Tag: Arts Interviews

Katherine Fleming On the Getty’s Role in the 21st Century

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Katherine Fleming. Julie Skarratt Photography Inc

Though a noted scholar of Mediterranean culture, history and religion, Katherine Fleming’s love affair with the region was initially less than academic. “I could try and hook up a highfalutin’ academic answer,” she told Observer. “But the real bottom line is that when I was a teenager, I dropped out of college and took a job as a waitress at a Taverna in Crete.”

Fleming, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, picked up modern Greek during her “wild, well-spent youth” on the island—a skill that in subsequent years came in handy in her studies of the humanities. “Since I had Greek, I wound up following a course of study that made it possible for me to make use of and deploy it,” she said. But for all the hinted-at shenanigans, the scholarly path she eventually followed didn’t come out of left field for Fleming, the daughter of a literary critic and Episcopal priest. After her adventures in Greece, she earned degrees at Barnard University, the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley before going on to work as a lecturer at several California universities and eventually becoming provost of New York University in 2016.

Today, however, Fleming works in an entirely different field. Since 2022, she has been president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world’s wealthiest arts institution with an $8.6 billion endowment as of last year. She oversees the Los Angeles-based organization’s Getty Foundation, Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute and its two museums—alongside the 1,400 employees employed by them. Fleming was hired as a strategist to help unify the Getty’s various entities. “I spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a public-facing cultural institution in the 21st Century because it can mean something pretty different from what it meant even twenty-five years ago,” she said.

A new definition of access for art institutions

One of those shifts includes evolved ways of thinking about who should have access to fine art museums. Located in Brentwood and Malibu, the Getty Center and Getty Villa respectively showcase pre-20th-century European art and Greek and Roman antiquities from the Getty’s more than 125,000-piece collection. “The organization is going through the process of trying to think really carefully and creatively about what it means to be wealthy, on top of a hill made of marble, in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in L.A.,” says Fleming. “We have to make that place as welcoming as possible to as many people as possible and to really make the people of the city of L.A. aware of it as theirs.”

A view of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Shane Gritzinger/FilmMagic

By emphasizing both physical and online visitor experiences, Fleming hopes the Getty will become representative of the kinds of institutionally neutral places that one can visit for a moment of reflection. This is especially important “in an increasingly chaotic world,” says Fleming, when “people are trying to tell people what to think and how to think about things.” In addition to ensuring visitors can interpret holdings in their own ways, without an assumption that one must have attained a certain level of education or have a particular knowledge base to truly appreciate artwork, Fleming wants the Getty museums to be “a kind of public square” where people can gather to enjoy the architecture and ocean views.

Other priorities include investing in the Getty’s public resource features, such as educational programs and teacher curriculums, and continuing major cataloguing and digitization initiatives like its work on the Johnson Publishing Company Archive. The producer of magazines including Ebony and Jet, the publishing company’s trove of images is co-owned by the Getty and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and stands as one of the most significant depictions of Black culture in the 20th Century, with pivotal snapshots of famous figures like Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr. and Billie Holiday. “I’m very proud to be at an organization that owns that archive and is actively working to make it as widely accessible as possible—and effectively saving that archive from going into private hands,” Fleming said.

Exploring new models of ownership

The Getty CEO is also proud of her decision to commit $17 million to Pacific Standard Time, an arts initiative that brings together institutions across Southern California on a five-year cycle. Renamed PST, its next edition will kick off this September with an emphasis on interactions between art and science. Another major move made under Fleming’s leadership occurred in 2023 when the Getty and London’s National Portrait Gallery jointly purchased the 18th-century Joshua Reynolds painting Portrait of Mai (Omai), which depicts the first Polynesian to visit Britain. “We are in a world in which increasingly we have shared services, we have things that rest on the premise that lots of people should have access to the same goods,” said Fleming. Acquired for $62 million, the work will travel between the two institutions for exhibitions, research and conservation.

The courtyard of the Getty Villa in Malibu. Nick Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images

Fleming’s enthusiasm for experimenting with ownership models extends beyond collaborative purchases. She cited fractional ownership platforms such as Masterworks and Artex, which offer the opportunity to acquire portions or shares of fine art, as key evolutions in an art market increasingly populated by investors and rising prices. “I don’t know yet what I think of them—it’s too early for me to make a judgment,” she says. “But I find it really, really interesting.”

Her own artistic inclinations reflect her commitment to culture in Los Angeles. Fleming is particularly excited about the rise of L.A.-based artists, like Getty Prize winner Mark Bradford, who are playing a role in shaping the city’s artistic evolution. Other influential creators include Lauren Halsey, whose installations in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles address local issues and offer critiques of gentrification, and Catherine Opie, whose photography documents Californian subcultures and queer communities. It’s the artists who are driving the region’s thriving cultural growth, said Fleming, as opposed to “the ecosystems of institutions that sell or curate or present their art.”

