WITH LAURA HEON
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SFR: The previous SITE Santa Fe executive director got canned after a very brief tenure and fled in the night. Did you have a sense you were joining an organization in some turmoil?
LH:
Is that the story you heard? No, I don't know about turmoil. I'd say that when I got here, people were well and truly ready for me to be here. More than turmoil I'd say in a very limited, practical way of speaking that an amount of time has passed without somebody in the top position to say up or down on any number of different issues. In addition, I think people here are ready for some 'new ideas and new visions.' Can you put that in quotes?
Your career has been as a curator at Mass MoCA. Is wearing the director's hat as well going to present a challenge?
So far, so fun, I have to say. I'm quite a bossy person and am comfortable directing. At the same time, I'm a sort of collaborative thinker-I tend to ask a lot of people their opinions and work in that way. I'm not someone who shuts my door and then slips a piece of paper under it saying 'now everyone must do this.'
You're the youngest director and curator SITE has had. Do you have a different perspective from the generation before you?
Not really. The real difference is between people who are behind the desk most of the time and people who are out in the world most of the time, whether they are 35 or 65. Some curators are always out going to studios and going to fairs and going to shows and meeting people, and I would be one of those. Does the art you're searching high and low for have to be more than just pretty? If I'm going to show it, it does. Art doesn't have to be anything other than what it wants to be, but that's art in general. Art that I'm going to show has to do a lot more than be pretty. Is SITE filling a niche or shouldering a particular responsibility within the context of the art world? Certainly the biennial is what it's known for. I'm just as interested in doing one-person shows of artists who have not yet had a big solo exhibition in LA, New York, Chicago, Berlin and so on. I think Santa Fe has a lot to offer an artist at this point in their career to come here and spend some time, make some new art and really be able to stretch themselves. The part of the job here at SITE that most intrigued me is to be able to sneak in sort of under-the-art-world radar and find somebody really great and give them an important show before anyone else is really aware. I enjoy that sort of competitive, big game hunting aspect of curatorial work.
Do you believe bringing new artists here to premiere significant bodies of work will support Santa Fe's emphasis on arts and culture as an economic driver?
I would agree with that. That's something I'm very familiar with coming from Mass MoCA which was founded as an economic development initiative first and secondarily as an art museum. Therefore every show I did had to attract lots and lots of people. The work needed to appeal to reviewers at the New York Times-whether to squash it like a bug or to sing its praises-but also to families on vacation in the Berkshires and people who lived in the mill town of North Adams. That situation is similar here; the work needs to be sort of scalable in terms of how it can be approached, and I think any great work of art should be able to do that, to be enormously appealing to look at for anyone, but at the same time you can spend as much time as you like going into it and it will keep revealing more. So my plan is to have broad appeal but also very deep appeal.
The Museum of Fine Arts here is trying to attract a broad audience; last year shiny Russian baubles and now some posthumous Degas pieces. But it feels like the museum is shopping from the bargain basement exhibition catalog-is that a danger when looking for mass appeal?
I'd say a greater danger would be to go out of business. I don't know what their financial situation is or even what their mission statement is, but if they're like other cultural institutions in general they're not sitting on a pile of gold bars over there and able to do whatever quirky little eddy of intellectual something or other that they feel like just because it's the pleasure of their curators who dine on truffles and foie gras or stuff like that. They have a responsibility to people to show things that are appealing and new to them and stretch the public's brains in a new way.
But to retain a good team of curators an institution has to let the staff stretch their brains too, right?
Yeah, totally. I would guess they are pacing themselves-they do shows with broad appeal and get people in the doors and show them what an art museum is and earn their trust and then bring them back for something more challenging. I read a big survey which said the number one reason why people do not go to art museums-it's very mundane-they don't know what to wear. To me this means, on a very basic level, they don't know if they're going to a mall or a church or a fair or what it is exactly. It's important to integrate in all kinds of ways. In Massachusetts I spent a lot of time judging parade floats and children's drawing contests and stuff like that.
Are you ready to confront similar demands from the community here?
'Confront' is a strange word. I like people, I like artists. I've been told that Santa Fe has the largest per capita amount of artists in the country which makes sense to me. They're not making crack or guns or dry cleaning chemicals-it's creative expression-and those are the people with whom I don't feel like a crazy person.
