What Does an Art Curator Do
5/28/21 - As more of us can step back into the world and get to look at art in person, we discuss the role (and responsibility) of an art curator with Helen Molesworth, formerly of MOCA in Los Angeles, and host of the podcast Recording Artists.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Executive Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Mercedes Gonzales-Bazan
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
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TRANSCRIPT: What does an art curator do
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Aminatou: Welcome to Call your Girlfriend
Ann: A podcast for long distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I’m Aminatou Sow,
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hello over there, Ann Friedman.
Ann: How's it going over there? [laughter]
Aminatou: I mean, you know, it's just going truly, it's just going, I've turned into one of those people that I'm obsessed with all of those like good news, like, you know, like news pages that have cropped up and, and it's, it's how you know that, like my spirit is really defeated because I read them and the good news is not enough adrenaline jolts to make me feel anything. The good news is like a lot of times, very dumb.
Ann: Well, I have a real treat for you today. I spoke with the contemporary art curator, Helen Molesworth, who was the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Los Angeles. And then in 2019, she released a podcast that she hosted in partnership with the Getty museum called Recording Artists, which I really loved and listened to a bunch. It is full of archival interviews with a bunch of incredible women artists who were working in the sixties and seventies. And then it features conversations among, between contemporary artists who are making work that somehow relates to the art that those women made.
[theme song]
Ann: I love the curatorial perspective that Helen brought to that project. And then I spoke with her last year when we were all at home, um, in lockdown and it just seemed to make sense to feature this conversation about curating and about the art world now that we are all a little closer to being able to go out and experience it for ourselves. So here I am with Helen Molesworth,
[interview begins]
Ann: Helen, thanks so much for being on the show.
Helen: Oh my God. And thank you so much for inviting me.
Ann: I'm thrilled about this. I have approximately 1 million questions for you. But I wanna, I wanna start a little bit 101, I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about what a curator does and what, what the calling to curate is all about.
Helen: I know it's still such a crazy mystery word, even, you know, I tell people all the time people say like, did you always know you wanted to be a curator? And I look at them and I say like, you know, I didn't even know what the word meant until I was like 25, right? So it's hardly a calling from childhood. You know, because for so long, it was such a, you know, hidden form of labor and you know, and then when it became curate, became this word that like, you know, your soaps were curated and your beer selection is curated, even then it just sort of, I think is like a really weak version of what a curator actually does. But so what does a curator do? And I'll speak mostly from a contemporary art position, cause it's different. The farther back in time, you go in terms of the, like the artists and the material you work with, the role changes, but a contemporary curator is essentially if, um, they work in a museum, they identify artists who they want to make an exhibition with, or they think the general public should know about. They identify artworks that they think the museum should buy and save and store in perpetuity. And they interpret works of art for a general public, the audience that would come to the museum. So it's a process of, you know, selection, acquisition, and interpretation. Those are the three sort of fundamental pillars of being a curator. How you go about each of those things and what kind of knowledge you use to perform those three activities, that's like where the sausage gets made. You know, that's the stuff of horse races, so to speak, but those are basically the three prime activities of being, uh, of being a curator.
Ann: Right. And so if people who are listening to this are museum goers or people who go to galleries, they see essentially the results of the decisions that a curator or curators have made all around them, right? I mean, everything, everything I'm consuming is due to the decision of a curator.