Amid an especially dynamic time for the Los Angeles arts community, Fleming believes the Getty needs to continue evolving and strengthening its commitment to the city it has long invested in. Fostering collaboration across the region and expanding its open-access resources are key elements of that mission—as are its plans to turn its physical campuses into more inclusive and welcoming sites. “In a place like L.A., which is so atomized and internal, people are in real need of it.”

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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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April 12, 2024
Katy Hessel Talks About Putting Women Artists Front and Center at Five Major Museums

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Katy Hessel Lily Bertrand-Webb

“’Museums Without Men’… ‘The Story of Art Without Men’… these are tongue-in-cheek attention-grabbing titles. Because it raises awareness: why museums without men?” Katy Hessel tells Observer. Championing a fiercely feminist re-reading of art, past and present, is Hessel’s signature. If you’re not familiar with her name, you’re likely familiar with her work. She is behind the Great Women Artists podcast and a runaway-hit Instagram account (@thegreatwomenartists), in addition to having published the best-selling The Story of Art Without Men. Said book—a compendium of women artists from the Renaissance to today in direct response to E.H. Gombrich’s women-absentee The Story of Art—was mostly championed for its corrective historical narrative, shrugging off the occasional dismissive accusations of being “tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism.”

To celebrate Women’s History Month, Katy Hessel launched Museums Without Men, a new but ongoing series of audio guides highlighting women and gender non-conforming artists in the public collections of international museums. The series launched with five participating institutions. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were first, and the Hepworth Wakefield in England, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Tate Britain soon followed.

Observer recently spoke with Hessel—who was included in our 2023 list of The Most Influential People in the Art World—about making museums accessible, non-binary artists to know, and thinking more carefully about museum captions.

To start, how did these guides come to be?

The Met was first—it was only sort of meant to be a one-off thing that I was doing with them. The guides are created for lots of different reasons. One was the fact that when you go into museums, oftentimes you’re overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and what you really want to do is spend time with seven or eight works—as much as it kills you—but really sort of get into it and leave the museum being like I really looked at something properly today. The whole point of my work is to get as many people into the museum as possible.

Hessel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Aurola Wedman Alfaro / Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Whenever I go to museums, obviously I always look at the label and see if it’s a woman, because that’s how I’ve discovered and learned about so many artists. Not only does that bring me into these artists’ lives and work but it also makes me realize how many women artists are being collected by these institutions—and reveals the shocking gender imbalance.

You communicate through many media: an engaged Instagram, a book, a column in The Guardian, a podcast. Are these guides a complement to what you’re already doing? Or do you see this as something separate?

I always think: what can I give people that will help them? Instagram serves a purpose, which is a daily dose of artists or artworks; it’s very condensed, it’s surface level. The book is a compilation of everything. It breaks my heart to have written just 400 words on Cindy Sherman—it shouldn’t be allowed—but you could also go to my podcast and listen to an episode with William J. Simmons, who’s one of the leading scholars on Sherman. The podcast is a whole hour to learn about an artist: it’s with a world expert, or it’s with the artist, and it’s hopefully this fantastic insight. It’s about saying to people, no matter where you enter from: welcome. You can go as deep—or not—as you like.

Do you think men will pick up the guides too?

I think it’s for everyone. There’s nothing inherently different about art created by a different gender; it’s more that society and gatekeepers have prioritized one group in history.

The National Gallery—not that I work with the National Gallery yet—has 1 percent women artists. However much I wish I could take out all the works and replace them with women artists, or make it equal, I can’t do that. What we can do is draw attention to these different artists in the museum and hopefully that will help. It’s a tiny way to raise awareness for the visitor, to realize that there’s more work to do, to introduce new names—and also for the museums to be like actually, we really need to focus on our representation here. They’re just missing out on great works.

Barbara Hepworth, ‘Two Forms with White (Greek),’ 1963, Wakefield Permanent Art Collection. The Hepworth Wakefield / © Bowness / Jonty Wilde

But how do we get men to feel implicated? Men may acknowledge it’s unfair that parity is far from being reached in a museum setting, as elsewhere, but that may not necessarily galvanize them to listen. I imagine with other media you’re involved in, it’s primarily women who are engaging?

It’s definitely majority women—but I engaged with so many male curators for this, and museum directors who were men and who were supportive of it. I hope that it’s for everyone. Curator Furio Rinaldi at the Legion of Honor, with whom I worked closely on the Mary Cassatt and the Leonor Fini work is curating the first-ever North American solo exhibition of Tamara de Lempicka, who was one of the most incredible artists of the 20th century yet has never had a major solo show in the U.S.

