Walk among oversized portraits of artists such as John Baldessari, Kara Walker and Lawrence Weiner, shot by photographers Catherine Opie and Brigitte Lacombe; Curator Helen Molesworth recently moved between her friends as she watched a mesmerizing Hockney film in the dark.
And she was. The show she held at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan — “Face to Face: Artist Portraits by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie– opens to the public on Friday and features artists with whom Molesworth has come to know throughout his 25-year career.
“That’s my post-pandemic show—I really miss you guys,” she said. We all do these weird hajj wherever we go to Venice or go to London, and we have our own idols, most of the people in this show are iconic. It means something to people.”
since she was suddenly dismissed As Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2018, protest Among her cohorts, 56-year-old Molesworth has drawn strength, support and purpose from artists. She’s also more acutely aware of what it’s like to be one of them lonely and unprotected.
“I love my life,” she said. “It’s hard and scary, but okay. It’s also more like being an artist than anything else. Everything you do goes out under your name and it’s really attached to you.”
“You’re exposed. You don’t have the agency’s shelter to protect you, and you don’t have the many things the agency gives you — health insurance, travel budgets, research assistants.” had to figure it all out on his own.
The past five years have been liberating and fruitful. Molesworth cemented his reputation as an independent thinker, interlocutor and public intellectual. She is in demand as a guest curator from galleries and museums. She’s experimenting with new formats like podcasts and videos. she speaks her mind
“Whenever such a cataclysm occurs in your life, be it dismissal or death, it gives you a chance to rethink everything where you don’t think it’s coming. I’m good at it, What was wrong with you?” she said. “I feel lucky and grateful to be doing what I am doing with the freedom that has just been given to me, the kind of freedom I would never have had otherwise.”
Molesworth’s six-part podcast “death of an artist,” delves into the charges that have swirled the American minimalist sculptor for 35 years. Carl Andre About his wife, a Cuban artist Ana MendietaHe died in 1985 after falling from the window of his Greenwich Village apartment.Andre is Not guilty about murder.
The series, which has been downloaded over 1 million times since its release last fall, economist When Atlantic.
The Atlantic said, “Molesworth faces the industry’s shortcomings,” arguing that “very often what the art world really drives is silence.”
Molesworth organized a show about artists Noah Davis 2020 and Ruth Asawa In 2021 in a group exhibition with David Zwirner,feedbackat the Upstate Gallery of Jack Scheinman in 2021.
She is Zwirner’s “dialoguepodcast, which hosts all of Season 7, which releases Wednesday. And she leads the art conversation as host of Zwirner’s video series.programThe next episode, released on Friday, will focus on abstract painter Joan Mitchell, followed on February 21 by an episode about Felix Gonzalez Torres, whose installation has just begun in Zwirner.
Molesworth said she realized her “secret sauce” was writing, or “translation,” and that’s what drew her to the podcast format. “I love writing for my ears,” she said. “I always thought of myself as the narrator.”
“Even my curation was basically writing in my head,” she added. “Each object is a sentence, a room is a paragraph, and six rooms are essays.”
Jacob Weisberg, CEO and co-founder of audio production company Pushkin, came up with the idea for Mendieta’s podcast. I asked for ideas on who should host. Zwirner he suggested Molesworth.
“She combines this omnivorous cultural quality with deep, rigorous study. Learning is greatly neglected,” Zwirner said. “She can very easily convey what others find very instructive.”
Molesworth is prohibited from discussing her dismissal in detail due to confidentiality agreements, but it’s no secret that she clashed with then-director of the museum, Philippe Vergne. resigned 2 months after her departure.
Molesworth made Statement critical of MOCA Before she leaves, she now only says:“
Opie, a former MOCA board member and close to Molesworth, would not talk about leaving, but said, “The world is still threatened by very strong women,” pointing to Molesworth’s no-frills, filtered He added that he appreciates the fearlessness of being unprepared. Talk to artists and ask tough questions about their own practice. “
“I know my job very well, but I feel like Helen made me understand it a little better.
During her years as museum curator, Molesworth added LGBTQ and people of color artists to her collection. Kelly James Marshall and Berkeley Hendricks at the Harvard Art Museum. Deana Lawson and Nicole Eisenman at her MOCA.
“Helen might like an artist’s work, even if it’s not verified,” said dealer Scheinman. “She still defends and stands by it.”
She was a founding member of the now-deceased underground museum Helped draw attention to the artist Noah Daviswho died in 2015 and to his widow the artist Caron Davis.
“She’s a curator of artists. The artists are always first,” says Davis, noting that she learned from Molesworth “how to take care of a piece, how to make it come to life, how to tell a story.” He added that Molesworth had often been at Noah’s bedside before Noah. died of cancer 32 years old.
“He promised her that she would be his curator and see his work live after he was gone,” Davis said. “And she has.”
A tall, low-voiced woman and outspoken, Molesworth admits she can rub people the wrong way. rice field.
Molesworth attributes some of this cockiness to her roots as a child from Queens, New York. Flushing and Forrest She worked in the menswear industry in the Hills. Raised by her artist mother and English professor father who taught at her college in Queens, she attended one of the city’s top public schools. entered Stuyvesant High School, one of her A class that explores culture.
“I was a terrible high school student, almost truant,” she said. “I went to museums, I went to repertoire cinemas.”
After graduating from the State University of New York at Albany, Molesworth participated in the Independent Studies Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. And that changed everything.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I want to be in this room with the artist, talk like this, think like this, have these experiences,'” she said. It was clear that it would require some intellectual effort on our part.”
She has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. She earned a BA in Art History from Cornell University, and in 2014 she worked as a curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Wexner Center, For the Arts, Harvard Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston before landing at MOCA. I was working. Research “Kelly James Marshall: Mastery” Co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Her approach to curation is fresher than most,” Marshall said in a phone interview. “If you have a genuine love for something, you don’t consider the easy-going side weak or weak.”
That nimbleness seemed to have dried up from Molesworth’s experience as MOCA’s chief curator, especially when the museum decided to go ahead with the contract with Carl Andre. retrospective despite her objections.
“Very few people get to see a museum retrospective. It’s a huge honor, like playing at NBA All-Star level,” she said. “I didn’t think it was an honor to be given to Karl André.”
“Looking back, I wish I had resigned,” she added.
Molesworth, on Pushkin’s podcast, has gotten somewhat braver, addressing questions about Mendieta’s death and how much the art world seemed to disagree.
“Museums tend to be very risk-averse and afraid to bring up difficult topics,” says Weisberg. “Helen is the opposite of her. She says exactly what she thinks.”
Molesworth has leaned into his strengths, but he has also become more clear about his weaknesses. “I’m not a great manager and I’m allergic to bureaucracy,” she said. “I don’t think it really worked in a rules and regulations environment.”
“I don’t know why it took me until my fifties to admit it,” she added.