Helen: Absolutely. Like, so every time you go into a museum, like if you go into LACMA, whether you're in the Renaissance galleries or the American modernist galleries or the pre-Colombian galleries, like everything that you're looking at has been selected by someone called the curator for a variety of reasons for its aesthetic merit, for it to store trickle importance, um, for its contextual importance, like an object might be in a room because it's actually sort of helping explain another object. An object might be in a room, real talk, because you're courting a donor because the donor has other objects. You're trying to get them to donate that object, so you put that other object out. You are trying to build a room that maybe tells a story, right? So you sometimes are choosing, only quote unquote, the best things. But sometimes you're trying to build a story, like what did New York, what did Soho look like in 1975? Right. And so you might look at everything in your collection and pick a selection of things that work together that give a viewer some idea of like, what was happening in the art scene then in there, or you might be building a room because you're trying to convey to viewers, all right, there's this thing called abstraction and some people just decided to make monochrome canvases one color. How did that happen? Right. And you might be sort of showing a variety of things that lead people to some sort of understanding of an art historical movement or term like monochrome abstraction. And then sometimes, you know, to be honest, it's not unlike fashion. It's not unlike, you know, you look in your closet and you think, oh my God, I cannot believe I have to get dressed again. And I'm going to make it super cute, or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that or does this, you know, whatever, let's be fancy, because there's a quarantine. Does this Rick Owens work with this Comme de Garcon? You know, I mean, you're trying stuff on just to see like what happens if it works. Can you make a room? That's got a great vibe about the now. You know, so there's lots of different ways rooms get put together in museums, but behind all of them is someone with some kind of intention.
Ann: I imagine that this must change depending on the space that you were doing the curating for, or, you know, a million other factors. But I'm wondering if you have some kind of baseline personal philosophy of what good curation looks like, or like what, what fundamental questions must be asked if you are in this powerful role as a curator, that maybe transcend the specifics of each situation.
Helen: That's such a good question. Because even that, I think I've always had like a kind of gold standard if you know what I mean, but I actually think it changed a lot over time. I think, you know, when I first started about 25 years ago, what I wanted to do was make these rooms that were like little art, historical essays, you know, it was really important to me. I've loved art history. I'm a total art history nerd. And I wanted to share that art that geeked out love of art history. Now I wanted to share it as a feminist and so I was already at the very beginning of my career, trying to figure out how to shake up the like super white male heterosexual club that is the art, you know, that is art and museums. And I think my feminist inclinations led me over the years to challenge myself in the museums I worked in even more. So now for me, like a great room, can't only be art by one kind of person, right? So if I find myself in a room of objects or paintings or photographs, and like they're all made by white men, even if they're all great, I feel really disappointed. I think, oh, this isn't good enough. This isn't what the world looks like. I'm never in a room of only white, straight men ever. And if I am, I'm really nervous, oh, that's not a room I want to be in, you know? Um, so I tried increasingly over, I would say the last 10 or 15 years to make shows, to make rooms, to make books, all of the things that curators do that just disallowed that kind of homogeneity. So in LA it was super fun because in LA I, I used to say I wanted the rooms I made to look like my drive to work, which I never, ever, ever achieved…
Ann: It’s a high bar.
Helen: Oh, it's a crazy bar, right. Can you imagine, like you drive through little El Salvador, the Persian Jewish community, or, you know, a Black working class neighborhood, a Black upper-class neighborhood, you know, um, an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. There was no way for the museum to actually represent my drive to work in LA, but that became the game. I was trying to play with myself. Like how, how heterogeneous of view could I create from the collection that I was working with at the time.
Ann: A little bit ago, you described curating as a hidden form of labor. And I think normally I hear that phrase, I think underpaid work done by white women and people of color. I think when I hear hidden labor, you know, I really have a lot of associations, but simultaneously what you're also describing is, is, uh, is a very, very powerful role within, you know, institutions with a lot of money and clout. And I'm wondering about that tension, like, is it, is it in fact hidden? Is it actually quite visible to people in the art world, but just hidden to the rest of us who are civilians coming to check out a museum? I would just love to hear you talk a bit more about this idea of it being hidden or not.
