Charlotte Burns: You've said that the goal from the beginning has been to create a platform that enables South-South exchange. You said, “In the past, many organizations have relied on Western institutions to determine their future. So it's important to create spaces that encourage conversations and permit us to write our own history. This has been the guiding principle.” 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think what has happened with the Sharjah Biennial is that we've opened up the space for many histories to be written and I do talk about like South-South conversation. It doesn't mean that the West is excluded, but it just means it's a different viewpoint or a different angle to perceive things, because as you see now, a lot of the history and everything that's been written, the way we've all grown up, has come from Western thinking. And you see it in the news, in social media, there's a big issue with that now. 

People are waking up, realizing that they have a voice and that they need to use it. And many spaces are popping up all over the world, and it's great for us to work together and come together and be in solidarity, to support a lot of artists who are not able to show in many places in the world.

Charlotte Burns: Just to take that a little further, tell me what you mean.

Hoor Al Qasimi: I'll give you an example. When we're creating our structure for our foundation, there are many institutions who would come from, let's say, the US or the UK to say, “This is how a museum should function.” We've realized that some things work, some things don't work. As people we’re very different. And it was the same when I was working with people in different parts of the world who are trying to organize their own structure. Sometimes they end up having advisors coming from the West telling them, “This is what you need.” And then I would come in and say, “You don't need to think in that way.” Look at your audience, your public, your culture, and you need to tell us or them what you need. 

So I think that's the difference. The idea of not always thinking that art or culture could be transported and that the same thing has to happen all over the world. No, there's a beauty in how different we are, and we need to embrace that. And that's why different cultures and spaces are exciting because we are different, but we need to come together with missions and values that are similar.

Charlotte Burns: I think that's really interesting. Often, when you hear people lamenting art these days, you realize that the people saying this are speaking from art market centers about art market art. And as someone who is so often looking beyond that, you travel a lot, but you are not someone who's necessarily going to every single art fair. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, so it depends. I don't like to go to art fairs as much because as a curator, I have to say it hurts my eyes to see art crammed in that way. So I do find it visually disturbing. Really, it does stress me out but if I need to be there because I'm speaking or because of an event, then I will go. 

Charlotte Burns: They’re still useful to go to for other reasons but when people lament about the art being made today, I often wonder if they're lamenting the places that they're seeing it from. And I imagine that you're probably seeing art more broadly than that. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, I completely agree with you. There's nothing wrong with an art fair. It's just that not everybody who works in art has to follow the market. I still don't understand the market. I don't know. I'm not good at that part and I don't have to be. That's not my job. 

I think there's room for everyone in the art world. There's room for a fair because artists need to sell. People need to live and produce their work. We need patrons and supporters to help us fund projects for biennials. So it is a network, but what's great is that you don't have to be a know-it-all and be part of every single part of that scene. 

I try to do as many studio visits as possible. For example, I was traveling in Central South America for a while, and somebody asked me to go visit an artist in the Peruvian Amazon in Pucallpa, so I went to visit this artist there. So I will make an effort to see artists because I think it's important to spend time with the artist in their studio, get to know them, get to know the practice and it's not about shopping basket, putting works together. That's really important because it's about the relationships that you build. There has to be a trust.

Charlotte Burns: Some of the artists that, when I've been researching that, people have said they've really enjoyed working with you because you've given them space. They felt like you understood the practice, that it would have time and space. And that you had generous budgets, and that things were being done properly. And another artist was like, “I don't know how she found me. She reached out to me on Instagram and.” How do you find the time for that? You have 17 jobs and you're the director of different organizations. I know that your parents had you working a lot in the evenings or weekends. Is that how you're doing it? You're just working 20 hours a day.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Kind of, yeah. I'm very curious person. I trust my instincts a lot because my instincts are what got me my job. If I didn't go visit documenta, I wouldn't be where I am today. So I learned to listen to my instincts. 

For example, the artist that I went to see in Pucallpa was mentioned to me three times. So I thought, “Okay, it's no coincidence. So I thought that means I need to go and see her. So I listen to these moments. I'm not a spiritual person, but I do trust my instincts. And if something doesn't happen, I try not to force it.

Charlotte Burns: You say you're not a spiritual person. What is it that propels you?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think I'm a stubborn person. That's for sure. I've been known to be stubborn. If I want to do something, then I'll put all my energy to make it happen. 

For example, budgets for Sharjah Biennial 15. I fundraised like crazy for that biennial. And artists helped me. Doris Salcedo's project was funded by Glenstone Museum. Without their support, it wouldn't have been possible. A lot of the artists helped us get support for projects like Bouchra Khalili's work, we had multiple partners, LUMA [Arles]and MACBA  [Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art]. Partnerships are also very important. 

The reason I pushed the biennial by two extra years, we basically missed a year. We needed more time, not only to fundraise but also for artists to produce the work and for our team to be able to put the project together. We do everything in-house in Sharjah. We have a full team. We're over 300 people at the foundation. We do all the AV, technology, carpentry, production. So it was really important to create a team that you can trust and work together and a lot of them, we've been working together for 20 years or so.

Charlotte Burns: I know you think collaboratively. Do you also think competitively? I know you think competitively with yourself. Do you think competitively with other people, other countries, other museums?

Hoor Al Qasimi: No, I am competitive with myself for sure. I always want to try to do better than I did. I have to say I do that mainly with weightlifting. When I lift weights. I want to go heavier each time. But I don't like competition. I think it's important to work together because at the end of the day, you have more possibilities when you come together. And I don't like the feeling of competitiveness. I think it's a generational thing. A lot of us don't want to compete anymore. We love working together. We like sharing resources. 

For example, you'd see artists in every single biennial around the world, and they're always pushed to do new work. That's really not sustainable also for the artists and their practice. So it was very important that when we co-produced Isaac Julien's project with the Barnes Foundation, it was supposed to premiere at Sharjah and then go to Barnes. But we postponed the biennial by an extra year and Isaac said, “But it won't premiere in Sharjah.” And I said, “Isaac, I really don't care.” For me, it's not about who shows it first. It's about the project being ready and possible. And a lot of people who are competitive used to think, “We have to premiere this work. It has to show here first.” And I don't think that is important.

Charlotte Burns: You're the president of the International Biennial Association and you've spoken a lot about this idea of pooling resources, collaborating more, and biennials being more mindful of creating opportunities for the next generation. What if biennials operated differently? Not only more sustainably for artists, for audiences, for each other, but I'm thinking also about what it is that Okwui always said about biennales, that at their best they can do what nothing else in the art world can do. They can do more than any museum exhibition can do.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, I agree 100%, and I think that's also why Okwui was very supportive of our platform. The International Biennial Association, it's a small association. I'm the second president. It's a network. It doesn't include every biennial in the world but what's great is that it's a network for members to see how biennials can be this change, know more about each other, find a space that you know, we sometimes have similar concerns or situations we find ourselves in. So how can we help each other? 

