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

What if we all name our dreams before following them? This episode we welcome Kemi Ilesanmi, the now-former executive director of The Laundromat Project, the non-profit focusing on the art of the everyday, amplifying community and artists as citizens and change agents. 

This show is all about ‘what ifs’, and Kemi operates from that place of abundant possibility. What if businesses invested in their staff, seeding future next generations? What if arts organizations functioned as community assets? Tune in for more.

 New episodes available every Thursday.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

Hello and welcome back to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast all about imagining different futures. I’m your host, journalist Charlotte Burns, and throughout the series we’re meeting some brilliant people who can help us explore some big ideas. Asking them to imagine, what if? 

[Audio of guests]

This episode we welcome Kemi Ilesanmi, the now former executive director of The Laundromat Project in New York, the non-profit focusing on the art of the everyday, on amplifying community and on artists as citizens and change agents. 

This show is all about ‘what ifs’ and Kemi operates from that place of abundant possibility. What if we all name our dreams before following them? What if organizations invested in their staff, seeding future next generations? 

As you listen to this, Kemi will be traveling around the world. Where better to start a new year? 

[Music break] 

Charlotte Burns:

Kemi, thank you so much for being here today.

Kemi Ilesanmi:

Thank you, I'm so excited to be here. Really nice to meet you. 

Charlotte Burns:

So we're lucky to catch you, Kemi, you're stepping back from The Laundromat Project after ten years of being its executive director. And you're heading off on a life-changing adventure from New Year's Eve to New Year's Eve, a gap year through 2023. This show is looking at life's ‘what ifs’. And it feels like you're a person who thoroughly embraces those possibilities. Can you tell us a little bit about where you're going so we can all dream and vicariously live through you for a moment.

Kemi Ilesanmi:

It started off being, “Oh, I'll probably need a break after being an executive director, and somewhere along the way morphed into what if we take a whole year?”. We're starting off in Mexico, then we’re off to India then Southern Italy. In between each trip, we're actually coming home to see family and friends. Then we take off for South Africa and Namibia, then Ghana and Nigeria. I'm from Nigeria and I’ve not spent a month in Nigeria since I was 15. And we're ending, we're in discussion... But we are ending in either Australia, New Zealand or Argentina. 

Charlotte Burns:

Oh my goodness. I can't imagine what that feels like. You're stepping back from, you know, you've been working so hard. You've built up this, you know, organization, when you joined, the budget was around $200,000 annually, you were the second employee. You're stepping back at a moment when the budget’s more than $2 million annually, and there are 12 to 14 staff. You have a physical location, a permanent home, a 10-year lease. And there's money in the bank. 

So you've worked tirelessly, with your community, with all your staff, to get the organization to this place through a pandemic. And now, instead of feeling that kind of cosh of burnout, you're feeling this sense of radical possibilities. Can you talk about that feeling, what you might expect? Because I know that you have epiphanies on vacation: you came to The Laundromat Project with the idea of becoming its executive director after taking a holiday. And you said to your husband, “I know what my job is. Now I have to go and get it.” 

So, what kind of epiphanies might you come back with?

Kemi Ilesanmi:  

Oh, I'm so thrilled in the not-knowing what exactly the epiphanies will be. But I believe in facilitated epiphanies, when possible. 

I am excited to explore community arts organizations in the countries we're going to, keeping an eye out for interesting spaces. My husband, similarly, is interested in community organizing entities in the countries that we're visiting, which have incredible histories in both of these ways of working, right, politics and art. So being really open to that and meeting up with artists. 

The epiphany I had this morning, because I'm very excited about Nigeria—I lived there for nine years as a child from six to 15—I'm really interested in digging deeper into my Yoruba heritage. This morning, I was reading The Times, and they had the second article in about two weeks that touched on the tradition of adire, which is tie dye in Nigeria. And it occurred to me that I could go and spend time learning about this, I could learn to do adire. So that would be completely new. But I think I'm excited to do things that make me think and feel differently. I don't have to be an expert. 

Charlotte Burns:

I love that idea. Essentially, what you're also reminding yourself is your potential. And this is something you're very good at doing. So much of The Laundromat Project is about reigniting that sense of creative potential, reigniting that creativity in people. 

If you could run the art world, what would you do? What's your what if? How would you get people to do that? Is it engaging with things? Is it making things with your own hand? Is it being in a space where you can be vulnerable? Like, what are the ways that you get people to remember that they're creative beings?

Kemi Ilesanmi:

Hmm, that's such a wonderful question. And you're right. It's one that The Laundromat Project is really focused on. The very heart of it is why we're called The Laundromat Project. The idea was to actually meet people in spaces in their everyday lives and insert ourselves into their everyday lives, like a laundromat, and just say this too can be a place of creativity. 

There's something really beautiful about that idea of meeting people where they are. And I do still think there's something really gorgeous about just going to that community event and saying we're going to figure out an art project or a conversation prompt that moves us into a space of creativity and generative thinking and generative making and doing. I live in Flatbush in the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn. We have a lot of musicians in the neighborhood and a lot of porches. A lot of the musicians really wanted to be able to share who they were. And regular porch concerts became a regular thing during Covid, and now continues. So you can just walk down the street and on a Sunday afternoon and possibly run into a saxophone player or a reggae band or whatever kind of music, jazz singers, and there's something really beautiful about the possibility of running into art, just by deciding to like take a little walk in the neighborhood. 

And there's something there that I think to be pulled out about just running into, and being a part of people's everyday lives, to the extent that it doesn't seem extraordinary. Right now, it still deserves comment. But what if it was so ingrained that it didn't deserve comment? Of course, I ran into a jazz singer, and of course, I talked to an artist or whatever that might look like in different neighborhoods. 

Charlotte Burns:

I love that so much, this idea of kind of bolstering creativity. In a past interview, you said something about, you know, artists are who we turn to in difficult times. And it reminded me of something the actor Ethan Hawke had said that people think that art isn't for them. But actually, when they're heartbroken, they read a poem. If they're feeling sad, they might watch a film like, you know, through art and culture is how we learn to find empathy from others within difficult moments like that. 

When we were prepping for the show, I said, what's your ‘what if’? What's the kind of imaginative space we might want to discuss or think about? And you said that your number one dream for our field was one in which POC arts organizations, artists and cultural workers are well funded and can thrive in their own communities. Can you talk a little bit more about that and bring us on to your work with HueArts NYC? 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

Before doing HueArts, I never would have guessed that New York City has over 450 arts entities, be they fiscally-sponsored, nonprofit, or for profit, founded and run by people of color. Black, indigenous, Latinx, Arab American, Asian American. Just every kind of person of color. Never would have guessed that. And it just made me so excited to know that there are 450 different seeds and, you know, cultivation opportunities out there around creative arts in the city, just around people of color, so, many others as well, right?

But what also made me take pause was recognizing how many of them were getting by on $15,000, $10,000, $20,000. Under $100,000. The vast majority are not well-resourced. 

Basically, at the top of Covid, I was following all the lists of Black bookstores, Black toy shops around the country; there were a number of those lists coming out in the midst of the George Floyd summer of 2020. I started sending those kinds of lists to a few funders and saying: “Wouldn't it make sense to have one of these for New York City around arts?” And very quickly, they turned back to me and said, “Well, that would be amazing. You should do it.” 

[Laughs]

And I definitely was not expecting that.

I thought they would hire, you know, someone fancy and get this done. And I had a job running a relatively small grassroots organization through a pandemic. So I was not looking for this project. But I did know that it had to be done. And that it did make sense that it be done by the people who are in that community and running a POC arts organization. 

So I quickly partnered with Museum Hue, which had worked with arts workers of color over the years, and Hester Street, which does phenomenal work around community-engaged processes and had worked on New York City's first, and so far only, cultural plan. And we raised the money very quickly from Mellon [Foundation], Ford [Foundation] and the Department of Cultural Affairs—Commissioner Gonzalo Casals was our fairy godfather. And basically, HueArts became my Covid passion project. That's what I worked on for a year and a half. And it went public with our map and our Brown Paper, looking at what we thought the field needed to look at and what we had learned from some of these 450 entities. And it all came out in February of 2022. 

It has been so empowering to recognize each other, for people who got to add to the list. Museum Hue now owns the project. From the beginning, I knew that it wasn't the Laundromat’s project to steward for the rest of time. So I wanted to bring in a partner that it did make sense for them to be the steward, and Museum Hue is now working in a New York State version with the New York State Council [on the] Arts, which is incredible. 

One of the things that it felt really important to me in that sense of making visible who was here being the step one because, again, I don't think there was any of us that was going to guess 450. And then through the Brown Paper to begin to name, here's where we have strengths. And here's where we have challenges beyond money, because we all know money is a challenge. But also that many of us wanted homes and spaces and brick and mortar, and didn't have them. 

And the LP, of course, had just signed a lease in March 2020 at the top of Covid. So we understood that very well. And it had taken us 15 years to get to that point. Even though our name… the dream was in the name. The Laundromat Project states our dream. It was that we wanted a home. And it no longer needs to look like a laundromat, which we now think about metaphorically, but literally, our dream was captured in our name. And it still took us 15 years to get to a place where we have a long-term lease. And there's still a dream of perhaps owning something more permanent in the future. 

So just being able to state our dreams was something that we talked to in some of our community conversations with other people of color-run arts entities. And very infrequently are we asked to dream. Instead, we're asked to solve problems. There's an expectation of prices, and very little of an expectation of dreaming and possibility. And that was something that felt just in the naming that we exist, and that there are so many of us, and then capturing some of that dreaming in our Brown Paper was part of the seed that I'm hoping to plant so that there can be other dreams that can be manifest. 

In my life, personally, just my personal philosophy, you have to name dreams so that the universe can figure out how to help you make them happen. So if we don't invite people to even name the dream, they can't get to where they need to go. 

Charlotte Burns:

And what happens to people when they name their dreams? What's happening to these organizations? What process—that kind of alchemy of this project? 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

A lot of people just looked up on the map, like who else is around me that I may not know, so that they can start connecting to each other. We, none of us—and people of color know this very well—we don't get anywhere by ourselves. But sometimes we don't even know who the other people are to band together with. So that was one of the biggest things we've just been able to make ourselves visible to ourselves. 

And then it gives us, when we're talking externally and meeting potential funders, we actually have something to point to. And it's data. It's actually, I'm not dreaming this. These are the folks who are down the street. Just being able to give people those tools to have a stronger conversation. Those are some of the possibilities that we're already hearing about. 

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns:

I want to talk to you, after this in a second, about that human-sized dreaming and how it leads to much bigger things. And I mean human-sized as opposed to sort of algorithmically sized. 

But first, I want to talk to you about data. Because when people talk about The Laundromat Project, they talk about community, they talk about grassroots. They talk about possibility, artists and neighbors and neighborhoods. But they don't really talk about data. And when I was doing research for this, I was thinking you're a kind of data nerd. 

By the time you'd become director in 2012 of Laundromat Project, for instance, you said that you had a lot of data about all the artists of color working across communities in New York. 

HueArts NYC is a data project. And it's something you reference as one of the key findings in the Brown Paper. You say that “the dearth of data and metrics on POC arts entities in New York City is significant and remarkable, creating barriers to truly comprehensive field knowledge, visibility and impact. It is one of the main contributors to the lack of POC arts funding, representation, real estate and decision-making power in New York City arts and philanthropy sectors.” 

So data is something you're very focused on. And a lot of organizations don't want to look at that data. It's something that feels intimidating. It feels like it may lead to processes that aren't human-sized. And so I was just thrilled to see that you're a data head, and I suspect that behind these, key findings, there is something of a plan to bring about more data. We know there's a dearth of data; what data do you need? And what are you going to do with it? 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

No one has actually called me a data nerd, so I really appreciate that. 

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns:

It's a highest compliment. 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

I accept. I take it as such. And shout out to Sade Lythcott of the National Black Theater and Kyoung Park of [Kyoung’s] Pacific Beat. They were both on our advisory committee and were very focused on the possibilities of data. 

One of the things that I'm always saying to my staff is, “We have our own data. We have the data,” whatever that might be. Like, we did a fundraising campaign, what happens when? We've been doing this for 10 years, what have we learned? Here are the artists we're working with; what are the trends? What are they looking at? And I'm constantly looking for those ways to, like, quantify, qualify, like a lot of the data I'm interested in is qualitative data. But it's just the idea of looking, recognizing and making things legible. And data helps to make things legible so that you can figure out the next step. 

And one of the things that goes with the data that I'll say that I really focus on is sort of that idea of, you know, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there, did it make a sound? How do we make this public and visible so that it does make a sound? So I made sure we had a PR budget. It wasn't big, but there just needed to be a PR budget so that we could get articles and move things out in the world. So one of the, for me, some of that is socializing an idea so that it is no longer a niche idea. Some of that is being able to inspire ripples that I can't predict. I may never know about, but if they don't even know the thing, then they can't be inspired to do whatever version of a ripple effect that might happen in the world. 

One of the things that really drove me in putting HueArts together was a dream of what it might look like for a young person of color, let's say, a young Black woman who is starting an art career—curator, registrar, there are options. She wants to make a life, a professional life, working with culturally specific, as in people-of-color-run arts organizations, in New York City or even around the world or country. 

Right now, that feels like, you know, that's 50 years. Someone is like, this is what I want to do for 50 years. This is where I want to invest and be a part of and dream and grow. That, in this moment, would feel like an incredibly bold statement. And it shouldn't. 

I am coming into this conversation with a lens that says that is a valuable life and professional goal. I did not work for a POC arts organization until I took the helm of the LP at the age of 42. And I love the places I've worked, I learned a lot. But there's something that has deepened in my practice, and the way that I think about my professional life, and what I have to give the world really came into crystal clarity working at a POC arts organization. So I didn't know what I was missing until I was in it. 

It doesn't have to be everybody's path. But I do believe it deserves to be a path that feels viable for young people of color in the arts. That, ultimately, is my goal. So to be able to make that path visible, legible and possible, we have to have strong POC arts organizations. There's got to be more than five. And they have to be different scales, different niches, around the country. So if you want to live in a smaller town, you get to be at the National Underground Railroad Museum [Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center] up in the Buffalo area, or, “I love heat. I'm going down to the Project Row Houses in Houston” or the Bay Area, you get to be at the African American Center or the East African Arts Alliance [EastSide Arts Alliance]. 