Helen: Oh I think, I love that you zeroed in on the inherent tension of the hidden labor too, because I think one of the things that's happened in museums really like since the beginning of the 21st century has been such a profound questioning of the labor of museums hidden and not, uh, so it's a great place to, to sort of dive into, so when I say hidden labor, I mean a couple of things and one you're not wrong. Museums are a, what they call I real, I learned recently a pink collar profession, meaning that the majority of the labor force is in fact women and it is in fact white women. And so there's just rafts behind every, you know, star male curator. You can rest assured um, there is a raft of, uh, young and not so young white women who are doing a lot of the labor, um, that then gets accrued under the name of a star male curator. There's been a big shift in the museum world in the 21st century to diversify the curatorial staff of museums. Um, and that has been like one of the single biggest changes in the field is that particularly in contemporary art museums, there is now, uh, a whole generation of young curators of color. And that has been a really exciting development in the field, but back to the hidden labor part. So there's different forms of hidden labor. There's the hidden labor of historically the curator was someone who, uh, was imagined to basically do the choosing, do the arranging, basically set the taste and then sweep themselves out of the room. So it would be as if the taste was omnipotent and magical and just existed. Like these Monet's are in a room because they are simply great.
Ann: [laughter] Sorry, but that's so funny to me.
Helen: [laughter] It's hilarious. I know, I know. It's just total like hand of God stuff. It's just a definition of white supremacy really, you know, it's like, oh, and then like Monet. Great. And it was imagined that the Monet was so great that it didn't need a wall label. It didn't need to be explained how it was acquired. Didn't need to be explained who thought it was great. Didn't need to be rendered public, why they thought it was great. Didn't need to be explained. So like when my generation I'm in my mid-fifties, when we came in, we were really, really interested in breaking down that fantasy that an artwork could just be great without any explanation of the why and the how. And you had to break down the why and the how, because that was the only way you could start making claims for why art by women was great, and art by people of color was great, and art by people who weren't Western European was great. Right. So you had to, we had to dismantle this idea that greatness was something that was just universal, quote unquote, um, by making greatness specific.
Ann: I'm wondering if you can tell me about the first show that you curated or the, whatever you might define as your first experience as a curator, what that was like and what you remember about it.
Helen: I mean, the first, you know, the first show I curated, I curated as a student at the Whitney independent study program, it was called the Unmaking of Nature, and it was in 1989. And, but I did it, you know, under, with such a huge safety net. I didn't realize I had that safety net at the time, because I was a 22 year old student, you know, thought I was doing everything myself. But the first show I really like, I think my first real show was a show called Body Space. And it was my first show at my first big time museum job, which was the Baltimore Museum of Art. I guess the thing I can tell you that sort of funny, as I saw, I kind of came up with the idea for the show that I came into a museum that was very anxious about contemporary art. And I wanted to make a show that was sort of like a come on in the water's fine, you know, like show them some stuff that was really sensual and gorgeous and provocative to get us to a place where they could trust me to do, you know, what I wanted to do there. And I fell in love with this work in a gallery by an artist named Josiah McElhaney. It was this extraordinary, like white open shelving with all of these white vases and glassware, he's a glass blower, that he had blown and put on this white shelf. So it was like this white on white composition. And it was all about like the history of modernist design. And I just, it was 2000 and it took the top of my head off. I just love this work by Josiah. And I went, I was in New York when I saw it. I went back to Baltimore, typed up the loan for myself, which is not something that's supposed to happen, like the registrar is supposed to do that, put it in an envelope and went back to New York to have a meeting with him in person and gave him the loan form at the meeting. None of this is how you're supposed to do this kind of work [laughter] But it was just an indication of how much I wanted that piece and that piece only. And I was, so I was like, the show won't work if I don't have this piece. And I think that was the beginning of my incredibly dogged, tenacious style. I mean, I'm kind of known in the field for getting killer loans and it started there like, just like I would, I would not broker no, I was absolutely prepared. And I was prepared to use all of the tools of, um, emotional manipulation in my arsenal to get what I wanted. [laughter]
Ann: Well that's it. That was going to be my follow-up question, which is just, um, you know, is it about, I mean, I probably wouldn't have used the phrase emotional manipulation, but since you did, I will feel fully empowered, you know. Emotional manipulation or just, you know, tenacity or, what are the kinds of negotiation skills that you have acquired over the course of getting great loans?