Recently we've also opened up for emerging biennials to come on board. I don't think there is one model and there shouldn't be a model. That's the difference between biennials and museums. You can be flexible and you could really cater to who your audience is. But at the forefront, it should be artists and public. And of course, you have to also look after your team. 

Charlotte Burns: You said there's a generation of us that thinks differently. Who do you count as your peers? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I could say generation but it's broad. In our network at the Biennial Association, we work with Berlin [Biennale]. Gabriele Horn has been really crucial. Sally Tallant, who's left us for the Queens Museum, we miss her all the time. It's important that we learn from each other. I was on the board of MoMA PS1 for 11 years. I'm on the board of Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, I learn a lot from Christine Tohmé, who runs that, Darat Al Funun in Amman. 

But it's very important that we have these spaces where we can ask each other questions and bring in our experiences. In our advisory committee there, we have Emily Jacir, Zeina Arida, many people who are running different institutions, and we’re all going through different things. But at the same time, we're able to speak openly about our limitations and our struggles. I think that's very important. And you can't do that if you're in a competitive mode.

Charlotte Burns: What do you think are the biggest challenges people are facing right now?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think the biggest challenges everyone is facing is the situation artists being canceled or disinvited. Academics, lecturers, people being fired in the art world. I think it's become very sensitive about what people could talk about or not talk about. And it's created such a disconnect. Suddenly people are seeing two sides to the art world. People that can control the situation because they can pull funding out and the other side who are allowing artists to express themselves. 

I know many people who got disinvited just for being Palestinian or just being Arab and it's quite disheartening because at the same time, the art world wants to connect. People want to be together, and want to share in our missions and values, but more and more we're seeing the disconnect and maybe that's because of where the power lies in certain institutions.

Charlotte Burns: Do you see a way forward?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think it's important for people to speak and listen. A lot of times people are ready to cancel things without understanding the situation. It's not black and white. I think for people to be vilified because they call for a ceasefire, I think is ridiculous. If anything, it seems like there's a lot of inequality, where certain lives are worth more than other lives. And you’d think that after Black Lives Matter, that people would be more open to understanding where the limitations are or where the failures have been, but we're not seeing that. 

And it's also to do with the different changes in governments around the world. The way things are shifting in different countries, in the Netherlands and Argentina. It's quite frightening that there could be that much control in terms of the art world and culture. The cuts that are going through culture. The racism that you see blatantly all over. 

I see the solution is that we need to come together, like I mentioned, about solidarity and get to know each other and work together. That's really the main goal for me, supporting artists who are finding themselves in this situation. 

But I think people are speaking up now, the world is very connected. You can't open up social media without hearing something that has happened and people either supporting each other or attacking each other, but there isn't the excuse of we don't know anymore.

Charlotte Burns: You've had to navigate politics through the biennial. You've said, “We've never been shy about showing art that's political because our region is surrounded by politics,” and you think art is one of the areas that can handle this because it's one of the few places we can have those conversations. It's harder and harder to have a space where we can come together, but you believe art can push people to contemplate certain questions. 

Have you seen through the 20 years of doing the biennial that different conversations can be held? Because Western commentators on the biennial in Sharjah tend to focus on the social and political conditions of the region, including restrictions, for instance, around workers' rights or legislation around homosexuality. How do you navigate those issues? Legislation hasn't changed, but have conversations?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, for sure. Society is very different from what people see as legally acceptable. People live their lives. Everyone's relationship is very private here. If you're heterosexual, homosexual, nobody asks you. Everybody's personal life is very private. But at the same time, there are conversations around youth and friends and people, it's normalized. It's not something that is seen in the same way that the West kind of enforced their stereotype of what needs to happen if you are homosexual, “this is how you need to behave,” because it's the way people behave within our culture in general, even if you're heterosexual or homosexual. There's a cultural way of being. 

I think, for example, certain works looking at workers' rights, we've shown in many biennials. We have also listened to any criticisms or discussions around Gulf labor. There are a lot of the artists who were part of Gulf labor who I've worked with. So I think it's important that culture can be this space of opening up conversation and it's a gentle way of doing it. It's not a way to alienate anyone, but let's just have this conversation and see what we can do. 

The biennial when we opened 20 years ago, it was around the war in Iraq, and everybody said to me, “Are you going to cancel?” Because the American troops had just marched into Iraq. And I said, “No, it's more important that we do this exhibition,” and it's a type of solidarity of coming together. 

We also have exhibitions throughout the year. It's not just the biennial. And now we have an exhibition looking at Palestine through the works in our collection at Sharjah Art Foundation's collection. But it's not only an exhibition, it's also a space where people can gather and speak. Sharjah has a huge Palestinian community, including staff members who work with us from Gaza. So it's very important that people are able to find the space to speak to each other, come together, find solidarity.

I have a great team. We're different ages, very open to listening to their feedback because I'm busy with whatever I'm doing, traveling around the world and working but I also need to listen to how people react to certain things and what they're looking for. But you have to listen to your audience.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Sharjah Art Foundation as well. You just announced the programs for 2024, including the first major survey, the late Pakistani artist and women's rights activist, Lala Rukh, the superstar artist that you're telling the world about. You do lots of pioneering things like this bringing attention to artists that people don't know about. Your ambitions just seem to grow. Once you've got a handle on the biennial, you expanded into the foundation, which is a year-round platform. Then in 2018, you set up the Africa Institute with Salah [M.] Hassan, which is separate from the foundation. It's a think tank for African studies. You are doing the triennial in Japan next year. You also have taken over your late twin brother's fashion label. You're a restauranteur…

Hoor Al Qasimi: I have a way of not starting things from scratch, let's say. With the Africa Institute, really people who know me know that I have a reputation for saving old buildings and renovating them and repurposing them, hence also the Sharjah Architecture Triennial that I set up in 2019. So it was very important for me to do a lot of research about these buildings and I started asking questions about the Africa Hall. Why was it that we grew up with a hall called Africa Hall? It was built in 1976 and the first conference was on African-Arab relations that my father had organized. I spoke with Salah Hassan, who I've worked with on many exhibitions, he looked at the African Studies Association Journal from 1976 and found the original report on the Sharjah Conference. There was a recommendation to set up an institute. So 40 years later, I suggested setting up this institute by looking at African Diaspora Studies and hired Salah Hassan to be the director. But I was also interested in setting up an Asia Institute because of our relationship with Asia. Half our population is South Asian. We have people living here for generations from Central Asia to South Asia. 

When we were working on the accreditation for a master's PhD program it made more sense to create an umbrella organization again. So we recently, last year, launched the Global Studies University in Sharjah, which will be the umbrella for the Africa Institute, Asia Institute, and others that I'm also in the process of working on. It's an idea to create this other way of looking at universities and academia from a different point of view where you're not limited in terms of your research because you're not looking at it from a certain geography. 

Our connections with Africa are very historic and very deep so there are things that we're able to do from this part of the world that make more sense. Our relationship with Sudan, with Zanzibar, the Indian Ocean. So it's really interesting that there's this space to navigate and work together. A lot of people are interested in collaborating with us. So yeah, watch the space.