So beginning to name and thread together and know that if I'm going to pick up and move to Oakland, so that I could be, you know, at such and such organizations—Self Help Graphics [& Art] in LA does amazing work and has been a part of a Latinx community there for years. Well I need to know that they'll still be here, and that I'll be paid in a way that allows me to have a family, because that's when people leave. It's when people start having families or just having those greater adult concerns that you have at 30 and 35 and 40, that you didn't have at 20. And you're like, oh, shoot, I need to actually be paid, so I can like send my kids to college to do these kinds of things, and have a life where I don't have roommates for the rest of my life. 

So if we can't resource organizations to be able to hold on and retain and build out our staff, and this field from that space—talk less of the ways that we can support artists and the dreams you might have about the work they do, when we get them, which is the next, obviously, a related layer. But my personal dream is like, wow, wouldn't it be beautiful if a young Black woman who's entering the arts right now, if she wants, could make a 50+ year career in POC arts organizations and not feel like she gave up any kind of professional development or material supports. Because I'm sure that she'll feel satisfaction about the artists she gets to work with. I'm not worried about that part. It's can you have a life? 

Charlotte Burns:

How far away is that? How possible is that, at this moment in time, do you think?

Kemi Ilesanmi:

I caught a glimpse of it at the Loophole of Retreat in Venice, which was a gathering of 700 women coming together under the auspices of Simone Leigh being the first African American woman to represent the US in the Venice Biennale. And she worked with Rashida Bumbry, Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman to put together an incredible three-day program with lectures, films, performances, and just time to be together on our own island. We had our own island. And it was our intellect, our creativity, our beauty. The fashion was awesome. Really, it was awesome. [Laughter]

One of the things I loved, it was such an intergenerational space. 

They had actually partnered with Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark Atlanta [University], which, jointly under Dr. Cheryl Finley, run a curatorial program at a historically Black set of colleges. There were about 20 of them there, who were either current students or very recent past students, and they introduced each of the speakers. And every single time one of them would get up and say, “I'm such and such from Spelman”, “I'm such and such from Morehouse”, the entire room would erupt as if we hadn't just heard introductions of the previous. We were so excited that there were 20-something young Black folks who wanted to be in this career, and they got to do this incredible three-day symposium at the age of 20, when those of us that were 50 were in tears at our happiness to be there. I can't even imagine.

Charlotte Burns: 

That is so powerful. So you had this moment where you could envision it. And now you're obviously one of the people who's helping build that. 

I guess this is the same space, this is that same imaginative space that you were discussing, bringing people together to dream. You're coming off this tenure, the successful tenure and the organization and you have handled this transition with such grace. People keep saying you have to ask how they handle that transition because it's a model. Because it hasn't been about you leaving. 

Usually, if a museum director leaves, it's about the buildings they built and the money that they fundraise and the wing this and the acquisitions there. Whereas you leaving has been about naming the next director. It's been about that continuum of the project. It's been about the next step dreams. And you're creating that space within the transition, I want to ask you how you did it? 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

It has been so interesting to navigate a transition. So the interesting fact, and it is literally fact, is that the day I took the job, I thought it was a ten-year job. I had dreams for the organization. And just knowing again, I was employee number two, I was like, it's gonna take ten years just to get where I'm going. Something that more than one executive director said to me when I first came on board was, oh, it's gonna take you about two to three years just to figure out what your job is. So I was like, well, I need the other seven just to do whatever I figured out in the first three years. So I came in with that frame. 

I had been on the board for a number of years so I had a sense of what the organization could be. There were a couple of different key moments for me, because, for me, it was always about, what's the dream if you can't begin to live it in some format. And the things that I imagined, which were not all crystal clear but became clear over time—and part of it were just experimenting and trying things and going “that, not that.” But I knew that we had the possibility of some really beautiful community building, creating a class of community artists in New York City and driving change in the city through that group. Being a good neighbor. 

So one of the things that I wanted to do early on was to just make sure that I was building our capacity. It seems so boring. But one of the best decisions I made about a year in was to hire a grant writer. I hated writing grants. If we had kept me as the grant writer, we would still be a $200,000 organization. Literally, that was the trade-off. So the trade-off feels like, “Oh my God, you're gonna pay someone $50 or $60 or $75 an hour? How could you do that? Like you can write, you're a good writer.” No one said this, to me, it's more an internal dialogue, But there is this sense of scarcity. And literally the trade-off was, well, we can be a $2 million organization in 10 years, or we can still be a $250,000 organization, and I'll write those grants for the rest of time. But we'll never get to live our dream. We’ll always be right below scale that would allow us to really dream. 

So that was one of my early best decisions, as far as I'm concerned. Because I worked with someone who worked with us for about six or seven years, her name was Jessica Svenson. Thank you, Jessica. And one of the grants she helped me write, about three or four years in, was to hire someone to be our director of strategic partnerships. And she later on became our deputy director. And that person turned out to be Ayesha Williams. 

So in our first interview, Ayehsa says to me, because she at the time she was working at Lincoln Center running their arts program, she said, “Don't let the Lincoln Center name fool you, I can get down there and really make things happen.” And I just took notice, because I was like, “Oh! Okay!” 

She has just jumped at every opportunity. She has been such an incredible partner. So two years in, she was promoted to deputy director and this whole time for her and the director of programs, who was then Hatuey [Ramos-Fermin] and is now Catherine Green, I wanted to make sure that I was helping to create people who could be leaders in the field going forward, very much inspired by the Studio Museum [in Harlem], because there's so many amazing people of color who have gone through, in particular, their curatorial program of the Studio Museum. 

But I also went through a very long and storied series of fellowships and internships at the Walker Art Center, which is how I started my journey. So I really take seeding the field with amazing people as a part of my job. So I was kind of like, well, you guys are probably going to be recruited and move on to other things and I want to make sure you understand budgets, and you understand strategy, and you can think like a leader and really bring that to the table. So we formed a leadership team. One of the things that a lot of people talk about is a sense of the loneliness of this job. And that's not untrue. But I have made it my duty to not feel lonely, to figure out how to be in community with other people, so that I can take some of that away, because it's too hard a job to do by myself. And Ayesha was part of that group. 

So once I realized that it really was 10 years, then started having conversations with my board, immediately, they were like, “Do you think Ayesha would want this job?” And I was like, “I don't know but I sort of was thinking the same thing.” [Laughter] 

So it was a very collective, very organic welling. And we kind of went to her and said, “This is sort of what's on our minds, what do you think?” And of course, she had to absorb that I was leaving, and then kind of track what the possibilities were and how they could affect her life. Very quickly she understood and saw the possibilities and stepped into her moment with such beauty and grace. And since March, we've been in discussions and passing on knowledge and pulling her into meetings. But the other day, she actually brought tears to my eyes because I was like, “We have to have a meeting. You know, we only have eight more weeks. I have to pass this on and do this…” And she said “Kemi, you're not going to finish. You're not going to pass on everything you need. It's going to be fine. We will be fine and we know where you live.” And I burst into tears. [Laughter]

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns:

I want to ask you about this, because a thing that you lean into is this idea of people being very complex, that emotion is a huge part of your job. It seems that you lead with that, in every sense. 

It's not what you hear, in most places of work. How did you decide that that was the thing? And how do you have the confidence to bring that into your practice?

Kemi Ilesanmi:

I think part of it was that I didn't feel I had a choice. Because very early on I ended up in discussions that immediately tapped into emotions. People were bringing me what looked like simple problems, but underneath were emotions about, “Well, I want a title change or a raise”, or “I'm having trouble with this other employee in these ways.” Whatever the case may be, there was always emotion under it. 

One of the things I feel I've learned just in life, was you take the power out of things by naming them. And I do believe both Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, in particular, have kind of spoken to this. You have to name the fear; you have to name the thing. And there's a power in naming. Again, making these visible and legible. So that you can then decide what to do with the thing that you just named. But if you don't even name it, it's just kind of in the room, affecting how people show up and how they respond.

Charlotte Burns: 

How would you scale that? If you were running the Met[tropolitan Museum of Art]? How would you scale the lessons you've learned from a nonprofit? And I'm only saying the Met because it's one of the largest institutions. How would you scale that learning, bringing people along together, when there's so many people?

Kemi Ilesanmi:

That is a question that I am going to answer speculatively. The largest organization I've worked in is the Walker Art Center, so nothing even remotely like the Met numbers. And yet, I do feel it's a really important question, right?

Some of the things that I think we have done that I think can be scaled creatively is, number one, creating connective tissue between folks outside of crisis. You can't suddenly be in crisis and think, “Now we'll bond and become best buddies,” when they have nothing to build on. 

So one of the things we do, and we've been doing for years—and it is one of my absolute favorite rituals, traditions at the LP—is we have a weekly staff meeting and once a month, except August and December, we have a reading group and someone on staff, from intern to ED and everyone in between, rotated over the year, gets to select a poem, a podcast, a magazine article, a chapter from a book that we all get to read together and talk about. And I've learned so much from that. And we also have an icebreaker at every meeting, which I know, again, sounds really simple, but we've gotten to learn all kinds of fun things about each other over the years. 

Now that we're together, again, we are doing a monthly happy hour because we don't all work on the same days in the same way. And we were doing a quarterly art opening. You know, that's what a company picnic looks like. But once a year doesn't cut it.

We also do a lot of collective staff training around things that we want to understand collectively. We had a session with a woman named Piper Anderson, who is amazing and who was our Radical Imagination fellow last year, around conflict and communication. We were back in the office by then, but continuing to build out what trust looked like and felt like to us and tending the roots. Trust is hard to build and easy to dissipate. So you got to keep up the work. And just giving ourselves collective tools around communicating, workstyles, all those things that just kind of help you continue to learn about each other, and hopefully in a fun way, or a way that is certainly generative. It isn't always fun, but certainly a sense of we're doing this and we're in this together-ness has to be part of the system. 

We also provide coaching for all of our staff. I was the first person who got coaching at the encouragement of one of my board members, six or seven years ago. And then over the years incorporated every level of permanent staff or full-time staff. So now everyone has access to a coach. It's a significant investment of money and time. But, here's the beauty of it. Everybody has someone to turn to with an external lens on what they feel they're going through. But this is a lens on our professional life. I can go and say, “This happened at the office and this person said this. And this is what I think is happening.” And my coach goes, “Or, maybe that's not it.” [Laughs] 

Having an external person that we all get to talk to, reflect with and think about our work life and journey, has been worth every single dime we've spent, and it is definitely a significant financial investment. For me, it feels like part of the professional development of caring for folks, and allowing them space to grow without judgment.

Charlotte Burns:

I think that's so marvelous. It's so unlike the art world that I've worked in. [Laughs] I can't imagine what that would feel like. That’s so fantastic. And it comes back to your point of, you know, seeding the field and creating better structures. 

There's a lot of stuff around funding I want to ask you. So the initial concept for The Laundromat Project was to own and operate a laundromat, using those funds to run the non-profit, which is a really novel way of thinking about ownership and about space and about community. At the time the funds weren't in place. So you pivoted, becoming a sort of decentralized, citywide organization. And then, like you mentioned earlier, this idea of being a laundromat as a gathering space became more of a metaphor, realizing that not every project needed to actually exist in that realm.
And something you've done at The Laundromat Project is this idea of giving away grants to artists to be artists, to live—artist-directed funds that are unrestricted. And you guys started doing that in April 2020, with the Creative Action Fund for the alumni network, then of $500. And now that’s something that's in your practice, these micro-grants to artists in BedStuy, where The Laundromat Project now has its permanent base. 

What we're talking about really is how you support artists. What can we do to think more creatively about funding in terms of supporting artists at every level of the art sector? 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

I worked at Creative Capital for eight years. And that's where I got really first introduced to thinking about money in a creative, innovative way. When I think about artists of color—Black, Latinx, Asian, indigenous, Arab American, all the folks—I know in my bones that they are vastly under-collected, under-written about. And how do you move to a space of abundance, which is something we think about at the LP. How do we create spaces that are for us, while also being like we deserve to be at the Met, and we're going to do the thing at MoCADA [Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts] and Recess and certainly Studio Museum, which is a major player, etc. So I'm always thinking on parallel tracks, I don't only feel like we need to be in the kind of tried and true predominantly White spaces. Although I appreciate that. 

I do think having communities of practice, communities where folks get to get together is important. So one of the things that we're really excited about, about having our space in BedStuy, is having a space where we can say, every third Wednesday, come on through and hang out and you're going to find other incredible artists, or just a neighbor who's interested in these conversations. To come together and find each other and just have unstructured joyful time over food, these are things that we think about. 

[Laughs]

And then for us giving people money to be that person—to be who they need to be, to make what they need to make, to create the spaces they need to create—does feel so central. At some point, you just have to say here are the resources. Money is one of the resources. Space is another huge one. Time is a different one that I find the most elusive, actually. 

What I love about a space like the LP or Recess or some of these other spaces that I think are seeding artists of color in particular with money, space and time, is that we're in the flow of life—their lives. 

And the more that we can put money into the hands of artists which, Ayesha is starting a strategic planning process, I know it always sounds boring, but it has been so incredible. The two processes I've gone through the LP, and I'm really excited for her process next year. And the central question is how do we build the LP as a community asset that builds wealth and possibility for all of our community, not just ourselves? And I think asking oneself that question—if every organization and arts entity asked themselves that, wow, what answers might that lead to? Because we're not all going to have the same answer. But I do know that money, time and space will be part of those answers. 

Charlotte Burns:

That is so interesting. Part of the HueArts Brown Paper, you found that, you know, through the data, but we know this, is that POC-arts entities face extra challenges in securing adequate funding in comparison to predominantly White-led arts entities. And that, those entities are extremely resilient and resourceful in the face of that long history of structural bias and under-investment. I guess it's kind of what you've been talking about, which is this sense of teaming together, of community, of seeding the future and abundance. How important is that sense of believing in abundance? 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

For me, it has been critical. It's been critical in my life. And it's been critical in my professional practice. 

I believe in writing things down. I believe in saying things out loud so that other people can join the dream, or assist and facilitate the dream, or ask you hard questions that sharpen the dream. 

And that mindset of abundance and possibility, for me, also feels really critical. And we've tried to lean into that, and really pulled it up as a value for the organization. So it is written, we know that this is something we lean into. A staff member can go, “Are we being abundant right now?” So we can hold ourselves accountable to a different way of thinking, and assuming that there's always a possibility. Sometimes things come up and we just lean into, “Okay, that seems crazy. And then it's like, wait, wait, but what if it isn't? How might we get there?” 

