Liz Munsell was recently appointed the Jewish Museum’s curator of contemporary art. In her new role, she considers exhibition styles and viewer experiences. Below, Munsell discusses her recent interests.
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Image Credit: Courtesy David Zwirner Books Before the children’s book Making a Great Exhibition [2021] by Doro Globus came into my life, I didn’t have a good way of explaining my job to my 3-year-old daughter, who would see exhibitions I curated without having any understanding of how a show is put together. This book explains the many crucial roles that people working in a museum play and guides readers through the steps of creating an exhibition chronologically, starting in the artist’s studio and ending with an opening party. I didn’t grow up knowing what a curator does, so I love that Globus makes the museum’s inner workings more transparent and accessible to young people.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts Mary Ann Unger was an under-recognized Jewish-American sculptor who worked with industrial and organic materials to create large-scale and sometimes immersive works. She was a key figure in feminist art discourse in the 1980s and ’90s. The retrospective “To Shape a Moon from Bone” [at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts] was brilliantly curated by Horace Ballard in close collaboration with the artist’s family. It included work by Unger’s daughter, Eve Biddle, adding insight and intimacy to the survey.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Penguin Random House Stay True [2022], a memoir by New Yorker staff writer and Bard professor Hua Hsu is intensely personal, yet it teases out the subtleties of an entire generation. The story focuses on the narrator’s college years and the murder of his friend in Berkeley, California, in the mid-1990s. It reminded me of how as kids, we brought cameras to special occasions like birthday parties and concerts—yet it was the shots of more everyday moments, quickly tossed off just to finish a roll, that became the most precious. The book illuminates just how much the function of the image has shifted in our lifetime, and how it frames our memories so differently now.
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Image Credit: Photo Don Stahl/Courtesy Dia Art Foundation In 2020 Kelly Kivland curated an incredible exhibition at Dia Beacon by Detroit DJ and producer Carl Craig at which the pandemic limited attendance. Music from the show is now available on the two-disc vinyl set Party/After-Party [2022]. It includes recordings made in the basement gallery that fuse minimalism and an industrial techno aesthetic. The recording captures the highs and lows of being at a party—the feeling of being intensely together, sharply punctuated by solitude. The LP is such a great alternative to a traditional exhibition catalogue, with the record’s liner notes serving as the essays. Through the music we can experience something of the show in our living rooms.
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Image Credit: Photo Andre Maier/Courtesy Foreland, New York High rent prices following the pandemic continue to drive artists and their families out of New York. One alternative that I’m excited about is the new artist residency and exhibition space Foreland, located Upstate in Catskill. The campus’s 19th-century buildings were originally used to create Army uniforms for Union soldiers during the Civil War. For the last couple of decades, the buildings have been largely unused. The complex has artists’ studios and galleries, as well as food and social spaces, that reach a growing art world outside the city.