Charlotte Burns: So what if you re-imagine academia as well, while you're at it?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, I think so because there are, for me, for us, even for my father, when we spoke about the Africa Institute, it's really important that it's about collaborating with universities on the continent as well. So our first collaboration was with Addis Ababa University. It's really exciting and interesting.

I think it's really important that we create these spaces again, not just for the artists, but also the curators as well. 

Charlotte Burns: What is the Asia Institute? Where's that going to focus? Asia is enormous.

Hoor AL Qasimi: Asia is very enormous. It will be from our part of the world, Western Asia, all the way to the very east, the north and south. This is the idea of really looking at it diversely and geographically, and its widest span and not focusing on what people might consider Asia to be.

Charlotte Burns: Tell me a little more. What does that mean? I'm trying to wrap my head around that. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Our part of the world is known as Western Asia. 

Charlotte Burns: This is all so interesting. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Because the Middle East is a colonial term that a lot of people don't like to use.

Charlotte Burns: So the Africa Institute is going to be part of this entity looking at the same sort of things, this idea of patterns of migration. Water rights, civic studies, histories, futures.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yes, all the institutes or centers around the Global Studies University would be looking at mainly social sciences and humanities, but also what was very important for me was to set up the language center. I'm obsessed with languages.

Charlotte Burns: You speak eight languages, is that it? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Seven, I'm rusty in all of them right now. I'm going to blame Covid and brain fog. But language is very important for me so I wanted to establish the language center at the Africa Institute. So we already teaching, Hausa, Kiswahili [also known as Swahili], Amharic, and Arabic. And of course, there will be more languages as we grow.

Charlotte Burns: You're going to be in Japan quite a bit this year. You're going to be the first, non-Japanese artistic director of the Aichi [Triennale]. Congratulations.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Thank you very much. Yeah, it's great since I studied Japanese 20 years ago, so trying to put it to good use now. The team is wonderful, and whenever I do a biennial or triennial somewhere, I really try to work with the local team. 

I also am working on a small artist-run biennial in Matanzas in Cuba founded by Maria Magdalena Campos Pons. So I've visited a few times and trying to work mainly on socially engaged projects, working with local artists as much as possible. 

Charlotte Burns: For Japan, can you tell us a bit more about the concept?

Hoor Al Qasimi: The title that I've chosen is A Time Between Ashes and Roses. It's from a poem by Adonis, a Syrian poet, that was written about the 1967 war. What I really liked about the poem is it starts off with, “How do wither trees blossom a time between ashes and roses is coming when everything shall be extinguished when everything shall begin again.” So this idea of what happens to Earth and to the planet after destruction. 

My interest is really about the relationship between people and the environment. It could be through war, it could be through extraction, it could be through over-farming or overfishing or so this kind of depletion of resources. But the way I wanted to look at it was to look at the relationship on two extremes. So one being a relationship that is harmonious, almost fairytale-like, where you can imagine plants and animals and humans living in harmony. To the other extreme science fiction, apocalyptic, the end of the world destruction. Just trying to look at these two extremes and how, also through science fiction, we can imagine a renewal. So it's a cycle of destruction and renewal. 

So it's been interesting. I don't know how it's gonna be realized. We have some great artists working there, but I'm also finding some interesting references within Aichi in Japan that I'm interested in looking at. And that opens on the 13th of September 2025.

Charlotte Burns: You are nothing if not a busy person. You so fulfill the criteria of a ‘what if.’ You are doing so many things that exist in that space of imagining, what if renewal, what if destruction, what if we could build a university structure that re-imagined what it meant? What if a Biennale operated differently? What if we rewrote our own histories? 

Which of those ‘what ifs,’ if you had to grab one and run, if you could only focus on one tomorrow for the rest of your life, which one would you focus on?

Hoor Al Qasimi: In terms of my job or in terms of ‘what if’?

Charlotte Burns: In terms of your energy. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: It's a very hard question because I would, what I would do is I would create a third umbrella organization and I would put everything under that one umbrella organization and focus on that. 

Charlotte Burns: You can’t do that! 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think both the Architecture Triennial, the Africa Institute, Global Studies University, and Sharjah Art Foundation are very dear to me, I have to say. And with my brother's fashion label, it's his legacy that I have to finish. But I guess Sharjah Art Foundation has been my longest-running job. 20 years. So that's something that would be very hard to live without for sure.

Charlotte Burns: Do you still find that as exciting as you did?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah, for sure. Not only because of the biennial, but because of the team I'm working with right now, it's been really great listening to them. Our team is growing to include things that I was hoping to do. Now our music department is doing very well. We have our performance festival. Good things always take time and I think there's always this way of not over-planning as well because you don't know what's going to happen.

The reason ‘what if’ works for me is that you can do that with a biennial where you can't do it at certain institutions. There is more flexibility: what if we didn't build it in this way? What if we just use the space as a shell? What would happen?

Charlotte Burns: Do you see yourself staying in that role? Can you imagine giving it over to someone else to do?

Hoor Al Qasimi: I will have to eventually, but I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I do threaten my team with my retirement sometimes when I'm exhausted and they just laugh and say, “You'll never retire.” But what I've done now is we're many directors on the team, different positions and that's been really great. What I want is people to be able to make decisions and take decisions and be in positions of authority.  I am involved in everything, but I don't want to micromanage. I want to give them the space to grow and also be proud of the work that they do and yeah, and they've helped me a lot. If they weren't there, I wouldn't be able to do Japan and Tunis and everything else.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the one that motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Right now I'm trying to fundraise for the project in Matanzas, and that's keeping me up at night. That's been a bit of a struggle. And the ‘what if’ that gets me up in the morning is that there's not enough time in the day.

Charlotte Burns: What is the change that you want now to create? What are you focusing on the most? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: It's not about me creating a change, I just feel speaking to each other is so important, and listening and creating these spaces where people can find similarities or share their issues and problems. I think that's important and it's happened in many places. More and more we are sharing, we're collaborating on exhibitions with partners and touring. For me, that's what is really important.

Charlotte Burns: What if you could go back to 22-year-old you starting out saying, “I'm not going to interfere, but let me just look at this.” What advice would you give her? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Run! Stick to painting! 

[Laughs]

No, I don't know. I don't think I would have been a successful artist, I have to say, just because I think I've got, I'm not diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I've got ADHD. I have problems focusing on one thing. Hence, the multiple jobs and umbrellas and not being able to stay in one place long enough. 

But, I don't know what I would say. I think I felt at that time that I got a lot of criticism, not criticism, but there was always a stereotype was, “Oh, it's only because you're the daughter of and you're a woman and you're a painter and you're 22.” So I was very insecure. I felt that I couldn't put myself in a position as director. Nobody would take me seriously as a painter, 22, woman, Arab. 