So, for me, part of feeling comfortable—more than comfortable, excited about the possibilities for the LP after my 10 years—is that there is money in the bank. There are new dreams to dream. There is a space. There's so many things that could happen. And I don't have to be the person who does it all. And because the organization grew in so many dramatic ways, I’ve run about three to four to five organizations in those 10 years. [Laughs] 

Every few years, it was something completely different; it was on a continuum. But managing 12 to 13 people is not the same as managing three. But wow, $2 million was not the same as $200,000. And it had new complexities and thoughts. So I'm just like, “Oh, my God, the possibilities are incredible.” I don't have to do it all. And that's something I really believe. I'm not doing the whole journey, I'm doing my part of the journey. And I feel really good about that. I'm like, I leaned into abundance, I leaned into the possibility. I built up to this spot, and Ayesha is going to take it to the next place. And I'm going to be at home. And I'm going to be there because I'm going to be a friend and supporter going forward. I'm certainly not severing ties forever, they’ll just be informal. But wow, I just already, like, have goosebumps at what I might be hearing. And so my favorite thing is that I'm going to be surprised. Like, “I wouldn't have thought of that. That's incredible.” “Wow, are you going to try that? That's great.” “Please. I can't wait to see where this goes.” 

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns:

But you've lived this practice, you know, you're not just saying, “If we had money, we'd give it away”. You literally did that. You were given $2 million out of the blue by MacKenzie Scott. You received an email that you thought was spam, like a lot of people. And you've said it was your MacArthur Genius moment, this moment of recognition in which you were seen and supported and not asked to do anything other than what you already were doing best. And your first instinct was to give away the money. 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

It was incredible. To receive the money to know that it was unrestricted. We gave them our bank account information on a Thursday, and by Monday, we had $2 million in the bank. I mean, there is just something head spinning about that. [Laughter] 

That sense of generosity. They said they had done their research and were really inspired. Ms. Scott was, you know, we were one of her lists that year. And it was a huge focus on arts organizations. It definitely was just indescribable. And it made us feel seen. There was just a sense of such deep affirmation. So that was just beautiful and it did feel, it just felt affirming. 

And my automatic instinct, I really cannot describe it as any other way, so I immediately started thinking, how do we give some of this away? Because other people helped us get here. How is it that if we win, everyone in our community wins? What would that look like? 

One part of that was, what can we do with this $2 million that will feed our community and feed the LP for the next 50 or 100 years? What's the decision we can make about this $2 million that will make us categorically different in a way that we are leading, but how will it expand our possibilities? So that's the $1.8 million, right? Are we gonna buy a building? Who knows, but it's meant to be a conversation about building wealth for our whole community in the long-term. And that's a discussion that Ayesha is going to get to lead going forward. 

I started doing a back-of-math-envelope, talking to a couple of board members, and was like, I think $200,000, if we broke off 10%—which is tithing in church—it'd be great to give away $50,000 in the same way that we received the $2 million. And we thought, should we do 10 organizations? And then we talked about it and it felt like $10,000 to five organizations would have more meaning. We wanted to be other people-of-color-based organizations. 

We sort of thought of ourselves at 2012, when I first became executive director; if someone had called and given us $10,000, I would have been over the moon. We wanted it to be money that was meaningful. We wanted to be organizations that we'd have a connection with. We wanted it to be city-wide, because our focus has been and continues to be city-wide, with main focus on central Brooklyn and BedStuy. So those are some of the things we're thinking about for that. 

Then we started writing lists. Who had been all the staff? Interns? We had to go digging, “We're like, who was that girl? Remember?” [Laughs] 

And we obviously gave it to all of the artists who had passed through and been part of the LP up until that moment. People, someone wrote back and said she was fixing her mother's roof. Someone bought a desk, her first desk, and she was really excited about it. Several people used it for projects. Someone, you know, went to a spa. Like people did whatever it is they needed to do. And it happened to arrive at the end of the year. So it's sort of in that, you know, holiday season. So it also just happened to be well timed. Because it took us a while to go through all the process. 

The other thing I'll just say that hasn't, you may not even know about this, is for the $1.8 million, we invested it, right? Because we want to make sure our money is working for us, while we think about and dream about what to do with it. We worked really hard to come up with an investment policy, which we had never needed before, that helps to create the world. 

So we both avoid things we don’t want: no tobacco, no fossil fuel, no prison industrial complex. But we also have invested in funds that invest in community development all around the country. We found a bank, Amalgamated Bank, that can help us think in that way, and we broke off a piece of it to put in our local credit union at the Brooklyn Co-Op credit union that invests only in our neighborhood of central Brooklyn--like they support homeowners and small businesses. So I like to think that some of, $10, of the LPs investment or $1,000 might be, you know, in that new coffee shop that happens to open up on the corner. That we helped make that happen. So we wanted to make sure that our values showed up in all the ways that we were going to spend and invest this money. So again, if we win, how can the rest of our community win as well?

Charlotte Burns:

There's so much more I want to ask you. But I guess what I'm going to have to try and get you to commit to is to come back in a year because I think that this conversation will be so different when you've traveled all around the world. And you will be bringing so many more ‘what ifs’ to us. I sort of feel like we're sending you off to an island with all of these big dreams. And it's very exciting. It's been a super inspiring and enjoyable conversation, Kemi. Thank you so much for being our guest. 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

Thank you so, so much. 

Charlotte Burns:

Thanks so much to Kemi Illesanmi for taking the time to talk to us before she headed out on her trip of a lifetime.

Join us next episode, we’ll be talking to the curator Cecilia Alemani, who was the artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, the biggest exhibition in the art world.

Cecilia Alemani:

We want to see museums more diverse. We want to see museums and institutions represent the world as it is, which is certainly not a White world. But how do we get there? Is it by calling out? Is it by doing the hard job of doing exhibitions that might not be as popular as Damien Hirst? What are the solutions that are gonna get there?

Charlotte Burns:

That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?!

The 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…?!, Episode 2: Glenn Lowry

What if we separated who funds the museum from who runs the museum on a board level? In this episode, host Charlotte Burns welcomes Glenn Lowry, who’s been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. He's led the institution through two vast expansions and, of course, periods of profound change.

This is a frank and revealing conversation covering a lot of ground. What if competition and collaboration were the same? What if museums refused to take in so many works of art? Join us for more.

New episodes available every Thursday.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, art journalist Charlotte Burns, and this is a series all about imagining different futures. We’ll talk about how we navigate the churn and change currently shaping culture. What are some of the biggest shifts that need to happen for art to stay relevant in a changing world?

In each episode we’ll be talking to some of the most interesting people in the art world, asking them ‘what if’? 

[Audio of guests]

This episode we welcome Glenn Lowry, who’s been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. He's led the institution through two vast expansions, and, of course, periods of profound change.

 This is a frank, revealing conversation with Glenn, covering many ‘what ifs’. What if competition and collaboration were one in the same? What if museums refused to take on so many artworks? What if we separated who funds the museum from who runs the museum on a board level. 

 We started with the idea of one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ facing New York City.

Charlotte Burns:

Glenn, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. 

Glenn Lowry: 

It's a pleasure. 

Charlotte Burns:

So Glenn, here we are sitting in New York, the greatest art city in the world. We seem to sit together in New York every four years or so. And I was thinking, by the next time we do that, in four years time, New York is going to look completely different. Because the city is at the beginning of profound change. You at some stage will be leaving MoMA, Richard Armstrong is leaving the Guggenheim, the Met[tropolitan Museum of Art] is under new leadership. People are expecting changes in other big institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, perhaps the Studio Museum [in Harlem]. So there's this shifting, this changing of the guards. It's also happening in the market. There are legacy plans being drafted for galleries from Gagosian to Marian Goodman [Gallery] to Barbara Gladstone;  the closure of galleries like Metro Pictures. Often these changes are staggered. This is happening kind of all at once, in a five year period. It feels momentous. What if this is truly the end of a New York era?

Glenn Lowry:

Oh, I think it's always premature to predict the end of an era. Sure, there's a lot of change out there. We've gone through a lot of change over the last 24 months, perhaps even more seismic than the change that might occur over the next five years. And, you know, I have no idea what is going to happen in the future. But my sense is that what keeps a place like New York vital is this constant influx and outflow of extraordinary talent: artists, curators, directors, gallerists, writers. 

And change is actually inherently good, it's vitalizing. It's not a problem. And so, if the next five years see significant change in the leadership of museums, that just means there'll be new visions and new ideas that will propel those institutions forward. I think it's just almost a liberating idea that New York can be the kind of place that absorbs seismic change as part of its day-to-day operations.

Charlotte Burns: 

I agree. I think New York can absorb the change. It is a changing city; it always has been. But it does feel sudden and does feel like we're going to see a value shift, a change in the way the institutions are run and the threat and the way that they're funded and who supports them and the kinds of visions they bring to it. 

Do you feel excited by that? And who do you think of the new generation emerging you feel particularly inspired by?

Glenn Lowry:

Well, first of all, I think you have to remember that most of our institutions are actually governed by boards of trustees. And those boards are not changing with the same kind of frequency and dramatic shift in potential direction that the leadership is. And there's a reason for that, right? They provide not just governance, but the ongoing stability that long-term planning and thinking enables. 

So, one can talk about the number of directors who might change over the next four or five years. But if the boards of these institutions remain stable, the values of the institutions are not likely to change. And I don't necessarily see that there's going to be a dramatic shift in funding over the next five years, at least not with the institutions that I'm familiar with. 

And if Paris is any example of what can happen when several new directors come onto the scene, like Laurent Le Bon and Laurence des Cars, to name but two, it's really phenomenal, a new generation providing new leadership, but not necessarily dramatic change to the institutions in the first instance. If that happens in New York, how good is that?

Charlotte Burns:

In the time that we've done these interviews, I was looking back on our last one in 2018, and we called it ‘authority and anxiety’. And we talked about this flammable moment we were living in where, and you said it was very flammable not because of censorship, which we were discussing, but because people felt vulnerable. 

And that was before Covid, before we even knew what a pandemic would feel like; the changes in the world that we've seen, geopolitically; the overturning of things that we didn't imagine possible, like Roe vs. Wade, gun laws in New York. So sitting here today, is this moment more flammable? Is it a continuation or an escalation of where we were?

Glenn Lowry:

It's differently flammable. I think what's happened, certainly since 2016, is that a number of issues that were complicated have become toxic. We've just endured two years of a pandemic that created even further gaps in social and financial inequality. We now know that our world as we thought we understood it is far more fragile, far more vulnerable to autocratic decisions. Wars that seemed inconceivable now happen. We've lived through a racial reckoning and really seismic social rethinking about race and equity in this country that is deep and profound. So all those changes, of course, impact our civic institutions in deep and profound ways. 

What worries me is whether democracy itself will survive the next decade. Because it seems to me, among all the different forces at play, the intolerance of other people's opinions—the sense that if I lose, it was stolen from me, that only I can be right—presages a condition in which we lose all ability to negotiate difference. And democracies, after all, survive in their ability to do just that; to take opposing points of view and find common ground.

Charlotte Burns:

Especially in America, museums are one of the very few civic spaces where you can enact these kinds of conversations. It's perceived of as being a public entity, even if the ownership structure is very different. But definitely thinks of itself as being for the public as being a public good, a civic-minded institution. There's only really libraries that remain that way. And it feels like a lot of the issues that are happening in the world are coursing through the institutions and re-changing them because it is a space where democracy can, can take place; you can have these conversations.

Glenn Lowry:

You know, I think that one always has to be careful about the relationship between broader societal forces and what any one institution can or should do. We are collectively a network of civic spaces. We do serve a public good. We are no better or worse than the forces around us. And if we can create a space where art itself is the center of conversation, with all of the contradictory and complex issues that it raises, then we will continue to thrive. 

I feel very strongly that museums should not be places that provide answers. Museums should be places that provoke questions. And that answers come later. And if you go to a museum for certitude, you will ultimately be disappointed. But if you go to the museum to discover, to learn, to question, to think, then you will be energized. 

And I think that's our role, especially in a moment of complexity: to be a place where people with different questions, different concerns, can engage with works of art, and the artists who made them in ways that are deep and meaningful, and that help them locate themselves in a larger conversation. But we are not the larger conversation.

Charlotte Burns:

Who is MoMA’s public? What data do you track on the public? How do you know who's coming? Define MoMA’s audience as it currently is, and, you know, kind of look back, I guess, because it's grown enormously and shrank again during the pandemic.

Glenn Lowry:

And then grown again. So we do regular audience surveys. So we have a pretty good sense of who's coming and where they're from, and how old they are and what their gender is. And we do a regular zip code and country captures, people come in and out of the museum. So we're pretty accurate about sort of broad demographic sweeps. We’re less accurate, of course, on the more complex socio-economic questions that can only come from regular audience surveys. We only do two a year at this point. 

But our audience, since we reopened in late August of 2020, has clawed its way back to something approaching 75% or 80% of where we were pre-pandemic. Our baseline was about three million. And obviously, in the year of the pandemic, our audience shrank to about 650,000. We were closed for five months. And then when we reopened, there were severe limitations on attendance. 

Our hope is that this year, assuming no other catastrophic issues intervene, we’ll be very close to where we were pre-pandemic. That's the ambition.

Charlotte Burns:

You just talked about this idea of authority and anxiety and tolerance, essentially. And when I asked you your greatest anxiety in 2018, you said, “I feel a kind of closing off of possibilities across a full spectrum of political issues. So the question of authority becomes fundamental because we have to give each other license to imagine.” You said the biggest single issue was this question of how we navigate who has the right to speak, and for whom? “Is it possible for us to get out of our bodies, skins and minds and empathize with those who are different than us?”

At the beginning of the pandemic, it felt like there was a vulnerability to the conversation. So there was a painfulness to the conversations that people were having about race, gender, privilege, class, money in the art world, and we'd had a comfortable ride for a long time, kind of self perceiving as paragons of liberal democracy, but not necessarily embodying that. 

There is a strong and committed push towards progress in lots of different sectors. But what we're also seeing is a kind of backlash against that. I was speaking to a critic recently, who said, “Oh, you know, everybody thinks that things have gone too far, political correctness has gone too far.” 

