Curating the West
What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
Travel in these pandemic days is more theoretical than possible. But I wish I could have seen Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Forgotten Stories: Northwest Public Art of the 1930s at the Tacoma Art Museum. On the international side was the retrospective of Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery of Art in London.
What are you reading?
I am an eclectic reader, and favor especially books on women (a strong curatorial interest of mine). Ones I have particularly enjoyed this year are Julie Summers’ Dressed for War: The Story of Vogue Editor Audrey Withers, Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents: A Story of Art,
Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Christina Weyl’s The Women of Atelier 17 and Maura Reilly’s Curatorial Activism.
Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art from Indigenous North America, the Heard Museum’s stunning show of contemporary American and Canadian artists. The pieces address challenging issues— including climate change, health, ethnic violence and gender identity—in works of striking yet subversive beauty.
What are you researching at the moment?
I am curating an exhibition titled Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West, scheduled to run November 7, 2021, through March 6, 2022. Mining was a transformative industry in the American West, its operations competing in scale and color with the sublime scale of the natural landscape of the region. The show will include works from throughout the West, including Morning at the Little Daisy, Jerome, 1936, and Little Boy Lives in a Copper Camp, 1939, by Arizona native Lew Davis. Philip Latimer Dike’s
Copper gives a dramatic aerial view of Jerome.
What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I’ve had a long interest in the New Deal era, and am committed to researching the art history of Arizona. A show focused on African American artists supported by the WPA would be fascinating (there is actually an Arizona chapter in this history). Another provocative exhibition would be one on Japanese-american artists who were interned during World
War II (Arizona was the site of two of the largest camps).