So I struggled when I went back to the Royal Academy. I realized that maybe I need to change my degree and get a master's in curating contemporary art. And I remember Teresa Gleadall saying, “But you don't need this degree.” And I said, “But yeah, I do need it,” because I feel like I'm always going to be stereotyped, always going to be judged. I wasn't confident in my position, and for the longest time, I wasn't. And I guess when I was invited to join the MoMA PS1 board, I found myself around a lot of curators who treated me as equals and I realized that “Oh, okay, they respect my work.” Even from Glenn Lowry to Peter Eleey and Klaus Biesenbach, everybody who was there, Laura Hoffman. So a lot of them made me feel equal, I would say, when it's always been, you haven't, I didn't feel that way so much in the West. And now, 20 years later, the work kind of speaks for itself. You like it or you don't like it. It doesn't really matter. This is the work.

Charlotte Burns: Did you need that? That Western validation? Do you think? 

Hoor Al Qasimi: I mean now I say to people, “We don’t need your Western validation,” but at the time I just, I think I was young, that's the thing. I was young and there isn't a handbook on how to direct a biennial or how to curate a biennial and maybe that's the beauty of it. As an artist, you're coming into it from a different point of view. I don't know if there is any degree or course that prepares you for anything like this. 

I still have my moments when I'm insecure, when I think, “Oh, I should have a PhD.” And, I got an honorary degree and my parents are like, “Oh, it doesn't count.” So there's so much of this kind of ambition, but there's no time really. Yeah.

Charlotte Burns: Are they proud of you?

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yeah. Yeah. They say it sometimes, but I think my mom, she meets people around the world who suddenly say, “I saw your daughter's interview on RTE or I saw this or,” so they see the change that happens. 

My father is also very proud that the work is very political because we learned a lot of that from my father. He marched with Muhammed Ali in Chicago in the early eighties. And he was very much part of a lot of movements for equal rights and he was friends with Nelson Mandela and it's really important. 

That is also part of the way we think about things. Yesterday we were talking about something with my mom and dad and I said something about working with musicians or people in the Sahara desert and looking at people from different parts of the world. And my mother just said to my dad, “Just like our father.” So that was really interesting.

But I'm also using my father's network when I'm working. For example, the artist, the older generation of artists in Sudan, the relationship we have with Sudan was from my father's generation. There's a hall at the university called Sharjah Hall in Khartoum. So I'm only always just building up on some of these relationships to make them more relevant for our generation but then at the same time, I'm working with Maori artists in New Zealand and Aboriginal artists in Australia. So it's a little bit of both.

Charlotte Burns: Such a process. It's a giant ‘what if’ building all these futures. That idea of the present and the future coming so much from the past.

Hoor Al Qasimi: Yes, for sure.

Charlotte Burns: Oh, this has been such an interesting conversation. All that’s left for me to do is say thank you so much and good luck with everything that you have on your plate. I better let you go because I feel like you have a plane to catch or something similar. 

Hoor Al Qasimi: Thank you very much. Thank you.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Such an inspiring conversation—and what a work ethic! Thank you so much to Hoor Al Qasimi.

Next time we’ll be joined by the Los Angeles art collector and philanthropist, Jarl Mohn.

Jarl Mohn: I’ve always found that if I’m struggling with a question in business or something, I love to go to see art that I don't know, art that I'm not familiar with and it’s like a kick in the head. It helps me open my eyes.

Charlotte Burns: Do join us. It’s such an interesting conversation. 

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.

The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 4: Salome Asega

Described as the “next generation of leadership”, in this episode we welcome Salome Asega, the director of NEW INC in New York and an accomplished artist, whose work is at the cutting edge of creativity and technology. Salome’s ability to look towards—and build—the future shines through in this conversation with host Charlotte Burns. Part of her work at NEW INC, she says, is about creating chance encounters for creative people who feel like “choosing your own adventure.” What if we focused on new inventions, narratives and opportunities? Tune in for more. 

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome back to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns and this is the podcast in which we imagine new futures. 

[Audio of guests]

This episode I’m delighted to welcome Salome Asega, the director of NEW INC in New York, and an accomplished artist whose work is at the cutting edge of creativity and technology. Salome’s been described as the next generation of leadership and her ability to look towards and to build the future shines through in this conversation. I really enjoyed talking with Salome. She brings a lightness of touch to really profound ideas and strikes me as a natural inventor. We talk about power and about leading, about technologies and what art can do. We talk about money and new ways of funding culture. Salome’s inspiring to listen to. Part of her work at NEW INC is, she says, about creating chance encounters for creative people that feel like choosing your own adventure. This conversation takes us from PokemonGo to water spirits and how the next gen of creatives are looking for opportunities to break the rules. Let’s go. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns:

Salome, thank you so much for joining us. It's such a pleasure to have you here on the show.

Salome Asega:

I am so thankful. Thank you for the invitation. I've had friends on the show and I'm a new fan of the podcast.

Charlotte Burns:

Thank you very much. Hopefully, you still are by the end of the interview. 

[Laughter]

So I wanted to start talking to you about your role at NEW INC. When you were appointed in 2021, Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said “Salome is a next generation of leadership and a role model for the interdisciplinary nature of the future of work. She's a creative technologist, a thoughtful strategist, and an empathetic community builder who will shape the next chapter of growth for NEW INC.” 

Very nice to be described in that way. How do you feel about being called the next generation of leadership? 

Salome Asega:

It is very kind. When I think about my journey to NEW INC, it's super windy. 

I actually have a long history with the program. I was an artist who participated in the third cohort and, I joined a team of other artists and thinkers who had really tough, big questions about institution building. And we were there as a group of artists trying to form a nonprofit organization called Power Plant and in the process of building that, we like learned all the things that need fixing the nonprofit sector. So to come back to NEW INC seven years later being able to apply some of what I've learned in the past seven years is quite incredible.

Charlotte Burns:

I'd be curious to know, seven years later, would you still see the problems as being the same or are we just in a different frame? Because seven years ago feels like a lifetime ago.

Salome Asega:

Yeah, I think more or less the challenges remain the same, but maybe we've just gotten better at asking more nuanced questions around how to frame the challenges. Even in 2016, as like a young artist working in a collective of other artists, we had deep concerns around the funding of this work. Where do we go for money? 

We quickly learned that every funding relationship is also an interpersonal relationship. And so we were asking basically, “Who do we wanna be in partnership with?” And I feel like those are questions I'm still asking today. 

Money is complicated and who you take money from sometimes comes with asks that maybe steer you away from the original goals of your project or initiative, right? And so sometimes that's good and sometimes it can be a distraction. I feel like those questions I'm still dealing with seven years later.

Charlotte Burns:

How do you approach that as a leader of an institution? Which I imagine is related, but probably different to how you think about that in your art-making.

Salome Asega:

Personally, as an artist, I'm pretty cut and dry. I don't do things I don't wanna do. There's a bit of a privilege in that, you know, because I'm a solo practitioner and I can make decisions for myself. 

Whereas when I am the leader of a program, I am considering benefits and opportunities for a much larger demographic of people, right? A community of people. And I'm always thinking about, “Who can this help?” 

There's some things that I do that I know might be a mountain of work on our end, but the outcome of it will mean we'll be so effective for many in our community. It's a different mind mindset, I guess. You're working in service to an audience in a community you serve.