A board member at another major museum recently, there was a big argument with the director, about, “I'm, you know, I'm not going to fund a woke museum.” And this was on a big board member call. And this is a very, very wealthy patron. 

So this is money. It's also critics, you know, it's a conversation that's happening. And that sense of being open and encouraging of progress seems to have curdled a little bit in on itself as things around us have returned more to normal. 

How do you grapple with that, because you, as a director of one of the museums with the largest endowments in the world, with an enormous staff, square footage, an extremely wealthy board, and huge attendance from all over the world, you're dealing with so many constituents who want very different things. How do you steer through that? 

Glenn Lowry:

Well, I don't know how you steer through that. You just hope that you can read the different issues well enough that you can make a series of rational judgments, because we're in new territory, or uncharted territory. 

In finance, there's a term when markets go up and or when markets crash, that there's a reversion to the mean. That ultimately, markets return to the mean average of where they were. And I think that's true about society that when we experience moments of enormous conservative thinking, ultimately, there is a moment when we move back to the center, when more liberal thinking permeates the way we live. And when we have moments of progressive thinking and progressive action, there's often a reaction to that, that pulls us back towards the center. 

So I'm not surprised that in the wake of all of the actions that have followed the murder of George Floyd and so many other Black and Brown men and women, that led to all sorts of new programs, new acquisitions, new positions, that there are also people who are concerned that we as a society may have gone too far. It doesn't matter whether you agree with them or disagree with them. They feel that, and so there's a counter-pull. 

And I don't even see these responses as necessarily setbacks. I see them as legitimate conversations that need to take place because people don't all agree about where we as a society should go. 

And I felt back when we last talked in 2018, and I feel it today, that if we can't have these conversations—if they become so polarized that they lead to divisiveness, political alienation, even violence—then we are going to fail as a society and that we have a collective responsibility to find a way to negotiate positions, and that we have to accept that we don't all get what we want, all the time. In fact, if you can even get some of what you want, some of the time, that is an achievement. 

And we have become such a polarized nation where the thinking is all or nothing. And I just don't believe that. I enjoy the give and take. I believe it produces better results that, of course, if you learn from somebody else's thinking, it's going to make your own thinking better. And in fact, the joy of living is discovering new possibilities. Then some of these threatening moments—where people feel that we've all become too politically correct, or wokeness has taken over America—diminish in importance, because it's not about wokeness. It's about doing the right thing. It's about understanding that in the ways in which you navigate that, you can help make this country better.

Charlotte Burns: 

Can you give any examples of things that you found threatening as ways of thinking that you've since encompassed into your practice and the way you work?

Glenn Lowry:

Well, look, I'm a self-identified Liberal Democrat. So I find some of the thinking on the hard-Right really frightening. But I'm willing to engage it. And I'm willing to listen. And I'm willing to recognize that some people really believe those hard-Right positions, and it's not going to work if I just simply ignore that. Right? And it's not gonna work for anybody to simply ignore somebody else's feelings and positions. We're going to have to encounter them and work thoughtfully, systematically and logically through the differences that we have. 

So, you know, take abortion. It's inconceivable to me that we're still stuck in this situation as a country, where you can have a Supreme Court that overturns Roe vs. Wade. It's just inconceivable. But that's not going to help, my feeling it's inconceivable. We have to go out and work, we have to go and recognize that if you believe in abortion rights, they are not God-given,  they’re hard fought. And as it turns out, in this country, they're constantly under attack. We have to recognize it's not good enough to say, “they're wrong, and I'm right.” You've got to engage with reality.

Charlotte Burns: 

Even if it's a reality that's distasteful to you. 

Glenn Lowry:

Precisely, if it's the reality…if all we do is operate in the realities that are pleasing to us, we live in an echo chamber, and we're going to make tremendous mistakes about our life, our sense of democracy, and the things we value. So this goes back to the question of tolerance.

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns:

I thought it was interesting you mentioned this idea of someone's emotions, because as a journalist, what I came to understand is that often what I thought was reporting the facts of a situation was actually just reporting people's feelings. Especially on things like progress, because there's so little data out there—it's not an industry that is very easily graspable. 

But we’ve spoken about the data studies that Julia Halperin and I do, the Burns Halperin report. When we did them, we were shocked to see the reality of progress was so limited. Looking at those figures is really disappointing because the reality, whatever our feelings are, we haven't, as a sector been engaging fully with that reality. And I'm not sure that we still are because overall, as a cultural sector, we haven't moved things a percentage. Grappling with the reality is different than grappling with the feelings, but we're living in a moment of heightened feelings. And so how do we create progress? How do you talk to your board about that? Do you set yourself internal markers? Do you believe in quotas? 

Glenn Lowry:

There are many different kinds of change. You can mandate radical change. But the problem with that is, the moment you move on to something else, or you change leadership, that change disappears. And so I think about change primarily through the lens of sustainable change; change that's irrevocable, that gets locked in. 

And that it's a kind of change that happens much more slowly. Because you have to buy in everyone who's involved, not just your staff, but your board and your public. They have to believe that the changes that are being made are foundational to the future of the institution. 

So, often, we want to see dramatic change, we want to see the dial suddenly go from zero to 60. But the problem with that is, it can just as easily go from 60 to zero. 

And if you start to look at change over longer periods of time, which can be very frustrating to those who feel disadvantaged. But if you look at change over a longer period of time, you can make a very substantial change in, you know, a decade, in five years. Whereas if you look at it in one year or two year increments, it might not seem that much. 

That's not a justification for failure to engage. How do you lock in sustainable change? What's the strategy in any one institution? Institutions are different. New York institutions operate in a very different environment than Houston institutions, which operate in yet a different environment than those in San Francisco. The public in Houston is going to be just dramatically different in makeup and in aspiration and in interest than the public in Boston. 

Each institution has to hold itself accountable, has to set for itself an agenda of where it wants to be on some spectrum of change. Define what the metrics of success are. Is it Y number of staff of color? Is it Z number of female artists? Is it by percentage? Is it by feel? Right? You can set all sorts of different ways to look at how you will measure your success. But you have to at least define what the terms of success look like. 

Charlotte Burns: 

What does that look like for you? When, you know, looking back, because you're coming to the end of your tenure at MoMA. So you're thinking about the legacy. Has your definition of success changed? Where is it now?

Glenn Lowry:

Well, first of all, I don't think about legacy, ever. It's just not something that interests me. 

And my definition of success hasn't changed that much since I arrived, which was to change the institution's way of thinking from, being the place that provided the answer to the question of “what is Modern art?,” to the place that constantly sees itself as a work in progress, asking the question, “what is Modern art or contemporary art?” 

And that is a mindset change. To be a place of questioning, of querying, of uncertainty; a place that felt more like a laboratory than a temple, that was welcoming and generous in its approach to the present, and discerning in its approach to the past. And where different publics could and would feel welcome. And to the degree that one looks back at my tenure, I hope that the sense would be that the museum changed a great deal during this time. And I'd be even happier if people felt the museum changed a great deal for the better during this time. But that's for others to judge.

Charlotte Burns: 

One thing that's changed so much is the internal structure of institutions and how power moves through them. When you first joined MoMA, the curators were the power force. 

You initiated weekly meetings with the heads of the curatorial staff to unite a frequently fractious team, and a “frequently fractious museum”, I think the quote was. John Elderfield, the chief curator at the time had said, “It's basically the old fiefdoms but the difference is basically that all the warlords now sit down at the same table.” 

You created six deputy director positions, including a deputy director for the curatorial department who was paid more than the chief curator themselves. That was a shift in the role and power of the curators. 

Often when you speak to creators now, they feel further away from the curating warlords of old and much closer to the fundraising departments. Meanwhile, the museums have become so much bigger and they have real estate portfolios that need funding. And so the boards have become richer and larger, and essentially don't have accountability structures really above them. 

So you've seen this shift from the power of the curators. Who has the power now? Where has that moved to?

Glenn Lowry:

So I didn't create the position of a deputy director for curatorial affairs. That was a position that existed when I arrived at the museum. 

I'm not someone who looks at power as the driving force of an institution. I, you know, it's not actually something that even interests me that much. What does interest me is how do you create a vibrant conversation across a largest number of staff members about the mission and values of the institution? How do you get people to participate, and to think holistically about the institution, rather than departmentally?

And so, when I arrived at the museum and it was described as a place of fiefdoms, that's not actually what I found. The chief curators who were there then were already talking to each other, and wanting to have a conversation across disciplines, but hadn't yet figured out how to do that in a regular way. 

And so if I was able to create a platform and a venue where those conversations could occur, and where we could test out different ways of working together, that was largely because that's what everybody wanted. It’s certainly what I wanted, but it wasn't successful because I wanted it. It was successful because people actually began to see that it was a lot more interesting to work with your colleague across disciplines than it was to work in some kind of isolation. 

Of course, over time, things change, and you give something up in order to get something, right? So in those in the model of the museum that saw it as a series of fiefdoms, each chief had his or her domain, her galleries, his galleries. And, in a way, nobody else was responsible for them but that person. But your territory was actually quite small and limited. So, if you want to operate at scale, when you start to look at all the different trade offs, you can begin to imagine that nobody loses anything in sharing. And you actually start to gain an enormous amount by doing so. 

So the ingredient that enables that to happen is trust. You have to trust your colleague, that he or she will listen to your concerns, will seek your advice when working with material that you know more about than she does or he does. It takes time to do that. 

I don't see that the power structure in the museum has changed a whole lot during the course of my tenure. It is still a place that recognizes that knowledge is a currency. And, if you want to talk about power, power lies with the ability to have a place where many people across many disciplines share a set of common values. 

And I still think of the museum as being curatorially driven, maybe not curatorially driven by warlords, but by a group of really interesting, thoughtful individuals who work together.

Charlotte Burns:

And obviously with the rehang, that's sort of embodied. You had this hang across media, bringing to light lots of overlooked work. And when I walk around the museum, I think it feels like a post-internet hang. 

Do you think you have found now a way of working in the institution that breeds collaboration? What was the formula? How did you get there? 

Glenn Lowry:

I hope we have. This goes back to thinking about this through the lens of sustainable change. We didn't do this overnight. We did this over literally two decades. We began in 2000 with an experiment, MoMA 2000, where we invited curators from every department to work together in a series of exhibitions to celebrate the millennium. 

And that was praised by some and roundly criticized by others as devaluing MoMA, fracturing the clarity of departmental thinking. But its real purpose was to begin learning how to work differently, because the one thing I really believe is that if you want to be an institution devoted to the art of our time, the present, then you have to be a place that changes all the time. That's why I think of ourselves as a work in progress. We're different in kind than a historical museum that's about preserving the past. We're all about engaging the present. And learning from that. And that many of the things we learned get absorbed, and even institutionalized, by historical museums, where we're constantly—or should constantly—be moving on. 

So we started with an experiment that some liked, some hated. Internally, it was controversial. Externally, it was controversial. But because we did this iteratively, and because there was a generational change of curators over this 20-year period, I think most of the curators if not all of the curators who were there today would say, this is how we want to work. Can we make it work better? Of course. 

But the idea that they sit down together and plot out what the gallery's will look like, what issues they will address, what acquisitions we will make that are strategic and amplify the conversations we want to have is part of a strategy that says these galleries are like laboratories, and they change with the time. This means everybody has to sit down together and hash it out. And the reward is a rich conversation and more interesting gallery. 

We’re the place that is going to give you the opportunity to think differently. And that's really important, from my perspective.

Charlotte Burns: 

How do you balance that though? You're a very competitive person yourself, by nature. You're a competitive cyclist, you ski competitively. How do you balance that natural instinct with the urge to collaborate and cooperate? Where is the competition? Who do you see as your rivals, as an institution?

Glenn Lowry:

Well, I'm inherently collaborative by nature, I love working with other people. I don't see that as in any way antithetical to also being very competitive. But by competitive I don't mean about winning in relationship to someone else, I mean, competitive in the sense of always wanting to do my best, to push myself. And if you want, by extension, the institution to outperform itself. And the only way you can outperform yourself is if you work with colleagues. You can't do this on your own. I don't see collaboration and competitiveness as being contradictory at all. This is a place that recognizes and values achievement, that you can…We hope our staff will want to do outstanding work because we're driven individuals.

[Music break] 

Charlotte Burns:

Let's talk a little bit about the funding. You grew your endowment over the time, you've been there from $200 million to more than $1 billion. 

Glenn Lowry:

When I arrived at the museum, the endowment was about $225 million. That's 1995. And today, it's about $1.7 billion. But to be clear, I didn't grow the endowment. An extraordinary group of people grew that endowment. First, our trustees. Second, we have a remarkable investment committee of the board that has advised our own internal investment team. Third, we have a really outstanding small group of individuals at the museum who have shaped that endowment. 

The growth in that endowment came from literally dozens of people working their tail off to make smart choices about investments, and really generous trustees who kept adding to the endowment because they understood that it was the long-term protection for the institution against the ups and downs of the economy.

Charlotte Burns:

So I think there's two things there. There's the funding and investments. And then there's the trustees. There was a recent article by the former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Tom Finkelpearl, with the artist Pablo Halguerra, and they talked about a different funding structure for museums. 

They said that museums should divest themselves from toxic philanthropy. The article asks what it looks like for museums to turn, and I quote “their billions towards positive good, instead of questionable investments simply for profit”. They state that seven in 10 museums don't have policies to guide investments towards environmental, social or corporate governance goals, or to ensure that the managers of those funds are themselves diverse. They suggest instead investing in local things like taxable municipal bonds, but helping build better public infrastructure, making it a priority to invest in cities. Scaling, maybe being smaller but having more sustainably invested funds.

What do you think of that? What is MoMA’s stance on ethical funding? Let’s kind of separate out board members for a second, but in terms of the investments, would you invest in oil, for instance? Are there guidelines in those senses around the investments in the endowment?

Glenn Lowry:

We use an ESG filter for our investments in our endowment. And it's not perfect. It's a set of guidelines. It's not absolute. But I think it's important that institutions invest in ways that are consistent with their values.

Charlotte Burns: 

In recent years, we've seen lots of articles about toxic philanthropy. The Sackler name has been removed from institutions around the world, in some places quicker than others. In Britain, it is still not happening at the same speed as it has in America. 