“Museums Without Men,” “The Story of Art Without Men”—these are tongue-in-cheek attention-grabbing titles. Because it raises awareness: why museums without men? Well, because historically most of these museums were Museums Without Women. And so, we need to talk about that. I want to invite everyone in because it’s about introducing people to artists they might not know. I hope that men enjoy it—it’s for them too, completely. And from a position of privilege that anyone stands in, there should always be interest in a different perspective. I don’t only want to learn about people who look like me. I want to learn about all sorts of people.

The press release mentioned that the artists featured are women and non-binary. Could you give an example or two of some of the non-binary artists?

Absolutely. We’ve got people like Gluck [Hannah Gluckstein], who was a fantastic artist working at the start of the 20th Century. They were based in London, where they did portraits of the queer community in the 1920s and 1930s. Virginia Woolf was writing Orlando.

There’s a fantastic artist called Rene Matić, a photographer whose work is at the Hepworth Wakefield. It’s this really beautiful series where they follow their friend Travis Alabanza, who’s a performance artist. There are gorgeous pictures of dressing rooms and quiet moments and the trust that people have to let each other into their very personal lives.

There’s a forthcoming expansion of the guides to Vienna, Austria—do you have other target venues that you can speak about? What is the scope that you have in mind for the guides?

I would love to take it global: the dream would be to work with museums and have translations. I only speak English, sadly, so I’ve done lots of projects and speaking engagements in America. That’s why we started with English-speaking places. There has been interest from other institutions since we launched. But yes, I hope it’s just the beginning of something—we’ll see.

Has there been more interest in contemporary versus historical women artists? Obviously, there’s a smaller pool historically, but have you noticed people gravitating toward anywhere in particular in the timeline of women artists?

I have never noticed that. My pool spans a whole millennium… I think it’s a mix. It’s always exciting talking about someone historic because you can talk about that from a very contemporary point of view. The work has outlived this person maybe for 500 years, but that doesn’t make it any less contemporary than works we’re looking at. And thinking about where the work is in the space, as well, and how it feeds the other works around it and how maybe we can look differently at them… When I was in San Francisco in November, I did the Louise Nevelson tour, and I looked at Robert Motherwell next to her and I saw him in a completely different light because of that.

Lee Krasner, ‘Siren,’ 1966, Oil on canvas, from The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981. Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. / Cathy Carver

In terms of the way museums have been pledging to aim for parity—however far away that may be—you used the word “accelerate” relative to the guides changing the pace at which people are focusing on women artists. How much have you seen that acceleration at play? As you’re speaking with curators and directors in institutions, what is your sense of the future?

I think it’s about having certain people who have the power at the moment. They’re conscious of what is in museums and what work needs to be done. I remember speaking with Emily Beeny, a curator at the Legion of Honor, about Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Cupid and Psyche. It’s a really interesting painting of this well-known Greek myth, but Cupid is not even present. Benoist was really telling this work from Psyche’s point of view. I find it fascinating that certain curators, and those who have power in museums, are saying: We need to be collecting this kind of work because we need a balanced perspective of what history is. Otherwise we’re getting a skewed idea of what happened before us. I wouldn’t say it was by chance that there’s a plethora of female directors, which ties in with the correlation of more representation.

Not to say that the men in charge aren’t conscientious—of course they are. Let’s just say the people who are in charge of a lot of museums are now very conscientious about representation. We can all do things that are in our own remit to help accelerate equality for anything, whether it’s supporting a business or buying a book. My thing is: I can make audio guides and I have a platform to do that, so why not use that in a positive way?

Do you get pushback from people who feel that using a gendered lens to go through a museum is flattening in some way? What is your response to that criticism?

I haven’t personally received any feedback like that. This is totally not prescribing that this has to be the way that people enter museums. I think it’s nice that it’s an option. People are excited about it because perhaps they won’t realize that a work is by a woman. In the Met audio guide, we were in this room in the European galleries—a sea of Courbet nudes! The female nude in her glory. Then there is this huge painting by Rosa Bonheur of the horse fair, and it just towers over every other work. To know that that’s by a woman, in this room, is extraordinary—the lengths she had to go to, to paint that.

Rosa Bonheur, ‘The Horse Fair,’ Painting: oil on canvas, 96 1/4 x 199 1/2 in. (244.5 x 506.7 cm), gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887. Trujillo Juan / Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York

Similarly, in the de Young Museum, there’s a fantastic moment of American realism in the 1930s with these images of farms and quite mundane family dinner settings in a working environment. And in the middle is this amazing sculpture from 2020 by Elizabeth Catlett. It’s the center of all these works that are by men, and the story is very much dominated by the male narrative—but then you have Stepping Out, which puts her in a very important place.

People don’t need to abide by my guides; they’re just to help them through. I often take friends to museums and pick out five to seven works I want to show them. What I do for my friends, I made into a guide.