Helen: Well, I think it's in a way, I think for me it might be two separate things like getting great loans, I had the, I had a Texan grandmother, and so I was trained in certain forms of politeness. And it occurred to me that if I was going to ask people to part with... very beautiful, very expensive, very emotionally meaningful things, that asking them by letter was not enough that I needed to go there. And one, look at the thing myself to make sure it was really the right thing, the best thing, and two, to show the person, by being there, sitting in front of them, I meant to do two things. One was to show them the respect of like, I know I'm asking you to take that thing off your wall and send it to my museum for three months or a year, depending on whether or not the show had a tour. And I wanted to afford them the respect of that ask almost like in this Godfather-esque kind of like you go and you sit down and that's how you do business. Um, but the other thing I learned, and this really happened, like once email really took off because in the beginning of my career was still something like you had to go to an internet cafe or, you know what I mean? Like your email, you left your office and then you didn't see your email again until the next morning. That kind of thing. Um, was I found that it was really much harder for people to say no, if you asked them in person, you could say no to anything in an email. But if I was actually there and I had like flown like across the country or across an ocean to ask you in person, it was super hard to say no. And so I wonder now, maybe we won't be traveling like that anymore. You know what I mean? And maybe, maybe that was excessive, you know? I'm definitely rethinking some of my former travel habits. I’m someone who had real wanderlust. I don't know. Are you guys thinking of, I mean, is it, are other people thinking about that, about how maybe we can't do this so much anymore now when we all get back to work?
Ann: I am trying very hard for myself to not game out the, like, what does the six months, two years, five years version of life look like? Um, but I will say that in a question that comes to me, when I hear you say that is, is a different sort of challenge of what does it look like to put in that level of care and attention? You know, the feeling that you evoked in people when you showed up in person to ask them about this work was really you showing respect for the work and their investment in it. It was you showing dedication. It was you showing that you would be a reliable, a reliable steward of the work, you know, like all these things. And I think the question for me is more about what are the ways in which that happens in the future. You know what I mean? If it, if it, if it isn't going in person, like how, how are we signaling that? And like, what are the ways that, um, you know, I mean, I think, listen, talking to you right now over the phone is a really different experience than you and I had exchanging emails. You know what I mean? There are, there are approximations of connection that feel more meaningful, even if you are not physically in person. And so I'm just wondering if maybe, I don't know, I don't, I don't know the answer to your question, but I do feel there will still be something that feels like the most effort, if that makes sense. You know?
Helen: Yeah, yeah, no, of course. And we'll make all sorts of adjustments. And, and I mean, the truth is, is that historically, um, artists and people involved in art and culture have been people who have circumnavigated the globe, even when, during periods, when other people didn't one of the great curators of our time was Okwui Enwezor who recently passed away, unfortunately far too young of cancer. He once said that for him being a curator was akin to being a diplomat. And at the time, you know, I confess, I thought it was like kind of grandiose. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that on any given day in a curator's life, especially if you're an institutional curator, you could talk to the janitorial staff, you could talk to someone in accounting, you could talk to your fellow curators, you could talk to an artist, you could talk to their assistants and you could find yourself in evening at the home of a billionaire, you know, collector. But what I'm saying is curators are people who move with great alacrity up and down class lines, almost daily in a way that I think is really different than a lot of other fields, because the curators got to get all those people on board for her project to make her project happen. And there's a lot of diplomacy in that about knowing who you're talking to and knowing what you need and knowing the roles that all those different people play in order to make this thing called like your great exhibition actually come to fruition.
Ann: And what was your diplomatic learning curve like?