MoMA has had its own pressure. There was a lot of pressure from artists and other activists about the chair Leon Black's financial ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

He decided he wouldn't stand for reelection. He remains on the board. Artists were very outspoken about this. Ai Weiwei told The New York Times that he would be ashamed to be associated with MoMA unless it took a firm position. And he hoped that if it didn't, they wouldn't have his works in their collection. Michael Rachowitz was one of 150 artists who spoke out saying, you know, he believed that Mr. Black should step down from the board altogether. 

So there, you're really in the middle of the constituents that we've been discussing—the people who were helping fund the institution, and then the artists saying, “we're at odds with this.” 

What if there was a different way of doing it? Do you think about that? And are you working towards that?

Glenn Lowry:

Well, I'm a pragmatist, first of all. So I admire activists. I often believe in the causes that they espouse. But in the end, I'm a pragmatist. And that is just where I come out. I like to get things done. And I recognize that I don't have all the answers, and neither do the activists. Nor do the trustees. We live in a world of compromises. 

And I respect the positions that many artists take and have taken, either in support or against the museum. That is their right. It doesn't mean that every one of those decisions is something we're going to do. We listen, we respond, we react, we change, when appropriate. But we live in a free world that actually values debate and discussion. 

So the fact that there are groups of people who believe ardently that we shouldn't do this, or we should do that, doesn't mean we're going to do either of those things. It just means that there are groups of people who believe that. We're going to listen. Where it is appropriate and where it makes sense, we're going to adjust and act and where it isn't, we won't. And we're not perfect either. 

And in the same way that, if we start to believe that trustees whose political positions are different than ours, or whose financial investments don't align with our values, are no longer welcome in our institutions, I think of that as fascism. I don't think of that as progressive liberal democracy. I think of that as fascism. “I don't like what you do. I disagree with what you do. Therefore, you are excluded.” That's a bad place for us as a society to be. 

We're a heterogeneous society, made up of people who have multiple sets of interests, and that if we can align someone's financial support with the values of the institution, that's a good thing because it doesn't matter whether they're of the progressive left or the reactionary right if they're supporting the programs and artists we believe in. At least for me. I know that for some people, that's absolutely anathema. That it is viscerally difficult to imagine someone whose politics or investments you despise or dislike supporting the programs that you want. I just don't feel that way.

Charlotte Burns: 

Do you feel that situation’s got worse, politics has become more extreme? And there's two questions in there really. One is the polarity that we discussed at the top of the show. Having people on boards who had slightly different political opinions from you maybe was different in that moment when everyone really believed that capitalism would encourage democracy rather than authoritarianism, in the kind of peak years of that, in the early 2000s. 

But the other question is, then, the governance…So a funding is one thing. Using the funds from a supporter to increase the activities of the museum and align with museums’ values, is a different thing than the governance of the museum. And is it possible to separate that because of course, the boards run the institutions? Do you think that would be wise or unwise? It's not the model that we have.

Glenn Lowry:

The issue around governance and funding probably varies institution by institution. So the core expressions of financial support at a place like MoMA are reflected in the acquisitions we make and the exhibitions we produce. Our board has no say in the exhibitions we produce. That is really driven from the bottom up by our curatorial staff. 

Acquisitions at a place like the Museum of Modern Art, because they involve assets of the museum, are ultimately board responsibilities. And so they are made through acquisition committees, which are made up of trustees and outside individuals who share an interest in a field—photography, architecture and design, painting and sculpture, and so on. 

They're called trustee committees because they're chaired by a trustee. But in fact, most of those committees are made up of more outside members than they are of trustees. And curators propose acquisitions. Trustees and committee members can't propose acquisitions; curators propose acquisitions, and trustee committees then either approve them or reject them. 

And I think that's a pretty healthy system. There are mechanisms that in one case, ensure that there's no trustee influence. There's oversight, like we set a budget every year, we make projections about attendance, and if we fail to meet our budget or fail to meet our projections around attendance, you know, trustees have the right to say, “are you sure you had the right program and what are you doing next year?.” But in my time, they've never interfered, never said, “Don't do this show or you must do that show.” 

And on the acquisition side, it's a very balanced group of individuals who have to agree with each other to make an acquisition possible. A trustee can't override the decision of the committee as a whole. 

On the governance end, we happen to have in this country a system of primarily private institutions. We can change that if we want to nationalize them. Or we can create new national institutions that are governed differently. But the structure here is one in which government has basically said culture is not going to be in our domain. That's for private individuals who think it's important to support. And so we've built an extraordinary network of private institutions across every discipline imaginable, that are governed by boards, that are self-perpetuating, because they ultimately own those institutions. 

The institutions operate in the public trust. There is a source that oversees the governance of institutions, and that's the attorney general of each state. So our board does have a higher authority that can step in and say, “you have a problem and you need to fix it.” And, episodically, attorneys general do step in when called upon. So it isn't like they that the board has a free hand in everything it wants to do; it has to abide by the laws of the state, laws of the country and by the practices of good governance. And it's held accountable, rightly, by the media on the one hand, and the public on the other hand and the attorney general of each state. So, there are checks and balances, even in that largely private structure. Everything comes with its benefit and its drawback, right? 

The system we came up with was to enable private individuals to create institutions that became self-supportive through the ongoing engagement of those individuals and their successors. 

And that's what I mean by I'm a pragmatist. I can live with that. I see its advantages. I love working with our trustees, I love working with our staff. We encounter lots of complicated, often divisive issues that we have to work out together. But when I think about the commitment that our trustees have to the institution and its staff, I'm always amazed at how devoted they are. So that's where I come out on this.

Charlotte Burns:

There's been a lot of talk through the pandemic, about staff, about staff safety, and this idea of care and what safety means, which means physical care, obviously, but also the work environment, in so many different ways. 

Of course, safety for you at MoMA became a very real thing. There was a stabbing incident and two staff were stabbed. How does that change the institution? And weirdly, we'd spoken about this on our last podcast. You said, “I know, as a director of an institution, when your staff feel threatened by physical violence, you have to take that very seriously. It's a reflection of the breakdown of our society. It's not a normal process.” That must have been an extremely shocking, very violent thing to go through, that makes you recalibrate everything.

Glenn Lowry:

That stabbing was the most horrific incident that I have ever had to live through and work on. And we like to believe that museums are places of engagement and of culture, of enlightenment, whatever that might mean. But they're places that also attract people who have really serious and difficult problems and when that crosses over into the kind of violence that unfolded, and that resulted in two remarkably young, wonderful staff members being stabbed. And a third one who was lucky enough not to be stabbed, but for all intents and purposes, lived through that as well. Plus a security officer who had to intervene as best he could, you have traumatizing experiences that are just so beyond anything any of us have ever encountered or know how to deal with. 

So we've spent a lot of time healing. And it's not something that happens overnight. It may not even be something that happens over months, it may be something that happens over years. We had a lot of meetings across staff, with therapists, with, you know, with colleagues. With anyone who wanted to talk about these incidents, to just begin the process of understanding what happened. To also understand that we need to ensure it doesn't happen again. So there's training, so people know what to do. And that training has to be so routine that it's instantaneous, that you don't even think about it. 

Increased security. We have returned to working with paid detail from the New York police, paid detail or off-duty police officers armed, in uniform, who report to us. We had paid detail pre-pandemic. We instituted that after the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2016. Several of us got together and said, “Oh my God, this could happen in New York. So what do we do?” And the first thing you do is, you make sure that you have really secure perimeters. 

We live in a society now where it is obvious that violence can and will occur almost anywhere. We need to make sure our public and our staff are safe when they are at the museum. I feel really strongly about that. 

Does it make me happy to see the amount of security that we now have to provide? No, of course not. I still have a naive notion that anyone who comes to a museum comes there to be engaged with the art and the last thing they would ever think about was a violent act. But that's just not true anymore. 

So it has become a huge preoccupation at the museum to make sure that we do the right thing. And that we can anticipate what might happen in the future. 

Charlotte Burns: 

It's such an experience of trauma to go through for you and all of the staff there. 

Obviously to have paid New York police, in a moment where policing is such a hot topic and the relationship between, you know, the authorities and communities just seems extremely fraught. To navigate that while the museum is trying to be more open to have more people feel comfortable in that space...

Glenn Lowry:

Look, I think this is not as complicated as that. Honestly, Charlotte, if you look at it through at least the lens I use, which is one of being pragmatic, we have to run an institution, the institution is in the middle of midtown New York. It attracts millions of people a year. We don't know who those individuals are. We don't run credit checks, and we don't run security background on them. We live in an increasingly violent society. And the police are part of the civil network that protects us all. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. Should we constantly be looking at ways of reforming the police, not defunding them, but reforming the police so that they do their jobs better, of course, we should. But in the absence of any other solution, to leave our public and staff unprotected when we know that violence can and will occur is unconscionable. It's not actually a complicated choice.

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns:

We're gonna have a slight change of conversation, I want to ask you about the volume of art. So I was we looked in our 2022 report, we found that 338,496 works, had entered the collection of the 31 museums across America that we survey in that 1- year period. And I was thinking about the sustainability of all this stuff that's in the museums? Should we carry on bringing everything into the institutions? How do you house all of that? 

Glenn Lowry:

Well, I think that one of the greatest challenges for American museums, and I've been very vocal about this, is to change from being places of acquisition to being places of program. That, if the 20th century saw the dramatic growth of collections across the vast majority of American museums because America had capital—there was a lot of art out there and we were prosperous throughout most of the 20th century, and so we built enormous collections. And we trained ourselves to keep building those collections. We built endowments that can only be used to buy more art. So we perpetuate the problem. 

I have been arguing for 20 years now that the 21st century should be about programming. That we should be diverting all that energy that goes into acquisitions, to doing more on the programming side. To produce more and better programs that reach larger and more diverse audiences. That's where our energy should be. 

Not that we should stop buying works of art. I don't believe that for a moment, but that we should shift the balance of what we spend our discretionary funds on from acquisition to program, and that we should start thinking more collaboratively about sharing our collections. That you don't have to own everything you display. That you can in fact be far more rigorous in what you acquire, and that we should be celebrating deaccessioning, not castigating it. That deaccessioning is a process by which we should be able to lighten our load, so that we can program better. And even though the new guidelines are more generous, but still very restrictive about the use of funds, the idea that once entered, a work of art can never leave the museum, I think, doesn't really make sense at the end of the day. Any more so that once a work of art entered the church, it could never leave the church. Well, 500 years later, it did leave the church. So works of art are created. They are owned, they change ownership, they come to museums, but they can also move on. And a work of art that is never seen in storage has become invisible, even if it has a digital image online. 

Charlotte Burns: 

You refer to the new rules. You were on a task force of 18 museum directors that determined these new rules that hadn't changed this 1981. They've relaxed a little bit now, but there's still a lot of guardrails on them, You can use it to defray the cost of caring for the collections, but still not for staffing or infrastructure in that way, or program. How much more do you want the rules to be relaxed? 

Glenn Lowry:

I believe strongly that the guidelines around deaccessioning at the AAMD [Association of Art Museum Directors] should be changed to allow for the use of funds to be directed towards program. 

The way I would do that is to stipulate that any work of art deaccessioned, that wasn't used by another work of art, the funds would be put in an endowment, and the draw on the endowment would allow for program. In other words, you never burn the value. You convert the value of a work of art into an endowment that could support program, but it could also support more acquisitions. There’s nothing that would preclude it. 

But I just think at the end of the day, that is going to have to happen. We are a large organization with many different points of view. We arrived at this as a next step. And I'm sure that over time, there will be further conversations and there will be further changes as the membership of the AAMD sees fit. We all had to come to a point that we could agree on. And so we did.

Charlotte Burns: 

You also talked about this idea of sharing collections. Do you think that will be a thing that museums might be less rivalrous about their holdings and actually have a kind of national sharing program?

Glenn Lowry:

Many of us already collaborate with other institutions in the acquisition of works of art and in the sharing of our resources. So this is not new, I just think we need to see it done at a more elevated and regular level. 

And a perfect example, the Museum of Modern Art had collection galleries and one of the unwritten rules was that only collection could be shown in the gallery. So if you needed to show something, you had to own it. 

If you really step back and think about it, how many times are you going to use it? And is it truly necessary to own everything you display? That feels to me like a very old model. We want to tell new stories. We want to engage new artists, we want to take risks. And therefore we want to have a backbone, a frame, that is our collection, but we want to constantly amplify it with works of art that we don't necessarily own or perhaps could never own, because they're already owned by another institution. 

Charlotte Burns: 

So Glenn, you're more experienced probably than anyone I've ever interviewed about museums and running MoMA at the level you have for all these years. What if you could change the model? What if you could make it different? What would you do now with the experience you have? How could it be better?

Glenn Lowry:

I think we need to imagine ways that we can expand the expertise that are on boards. And that's not just about diversity, it's about different forms of knowledge. Because I think at the end of the day, there's a simple rule that I believe in, which is no institution can be better than its board. So we want outstanding boards at our institutions, so we can have outstanding institutions. So I think, thinking about how to make boards even better than they are.

Charlotte Burns: 

How do you do that?

Glenn Lowry:

I think those are discussions that boards have to have within themselves and perhaps with leadership at institutions. And to…you said, what would I like to see? Doesn't mean that I will see it. But I'd like to see, you know, a more robust conversation across all of the boards of museums that look at how to engage new and different forms of knowledge. 

I would like to see us ensure the viability of the kind of program that we've developed, which sees our collection as an ongoing series of exchanges, intellectual, programmatic, artistic. That's very hard to do. It's very labor intensive, and it's very costly. So I'd like to see that truly locked in. 

I'd like to see us have the resources to continue to expand the knowledge base of our staff. We just started a program through the Ford Foundation of inviting senior scholars from different disciplines to be resident at the museum for a year, to just animate our conversations. I'd like to see how we can make that even more entrenched within the work we do so that we are truly a place of ideas. 

You know, and I want to make sure, I'd like to see us have the resources to live our dreams. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what I would love all of our institutions to do, to be sufficiently well resourced that they can live their dreams.

Charlotte Burns:

So Glenn, what are your plans? Do you have a sense of when you might be thinking of stepping away from being the director of MoMA? How do you feel about that?

Glenn Lowry:

You know, I get on my bike every weekend a couple times during the week and I ride as hard as I can. And I go to work and I work as hard as I can. And that's what I think about.

Charlotte Burns:

If you could pick your successor, do you think about that?