There was a Rosa Bonheur exhibition in France last year at the Musée d’Orsay, and I was appalled by the text in the museum, which was very elliptical about her queer identity, saying instead that she ‘lived with a friend for a long time.’ The text refused to engage overtly with her queer identity. Some museums remain very conservative.

It’s ridiculous. How we contextualize artists is so important. I was at the National Gallery the other day, and I went to look at works by women artists—and every single gallery label for women artists, all about fifty words, included a male artist’s name. For Artemisia Gentileschi, it said she was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, who was the contemporary of Caravaggio. Or for Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who—it said in the first line—this work is a response to a Rubens self-portrait. No one is writing of Orazio Gentileschi that Artemisia Gentileschi is his daughter—which is really what they should be saying.

It’s about making sure you contextualize them in a respectful way. Personally, to say someone has a queer identity, it’s just a normal thing, and it’s about normalizing the way that people live. Because there is no shame in that. And I hope I can be respectful to all different people with these guides.

I don’t assume that people know who Artemisia Gentileschi is. It’s not a definitive thing for the artists. It’s a nice resource. I hope it encourages people to take something from it and have their own interpretations. Creating these was even great for me to get to know new work—it led me down rabbit holes for artists I thought I knew so well!

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Sarah Moroz

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April 2, 2024
Collector Spotlight: Don and Mera Rubell On 60 Years of Marriage and Art

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Mera and Don Rubell at the Washington, D.C., campus of the Rubell Museum. Shuran Huang for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Don and Mera Rubell first met in the early 1960s in the library of Brooklyn College. The duo, now aged 83 and 80 respectively, sat at the same table for six months without saying a word to each other. “Then he says, would you marry me?” Mera tells Observer.

When they revisited the library 50 years later, they were astonished to discover that their initial meeting had taken place on the art floor. “We didn’t know at the time, because neither one of us had anything to do with art,” says Mera. She was a psych major at Brooklyn College, while Don was a mathematics graduate from Cornell.

Today, however, art is very much a part of their lives. The Rubells oversee one of the preeminent collections of contemporary art in the U.S., with 7,400 works by more than 1,000 artists, and they have a widely acknowledged and well-earned reputation as spotters of young talent. “We’ve only had one week where we haven’t owed the art world money,” Don tells Observer. What’s less well-known is just how much their relationship is at the heart of their collecting activities. Don and Mera will celebrate 60 years of marriage and 59 years of buying art this year, and they aren’t planning on slowing down anytime soon.

The Rubells’ humble beginnings

They fell into art collecting while living in Chelsea, where the couple walked around the studio-filled neighborhood in between breaks of studying and began building relationships with the artists working and living there. “At some point, they said, ‘Well why don’t you buy something?’” recalls Mera. But with Don attending medical school and Mera working as a teacher on a $100 weekly salary, they didn’t have an art collector’s budget. So they agreed to begin acquiring works in the $50 to $100 range by putting aside funds for modest payment plans.

After relocating to Miami from New York in the 1990s, the couple now sustain their passion for art through real estate. They run Rubell Hotels, which Mera describes as “a day job to pay for the collecting.” And as for the collecting? Masterpieces by the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Yayoi Kusama Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami can be seen at their Rubell Museum, a private art institution with locations in Miami and Washington, D.C.

The idea to open their collection to the public came from the Rubells’ son Jason, who alongside his artist sister, Jennifer, got the art bug from his parents. As a young teen, Jason acquired his first piece—a painting by the then-rising star George Condo—with a payment plan funded by a tennis racket-stringing business. He went on to study art history at Duke, where his senior project focused on how private collections become public museums. “That was the seed that got us involved,” says Mera. “He was so seduced by the idea of these private collectors becoming public institutions that he encouraged us to do the same.”

In 1993, they opened what was then known as the Rubell Family Collection in a two-story warehouse formerly used for storage by the Drug Enforcement Agency in Miami’s Wynwood area. The area’s transformation from a once-underdeveloped neighborhood into a leading arts district is often credited to the Rubells, who also played a role in convincing Art Basel leaders to bring the fair to Miami Beach. To keep up with their growing collection, Don and Mera moved the renamed Rubell Museum to an expanded space in the Allapattah district of Miami—another neighborhood that has seen a proliferation of arts spaces and increasing gentrification in recent years. In 2022, they opened a Washington, D.C., outpost in a former school once attended by Marvin Gaye.

The Rubell collection is built on consensus

The couple were early collectors of artists like Keith Haring. Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Despite having been in the art collecting game for more than half a century, the Rubells continue to focus on truly contemporary work. “A lot of collectors fixate on their generation and they stick with that generation,” says Mera. “All of a sudden, 50 years later, you wake up and say, ‘Oh my god, I’m only focused on artists that are dying or dead.’”