Helen: Oh God [laughter], it was a steep climb rather than a curve, I would say. Oh yeah, it was tough. Yeah. It's hard to, you know, I came in sort of young and brash and a little arrogant around the edges. And I had to, I think I had two learning curves, really one, was like right when I started and I realized, I didn't know everything. And I needed to like check my shit and learn all kinds of other parts of the way the thing worked so that I could be respectful of everyone's labor. That definitely took a minute. Um, cause I came in and I was really young and, you know, I had this big fancy degree. I was very pedigreed education. I had a lot of ideas and I think I was a bit of a bull in the China shop around people's feelings and there, you know, recognizing people's labor. And then I think the second wave for me was trying to negotiate perhaps the disparity between my own political beliefs and how museums work, that, that was a big curve. And I'm not sure I was always 100% successful in that curve. That's really hard because museums are dependent upon, you know, the largess of extremely wealthy and powerful people. You know, I had some beef with some of the ideology of those folks and so that, you know, that's, that's a real struggle and I think that's a struggle for a lot of people still. And mostly what curators do are, are they're really quiet about it. And I've been talking to folks lately about like, what would it mean if we weren't so quiet? Like how can we actually start to broker different relations between curators and artists and benefactors? How can we have more honest and transparent conversations?
Ann: Let's take a quick break for a couple ads
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Ann: I'm wondering, um, how you're thinking about your personal role these days as it relates to initiating some of these conversations.
Helen: Well, I don't know. I mean, to be honest, I find myself in a kind of curious place. I think I did a lot of work and if your listeners don't know, like I, you know, I'm kind of known for showing women and showing people of color and showing queer folk and, you know, really pushing on institutions, you know, both the Institute, the institution of the museum to change its collection and display policies in the field of art history to change this kind of stories that it tells. And I think I did that work for all kinds of like really super personal reasons and sort of hard, and I was kind of hard wired to work, you know, I really liked to work and I had a lot of energy and I did a lot of work and I sort of did it with my head down, just barreling through. And it turned out that that work ended up being really meaningful for people in ways that I wasn't really even fully aware of until I stopped working in an institution. And I began to see that I had a kind of public identity that I don't think I had really, I didn't quite understand how public my identity was. I've tried to advocate increasingly for people younger than myself. There's a sort of growing generational divide in the culture world, in the museum world, I think in the world at large. And I mean, there's a lot that younger people are thinking and believing that I don't understand. And I'm not necessarily sure I believe in, but I also feel like the world is theirs and that we, as people on the older side of the divide need to be way better listeners to what younger people are saying and to not be impediments and to try and figure out how to have intergenerational conversations where the kinds of things I know that I think are really meaningful, that I'd love to see carried through into the future that I advocate for those things while also making room for younger, younger people who have different ideas than, than I do, or my generation does.
Ann: That seems like a perfect transition. Perfect transition to me, to talk about Recording Artists, which is a podcast you hosted that came out last year 2019. Is that right? Um, what is time? I don't know.
Helen: What is the, I don't know, right. I was telling my shrink the other day on zoom, the virus has killed time.
Ann: I know. Anyway, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about recording artists and the structure and concept of the podcast and how it came about. Because when I hear you talk about intergenerational conversations, I really do think of some of what appeals to me about that show.
Helen: Oh, that's interesting. The Getty research Institute had acquired the archives of two women critics and art historians, Barbara Rose, who is an art historian and Cindy Nemser, or who is an art critic. And apparently both Rose and Nemser had gone out in the seventies with reel-to-reel tape recorders and were interviewing women, women artists. And Nemser who was doing it explicitly because she was a feminist and she was trying to write a book on women artists in the wake of the feminist movement. And Barbara Rose was, I think also a feminist, but one of those generational feminists that they don't say they're feminists, but they act like a feminine. Anyway, these women were out there interviewing women artists at the very moment when the idea of what a woman artist was had sort of emerged into the public sphere and people were trying to figure out what did that phrase even mean? And so Andrew said, why don't you come and like, listen to this audio and tell me what you think you could do with it. Do you think you could do a podcast? And so I have to say, Ann like, you know, I listened to it at first, I was like, oh, this is a fiasco. I can never do anything with this. None of this makes any sense. These are like field notes from the seventies. Like, what the hell am I going to do with this? And then I just decided, focus on the individual artists and use them as like a case study. And then that was like the opening. So then I started listening to the archival audio and I did like super deep dives. I like read everything that had been written on those women. And I watched like tons, like everything you could watch on YouTube. And like, I really would do a deep dive on each artist. And I started trying to imagine like, okay, how could you make a podcast about Betye Saar or Yoko Ono that did a couple of things. One, really highlighted what it was specifically about their gender that inflected the work, two, introduce those amazing figures to like a gen pop audience, three, make something, and this is always the highest form of criteria for me, make something that artists would listen to in their studios, like what an artist put this on and listen to it while she was working and, four, figure out, because I no longer had a museum gig how to tell the kind of stories I was telling you my exhibitions in an oral format rather than a visual one. And so that's how they came about. And, you know, then I started reaching out to people I thought would be interesting to talk to on the podcast because I listened to a lot of podcasts and I was really interested in the difference between the podcast to try and tell a story versus the podcasts that are super conversational. And I was curious if I could marry those two modes and then I don't know. And then it just happened. And then I was found myself through like interviewing people, like you're interviewing me now and loving it and writing scripts and loving that. And yeah, and it all, I really, really liked the way they turned out.