Charlotte Burns:

Would you identify funding as the single biggest problem that nonprofits face?

Salome Asega:

Not the single most. I think a close second is storytelling and communications. Many people, ourselves included, are so head down doing the work that we forget to talk about the work that we're doing. But the storytelling piece is important. That's what keeps people engaged and wanting to plug in. But it’s hard to do it all. You know, once you've designed the program, invited everyone, filled the room, then you gotta talk about it. You know, you're like, the work can feel like it never ends. 

Charlotte Burns:

You've been inside various institutions from New York's Parsons School of Design, where you've been teaching speculative and critical design classes to the Ford Foundation—you were its inaugural new media art research fellow for Creativity and Free Expression—to being involved in various cohorts and labs for instance, the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, moving around so many different institutions, you get this great sense of being able to peer under the floorboards and look at how they work. 

What's the biggest surprise for you as an artist going into those institutions, thinking of how that translates into your work as a leader of an institution?

Salome Asega:

You reading that to me just made me think, this past weekend I gave a talk at Yale's MFA graphic design program, which Nontsikelelo Mutiti runs, this incredible leader and someone after my talk asked me if I'm experiencing an occupational identity crisis because I've worked in so many spaces and spaces that are very different from each other. 

[Laughter]

But I think to me, you know, I've always been drawn by certain ideas and I'm always looking for the spaces that can hold those ideas so I don't think of myself as a title or an occupation, but I think of the work I do as being driven by questions. 

Charlotte Burns:

Having seen institutions from the inside out, I'm sure there are things you can see where things are moving productively and effectively and where things get stuck.

Salome Asega:

I think in the last couple of years I've seen organizations start to consider how they embed care into working with artists directly, in a way that feels new. And so I'm seeing people edit and re-edit, for example, their applications, and the processes for selection, determining more clear criteria for how they worked with artists. 

I think at some point it was a measure of success to have thousands and thousands of people apply to your open call or grant opportunity but really what I think that signals for me, and what I think it's starting to signal for other people, is that maybe we're not clear and our goal should be to not waste people's time, right? 

And I'm also seeing opportunities that engage artists that are taking care of them or meeting them where they're at as full people in the world, you know? I love, for example, Abrons Arts Center has an artist residency program for artist parents, which I think is so beautiful, and I'm hoping to see more and more examples like that. 

I think the pandemic was a moment to say, “What are we doing, and who are we doing it for? And how can we be doing this better?”

Charlotte Burns:

Is that what you think goes towards defining a good leader? 

Salome Asega:

I sat in a workshop once where the facilitator was trying to get us to think about power. She asked everyone in the room to consider if they had a timer in front of them. By the end of our session, to think how many minutes did you rack up on your timer? 

For me, leaders maybe don't have the most time racked up on their timers. I'm drawn to leaders who are strong and quiet. I've been mentored by a lot of listeners, and that's what I try to emulate in my own leadership now. I don't rush into decisions. I don't think I need to be the loudest person in the room. I'm a listener. 

When I was at Ford Foundation, I was hired by Elizabeth Alexander when she was running the creativity and free expression program and I think she was that exact kind of leader who was attentive, looking around the room, would call on someone if they were quiet, because she knew that they were thinking, the gears were turning, and so she would pull them into the conversation. 

And Margaret Morton ran Ford Foundation's creativity and free expression, and I would say very similar energy. That's such a beautiful way to lead, to make sure everyone's voice is included.

Charlotte Burns:

You've said that the north star of NEW INC, which was founded in 2013 as the first of its kind, is to think about the ways cultural practitioners can build sustainable careers. And when you were appointed director, you were overseeing a hundred creative entrepreneurs, 600 alumni, and a very large group of mentors through the years. Obviously, you've also taught at Parsons. What are the challenges and opportunities for that younger generation of cultural practitioners?

Salome Asega:

Both the young artists that I was teaching at Parsons and also the kind of emerging cultural leaders that I'm seeing now at NEW INC are all thinking about new ways of doing business. 

They wanna know the rules, they wanna know how it's usually been done, how the game has been played. But they also wanna know where are the opportunities to break the rules, and not have to not have to operate under the status quo. 

Many of the people that I'm seeing come into NEW INC are interested in solidarity economies. They're interested in cooperative models for organizing, for doing business. They're interested in worker-owned business models. And these are all things that we've started to introduce into our professional development program, which is exciting. And we have artists and thinkers like Caroline Woolard, who have been for a long time thinking about collective organizing and we have like people who are on the ground thinking about new economies in the program.

Charlotte Burns:

Can you describe what that would look like?

Salome Asega:

Yeah. For example, there's a project in our program right now called “Duty Free”, which is a graphic design studio where the graphic designers own part of the company. And for them, that kind of moves beyond a traditional model of graphic design, where the studio is led by kind of genius figure. And then everyone kind of reports to the head of the studio. And so now the studio is organized in a more horizontal fashion.

Charlotte Burns:

Do you think those same principles apply when you're working in labs?  Recently you were selected to be part of the inaugural Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, which is organized by Theaster Gates with the Prada Group. What makes a lab work? 

Salome Asega:

Yeah. I think the most successful labs are the ones that bring together people that are working across disciplines, across silos. With the Dorchester Lab, I love this lab, but it brings together creative technologists like me, a farmer like Yemi Amu. It brings people in fashion, in the arts, in graphic design, in food. An incredible mix of people who all have something to learn from each other. 

And I think that's also what makes NEW INC successful is that you don't really know who you're sitting next to, but you all have this hunger to build something that is self-sustainable, that is your own vision. And in that process, you learn that you have things that you can learn from each other and provide each other. 

Charlotte Burns:

I think a lot about that because there's so much premium placed on efficiency in our daily lives, especially in our professional lives. And then we can lose some of that friction that can be a helpful friction. How do you think about friction and efficiency in your work? 

Salome Asega:

In terms of efficiency, I'm really mindful of my team's capacity to execute projects. I think we're highly ambitious and we're dreamers, but I do think about efficiency from the standpoint of what is the team capable of doing. 

But in terms of creating the randomness, the chance encounter for our members, I feel like more is more is the way to go. I don't wanna restrict any, any potential there at all. 

In the NEW INC program, I think we over-program intentionally because we want it to feel a bit like choose-your-own adventure.  As you're popping in from different working groups or intensive workshops, you'll meet different people. And that's where I think the magic can happen. And I think more is more is beautiful. Abundance, right?

Charlotte Burns:

Yep. Abundance, maximalism.

Salome Asega:

Yes.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns:

Maximal abundance. So you talked about the communal ethos. Those things often in corporate life are binaries at odds with one another. You're either entrepreneurial and therefore individualistic or you are communal and therefore part of a group think. Can you describe how you see those things? 

Salome Asega:

I would say that even for more traditional business spaces, there is an understanding of community, right? There have always been these kinds of boys' clubs you enter and you know that you're in fellowship with other people that will become your future colleagues, that will be your references for future jobs, that'll get you in the door of the company. 