They primarily focus on work by young artists and those who haven’t yet received mainstream recognition—the same tactic they applied when becoming early collectors of now-famed artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman. “The dream and the fantasy is really to find the new Basquiat. And there always is a new Basquiat,” says Mera. The couple pointed to the French-Senegalese Alexandre Diop and Havana-born Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, as well as several young Los Angeles-based artists, as emerging talents to keep an eye on. While the Rubells try not to sell their artwork, they occasionally deaccession pieces to fund the acquisition of new ones.

Don and Mera say they are offered the best works by artists and gallerists who know it will be shared with the public. “They don’t want you to hide it in your basement, they want to show other people,” says Don. The couple is known for their intensive approach to art acquisition, which involves studio visits, in-depth conversations with artists and a rule that Don, Mera and their son Jason must unanimously agree on every purchase. If even one family member vetoes, the acquisition is a no-go. The three bring different strengths to the table, according to Mera, who describes herself as “more impulsive,” while Don focuses on research and Jason brings an art history perspective.

“I would say 50 percent of the time, we agree immediately, and 50 percent of the time, it’s a bloody battle,” says Don. The trio has only broken protocol once, when Don viewed a work he considered “absolutely fantastic” but his wife and son weren’t quite as enthusiastic about. “I bought the work without consulting everybody, and then Mera and Jason made my life so miserable that it was the only time we canceled,” he recalls.

Consensus also shapes how the Rubells operate as a couple. “It’s frightening when someone is out of control passionate about something and has the checkbook to spend it,” says Mera, adding that their process is reflective of how they started their life together. “It could have been his money, my money or our money. And it became our money,” she says. “So if we’re going to collect art, that decision has to be in the ‘we,’ not with an ‘I.’”

Art as a multigenerational affair

The art collectors also seek input from their daughter Jennifer, who chooses not to participate in their collecting activities but still participates in acquisition conversations, and their five grandchildren. “We have the eyes of different generations looking at the work,” says Don. “Ultimately, the history of what this work will be depends on a lot of different eyes, thousands of eyes, looking at a piece of work over time. So this is a very unfair advantage over others.”

Kaari Upson, Rubells, (2014). Courtesy the Rubell Museum

When it comes to the future of the Rubell Museum, both Don and Mera concede that they “won’t live forever.” They’re hopeful that their children and grandchildren will continue as stewards of the collection. Although “we’d be very upset if it became a chore for the next generation, or the generation after that,” adds Don. “They have to have the joy that we have.”

But for now, the Rubells are happy to continue pursuing fresh talent and experimenting with new programs. A recent collaboration with theater company Miami New Drama, for example, saw playwrights stage shows inspired by and performed in front of artwork hanging in the Miami Rubell Museum. One of the dramatic works centered on the 2014 piece Rubells by the late Kaari Upson, who was commissioned to create a portrait of Don and Mera for their 50th anniversary. Instead of photographing the collectors for a traditional painting, she asked for the couple’s shared mattress and cast it in silicone. The Rubells describe the journey their anniversary portrait took from mattress to play as “a way to understand what art does to the brain and imagination.”

It can also be seen as mirroring their own journey in the art world, which has strengthened their marriage instead of strained it. “My story is not about a successful woman with a vision to make something happen,” says Mera. “My story is really about how to make something happen inside of a relationship. And then, by extension, inside of a family.”

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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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March 29, 2024
Dr. Namhee Park On Video Conservation, Mass Media and Finding the Next Nam June Paik

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Nam June Paik Art Center Director Dr. Namhee Park. Courtesy NJP Art Center

Dr. Namhee Park was recently named the new director of the Nam June Paik Art Center, the Yongin, South Korea institution tasked with protecting the Korean-American artist’s legacy, curating shows highlighting his work in classic and new contexts. Paik seems to be having a moment, with a new documentary and his prominent placement in the Museum of Modern Art’s recent show about video art. But when doesn’t it feel like that? Observer recently caught up with Dr. Park to hear more about the institution’s relationship with the ever-relevant artist.

Why do you think the work of Nam June Paik remains so beloved today?

Nam June Paik was born in the 20th Century, but his spirit was already living in the 21st Century. If his art was avant-garde in the 20th Century, it can be considered contemporary realist art in the 21st Century. Since it is realist art as a ‘total reality’ that hybridizes almost all areas of intuitive but philosophical, sensuous but technical, it can be felt emotionally and methodologically more familiar than in the past, and from a media archaeological perspective, it can be felt as nostalgia. In that sense, his art is an ‘old future’ and is in touch with the art of the contemporary digital media environment.

His art and life attitude of “no boundaries,” “curiosity” and “infinite connection” to all things in the world, including media, information, technology, nature and planets, are still vivid values to his contemporaries. When I took office last year, I proposed ‘hyperconnectivity,’ ‘heritage community’ and ‘polyphony’ as the core values of the Nam June Paik Art Center to evoke and spread this spirit in his art to the contemporary era. This is because his art has already penetrated the current hyper-connected spirit and phenomena.