Ann: I do too. I really have to tell you, I am not, I'm an artist who was working in my studio, but I listened to each of these episodes multiple times.
Helen: Oh wow. Thank you, gosh.
Ann: In part, because that rare gem quality of listening to women whose art I'm familiar with talk about their work in real time. Often these interviews are recorded, you know, in moments when they are not, or were not respected and sort of put in the Canon and the way they are today. And I think, um, there was something very powerful about that to me too. And, you know, a lot of the, at least in the journalism world, a lot of like the iconic archival interview, things are really centered around men's experiences. Like I think of Stud Terkel's working tapes. And I think about, you know, it just, there was something so rare gem about interviews themselves, and I really appreciated the conversations as well with the working modern artists that you incorporated, because I also think that one of the really important things about listening to interviews like that, particularly with like white women artists, is that we have some acknowledgement today that like, okay, you know, so maybe as this, you know, our, our understandings are constantly shifting of the various oppressions and privileges that we are all dealing with. And so, I don't know. I really, I really thought that was quite clever. It introduced me to the work of the modern artists that were participating in the show. And, um, I'm really struck by the fact that it, uh, I mean, editing, curating are these the same? I don't know. I mean, but the skill set is clearly the same and I really did not fully put together that it was the experience of going to a museum show until I heard you just say that. So you did it, so you did it.
Helen: Ah good, that makes me so happy and I think, can we just do the white woman thing for a minute? Cause I think it's so important. You know, I mean, I think that, especially in the wake of the data that we know that 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump, right. And, and that, you know, clearly our, like if we have a bond, if white women have a bond, our house is not in order, you know, and we are not, we have not figured out how to talk to each other across some pretty powerful dividing lines in this regard. And I think that I, you know, there's this incredible moment in talking about Helen Frankenthaler, who was an affluent, you know, white woman who becomes this really just bang up painter, man. I mean, she's just a great painter and invents, you know, a mode of painting called pouring or staining. And, you know, that's quickly, you know, sort of taken up by men who have more famous names than her, or more famous careers than her, make more money than her, and all that stuff. And so white women tend to hold Frankenthaler up and, you know, as this kind of martyr, and I asked this artist, Rodney McMillan, who is a African-American man who pours paint, you know, if he would talk to me about the Frankenthaler thing and his capacity to identify Frankenthaler’s privilege through the most subtle details of the story she was telling were, were really revelatory to me. So like Frankenthaler tells this story about, she's asked, you know, what was your first drawing? And she tells this delightful story about being a young girl and taking a piece of chalk and dragging it on the sidewalk in New York, from behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to her, you know, upper east side doorman building all the while, accompanied by her nanny. And this is a somewhat famous quote in art history geek out circles. And they always talk about the line and her body and movement and everything. And no one in the 20-some odd years that I had known this story, except Rodney had ever said, yeah doesn’t she talk about being with a nanny? Doesn't she talk about basically she's being cared for and in this space of care, she's able to experiment. And I was just like, oh my God, like we have so much work to do still. Right. I understand our privilege and to understand how to not so much, I don't think the task is to feel bad about our privilege, it's to understand what it made possible for us, so that we can in fact, engage in making more equitable spaces for others, right? Like that. So that we, we are all participating in trying to figure out how to make the space of culture, be more inclusive and have more room. And