Glenn Lowry:

It's really not up to me to pick my successor. As I told you, I don't think about legacy. I try to be focused in the day. Focused in the moment, in what I do. And I have a lot of confidence that our board will pick an outstanding person who will do an even better job, and I think that will be fabulous.

Charlotte Burns: 

You began as a specialist in Islamic art, do you think you'd return to that? Do you see yourself staying in museums? Would you like to go to run another institution? Or is that just the last thing you could imagine? 

Glenn Lowry:

No, look, I've had a fabulous run at one of the greatest institutions in the world. And I've loved every moment of it even…I can't say I've lived every moment of the last few years. But it has been a really thrilling time, I've learned an enormous amount. And I still learn an enormous amount from staff and our trustees and the artists I get to work with. And that's just invigorating. You know, the next…Whatever comes next will happen. And I've, I suppose, been lucky enough that that next step has appeared at the right moment. And the board will be quite clear sighted in when it feels my time is up. You know, we all have an expiration date. I probably have lived long past mine. And that's fine.

Charlotte Burns:

Do you have a sense of what you want to do next? Are you just going to get on your bike and think about that then?

Glenn Lowry:

I’m going to get on my bike and I'm going to think about that. I still am deeply interested in the Middle East, I do a lot of work on contemporary art in the Middle East. That's a field that retains a lot of interest and focus for me. But there are a lot of other things I'm interested in too. So you know, the future will bring what it does.

Charlotte Burns: 

So the other thing I wanted to ask you is, how being a parent has impacted your creative practice.

Glenn Lowry:

Patience, which is not necessarily something that comes naturally to me, is truly a virtue. That if you want your children to learn and to grow, you have to understand the speed at which they can do that. This isn't your speed, it's their speed. And I think being a parent teaches you an enormous amount about humility. Which is a good lesson for all of us to have.

Charlotte Burns: 

What are the things you stand for, if you were going to define them. What do you believe in?

Glenn Lowry:

The belief first and foremost that art is one of the most important human creations and that we, as a society, have a responsibility to ensure that we have a climate in which art can be made, that celebrates human creativity, that celebrates dreaming. Integrity, I hope. Community and collaboration. And above all a respect for knowledge and expertise.

Charlotte Burns:

Glenn, I think there's a perfect end to the show, thank you so much. 

Glenn Lowry:

It’s a pleasure.

[Music break]

 Charlotte Burns:

Thanks again to Glenn Lowry for sharing his deep insight into the art world and its futures. And for helping us think about so many ‘what ifs’. 

Join us next time. We’ll be talking to Kemi Ilesanmi, community amplifier, and the extraordinary now-former executive director of The Laundromat Project, which has trained and commissioned more than 200 artists. Our conversation covers her belief in abundance, the power of everyday art and—of data.

Kemi Illesanmi: 

No one has actually called me a data nerd. So I really appreciate that. 

Charlotte Burns:

It's a highest compliment. 

Kemi Illesanmi: 

I accept. One of the things that really drove me in putting HueArts together was a dream of what it might look like for a young person of color, who wants to make a life working with culturally specific, as in people-of-color-run arts organizations. 

That, in this moment, would feel like an incredibly bold statement. And it shouldn't.

Charlotte Burns:

That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?! 

 The 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…?!, Episode 1: Naomi Beckwith

“Not just what if—but what are we missing?” In the first episode of this new podcast, host Charlotte Burns is joined by Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Someone actively working to recalibrate the field in the most exciting and dynamic ways, Naomi starts this episode with science before moving on to museums—and how we can create change. What if our textbooks were Black? What if we decentered the Western world in conversations about art? Tune in for more. 

New episodes available every Thursday.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: 

Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! 

I’m your host, art journalist Charlotte Burns, and this is a series all about imagining different futures. We’ll talk about how we navigate the churn and change currently shaping culture. What are some of the biggest shifts that need to happen for art to stay relevant in a changing world?

In each episode, we’ll be talking to some of the most interesting people in the art world, asking them ‘what if’? 

[Audio of guests]

In this episode, we welcome Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and Jennifer and David Stockman chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 

Over the years, I’ve been a journalist, if ever I have something difficult to think about, Naomi is someone I like to try to talk to because she is such a precise and a completely independent thinker. Naomi is not someone who says what everyone else does, instead, she approaches art and the industry on her own rigorous terms. 

Naomi and I began our conversation with something that inspired her from an early age—the link between science and art…

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns: 

Naomi, thank you so much for joining me today.

Naomi Beckwith: 

Hi, Charlotte, you're very welcome. I'm thrilled to be here.

Charlotte Burns:  

So, I wanted to start in a slightly unusual place, which is in the world of science, because you didn't intend to be an art person. You initially trained as a scientist. And prepping for this conversation, I watched a PBS interview with you. You were talking about how you'd written a paper on the Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, who came to America to work on the Manhattan Project. And then later, you realized there was a monument to that process in Chicago's Hyde Park by the artist Henry Moore. And you talked about how the sculpture [Nuclear Energy (1963-67)] represented the new possibilities and the shiny new world of this tech—but also meant that something we didn't know was coming. 

And that seems like an apt place to start this interview amidst great change, great potential and, also deep uncertainty. 

Naomi Beckwith: 

You're right, it actually is an interesting crossover from the world of science into art for me because both, essentially, if they're doing their work right, are dealing with questions of the unknown. And I think that's perfectly appropriate for a podcast called, What If?! 

Essentially, I grew up in this neighborhood with this monument, and it was something quite different from many of the other monument-like things that I'd seen around. There were plenty of Grecian figures in and around the South Side of Chicago. There were men on horses—of course, as usual—roaming around the city. But here, outside the Library at the University of Chicago, was a sculpture that was completely abstract. 

But if you can imagine it, Henry Moore loved the idea, as did the rest of the St. Ives group, of a kind of abstract language that was fielded through the forms one could conceive of in nature. Biomorphic forms that looked a little bit, in this case, like maybe a knuckle, a bone structure, something that had a big rounded top, and then an overall rectangular form with a void in between. 

And it was this shape that, on the one hand, reminded me of the mushroom cloud. I am a child of the ‘80s. I grew up in utter terror of nuclear annihilation. I’m sad that we find ourselves pondering these questions again. But I was also a child that knew that the more that you began to play with forms, the more that you could neutralize it. 

And I think this is what Henry Moore was doing—trying to give us the sense of the shape of a nuclear reaction, but also understanding that if you harness it in the correct way, you could do something with this great power. This great potential. This thing that could, of course, destroy us, but could also give us endless energy. That could also be a sign of our intelligence and our curiosity. And that could also lead us into a future that we couldn't imagine before. 

What on earth are we going to do with the knowledge that comes after that? And what on earth are we going to do with the power that we still hold?

Charlotte Burns:  

Well, they're great questions, indeed. What are we going to do? 

I'm going to bring it slightly into a more prosaic space by asking how you bring that to bear, your scientific background. As the oceans rise and temperatures increase, what can the art world what can museums learn from the scientists? You're at the head of leadership now in a major institution. How much is this spoken about? 

Naomi Beckwith:  

If anything, there's been sort of two divergent conversations around this. Really, you know, our survival as a species, and then the role of art institutions inside of those conversations. 

The first conversation is really how do we, as museums, just do better as global citizens? How do we reduce our carbon footprint? How do we recycle the majority of our materials? These are things that have been coming to us, both in terms of municipal pressure but also been long-standing conversations internally. 

We've been working very deliberately and diligently with external groups and are part of a consortium of museums answering this very question. You don't hear about it because it's not sexy, right? It's not sexy to talk about the cardboard we use. It's not sexy to talk about our waste management systems. Nobody wants to hear that. The mundanity of it isn't dazzling. And that's okay. Because, in many ways, it is our mundane actions and our carelessness in our mundanity that has gotten us to this current crisis. 

On the other hand, there is a very public sort of conversation that we're seeing, which is this series of protests that you see with, for instance, [Just] Stop Oil and tomato soup going on a Van Gogh. I forget at which museum people were gluing themselves to the surfaces of framing. This is another kind of forced conversation that we have, but it's a conversation that really asks, I think, a very key question around this climate crisis, which is where do we turn our attentions? And where do we turn our resources as a society? 

Obviously, I agree that we are well within, I think, a decade of sheer, irreversible terror in terms of the way the Earth will or will not function. And while I very much agree that we need almost a kind of desperate stunt to call people's attention to it, I don't agree that it's a zero-sum game between culture and climate. Thinking about it as either the arts or the climate, thinking about Van Gogh's sunflowers or mashed potatoes, I think, lacks; lacks serious imagination. We have all the resources and power to do both. And we shouldn't be pitting one against the other.

Charlotte Burns:

An interesting thing related to this in terms of museums is, of course, museums preserve the past and in very specific climate-controlled conditions. And what we've experienced over the past several decades is this boom in museum building, and in terms of our travel around the globe as a kind of community, but also the expansion of museums domestically. When we think about that—this idea of phenomenal growth of institutions that have gone from, you know, maybe 30 or so people inside an institution, like the Guggenheim, to now corporations spanning the globe, like the Guggenheim—how do we think about collections? 

And this is a kind of two-pronged question because, on the one hand, there's always the imperative to grow more. And right now, we can discuss that in the lens of diversity, and the time it would take, the drive and scope and capital investment it would take, to grow the collections of the Guggenheim, for instance, to achieve any kind of equity or parity. 

And on the other hand, there's this sense of so much stuff. When we look at the annual acquisitions across major American museums, the number of works coming in as gifts, specifically, is enormous. It's about 60% of the figures that we look at in the Burns Halperin report. So it kind of makes us scratch our heads and say, well, museums are talking a lot about equity and parity, and they are trying to do the work. And then directors and curators will say to us, well, there's this tide of gifts coming in that means that we're kind of dampened in what we can achieve. 

Is there a moment in which we have to say, Okay, are museums just taking too much stuff in? Do we have to rethink accessions? Both from the point of view of achieving parity and equity and, and also from the point of view of sustainability. Can we keep growing?

Naomi Beckwith:  

First of all, every museum has to be judicious around what their mission is. We're always going to be offered far more objects than we ever can absorb. 

I think we want to take museums at their word when they say they want to conserve culture. Now, there have been so many challenges to what that means. There's so many challenges to what we define as culture. And so all those kinds of challenges, I do believe, actually, if anything, has allowed museums to think about an expansion of their remit, which I don't think is the same as growth for growth's sake. 

That said, it is the case that we are all limited in the ways in which we can acquire. I think it behooves every museum to look very deeply at those missions and decide for themselves, where are we going to focus energies? We not only have limited physical space where we have to hold everything, but there's a limit to what you can ship where. There's a limit as to why you should be shipping. And there's also a limit to your mission; your mission is not just there to be an all-embracing thing, your mission is there to focus. 

You and I have spoken very much about the fact that there are calls, in these renewed missions, in these growth of collections based on a real, almost maniacal, need to conserve things, which I don't think is the problem. The question is how. We know that in those calls for equity and diversity, we’re still looking for the end game. 

The question for us, really, I think, for all museums, is if diversity is going to be a goal of yours, what are you looking for? Are you looking for a kind of parity in your collection, assuming that your collection is primarily Western Europe and North America? Are you looking for a kind of specific percentage representation? I don't know. 

But I do know that if I look at the collections of many museums, especially around North America, you're going to find if you're not a culturally specific institution, that your collection is pretty much 85% White and the vast majority of that White men. So what do we do about that? 

I also realize that many institutions have taken very specific steps to then remediate that. And the steps sometimes have been incredibly radical. We see stories of massive, major de-accessions of work that bring in millions and 10s and hundreds of millions of dollars toward the goal of diversifying collections. But if you were to look again at those numbers, and let's say the first time in which I looked at those numbers was around 2013, 2014, if you were looking at those numbers again today, you will find that they've barely budged. And I do think this is where simple math helps here to do the analysis to realize that when you have thousands of work in your collection, buying 10 works a year or buying 15 works a year, it's not going to put a dent in your statistical numbers overall. 

So if we are reaching certain percentages, if we are reaching a real parity in the collections, those are the goal, if we're even reaching majority people of color in the collection, we need to understand that it will take many years, many decades, and millions and even billions of dollars to actually reach those goals of parity. If it took you 50 years to get to 85% White Men, it's gonna take you 50 more to get to a kind of balance. And I do hope that my colleagues and I begin to really get a grasp on the long-tail enterprise that this is going to be.

Charlotte Burns: 

I want to dive into that with you, this idea of the mechanisms that we need to ensure this, and actually, that's something you said to me in one of our last conversations, you said this is like the climate. There's a need for immediate action. But this is also going to outlive us, not only our tenures but our existence on this planet. And we're talking about the same stakes really, with what museums are and who they're for, and how they prepare themselves to be more than sort of precious jewels as they move forward through time. 

But also thinking about change. I think you're totally right when you look at the contextual totals that, of course, you know, buying 10 works this year and 20 works next year isn't going to make a dip in your overall collection. But it should make a difference. What we should be seeing in the data is that, if we look at the data of the last five years, or 10 years or 12 years, we should be seeing, if we just focus on accessions, we should be seeing greater change there. And we're not really seeing that either. I mean, the biggest volume of collecting of work by women peaked in 2009. For Black Americans, it peaked in 2015. Our latest study shows that those results are both around a fifth of what they should be if you look at the demographics of America. And the figures are especially compounded if you are a Black American female-identifying artist, in which case, the problem is around 13 times as bad as it should be. And so we're not actually even really seeing that shift in terms of acquisitions. 

Which gets us to your first part of what you were saying; why are we doing this? Is it representational? Is it reputational? Is it a means to an end? You know, why should museums do this? And are they having that conversation?

Naomi Beckwith:

So, first of all, thank you for reminding me of my climate analogy. It is true, you know, we have a planet burning, but we also have, in many ways, museums burning. They’re not literally burning. They’re burning, I think, with a hope from the public, that we would be able to demonstrate a better way of being in the world, a better citizenship, a better cultural responsibility. This is the kind of burning question that people are throwing at us. And absolutely, you know, like the climate, we're gonna have to do long-term changes in order to stabilize and then move on in a kind of happy cohabitation with the world. 

When we ask why we're doing this, I think it's a bigger question than just numbers and statistics. I think it's a question of what does it mean to actually engage with culture now, in the world where we do not have the kind of luxury to act like a little village anymore? 

