Words Paul Laster Molesworth portrait by Christian Witkin

Originally published in No 10

Feedback is on view until Oct. 30th, 2021 at The School, Kinderhook, NY.

Anderson Ranch Arts Center's Curator-in-Residence, Helen Molesworth, has a deep knowledge of art history and an intuitive understanding of how contemporary artists continue to contribute to that history while critically interpreting their times. 

A former curator at the MOCA LA, ICA Boston, Wexner Center for the Arts, Harvard Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, she’s organized solo shows for Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Josiah McElheny, Louise Lawler, Luc Tuymans and Amy Sillman, as well as group exhibitions on activist art during the AIDS crisis and the artistic legacy of Black Mountain College.

A scholar on the work of Marcel Duchamp, about whom she wrote her PhD thesis, and the recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, Molesworth was recently invited by Jack Shainman Gallery to curate a group exhibition at The School in Kinderhook, NY, for the summer of 2020, which many expect to be a politically turbulent time. 

Is there anything in your upbringing that helped shape your curatorial point of view? I was very fortunate to have been raised in New York City by parents who were invested in and believed in culture. I was taken to museums, the ballet, the botanical garden, and all those sorts of places in the city. I think it shaped me to my core.

What initially drew you to curation? I loved art history as an undergraduate in college and assumed that I would take that love and become an academic — an art history professor, which I did in fact become. I found that I didn’t like the classroom, but I really liked the art gallery. I probably became interested in curating because I really love artists and I’m a fetishist, which means I really love objects. Those two loves seemed better suited for the museum than the academy.

How have you employed curating to advance the arts and the ideas that you deem important? I think about exhibitions like they’re three dimensional stories. And they are because they happen in galleries and museums — they happen in public space. So, I try to think about making them in a way that reflects the public, challenges our idea of what the public is, and tries to expand on the public nature of art. I think all those things have fed into a desire to tell the most complex stories about our culture that we can tell. Like many others, I’m interested in what feminism, the civil rights movement, and new theories of subjectivity and history make possible in the art space. All my work has been generated by and hopefully has added to some of those complications.

How did you come up with the concept for this show? Jack (Shainman) asked me if I would consider doing something for The School. I hadn’t been there yet, so we went together, and I just loved the space. I was taken with what I felt to be its deep sense of memory, in which I could still hear the sounds of kids in the hallways. I wanted to riff off that space of the school. He asked me to do the show in the summer of 2020, and I know — as we all do — that whatever conversation we are having by next summer, it is going to be pretty intense politically. And then there was this work by Janet Cardiff called Feedback, which I had seen, interacted with 10 years ago, and had never forgotten. I always wanted to do something with it, but I couldn’t find the right place. I think this is it.

Within this context, what is the title meant to convey, outside of the context of Cardiff’s particular artwork? I love the word feedback because it has different connotations. It’s got this recording connotation, in that it’s about an electrical feedback loop, which is being impacted by itself. It also has an art school connotation, in that one of the things that everyone is always asking for is feedback — tell me what you think, tell me how this affects you so that I can take some of those responses and incorporate them into the work. I like this doubleness in the title — to be thinking about art, but also about how and where we learn. 

How does this show fit into the other group shows you've organized? It’s quite different, which is why I’m excited about it. The other group shows that I’ve done almost always started with an art historical problem — and I was specific in my choice of objects to render that problem in three-dimensional space. This show starts with a series of questions or a response to Janet Cardiff’s work. I told the artists what the show was about and showed them pictures of the space. They’re responding to, riffing on the idea, or engaging in some sort of feedback about the idea through their work, which is a different curatorial premise for me. 

What was the criteria for choosing artists? It’s a list of artists that I have been interested in, been following and thinking about, and that I’ve wanted to do stuff with but didn’t have the right venue or space. They’re all interested in making things. They’re interested in craft, in language, in things that stem from the everyday, and in representation and figuration. They share a lot of interests, even though their work doesn’t look that much alike.

You have a mix of men and women and artists of color and different nationalities. Is that your way of curating? Should curating be inclusive?  Yes, I curate with an eye toward diversity across many fronts — gender, ethnicity and geographical origin are important to me. When I think about diversity I’m also thinking about a diversity of media and this show has painting, sculpture, neon, weaving, and ceramics. I’ve had an active dialogue with the artists and many of them are creating new works for it, which is unusual for my shows.

There seems to be a folk art nature to some of the work in the show. We’re you aiming for a dash of Americana? Yes, very much so. I’m interested in Americana. Obviously, I don’t live in the Hudson Valley but I imagine that’s there’s something that draws people to the area — that it is a kind of a respite from other ways of being and it does look like it’s from another time with the architecture and the craft traditions.

How do you envision the works being exhibited in the space of The School?

Because The School has no linear quality to it — most museum galleries have a beginning and an end point — I’m thinking about installing things in the structure of a round. So, like when you sing Frère Jacques and have that round quality to the song, that’s how I’m thinking about installing the work. Artists won’t just have rooms dedicated to them, rather everyone will be paired and those pairs will overlap.

What do you hope the takeaway will be from the show? A lot of the artists in the show are not particularly well known outside of Los Angeles, so I’m hopeful that people will see some of what’s going on out West. While there are some quote-unquote big names in the show, there are also a lot of emerging artists — people who are doing great work but who don’t have the kind of name recognition that I think they should have. I’m hopeful that people will take the exhibition in that spirit — that they will find themselves discovering artists that they didn’t know and enjoy that quality of the show. And I do hope that people will be thoughtful about all of the different kind of ideas and components that go into learning, like how we learn, when we learn and why we learn what we do at different moments, and take that into their thinking about what’s going on in our country right now.

Feedback opens June 5th, 2021 at The School, Kinderhook, NY. Learn more at: jackshainman.com/school

 Paul Laster is an art journalist and independent curator. He’s New York Desk Editor at ArtAsiaPacific and a frequent contributor to Time Out New York; Art & Object; and Galerie Magazine. 

Christian Witkin is an internationally recognized portrait photographer. He presents his subjects as they are; human, exceptional, ordinary. christianwitkin.com