Maybe why a program like NEW INC looks different or Dorchester Lab looks the way it does is that it's just not the traditional makeup of like a Y Combinator for example, right? NEW INC program is 79% BIPOC. It's 80% women and gender non-conforming folks. We don't look like a typical tech incubator and so we read as more of a ‘community space’, which we are but, I think that a lot of tech and business spaces have always understood community building as a tool for progressing in their individual careers. And I think we do too. We just maybe market it differently or talk about it differently.

Charlotte Burns:

I think that's really interesting because of course, you're right. The networks of power are long established and this is essentially just a self-consciously built new network of power, in essence. Which brings us onto technology, and groups of people who design technology. 

[Musical interlude]

You said you're interested in building consentfull technology and I was listening to a talk you did with American Artist who was on last season's podcast, and you said, “Right now there's a group of cishet white men in Silicon Valley that are actively working to build a future for us without our consent. We are living in their imagination. And I'm very interested in leveraging the power of collective imagination to present counter futures.” 

I love this idea of tackling the biases of technology and who's building it, and that's something you really tackle in your practice. Can you talk us through that?

Salome Asega:

Yeah, I am the niece to many computer scientists in my family. And whenever my family would get together, it was always common for one of my uncles to come and bring a computer and have us take it apart and put it back together. And he really wanted us at a young age to kind of build a literacy around technology and have us understand that this is a designed object. Someone thought that this should look like this and operate like this. And these were all choices that a person made. 

Fast forward going to doing my MFA and designing technology at Parsons, I was like a kid in a candy store. I was instantly thrown back into playing with my uncle on the living room floor. I had access to all this like emerging equipment, the latest and greatest. I just felt like people outside of the program needed to know that all of this stuff was happening. And so I then started to implement a kind of participatory-design process to a lot of my projects just because it was like a hack for me. It was like a way to get the equipment out of the space into community and do workshops with people. 

I think from there, I became really invested in design thinking as a potential approach for challenging what we were seeing in our technology landscape, and through our workshops people felt self-empowered to make aesthetic and technological decisions just like the people in Silicon Valley are doing. And so that for me was kind of great success of some of the early projects I was doing.

Charlotte Burns:

I was reading about your ongoing research project Possession, which explores the connections between VR and spirit possession in West African and Caribbean spiritual systems, which I love the sound of. 

Can you tell us a little bit more about the underwater fortress?

Salome Asega:

In 2016, I was tapped to be part of a collective of seven women artists exploring Mami Wata as a complex figure, a femininity in Caribbean and West African spiritual systems. 

The seven of us each produced projects that landed in a show also called MAMI Wata at the Knockdown Center. I was like playing with one of the first Oculus Dove kits, so this is early VR for this phase of VR.  I was interested in researching Mami Wata, I was interested in all these like sculptures that I was finding of practitioners holding an orb-like figure over their heads. This is meant to represent the Orisha. It said that when the Orisha mounts the practitioner from the head, they get transported into the Orisha’s world and teleported. That reminded me of like the idea of putting on a headset and being transported into another world. 

I made this first project, you put on the headset and you're standing on a beach and it's the palm trees are making soft ruffles in the wind and the water is like hitting your feet then the music starts to grow louder, and then you're pulled into the ocean, into the waves, and then you're brought all the way down into the ocean bed floor. And you start to see like piles of gold and jewelry and you're still moving and then you're at the door of a fortress and then it goes black. 

And then you start to hear recordings I did with practitioners who've had the experience of being spiritually possessed by Mami Wata. So they're just kind of recounting their experiences of meeting her. Once their voices end, you're spit back out into a wave and you don't know if you're gonna get back up to air, but you eventually do.

Charlotte Burns:

I love this. 

So your practice is really wide-ranging. From this project to the LEVEL UP[: The Real] Harlem Shake, the interactive video game to building a Monster truck, and the Iyapo Repository, I think on this idea of building new worlds. Obviously, POSSESSION is a project where it's an augmented reality, it's a virtual reality. But with the Iyapo Repository, the group is not only working to imagine new futures but also to physically build prototypes for them. And I really like that intersection of imagination, creation, and archiving. 

Salome Asega:

Totally. So Iyapo Repository is a resource library that exists in a nondescript future and houses a collection of art and artifacts made by and for people of African descent. 

The repository takes on an institutional fiction. We've named the repository after Lilith Iyapo, who's a central figure in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. In the novels, Lilith is the last human being that resembles people of our kind. And so taking on an institutional fiction, we wanted to name the library after a person, and so we pay homage to her. 

The repository has four divisions, and each requires some level of participation to create. Divisions are manuscripts, art and artifacts, film, and rare media. We host these workshops in partnership with museums, universities, arts organizations where we'll invite a small group of people to play a card game with us. You'll get a card that describes the domain in which you're designing for, so maybe it's education, or the environment, or fashion. You’ll get an object card that signals some physical quality your future artifact must have. The participants draw their future artifact on this like official manuscript, and then those workshop drawings all get encased in acrylic and preserved in what we call the manuscript division. 

From there, we'll take the drawings and then work to actually build the drawings into fully-functioning technological objects.

Charlotte Burns:

Can you tell us a little bit about the water suit?

Salome Asega:

Yes. The water suit, artifact 12. The person who drew that was thinking about her relationship to water and wanted to create a sensory suit that gives the wearer the calming sensation of being underwater. For her, she was thinking about the transatlantic slave trade, her own fear of water, a generational fear of water. We built this suit and it has these black cuffs at each one of the joints that have vibrator motors embedded that are synced to tidal patterns of the Atlantic Ocean. So you get this nice kind of undulating vibration along your body. There are all these water tubes that are pumping water around your limbs. 

That was always the best part of doing Iyapo repository was that you would make something that came from someone's vision and then bring it back to them to see. And it was like always a “Oh my goodness!" moment! “I drew that! I invented that!”, was the sense most of our participants had.

Charlotte Burns:

I really love that and I love the idea of the suit. And I was reading about its healing capacities, not only for trauma but for people with dementia or Alzheimer's.  

Through your practice, there's this real premium on inventiveness. How would you define creativity? Would inventiveness be a core part of it? 

Salome Asega:

I think of inventiveness as maybe a nice symptom of creativity. I think, I hope, creativity doesn't have any deliverables. I think it's in the play and when your mind is just going and going that you're able to make, or you're able to see something that maybe you weren't before and maybe that's what leads to the next great idea. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns:

I watched a video in which you were speaking a kind of mantra. You said, “I'm creative, I'm powerful, I am loved.” Is that a mantra you use often and when do you feel those things the most?

Salome Asega:

Yeah. I should bring back that mantra.

Charlotte Burns:

Why did you drop it? I guess life got too busy.

Salome Asega:

Yeah. Life got busy. 

[Laughter] 

Yeah, I do feel creative. I feel creative every day. I think even in administrative work there's a lot of creative problem solving. And also when you're planning programs, you're bringing your curatorial, your editorial, thinking to all of that. 