Nam June Paik with ‘Cyberforum’ (1994). Photo By MICHAEL MACOR/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

How is his legacy perceived in Korea?

Although he spent more time in Japan, Germany and the United States than in Korea, the affection and pride for Nam June Paik and his art is very significant in Korea. We Koreans are very grateful to Nam June Paik, not only for his status as an internationally renowned artist and his outlook for future society but also for his contribution to driving Korea toward internationalization. In particular, since the NJP Art Center opened in 2008, it has been working hard to preserve Paik’s legacy by collaborating with many artists at home and abroad. The roles of former directors Youngchul Lee, Manu Park, Jin-seok Seo and Kim Seong Eun were crucial; they were at the forefront of promoting Nam June Paik’s legacy more widely through exhibitions and research. However, the awareness and promotion methods of its importance do not lead to active or full support.

His legacy, which includes his role in the art world and his global perspective and desire for world peace, still requires much time to receive more empathy, broader awareness, and practices. As the fifth director of the NJP Art Center, I presented the new vision to create a ‘shared museum connected through art and technology’, which aims to hyperlink Nam June Paik’s legacy with contemporary times. The NJP Art Center, named “the house where Nam June Paik lives for a long time” by Paik himself, serves as a platform for the post-Nam June Paik through his legacy. Continuing research related to Paik every year through the academic journal NJP Reader is also a process of practically understanding his legacy and putting it into practice.

Of course, besides our museum, more and more people, individually or collectively, recognize and study Paik’s legacy as very important. The NJP Art Center is working to preserve his legacy by collaborating with major Korean institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea and the Leeum Museum of Art.

I understand that some of his video work is very hard to maintain these days, given that much of the technology it used is no longer manufactured. What is your ethos towards conservation?

Not only Nam June Paik’s art, but also media-based works in which electronic devices play an essential role in the realization of art from the late 20th Century to the present are being reviewed from various angles, as the object of exhibition, collection and research, regarding their operation, sustainability and preservation. In particular, many are interested in Paik’s works using television monitors because they are the most original examples of this media art. The fact that CRT monitors are no longer manufactured due to the technological development of television may cause concern that problems with the operation or preservation of his work may arise. I thought that by constantly asking, ‘How did Paik deal with this problem?’ we should not forget his openness, flexibility and quickness while looking at the various situations, testimonies and records in which he worked.

His work, which pioneered video art by placing television at the center of his art, was a combination of the developer’s attitude and artistic experimentation from the beginning. Paik was always open to many situations and had the agility to apply various elements, even when confronting variables or unexpected situations. For example, Zen for TV (1963), too, was created by chance in such circumstances. Considering the attitude of Paik and the next steps after the monitor production is discontinued, we keep the following two things in mind: The first is the opinions of the assistants and technicians who worked with Paik, and the second is the remediated perspective of media in the context of technological evolutionism.

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For example, Jung Sung Lee, who worked as a technician for many works of Paik, presents a clear opinion on the monitor issue in The More, the Better (1988), owned by The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA Korea), which is persuasive: “Recently, MMCA Korea announced that as a final restoration method, they would apply the latest technology only in part of the monitor while maintaining the form of the existing cathode-ray tube monitor. However, since the essence of a media artwork is the content of the media inside the monitor, I believe the restoration should be done by replacing it with a new LCD monitor, in line with technological development. Suppose the restoration continues to maintain the original cathode-ray tube. In that case, breakdowns will increase, and the subsequent restoration will become more difficult, ultimately increasing the possibility of raising public skepticism about the work.”

Lee’s comment suggests that replacing it with new media is possible, considering the technicians’ opinions and the essential content of the media that I mentioned earlier. To summarize, my opinion so far is that, just as Nam June Paik’s creative journey was, media such as television are open to the possibility of replacement due to the evolution of technology, which, I believe, will more firmly defend Paik’s legacy.

Nam June Paik Art Center. Courtesy NJP Art Center

What are some of the key challenges facing your institution and how do you plan to tackle them?

The NJP Art Center opened in October 2008 and is now in its seventeenth year. We have worked hard to integrate Nam June Paik’s art into the museum system that collects, exhibits, researches and educates, and now we have reached the point of taking another leap forward. Above all, it is a time when institutional and content conditions must be improved to rebuild as a contemporary media art platform where Nam June Paik and post-Nam June Paik come together. As is the case with many art museums in the era of local autonomy, as time goes by, physical spaces such as exhibition halls and storage facilities initially set up need to be reorganized. In addition, realistic development plans are continuously being considered, such as securing budgets for continuous program development, improving old facilities and public recognition and increasing accessibility.