We all now have too much access to information. We have too much access, I think, to critical thinking around how we receive information to then uphold one kind of model of cultural excellence as the model for the entirety of the world. That's just not going to work anymore. 

And I do believe that, from well, at least in the case of my colleagues, we've all come to understand that, right? So when I began to do work, like advocate for Black artists, I'm not advocating for Black artists just for the sake of having more Black artists in the collection, which, yes, I do want. What I'm advocating is for a broader conversation around what culture does and means and how it can function. What begins to happen if you stopped looking at, let's say, painting as the highest form of art, and think about it in terms of sculpture, or performance, or the interrelation of media, what kind of stories do we tell about human history and human excellence if we just began to kind of, if not invert, at least pivot some of the foci that we have in our cultural conversation. 

I also think that, in many ways, this question of bringing in these other narratives, making other artists and other kinds of objects visible, has been too much of a success in which, in the media, especially the social media sphere, there's so much more visibility for queer artists, artists of color, much more celebration of women, especially we began to look retrospectively at artists of a certain age, that kind of revival of the careers and the presentation of the careers of artists within their 70s, 80s and now even 90s, right? These are the things that we're seeing rising to the fore of, I think, our kind of media imagination. And when you see that, right, when you see so many incredible Black artists on the cover of magazines and on billboards, then you begin to imagine that we've come to a better place. So the danger is to equate, then, that kind of media visibility with equity. And that's not the same thing. And I do believe that's why people are shocked when they hear the numbers, but at the same time, right, imagine a much more equitable and equal world. 

I’ll also say one thing too; don't underestimate the number of objects that an institution brings in, year by year. 10 objects a year, 15 objects a year, for an institution, my size is fairly normal. Yes, we get massive tranches of other gifts. We, of course, like many institutions, rely on incredibly generous people. But you know, we're talking about collecting work in the dozens, not hundreds, year after year. 

So I think even for a lot of art professionals, when you say 10 to 15 works a year by POC artists, that sounds radical to them. But again, as I said before, that doesn't put a dent into the work that you have to do. That becomes step one of a multi-generational task.

Charlotte Burns: 

There was a symposium about the future of collecting at the Whitney [Museum of American Art], and you talked about the stubborn percentages and the need for new interpretive strategies.

Naomi Beckwith:

What we are asking really is, what do these objects do once they join the family of the collection? Right? It is basically like intermarriage. If you have an intercultural marriage, you should then have intercultural exchange. And that's what I mean by new interpretive strategies, right? Greenbergian formalism will not work on the Khartoum school. Don't try it! [Laughs]

So the question then becomes, how do we make sure that we bring in new voices and new forms of knowledge, as well as new objects? That's going to be paramount.

It's also the case that we work in museums, clearly, because we're thinking of a future beyond ourselves. But we have to imagine ourselves, if we're going toward a future of a different kind of collection profile, then we have to imagine ourselves then doing the work of making sure that that collection profile happens. It also has to be about cultivating young collectors now, to imagine a different remit for what may be even right now against the grain of the market. It also means really training people to broaden their own perspective on collections now. We have to be sort of active partners, with our patrons, with our supporters, up with our market friends and asking questions. How do we do this long work of making sure that we are going to see this long-term growth in diversity in our collections?

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns: 

The market right now has become the biggest voice in the room in most rooms that we're in, and museums can't really separate themselves from that because they're funded by trustees, and most trustees are collectors and there's a spiral. How do we move away from that dominance of the market? Because we hear from curators that, as they advocate to buy a work, say, by an older artist, who's being rediscovered as they become a nonagenarian—if you outlive them, you might find success—they spoke to us of their frustration that you can do the work, you can bring in the scholarship, you can even have the exhibition, but the market creeps in because it creates a sense of urgency around certain figures. How do you, as the chief curator, navigate that?

Naomi Beckwith:

It's really funny. I love the way you describe it as a spiral, right? This shows with spiral, and I'm in a building that is a spiral. But I think you've mentioned in terms of a downward spiral, maybe.

Charlotte Burns:  

Well, I meant certain curves of repetition, perhaps.

Naomi Beckwith:

I think there's a way to turn it into a vicious, not a vicious, sorry, but a virtuous cycle. [Laughs] Maybe I’m making a Freudian…

Charlotte Burns:

Freudian slip there. 

[Laughter]

Naomi Beckwith:

Exactly! Exactly. Listen, you know, the market is dominant because it's glitzy, and it has things that people understand, like numbers. I mean, let's also understand it's graspable. My job, and the job of my colleagues, is to do something that gets people to grasp the ineffable. I think every curator hopes to do that, and some are better than others, I'll just be real. 

But at the end of the day, you're a) not going to win every battle, but b) you have to build the trust of your patrons and supporters. There is a reason why you've ascended to the position that you're in. You have to find the language and the ways and the means to advocate for that which is important to you. And it's not going to be the same for every person.

There is always going to be a person who's only interested in the market. But I don't think any board or any support group of an institution is wholly comprised of people like that. They are people who are there because they care about objects, and they care about future, and they care about the reputation. So if you begin to talk about the ways in which an artist has reconfigured your mind, and reconfigured the language of art, and maybe done something that was the root of what is the white-hot market now that we ignored some time ago? These are the conversations that are worth having. 

But I'll also say, look, the market is not everything to everyone, either. There are plenty of artists who want to sell, obviously, but they are still looking for that validation inside of institutions. They're still looking for the publications. They're still looking for scholarly respect. I don't know any artist who wants to die with nothing but sales and no retrospective. Right? Nothing but sales and no survey. 

So it also behooves us to tell our supporters that we actually sometimes have to remember that we are the goal and not the sales. We are the prize, and why are we the prize? Because we actually have the foresight and maybe a little bit of discernment to really think about what's going to be important into the future. Or at least we have the foundation and the platform to create importance for the future. I think we can't underestimate our power. Just like Henry Moore, I guess we'll just say.

Charlotte Burns: 

I love that. You also talk about your trustees there. One of the kind of ‘what-ifs’ of this show is thinking about that idea of governance. What if we could separate governance from funding? Would you advocate for something like that? 

Naomi Beckwith:

Something about that sounds incredible. I have to think about this just a little bit. What if we could? Yes, I actually think that could be interesting. 

But if I were to give a counterexample, which I don't know well, the question is, is it that much better, let's say, in a European context, where funding might be coming from the state and governance might come from other people? I don't know. Right? 

It's really a question about where do you put your energies? And then what do you get back from those energies? How much time do you spend really trying to justify the moves that you make with your supporters? And, you know, institutional leaders? Do they trust your vision? Right? Do you have a vision? 

But I do agree, right, that the boards have become the primary source of funding for institutions. And while I don't have a total distrust of that, I actually think it puts a lot—an incredible amount—of pressure also on the board. Right? I don't think they enjoy being in that position. But they feel responsible. So many of them rise to the occasion.

Charlotte Burns: 

Talking about leadership, you're back in New York now, you're at the Guggenheim, which is about to undergo a change in leadership with the departure of the longtime director, Richard Armstrong. And I want to talk to you a little bit about that new direction, how that's feeling internally. 

But also, I want to talk to you about New York itself. It's about to undergo this enormous generational shift. You have, obviously, Richard at the Guggenheim, at the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art], there's a new leadership structure in place. There's change expected in institutions all around the city from MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], possibly New Museum, possibly Whitney, possibly Studio Museum [of Harlem], there's a lot of talk in the air about change coming in the next several years. 

And this is also happening in the market if you think of legacy plans happening around kingpin galleries like Gagosian, Gladstone, Goodman, the closure of Metro Pictures, galleries like that. 

So it seems that this is an unprecedented moment of sudden, rather than staggered, generational change and new leadership vision. We're in the moment before the enormous change, and it feels like it could be momentous. New York is the center of the art world and still is the hub of activity. What do you feel about that big generational change? 

Naomi Beckwith:

Yeah, it's a surprising one. Honestly. This sounds really naive. But I don't think I saw it coming so quickly. But you're right, it does feel like something's on its way, though. You know, look, I'm not trying to kill any icons or running institutions out. [Laughter] I wish you all long and healthy careers. But that said, it did feel we do see something on the horizon. 

You know, yes, there's an exciting—a super exciting—generation coming. And I do think they're going to grapple with very different questions around institutions than the generation that has been, you know, my educators and my leaders for the entirety of my career in education as of now. 

And it first starts with, I think, the deep questions that this current generation had to grapple with, probably over the last 25, 30 years. How do we sustain institutions when the state just plummeted in support? How do you talk about culture in the realm of a globalizing world? Right. Those, I think, were the big questions. How do we sustain ourselves? How do we become global? 

The generation to come really still have to, I think, grapple with those; we just talked about this idea of patronage and who's supporting the institution. We have, of course, talked about the idea of institutional survival in the climate crisis. 

But I also think the bigger question now is citizenship and the role of museums now, when you have a world, especially a Western world, that is so deeply cynical about the possibility of nationhood, and the possibility of public space, and civic belonging. So there's a reason why, when someone wants to get attention, they walk in a museum and they tape themselves or glue themselves to a famous painting. 

It feels as though museums are almost the last site by which we can surface all these questions around our future. It's a scary thing, but it's not, I think, an uninteresting one. Why are museums the last public space? And what becomes the responsibility of a museum as the last public space? 

I am not someone who's so Pollyanna, who believes that art and museums will change the world. But I do believe they can, right? I do believe they can become the sites where we begin to imagine change. I do believe they can become the sites where we can literally talk safely around certain ideas. I do believe they are the sites, especially through artists, that allow us to deal with our anxieties personally and politically. So why not take advantage of that platform? And imagine what the museum can be in trying to hold this world together that is still grappling with its own post war legacy.

Charlotte Burns:  

I think that’s so interesting. And it's only going to happen if museums can change themselves, of course, first, which is a big responsibility. How do you go about thinking about that, and how much of that is rooted in this sort of balance between local placemaking and global thinking? And by which, I don't mean globalized in this sort of, which is a business word, really. More the idea of cosmopolitanism. 

Naomi Beckwith:

I don't see a distinction between the two, honestly. And I think my model for that really comes from my sort of Southside of Chicago upbringing in, you know, a kind of post-Black Power, pan-Africanist way. 

Two things really came out of that, and one is, for my kind of education with the capital E—the breadth of the way that I've learned to navigate the world—there was no distinction between me imagining myself as a kind of political figure, and imagining myself as a cultural figure. This project of Blackness and Blackness and formation was about a kind of being able to exist in an American polity, with an identity formation that had been informed by certain cultural practices, real and imagined. Right? Real: the food. Imagined: you know, a kind of, I don't know, a sartorial relationship to Africa. [Laughs] Everyone running around in Kente cloth, right, and dashikis, right? 

So these things were one in the same for me. But it also engendered a second thing, which is to say that, in that relationship to Africa—again, both real and imagined—there are Africans in my family, right? But though, at the same time, there was a kind of fantasy of Africa as a place inhabited wholly by kings and queens, right, there was no underclass. [Laughs] And all those kings and queens had been then denigrated in the Atlantic crossing to the States. That was, again, a fantasy. But what it began to engender was a real curiosity and relationship to the African subcontinent. So by the time that I am sort of rising with my interest in art and culture, and Okwui Enwezor becomes one of the dominant voices around cosmopolitanism, he makes perfect sense to me. 

The locality of the version of a cosmopolitan Africanism, on the South Side of Chicago, was exactly the thing that allowed me to imagine then not only relationships to the African subcontinent but the relationship to what we now call and probably shouldn't call the global South. These were shared understandings of our unfortunate relationship to a narrative of cultural teleology in the north that needed to go. That then becomes a global, international, cosmopolitan project that sat right beside those little African dance classes that I took on the South Side.

Charlotte Burns: 

You spoke recently to me about this idea, you sort of lamented a little bit this sense of cosmopolitanism on the wane in the cultural imagination these days. Can you talk a little bit about how you're experiencing that?

Naomi Beckwith:

Yeah, I do think that there's a way in which people are trying to revive the local at the expense of the cosmopolitan, but not in relationship to it. I'm thinking about a kind of deep interest in a kind of Black study that really wants to focus just on the US, a very specific kind of historic moment, maybe right after the abolition of slavery. And I'm not saying it's not a problem historically; I'm deeply interested in it. But I began to really wonder what happens when we lose the idea that there wasn't just a distinct Black culture that grew up in a crucible of one site, i.e., the American South, or became the American South. But there had always been these cultural exchanges with Africa, and the Caribbean, and North America, all the way up to the quote-unquote emancipation of slavery, right? That never stopped. I think we have a way of fixing some of these narratives around what certain places and what cultures are at present, when in fact, there's always going to be swirl and exchanges at different understandings. 

There's something, I think maybe about my own instincts, that feels as though if we're not thinking about any kind of cultural moment as a continuum and as an exchange with other peoples, other languages, other cultures—and we're not imagining what happens in both that collision and that melding—then we're probably not really doing a very good job of grasping what's happening. 

One of the reasons I constantly go back to someone like Okwui Enwezor, besides this sort of capacious genius in general, is because, for him, there is no shame in history. There is no shame in colonialism in Africa. Was it a problem? Yes. But it's not something that he needed to be ashamed of. He's much more interested in what happens when you take these kinds of colonial structures and try to overlap it over a pre-existing cultural and political hegemony that already existed in Western Africa. And what strange surprises begin to come out of that? What happens when you try to recuperate that in decolonization?

He was not ashamed of the Nazi past of Haus der Kunst. And that it was, in many ways, a Nazi design project. And so, instead of sort of sweeping it under a proverbial rug, he was much more interested in what happens when we talk about that design project. And when we talk about where objects literally went, how it passed through the Haus der Kunst, and how that actually can be helpful in restitution projects. 

This idea that we don't have to kind of recoup a glorious past in order to give ourselves credence, but we need to actually not be ashamed of what's happened and begin to grasp it for ourselves and talk about the possible worlds that can come from that.

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns: 

I guess what you're talking about is, what if we could imagine different futures? And this is your point of the spiral that I know you've talked about as being such a part of your practice, this idea of, again, not a downward spiral, but a reaching back and forward at the same time, and having that relationship between the both of them. 

And you mentioned as well, growing up, you're born and raised in the South Side of Chicago, you came of age in the 80s, in the wake of the Black Power movement, and you you attended a very experimental public school that fostered high academic achievement in its pupils, 98% of whom were Black American. 

