Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/691761
culturedmag.com 221 Adrienne Edwards Curator, PERFORMA, and Curator at Large Visual Arts, Walker Art Center New York City, NY "Everything begins really instinctively. It comes through, on one level, from a very deep ethical imperative that I have. The best way I can describe that is that I would always get irritated when I read something that said, 'Oh, this artist's work is about art and life or art and politics.' I thought that it was a disservice to the work, because it reduced and conflated really complicated material processes or formal concerns and certainly their own political, social, cultural and even economic reasons for creating the work. So that ethical imperative is really trying to get to the many threads that are present to allow a space for all of that to vibrate and be suspended in a way. For me, it's important for the curatorial process to be a bit provisional—a mode of visual note taking." Roya Sachs Independent Curator New York City, NY "One of the most important things for me in my practice is to engage the audience. I really try to bring the experience of art back into the realm. I specialize in immersive and experiential exhibitions, and also performance. I like bringing back this idea of act and react, because in the end art is an expression and people should react to it. I also like taking people out of their comfort zone and into an environment where they're in a different place. Live art and performance has the power to engage and pull an audience in. That's really the crucial outline for all the exhibitions that I do." Sarah Lewis Assistant Professor and Curator, Harvard University Cambridge, MA "Currently the focus is on understanding the relationship between art and citizenship and how the arts impact our vision of the society we would like to create. What did Duke Ellington say about his music? 'My favorite song is always the next one.' For me, the show that's coming up is the most significant one. It will open at the Harvard Art Museums, and be called 'Vision and Justice.' It's the most meaningful for me because it tightly crystalizes and synthesizes a great deal of my interests in one exhibition. The other show that was pivotal for me was curating the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in 2010. That was crucial for my own development. I was the curatorial assistant on that six years earlier, when Rob Storr curated 'Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque.' To go in six years from working for someone who was curating it to doing it myself was a huge honor. It was a way to see how a certain set of ideas is best deployed. It was the first time I saw the relationship between an idea and its form." Daniel Palmer Associate Curator, Public Art Fund New York City, NY "I have immersed myself in contemporary art and work with a lot of emerging artists. I wanted to take their work and figure out how to present it in a more historic context. There's been this artificial division that's been thrust on the world where something that's old is historical and happened way back when, and maybe we look at it but we look at it through a microscopic lens. Then there's the art of the last five minutes and everybody is gaga over it but they don't necessarily want to think about how it occurs in a much larger scope or how it's influenced by other things that are more historic. For me, I don't really feel like I need to consider myself only a curator of historic art or only a curator of super contemporary work. For me, it's been really special to be able to play between the two and create a space for a much longer dialogue." EDWARDS: WHITNEY BROWNE; PALMER: CAREY DENNISTON; LEWIS: KWESI ABBENSETTS