Many issues are directly related to budget, and various strategies are needed to solve them. We are currently seeking support and cooperation from companies from which we can secure financial resources. Meanwhile, regarding content, the NJP Art Center has reached a point where it is necessary to expand the public forum further so that many researchers can participate. We have been sharing our research through the symposium ‘Gift of Nam June Paik’ and NJP Reader, but we are working on creating ways to share the perspectives and opinions of more researchers.

Part of your mission is to “discover the future Nam June Paik” through your art prize. What are the qualities of that future Nam June Paik?

Nam June Paik was an avant-garde artist full of humor and diligently explored new things. The Paik of the future will artistically embody thoughts that can have as fresh a shock as Paik’s impact on humanity. In other words, the ability to drive the positive function of art artistically and technically is required, under Paik’s spirit, such as child-like curiosity, scientist-like inquisitiveness, avant-gardeness of overthrowing fixed ideas and forms, union/fusion rather than separation/division, and the desire for peace rather than war.

Paik’s work was heavily influenced by the then-new concept of mass media. What do you think he’d make of this era where mass media seems to be dying?

Nam June Paik’s art started with the most popular medium, television, but utilized various technologies and media, including robots, satellites, and lasers. As for mass media, Paik paid attention to it as a system to share information with many people with the advantages of serving as a field to connect and share people and thoughts and also recognized the disadvantages of its one-way communication. When he attempted ‘satellite project’ such as Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), he maximized and demonstrated the advantage that it was possible to have a meeting without the immediacy of information and physical communication through live broadcasting by trying to communicate two-way rather than one-way between cities with a broadcasting system.

Now, this is being done not only by mass media such as television but also by social media connected through the Internet. Paik would have been very interested in this situation for its freedom from the monopoly or fixity of the media and its autonomous activity of new media. He might even be happy to think we are getting closer to spirituality, which he said was the most crucial medium after the laser. He may have been pleased to see that mass media is transitioning to its new role rather than dying and that we are moving toward a world where the openness and diversity of media have expanded. In that sense, he is truly in the time of our old future.

What is your favorite work by Paik in the museum’s collection?

Among Nam June Paik’s many works, my favorite is Moon is the Oldest TV (1965). The work reveals his original understanding of the medium and intuitively reflects the Eastern and Western understandings of time. In this work, created in 1965, the moon’s shape appears different depending on the time of day. The lunar cycle from the new moon to the full moon is divided into twelve television monitors. By inserting a magnet into a cathode-ray tube to interfere with the electromagnetic signals of the internal circuit, Paik made various moon-like shapes appear on the television screen using only those signals. Viewers have an opportunity to think about the length and depth of time, the moment and eternity.

The moon, the oldest light of humanity and the only satellite of the earth, was the object of projection of countless imaginations and aspirations even before scientific exploration. At the NJP Art Center, after the video E-MOON (1999) was added to the original twelve monitors, this work consists of thirteen monitors. The moon, which shows time by recombining it spatially, is formatively meditative and overflows with poetic imagination.

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Dan Duray

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March 20, 2024
Curator Kevin Tervala Reflects On His Time at the Baltimore Museum of Art

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BMA curator Kevin Tervala. Maximilian Franz / Courtesy the BMA

A few months ago the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) named Kevin Tervala as the institution’s new Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator, a role he previously filled on an interim basis for almost a year. Before this posting, Tervala served as head of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific Islands department since 2017, and he brings to the table plenty of ideas about how to program such material for a city as diverse as Baltimore. Observer recently caught up with Tervala to hear about his new role and his thoughts about the art world at large.

You’ve been at the BMA since 2015. What’s unique about it as an institution? What does it do better than others?

In 2018, the BMA went through a strategic planning process that resulted in a radical revision of our mission and vision statement, one that commits us to “embodying a commitment to artistic excellence and social equity in every decision from art presentation, interpretation and collecting, to the composition of our Board of Trustees, staff and volunteers.” This commitment is deeply felt at all levels of the BMA, and since 2018, we have moved rapidly to transform our organization from top to bottom. This has only been possible because of the incredible people who have committed themselves to this institution, from the staff and Board to the artists and Baltimoreans who put their trust in us.

What are some of your favorite shows that you’ve worked on in your tenure there?

That’s a tough one! I have had the privilege of curating eight exhibitions in my time at the BMA, ranging from small, one-gallery presentations to sprawling, multi-gallery projects. Of these, two stand out as my favorites: “Kuba: Fabric of an Empire” (August 19, 2018 – February 24, 2019) and “A Perfect Power: Motherhood and African Art” (April 5, 2020 – March 7, 2021). In “Kuba,” the BMA examined the relationship between the political history of central Africa’s Kuba Kingdom and the designs embroidered into the textiles created for and worn by the kingdom’s elite. This was an enormously fun project to research—one that involved carbon dating a cache of textiles to create a 250-year timeline of Kuba two-dimensional design—and the results helped us understand the important role of fashion when it comes to the exercise of power.