And a sad thing about this is that you had no idea that as soon as you left school, that Black history would no longer be part of your formal education anywhere else. That's also a kind of huge, what if, like, what if that continued? There are models that have worked that just haven't been expanded or developed or picked up enough, you know, this is, you're a product of something very specific in so many ways.

Naomi Beckwith:

You know, in many ways, my education was like a fish in a fishbowl, you don't realize that not everyone else has undergone the same thing. I just assumed even White people knew about Black history, obvi. [Laughs]

Actually, I didn’t. I did know it was something distinctive, but I didn't know how much till much later. And I, I agree, there have been models in terms of trying to create new citizens. I mean, that was a project in new citizenry. Again, not at all distinct from cultural history and arts and imagination, those two things always went along with each other. We have to keep doing that work. And in fact, I did a whole series for the BBC called What If My Textbooks Were Black? And I walked through certain kinds of cultural histories, centering Black figures in that culture history and had conversations with people across disciplines—dance, music, literature—beginning to recoup a notion of American history. 

I also believe that there doesn't have to be some massive exchange, i.e. that we throw out all the history books—or maybe we do throughout the history books, we can rewrite some of them. [Laughs] We don't throw out the history, right? No shame. But we need to explain those histories. We need to really begin to either understand how we can talk about, let's say, in my context, American history, with the contributions of immigrants, because that's what we all are, right? 

I'm kind of tired of living in a country where people constantly turn to me and ask where I'm from. They don't turn to people with white skin and ask them that question when my family has been here for hundreds of years. So what is that presumption of Blackness as foreignness? So what if we began to teach our history in a different way? That doesn't presume that Whiteness is the norm? Which it is actually not and hasn't been for quite some time? 

What if we began to do a kind of cultural education that allows us to imagine that there are all sorts of forms, not even integrated in the market, that allow people to understand what aesthetics are, what beauty is, what object-making is, what community means? What if we actually spend time archiving and researching those things? 

And again, not against object-hood, but along with. And if we do that, we might have, let's say, a better understanding of the work like an artist like Nick Cave. We are dazzled by these objects. But those objects have a very specific material history to them. So I'm really interested in a kind of model that is always about expansion, always about asking that question: what are we missing? Not just what if, but what are we missing? And that takes that as the core of its intellectual enterprise, rather than one that starts with certainty and begins to say, this is the best, this is the greatest, and this is the only way forward.

Charlotte Burns:  

I love as well how this extends back, this is something so formative for you because you've spoken about growing up in such a vibrant cultural scene where the object was just one thing that was one part of that creativity and imagination and the value of creativity and culture. So it was art, it was dance, it was performance, social spaces, and so much more were enmeshed. And then you spoke about how when you became a museum professional, you were sort of like, oh, wow, we're just talking about the object?

And so this has been a concern in your practice for a long time, you know, from your exhibition, “The Freedom Principle[: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now]”, specifically looking at jazz and experimental music in the 60s, especially in Chicago, and the influence of that on contemporary culture. And now, of course, visitors to the Guggenheim, between now and April, can go and see the amazing survey of works by Nick Cave. So tell us a little bit about that strain of thinking in your practice.

Naomi Beckwith: 

I'm not the only one doing this work. And that's exciting. I just think that that's part of that generational shift. I think many of us either weren't raised with the same kind of academic presumptions. And many of us, of course, again, don't have a shame about where we've come from. Even if we weren't raised in the depths of those kinds of academic presumptions. I'm not ashamed of a wonderful sort of working-middle-class background on the South Side of Chicago again, I thought it was vibrant. So I just want to share it. There is a real glee in talking to people about the beauty of the free jazz movement. Because, you know, where would we be without it, we'd be a much poorer world. 

Charlotte Burns:

It's also, you know, the everydayness of it. It's the conversations, it's the music, it's the food you eat while you're talking about the music you're listening to or dancing to. And it is life, rather than a relic of a life past, which is a shift, I think, that you're right is a generational one. 

Naomi Beckwith:

Let's not forget that that's not new, also, to the Western art project. That was exactly the shift that got us the great Modernism enterprise of the 19th century. That's the shift that got us genre painting. That's the shift that got us Manet, right? The question is, whose mundanity is going to be, quote-unquote, valued? 

Charlotte Burns: 

I love that. Will you remain in museums? Do you see your future in the institution?

Naomi Beckwith: 

Yes. I hesitated because I have no crystal ball. I wish I did. If I did, I’d work in the markets. [Laughs] But look, there is only one site that I can think of that allows you to do multiple really incredible things. To sit with objects. And it is amazing to be able to sit and stare at something for a long, long time. It is amazing to have the benefit to study something in-depth and make friends with something. 

It is also amazing to come together with colleagues who are all about the mission of the care for history through objects. That people are trained to tell stories. That there are incredible resources put to the idea that art objects are important. And it is unusual to be in a place that is wholly committed to sharing that with the broadest possible public. 

And I don't think there is an institution that has really worked to rethink itself over the centuries, moving from these kinds of really idiosyncratic gentleman's collections to one that really begins to ask questions around civic practice and civic life. There’s something so incredibly important and exciting about that. And I can't imagine another institution that would do that for me.

Charlotte Burns:

It's really interesting because it's sort of like the job that museums said they wanted but didn't really apply for. 

Naomi Beckwith:

[Laughs] 

Charlotte Burns:

And then now they're sort of landed with it because there's been this complete shrinkage in the public sphere, otherwise, of spaces, which is why you see, like you say, these big arguments around monuments and museums, because where else are you going to go? 

Do you think they're up to the challenge? Can you think of museums doing that work well right now?

Naomi Beckwith:

I think it will take some training. I don't claim to have all the answers to, you know, how to engage with this new pressure of the expansion of our civic roles. I think we have to begin to reimagine ourselves a little bit. We have to reimagine our public as very different from that kind of enlightenment subject. 

I think we still have to reclaim some of that space from the white-hot market and and tell a compelling story about why we exist. So it'll take some work, but I don't think we have a choice. 

Look, you brought up a very important example of the destruction of monuments. Most of the people who took that statue of Colston down and threw it in the river will not be able to give you a disquisition on the importance of monuments, right? But they do understand symbolic value. And we, as museum professionals, are the keeper of symbolic values. And we need to respect people's understanding of that and walk with them through that. 

But I also want to think about the ways in which, when the world began to open after the pandemic, or when I was living in the city in the wake of 9/11, how many people ran to the Met? How many people went to museums? People still trust us, and it doesn't look like trust. But I think that agitation and advocacy inside our spaces is a sign that they're really looking for us to help them also navigate all the symbols thrown at them, especially when those symbols come in the form of death and destruction.

Charlotte Burns:

I think you're right, that's so true. That’s where people go to find that connection with—communion, I guess—with other people's emotions, whether past or present. 

[Music break]

Charlotte Burns:

So I'm going to ask you a couple of ‘what ifs’ just to round us out. 

Naomi Beckwith:

Okay.

Charlotte Burns:

I was watching one of your videos that you've done. It was a show called My Chicago, and you're driving around Chicago. You were talking about the role of a curator as being a translator, and the host said, a lot of people just say they don't understand that it makes them feel uncomfortable or stupid. And you said yeah, this happens every day of my life. And I thought, well, what if art didn't make people feel uncomfortable or stupid or lacking in some way?

Naomi Beckwith:  

Art doesn't make people feel stupid. People just don't trust themselves. So I think the question is, what if we actually help people trust themselves in the face of something that felt bigger than them? And I think if we did that, we’d probably be better able to talk to each other about things, right, we'd be able to talk to each other in this kind of social space of political agitation, and we’d definitely, I think, be able to talk to each other much more cogently around cultural exchange.

Charlotte Burns:

Okay, another question for you. What if the canon didn't matter? By which I mean artists today, not all of them find the canon to be totally relevant anyway to them. What if it doesn't matter?

Naomi Beckwith:

Every artist has a canon that matters to them. I think first, it's important to talk about multiple canons. No artist, or at least one I find compelling, sprouts from the head of Zeus fully formed. Every artist is looking at something that came before them. The ones I find the most compelling are the ones who are the most self-aware around that. So I think the question is, what if we took a little bit more time to understand what those canons are that are important to that particular artist and then begin to judge for ourselves whether or not this is something we want to engage with.

Charlotte Burns:

What is the ‘what if’ that motivates you?

Naomi Beckwith:

That's a good question. The ‘what if’ for me is, what would I do if I had unlimited resources? 

But I think that's a utopic. What would I do? This sounds really selfish but I’d build other Guggenheims. [Laughs] They wouldn’t look like this one, though, and they probably wouldn't be in the form of Abu Dhabi. But I'm really interested in what would it mean to have a proper network of museums, right? Not just distinctive ones but a network of museums doing that work of cultural exchange, as we do on a small level now at the Guggenheim, sharing exhibitions. But you know, what if we were a multi-sited institution that thought of itself much more unitarily? 

What else would I do with unlimited resources? I’d do a lot of conservation work. I’d do a lot of arts training. I’d do a helluva lot of professional development for people who don't traditionally have access to the arts. 

But I also think it's very important to not ask the question about winning the lottery. But also imagine, what am I going to do with what I have now? And again, in that spirit of not being ashamed of what might be perceived as not enough, or a lack, but really understanding, I still have a gift. I have a gift in this position, I have a gift in this incredible institution, I have the gift of access to a wealth of incredible colleagues who have intelligences beyond my imagination. What are we going to do with it now?

Charlotte Burns:

What is the Guggenheim going to do with it now?

Naomi Beckwith:

Right now, I think we're going to open Abu Dhabi. And we're gonna ask the question, ‘what if the center of our conversation around art isn't going to be cited in the Western world?’ What are the stories that we're going to tell when we have a global collection in the Middle East? And what, then, is our responsibility to the growing stories that are going to come out of that amazing remit?

Charlotte Burns: 

Naomi, this has been a true pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. 

Naomi

You're welcome. 

Charlotte Burns:

I always love our conversations. 

Naomi Beckwith:

I also always love our conversation Charlotte, and really, really look forward to more and thinking about what happens if we don't just change the numbers but begin to change our hearts and minds.

Charlotte Burns:

I think that's a perfect, perfect question to end us on. 

Naomi, thank you so much for joining us.

Naomi Beckwith:

Til soon. You’re welcome. Bye bye.

Charlotte Burns:

Thank you once again to Naomi Beckwith for that conversation and for helping us untangle some fascinating ‘what ifs.’ Naomi is a next-generation museum leader, someone actively working to recalibrate the field in the most exciting and dynamic ways. 

Next time we’ll be talking to Glenn Lowry, who’s been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. We talk about his concerns about democracy itself, divisiveness in culture, among many other things. 

Glenn Lowry:

If we start to believe that trustees whose political positions are different than ours, or whose financial investments don't align with our values are no longer welcome in our institutions, I think of that as fascism. “I don't like what you do. Therefore, you are excluded.” That's a bad place for us as a society to be. It doesn't matter whether they're of the progressive left or the reactionary right if they're supporting the programs and artists we believe in. 

Charlotte Burns:

That’s all coming up in the next episode of The Art World: What If…?! 

The 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.

Introducing The Art World: What If…?!

What if we reimagined everything in culture, from painting to patronage? Tune in to The Art World: What If…?! to hear some of the leading thinkers, creators and innovators in the art world rethink the system, exploring the consequences with wit, wisdom and humor. 

Join art journalist Charlotte Burns and world-renowned art advisor Allan Schwartzman as they exclusively interview museum leaders, collectors and artists including MoMA director Glenn Lowry, Guggenheim deputy director Naomi Beckwith, non-profit leader Kemi Ilesanmi, curator Cecilia Alemani and Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the director of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and many others over the course of the series.

From the team behind In Other Words and Hope & Dread, The Art World: What If…? is brought to you by Schwartzman& for Art& and produced by Studio Burns.

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: 

Hello, I’m Charlotte Burns, an arts journalist.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman, an art advisor.

Charlotte Burns:

And this is a brand-new podcast series from the makers of In Other Words and Hope & Dread.

Allan Schwartzman:

It’s called The Art World: What If…?!

[Audio of guests]

Charlotte Burns:

Each week we'll be joined by fascinating people—innovators in art and culture—from museum directors and other leaders to curators, collectors and artists. 

Naomi Beckwith:

It’s true. You know, we have a planet burning, but we also have, in many ways, museums burning. 

Allan Schwartzman:

Our conversations are with today’s leading thinkers and creators, among them Naomi Beckwith, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Kemi Ilesanmi, Glenn Lowry, and Cecilia Alemani. And others whose names may not be as familiar to you yet.

Glenn Lowry:

If we can’t have these conversations, if they become so polarized that they lead to divisiveness, political alienation, even violence, then we are going to fail as a society.

Charlotte Burns:

We’ll be asking our guests to imagine different futures for the art world. We’ll be asking them, “what if?”

Allan Schwartzman:

This show is driven by the need to look now at culture from different perspectives because we’re on the precipice of dramatic cultural and historical change that we’re probably not able to see. We want to shift our perspectives—and yours. 

Kemi Ilesanmi:

There’s a power in naming. Making things visible and legible so that you can then decide what to do with the thing that you just named. [Laughs]

Charlotte Burns:

Once we’ve named it, how do we navigate it? What are some of the biggest shifts that need to happen for art to stay relevant in a dramatically changing world?

Glenn Lowry:

If you go to a museum for certitude, you will ultimately be disappointed.

Cecilia Alemani:

Can we look at what’s been happening since the pandemic as a sort of, a new wave coming through the art world?

Allan Schwartzman:

So what are these new waves? How do we overcome some of these complex issues? And how do we talk? How do we think about value?

Naomi Beckwith:

Listen, the market is dominant because it’s glitzy, and it has things that people understand, like numbers. My job, and the job of my colleagues, is to do something that gets people to grasp the ineffable. 

Cecilia Alemani:

What if financial values was no longer the way we talk about success?

Charlotte Burns:

What if art and culture can change the world?

Kemi Ilesanmi:

You have to name dreams so that the universe can figure out how to help you make them happen. So if we don’t invite people to even name the dream, they can’t get to where they need to go.

Allan Schwartzman:

The Art World: What If…?! will be available weekly from January 12th, when you can listen to three bonus episodes right away. 

Charlotte Burns:

The Art World: What If…?! 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. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.