I feel creative every day, and I do feel loved. It's hard to remember and hold onto that. I think for many of us in the world we live in, it's so tough. But it's a thing that I need to, that's why I'm like, I should bring that mantra back. But it's a thing I need to remember each day. What was the last thing?

Charlotte Burns:

I am creative. I am powerful. I am loved. 

How do you think about power?

Salome Asega:

Power for me, I think, was always a process of self-reflection and self-improvement. It was power, I guess, as measured against myself. 

Can I outrun maybe the other parts of myself that are saying you can't do it? And when I can beat those other parts of myself I feel victorious. We all hear those voices every day that tell us, “You can't do it. It's too hard, don't bother.” And I think when you can get past that, I know for myself, I feel powerful.

Charlotte Burns:

How do you get past that?

Salome Asega:

Oof. I think, taking the first step. It's gonna be hard. I think acknowledging when it feels hard, it's gonna be hard. Just take the first step and then take the second step, and then all of a sudden you're walking. But it's just taking the first step. 

I'll tell you a secret. I can procrastinate. I can procrastinate a little bit and it's be…

Charlotte Burns:

I’m not sure I believe that when I look at this list of things you do…

[Laughter]

Salome Asega:

…But I think that's a, that's fear-based when you're just like, I don't know if I can get it done. But I think, yeah, just taking the first step, as difficult as it may feel, then you're in a groove then after that.

Charlotte Burns:

When you say it's fear-based, are you afraid of not being able to do things, of failing?

Salome Asega:

Absolutely. I think that's normal. I think a lot of us feel that.

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, but I wonder who it is. You face inward and outward all the time, in the work that you do, plural. And so I'm imagining that's multifaceted; there's different layers of fear, I'm imagining, within that because you have different responsibilities.

Salome Asega:

I think the fear that I am most afraid of is the fear that I don't meet my own expectations for what work can be. That's always the hardest one, right? When you have a certain vision for projects. And yeah, just because of whatever constraints you can't get there. That can be a difficult kind of failure. That is not even it's a failure out of your control sometimes, even. It’s like a let go, let flow. What it is is what it needed to be sometimes. 

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, it's another step. 

You've talked about how you were inspired by Xenobia Bailey, the designer, fiber artist, and industrial design graduate of Pratt [Institute], who questions this idea of the professionalization of design instead of focusing on the things that we do every day. 

To what extent can creative practitioners that you are working with day in and day out disrupt the technology that we have by which, I mean we're at this stage with technology where the algorithms are predictive and they're based on everything that's ever happened. And the possible outcomes of things get smaller and smaller because the forecasts are only ever based on things that have gone before. 

Is there a way that can change, do you think, on a large scale now? 

Salome Asega:

It is a bit difficult to say, honestly. I feel like the cat's outta the bag with a lot of this stuff, and it's in wide use already. But I think what role artists have is in narrativizing, like, what's happening. I don't think a lot of people know, because it's moving all so quickly. 

Because I don't wanna be stuck in the doom and gloom of all of this, right? I think there are probably opportunities for algorithms, artificial intelligence to do good things.

That's also maybe an area where artists can help. Just show us good examples. 

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, I'm thinking specifically of AI because things are moving very fast. How do you think about that, that the historical record that AI is built on, and how we build new futures when AI's built so often on what's past?

Salome Asega:

It's extremely dangerous especially since we don't have an accounting of a historical record that we all can agree on. And so when AI is projecting based on a past, my question is, “Whose past?” You know, like, “From where are you pulling?” 

I am inspired by artists like Stephanie Dinkins who see that as an opportunity for change. It's widening the data sets and maybe if we include more of an accurate historical accounting, then the data sets that AI pulls from feel more honest, more true, represent us better. Yeah, I think that is also an opportunity there.

Charlotte Burns:

The big tech industry famously hasn't been that interested in the art world. Why is that, do you think? And is that changing from your perspective?

Salome Asega:

Actually, a lot of the big tech companies have some kind of arts and culture component to their work. So for example, Google has arts and culture. For the big tech companies, there was always some acknowledgment that creative thinking, arts thinking, helped find the gaps in their products right? Or helped them see things differently. And that kind of investment has always been there. 

At some point, I thought Big Tech would become major players in arts funding. I think they're still very visible, but they haven't overturned traditional arts philanthropy.

Charlotte Burns:

Why not, do you think? Is that because it's an industry that sees itself as creative? 

Salome Asega:

Maybe it's a mix of things. I think there isn't like, from my experiences in partnerships, there isn't always like a strategy for giving. So that could be one thing. And then also the other is, a lot of the support comes through marketing departments, and so it can sometimes feel like the partnership is there as like a storytelling opportunity for the tech company, as opposed to a strategy for philanthropy. 

Charlotte Burns:

What technologies are inspiring you in your own practice right now? Less as leader of NEW INC and more as your artist hat on?

Salome Asega:

I'm a big fan of augmented reality still. I think since the Pokemon Go moment, it felt like a really… Do you play Pokemon Go? 

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah. And my daughter loves it too now. But I think I like it more than her.

[Laughter]

Salome Asega:

I loved Pokemon Go because it got people out in the street playing with their phones and playing with each other. I remember catching a Pokemon before getting on a train to go to work, and someone knew exactly what I was doing and came over and laughed and then we like looked at each other's apps to see what we'd both collected in the neighborhood so far. 

Yeah, I just would love to see more augmented reality projects like that, that got people outside and just like rediscovering their cities or their neighborhoods again, and meeting their neighbors. 

So I've done a couple small AR projects, but I think that's like where I wanna dig in some more next.

Charlotte Burns:

What is it that you want to do? Do you have ambitions to remain in institutions and keep leading in that sense? Separately, I guess, is your ambitions for your practice?

Salome Asega:

I think my overall ambition is to find a way to marry my personal practice and the institutional work I do. I don't see myself dropping anyone, anytime soon. And so I need to find a way to build the bridge, in a way that feels seamless and that they're supporting each other. 

So I've had ideas for way down the road, maybe starting a space of my own, that in part is like a studio space for my practice. But there's so much time. 

I'm getting like my Ph.D. in non-arts nonprofit management right now by just doing. I'm a sponge. I'm learning a lot, under great leadership too. And so, I think that's where I'll be for a little bit longer.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns:

The show is a ‘what if’ show. So what if you were building your own institution, what would it look like?

Salome Asega:

It would be in Las Vegas, I think. I don't know if I can claim that without knowing what it is yet, but…

[Laughter] 

Charlotte Burns:

You can. Of course, you can.

Salome Asega:

…I think I've learned so much in New York since I moved here in 2007 that I'm ready to do this somewhere in the southwest. And I think my hometown of Vegas makes the most sense. But I would, I'd wanna start a space that is a residency program that is a public arts... I think I wanna start a space that supports artists in doing their first public art commissions, or projects. 

So I think I'd like to create something like that in my hometown.

Charlotte Burns:

What was it like growing up in Vegas?

Salome Asega:

It's a strange place. 