In “A Perfect Power”—an exhibition that examined the role of maternal iconography in historic central African states and societies—I curated the show alongside a truly brilliant cast of scholars and students, including Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, a professor of Sociology, Africana, and Women’s Studies at Stony Brook University; Jennifer Kingsley, Director of the Museums & Society Program at Johns Hopkins University (JHU); and Michael Harper, Hae In Kim, Maria Kyriakakos, Clara Leverenz and Andrea White, undergraduate students in a Spring 2019 Curatorial Practicum that I taught with Jennifer Kingsley at JHU. This collaborative curatorial process was so enormously important in making the exhibition the success that it was, and it also made it a ton of fun.

How do you program for both the people of Baltimore and the broader art world?

This is a great question and one that speaks very directly to everything that we are about at the BMA. Our director, Asma Naeem, has made it her mission to interweave global and local histories, and we are shaping our exhibition program and our curatorial strategy for collection galleries to bring these narratives to the fore. And it is quite an easy task. Baltimore is and always has been a global city. So, if you are focusing on Baltimore-based artists and Baltimore-based narratives, you are naturally going to be focusing on histories of interaction and exchange. Our upcoming retrospective on the legendary Baltimore artist Joyce J. Scott—”Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams” (March 24 through July 14, 2024)—makes this clear. Joyce has lived in Baltimore for most of her life but has traveled the world to learn and make with other artists. Her artworks and her artistic practice are deeply grounded in this city, but they are also related to the artistry and the history of our world.

You have a PhD in African Studies from Harvard. What drew you into the field?

I fell in love with African art during my freshman year of college. At the time, my undergraduate alma mater—the University of Maryland—required all its students to take a history or theory of the arts class as part of its general education program, and I signed up for an Introduction to African Art course to fulfill that requirement. At the time, I had no idea what art history as a discipline was and had never taken a college-level humanities class. I had, in short, no idea what I was getting into, and I fell absolutely in love with what I was seeing. Part of this is because African art history is filled with a dazzling array of visually arresting works that delight the eye and challenge the mind, and part of this is because art allowed me to transcend myself and my personal experiences.

Art by people of color seems to be more popular than ever with collectors and curators. How has that affected the field?

While I would agree that the “art market”—that amorphous entity centered in global financial capitals—has finally recognized that people from across the world have been creating gorgeous and thought-provoking artworks for millennia, I think it is also important to recognize that the perceived novelty of this emphasis is something of a localized phenomenon. Collectors, curators, scholars and artists throughout the Global South have been collecting, curating and thinking about artworks created by artists of color for centuries. And there are plenty of scholars and curators in the Global North that have also made it their life’s work to champion artists of color and the works they produce. The “art market” is simply catching up. And it is high time they do so. We need more exhibitions and scholarship focused on historic and contemporary artists of color. We need more collectors to support artists and galleries that focus on these works.

Your museum recently acquired its first piece of performance art. What does this tell us about the future of your acquisitions strategy?

We could not be prouder to be the institutional steward of Jefferson Pinder’s phenomenal performance piece Ben-Hur. And though this is our first acquisition of a performance, it will certainly not be the last. Indeed, we are committed to caring for all forms of artistic expression and are continuously revising not only the collecting roadmaps that guide our acquisitions strategy but also the internal policies and procedures that guide the way we collect, research, exhibit and care for artworks. Take “Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800,” for instance. This exhibition—which was on view at the BMA between October 1, 2023 and January 7, 2024 and opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario on March 27, 2024—uncovered and valorized women artists who worked in artistic mediums that have historically been ignored by mainstream art historians and art museums. By putting artistic mediums like lace and paper quilling on the same level as painting and sculpture, our brilliant curatorial team showcased the extraordinary diversity of artistic creativity in early modern Europe.

Similarly, much of my research revolves around artworks made by nomadic artists, and what I have found is that the normative artistic mediums of many nomadic artists are quite different from the normative artistic mediums of many sedentary artists. There is, as I am fond of saying, a little bit of art in everything, and at the BMA, we want to make sure we are showcasing and uplifting the sparkling diversity of our shared creative spirit.

What would you say you’ve learned in your nine years at this institution?

I think an easier question to answer might be what haven’t I learned? I feel incredibly privileged to have spent the last nine years working alongside the most intelligent, passionate, hardworking and innovative group of colleagues (both in and out of the museum). Through them, my approach to pretty much everything has been radically transformed. And I think that is the biggest lesson I have learned at the BMA. Our work is always better when we engage—openly and deeply—with one another.

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Dan Duray

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March 13, 2024