that this means that you can't, you don't do this merely by setting another place at the table. It means you actually have to understand how you got to that table, what that table signifies for you and what it even means to set that other place, right? Like you have to rethink every single part of what you've been doing. And that's really hard and it takes time and effort and self-reflection, and it often means you have to give some stuff up. And you know, getting to that space as white women, I think is just like so important, you know, like what are we all willing to give up in order to, to make room? And, you know, because there's not an infinite amount of room, there isn't. There's enough for all of us to go around, but there's not an infinite amount of room. So how do you, how do we, how do we work together as white women to, you know, acknowledge like clearly the misogyny at play. Like we, we do not appear able to elect extremely competent women into public office. And the pain of that is real. And the rage that that produces is also real. And then how do you also not center that pain and that rage to an extent that it continues your own privilege.
Ann: Before I let you go, I want to do a little lightning round. Favorite snacks?
Helen: Favorite snack. I love dates, dates, nuts, and clementines.
Ann: Wow. Very, very fruits of California.
Helen: I love California. I'm a native New Yorker, man. I freaking love it here.
Ann: It's pretty magical. A friend who has really profoundly shaped your views about art and curating?
Helen: A friend who has, oh God, it's like everyone. It's like every friend I have, because I'm really lucky I'm friends with artists. So there, I would just say like every artist I've ever had a conversation with, like it's so deep.
Ann: What is the last show or individual work of art that you saw and then could not stop thinking about?
Helen: Oh, wow. Can it, can it be twofold? Lauren Halsey show at David Kordansky gallery, which just closed, in which he kind of made this fantastical sculptural landscape, utopian architecture with all of the vernacular aesthetics of south Los Angeles. Just I think about it a lot. And Rose B. Simpson, who's an artist I've recently started to work with who lives on a Pueblo outside of Santa Fe. She's indigenous. And she's been making these incredible ceramic figures that are like a cross between Madmax and I don't know, pottery from a thousand years ago. Awesome. I think about both of their work all the time.
Ann: And finally, the last book you read that you loved?
Helen: The last book that I read that I loved? You know, I read a lot of books, but the last book that I read that I could not put down was Marlon James, his book, Book of the Night Woman, which is a novel that was given to me by a friend. And it's a novel about a group of enslaved women on the island of Jamaica in the year before a slave rebellion. Phenomenal.
Ann: Helen, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Helen: Ann, thank you so much for having me. I'm really flattered. And, um, I hope we get to meet in real life one day.
Ann: Ah, so do I. I hope we are doing all kinds of things in real life someday soon, because that is really my real hope for you and me and everyone.
[interview ends]
Ann: I really, I also, we didn't get it talk too much about like the act of being a curator, like in your daily life. And I actually, when I was talking to her, was thinking about you as being like an amazing curator, like a curator of people, a curator of memes, like all my favorite people are good curators.
Aminatou: Ya know, right back at you. I love this. I love this for us. Good taste. It makes the world go round.
Ann: The strongest sensibility.
Aminatou: [laughter] This is, it's making me both like very emotional. And also I think that, you know, there is like a kind of person who obviously is like very adept at telling you why they make certain choices for themselves. You know, they just like, they know why they're on the vibe, the on of the vibe check is always strong. I am not always good at articulating my vibe. I just know how to make choices for myself. So it feels good to be seen. Thank you.
Ann: Oh my God. Okay. Well, I will see you in all of your curations on the internet. We will link to Recording Artists in the show notes and you can also find Helen Molesworth on Instagram these days.
[outro music]
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.