9: Art Curation and Architecture with Catharina Manchanda

““There is no such thing as an invisible hand - there is always a constructive and thoughtful element that goes into the mounting of an exhibition.” ”

Catharina Manchanda, the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Seattle Art Museum, discusses the complexities of art curation as a social, cultural, aesthetic and spatial practise, both in the local and global contexts. Topics include: exhibition design, Seattle art culture, design as staging, the impact of the digital, and building facades as art canvas.

Timestamp Outline

1:00 You don’t like the word ‘design’?
2:27 “There is no such thing as an invisible hand--there is always a constructive and thoughtful element that goes into the mounting of an exhibition.”
3:23 How is a collection architecturalized into an exhibit?
5:02 The spatial presence of paintings, the Big Picture exhibit, painter Jo Baer, and the backsides of canvases
8:23 “Everything is under development in contemporary art.”
10:08 As a curator, how do you make a body of work?
12:12 “All Eyes on You”: politics of vision, Las Meninas, sightlines and point of view
14:17 Anxiety for artists releasing their work from studio to exhibit: Ed Roche painting
17:33 More exploration vs chronological bend and emphasis on European and North American in exhibitions
19:22 Role of museum exhibitions in architectural discourse: Philip Johnson’s Modernism exhibition and Deconstructivist exhibition at MOMA
20:21 More “conversation” than “time capsule” exhibits to break up a monolithic Modernism
22:02 Brazil postwar: geometric abstraction and poetry vs US postwar: gestural abstraction
23:14 Influence, regionalism, and Seattle in relation to the world: isolated or “pioneer”?
24:44 Ian Wallace, Vancouver artist
28:13 Influence of the SAM Asian Art collection on Northwest Modernists (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves)
29:41 Yayoi Kusama show
30:37 A digital frontier?
31:02 Gary Hill exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery: new technology, ongoing exploration
32:54 Seattle Art Museum façade by Doug Aitken, Mirror responds, an ever-changing collage
34:04 Tamiko Thiel’s Gardens of the Anthropocene augmented reality installation at Olympic Sculpture Park
34:48 Tech industry’s (lack of) connection to art
36:51 What’s next in museum spaces, after the white box of modernism?
37:51 Future of the façade