[Laughter]

I love my hometown. I grew up on what felt like the edge of the city so we just had desert, like in our backyard, and we'd see all kinds of desert wildlife. And then it was very normal at the same time for us to go to the Las Vegas strip for like back-to-school shopping. So I had the kind of high/low life of driving by the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas and then going back and seeing geckos in my backyard.

Charlotte Burns:

I love that. 

Is there a big tech community in Vegas that you could plug into?

Salome Asega:

Not yet, but it's slowly…People are seeing it in the same way that they've seen Austin as like a potential outpost for tech companies. I think it’s much more affordable to do business in Vegas. And so it’s not quite there yet, but I think it'll come in the next couple years.

Charlotte Burns:

To what extent do you think about like investment in that? And I'm saying that because as a leader of NEW INC, you think about that; you just expanded Demo 2023 where artistic and technical creators' work was on display for viewers and investors alike, and you expanded that. That used to be an evening and then it became a three-day event with talks and performances. 

Was that successful from that point of view of bringing investors in? How do you figure out which investors to target? How important a metric is that for the success of that kind of event? 

Salome Asega:

We've had to widen our definitions for who can be an investor. And so yes, there are some more traditional kind of like VC investor types that attend Demo but then we're also thinking about curators and arts funders and education directors at museums. We're thinking about a whole suite of people who can help land the projects in their next home for presentation. 

That to me is like the critical part of doing this program. The NEW INC members have spent a year with us, and this is the exclamation mark to their NEW INC cohort years, like really presenting their work publicly. And that audience needs to be made up of not only their peers but also people who can help propel them into whatever the next chapter of their careers will be.

Charlotte Burns:

I had a couple of ‘what ifs’ for you. 

What is the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning and the one that keeps you awake at night?

Salome Asega:

I think the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is the, probably like a “what if I don't respond to that email?” 

[Laughter]

It's terrible how much emailing has crept into my dreams recently. 

Charlotte Burns:

Do you get out of bed and reply to the email? 

Salome Asega:

No. I only respond to emails in the working day.

Charlotte Burns:

That's good. Boundaries. 

Salome Asega:

It’s hard. 

Charlotte Burns:

And what's the one that gets you up in the morning?

Salome Asega:

Probably “what if I make this introduction?” I really love connecting people and also connecting like our program to potential partners and finding an alignment. So my favorite emails are the ones to send that are like, “Let's get a coffee, let's connect, let me learn more about your work.” I get all of those done early in the morning because they're exciting to write.

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, get them out there. They're the ones that get you out of bed. 

And so you've said that your work starts with getting people to the table. What if you could get anyone to the table? Who would be at your dream table?

Salome Asega:

I would have my grandfather at the table. I never met my grandfather, but he had a very rich archiving practice. He took photos. He was like the only person in his neighborhood, in Addis, I think, with a camera. And so he would document the neighborhood and I feel like I inherited some things from him. 

I would love to have like my fifth-grade teacher at the table too. Someone who invested in me early, saw that I had drive and really fed into it, Mrs. Stevenson. Being a teacher is such a thankless job because you don't always know where the people you support end up. And she doesn't know where I am, so I need to go back and talk to her.

Charlotte Burns:

I think this is another email you need to send.

Salome Asega:

Yeah.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns:

So is it a table of three or are you gonna bring anyone else?

Salome Asega:

I'm gonna bring my dog Romy because everyone loves a dog at the party.

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah, that's a great call. So nice and intimate with a pet for entertainment.

You are reimagining institutions. What if we could reimagine institutions? We've talked about your institution, but what would you do if you could say, “Okay, let's fix the problem of institutions.” 

Salome Asega:

Funding is up there. It's so hard to envision a new model that doesn’t again have us dependent on someone making decisions for the field. 

Charlotte Burns:

Is it possible to separate money from governance?

Salome Asega:

I don't think so. I don't. I think that the distribution of money always requires some kind of facilitation and that's a very difficult place to be. Because how do you make decisions? But maybe it's, maybe there's some kind of structure in which people are always cycling in and out and it's always peer-led. I don't know. That kind of “for us, by us” model.

Charlotte Burns:

How closely would you fund this institution with business products? I'm thinking here of work you've done around prototypes and video games. Would the sale of things like that fund the institution or would you keep those separate?

Salome Asega:

Yeah, I think so. I'm definitely interested in earned income opportunities for arts organizations. But yeah, figuring out what that is is like the big question. 

You still want it to be tied to mission. When NEW INC was first founded, there was an initial interest in investing in some of the projects that were part of the program and then eventually maybe seeing if one of the products or services became like the next big tech thing, then the museum would see a return on investment. 

But I think that felt a little confusing because we also see museums commission artists’ first projects, and then sometimes those projects go on to sell for a lot, and museums never ask for a cut. A museum would never do that with a commissioned project. Why would we do that with NEW INC? 

But there is a boundary that's being tested. I think we need arts organizations, if they wanna be self-sustaining, they'll need to figure out what are the things that they're willing to change about their operations? The things that maybe used to feel uncomfortable, like maybe we need to just test right now and find out if they truly are uncomfortable. Because how we're operating right now is just, it's not working for everyone. We know it's not working.

Charlotte Burns:

There's just degrees of discomfort too and ultimately if, like you were saying, wherever the money comes from, there's a degree of discomfort, which it's kind of a scale and in a way and rethinking it also probably isn't easy and probably won't work at first.

Salome Asega:

Yeah.

Charlotte Burns:

Okay, so I'm gonna ask you a ‘what if.’ You've said, “I hope our audience leaves knowing the futures that we want to live in are ever present and near. There are creative people working quickly around us to realize a world that centers on sustainability, inventiveness, collectivism, and culture.” 

What if people did leave knowing that? How would that change things? 

Salome Asega:

Wouldn't that be a better world to live in?

Charlotte Burns:

I agree.

[Laughter]

Salome Asega:

I don't know. I think if we all believe that, that's like…have you seen those memes of like if X happened, how the world would advance. It's like flying cars and like lush green scenery and I think we would live in that meme where it just like the future would be so real. We would get so much farther in all our like ideations of what a potential future could look like. They would just be realized because we are operating from the belief of care for each other, for the collective. I hope. Maybe that's the mantra I need to bring back.

Charlotte Burns:

What is the mantra? What if you could make up your new mantra right now on a podcast, what would it be? No pressure.

[Laughter]

Salome Asega:

Oh my goodness. I can't do that.

[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:

I think it's good. It is good. We've discussed boundaries. It's good to have them. 

[Laughter] 

Thank you so much, Salome, for joining me. This has been such an enjoyable and interesting conversation. It's really been a pleasure.

Salome Asega:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to listening back to this.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: A huge thanks to Salome Asega. Next time, we’ll be talking to Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation.

Hoor Al Qasimi: I think what has happened with Sharjah Biennial is that we've opened up the space for many histories to be written and I do talk about like South South conversation. It doesn't mean that the West is excluded, but it just means it's a different viewpoint or a different angle to perceive things.

Charlotte Burns: This is a great conversation. Join us for it next time on The Art World: What If…?!

This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.