Vivian Zavataro: Thank you Apsara, for taking the time to talk to me for this issue of OnCurating. We have been seeing a wave of right-wing extremism all over the world, and for this issue we wanted to interview curators who counter these ideologies. I have been following your work for a while now and have always been inspired by the way you use the exhibition space as a place of resistance against injustice and hegemony. In your curatorial role at the Whitney, you also organised your own shows. Could you tell me about those?

Apsara DiQuinzio: In 2006, I co-curated Skin Is a Language[1] with Carter Foster, which was a permanent collection show. The exhibition explored how artists use skin as a site for communication. My second show was at Whitney at Altria, a satellite space that no longer exists. It was located in the Altria headquarters near 42^nd Street. There, I did a show called Burgeoning Geometries: Constructed Abstractions (figs. 1 and 2).[2] The exhibit was looking at work being made in a post-industrial landscape and how artists use a wide range of materials, often recycled (silver pins, Styrofoam, wood scraps, and found oil drums, for example) to create innovative large-scale works that were informed by excess and waste, but also built on motifs developed by Minimalism and Postminimalism. Towards the end of that year, I moved to SFMOMA, where I worked for six years. As an assistant curator, I organized the New Work series[3] (the project series at SFMOMA) as well as SECA Art Award exhibitions, which is the biennial art award for local Bay Area artists.

 

Fig. 1 + 2 – Burgeoning Geometries: Constructed Abstractions, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, October 7, 2006 - March 4, 2007, installation view. Photo by George Hirose.

 

At SFMOMA, I was also able to develop a few larger, group exhibitions as well, including The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality (fig. 3) [5 November 2011–20 February 2012]. This exhibition invited artists and poets to make new work about same-sex marriage, which I considered to be one of the most important civil rights issues facing the country at that time. This was back before same sex marriage was legalised [in the United States]. That was a fun and rewarding show. I received a Teiger Foundation grant that funded the project; otherwise, it would have never happened. It started out as a book and then became an exhibition. I commissioned about thirty artists and poets to make new work so, eventually we decided that we also had to show these works. These were small-scale works, mostly on paper, that would reproduce well in a catalogue. People like Carlos Motta, Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie, Laylah Ali, Colter Jacobsen, and Sam Durant contributed work. John Ashbery even gave me a poem! I mean, talk about shows that counter a right-wing perspective.

 

Fig. 3 – The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality, the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art, November 5, 2011-February 20, 2012, installation view. Photo by Adam Jacobs.

 

VZ: Exactly, the exhibition was happening before same-sex marriage became legal in the state of California[4]—it was so timely in a way.

AD: I wanted to do an exhibition where I gave artists the opportunity to weigh in on an important and urgent civil rights issue as it was unfolding. It was about advancing artistic voices to expand paradigms and ways of thinking about situations that seem resolute and fixed. I was in San Francisco, so, if it couldn't happen in San Francisco, it couldn't happen anywhere. I did try to travel the show, but no one took it. I wanted it to go to places like Texas and Florida, but it might have been too controversial. There was one moment when a reporter was inquiring about the exhibition and he stirred up some fear within the institution, I would say. He wanted to talk to the director about how and why this exhibition was happening and what we were going to do if the right wing showed up on our doorstep protesting the exhibition. That kind of sent alarm bells throughout the institution.

VZ: Did they end up closing the exhibition early? Were there any consequences to this reporter’s questions to the director?

AD: No, there was never any protest. Nobody ever voiced any kind of opposition, in terms of the exhibition.

VZ: Tell me more about the exhibition, how did you come up with the title?

AD: The title, The Air We Breathe, was inspired by a poem by Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again,[5] which is one of the most powerful poems I've ever read. It’s a line from the poem: “Equality is in the air we breathe.” If you read it today, it still seems acutely relevant.

VZ: And it is in line with the themes you have been exploring throughout your career.

AD: Yeah, I think I still come back to it also. Oh! Actually, I forgot about another exhibition I did. This was in 2004, in New York, when I was still at the Whitney. My colleague, Tina Kukielski, and I co-curated a show called The Freedom Salon,[6] which was part of the Imagine Festival of Arts that was taking over New York. It was when George Bush was running for re-election and the Republican National Convention was going to take place in the city. This was during the Iraq War, and he was running for his second term. So, a lot of people banded together, or it happened spontaneously across the city. Everyone started doing political shows to offer a counter-narrative to the Republican National Convention, but also primarily to oppose the Iraq War. This was almost twenty years ago now. We invited an incredible group of artists to participate, people like An-My Lê, Yoko Ono, AA Bronson, Emily Roysdon (now Every Ocean Hughes), Taryn Simon, Wayne Gonzalez, and many more.

VZ: Did you put a call out for submissions, or did you invite these artists?

AD: We sent invitations to artists we thought might be interested. For that exhibition, we wanted to do a show that reclaimed the idea of freedom from the right. Because this was a time when the right wing had co-opted the idea of freedom in service of the Iraq War. We wanted to create a space where freedom was re-appropriated by the left and to counter that ideology of false freedom that we felt the right wing was supporting and promulgating at that time. So, The Freedom Salon was my first political exhibition. In retrospect, The Air We Breathe built on that one, although I probably wouldn't have thought of that at the time.

VZ: Tell me about one of your favourite exhibitions that you curated, from concept to execution.

AD: At SFMOMA, I did an exhibition called Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art (figs. 4 and 5) [15 September 15–31 December 2012], and that was an international group exhibition that was intended to examine the shifting terrain in contemporary art in relation to the idea of peripheral and artistic centres.

 

Fig. 4 + 5 – Six Lines of Flight, installation view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 15–December 31, 2012; photo: Ian Reeves

VZ: There was a publication for that show, correct?

AD: Yes. Six Lines of Flight was about cosmopolitanism and thinking across networks. Bruno Latour was an important thinker that helped me frame that exhibition. I wanted to think about how all these cities are connected, while being so far away from each other. I looked at six different cities around the world where artists were playing an important role in catalysing each of the artistic scenes in their communities through the creation of various collectives, organisations, art centres, and so on. It is this idea that the periphery has to do it themselves, right? The artists were creating their own platforms and institutions in order to support their communities.

VZ: In a way, artists must create their own centres to disseminate their work, right?

AD: Right! So, I focused on six different cities: Cali, Colombia; Tangier, Morocco; San Francisco, United States; Beirut, Lebanon; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Cluj, Romania. So not your typical art centre, especially at that point in time. In 2010 (when I started researching), these scenes were still emergent. Yto Barrada created the Cinémathèque de Tanger and that helped to ignite a film scene, and it was also a residency program for other artists. Lamia Joreige created the Beirut Art Center, Akram Zaatari created the Arab Image Foundation, and Oscar Muñoz created Lugar a Dudas in Cali. The exhibition was looking at all these different artistic spaces that were created, and then showcasing the artists who created them in the exhibition. We also had an extensive education program, thanks to the collaboration of Dominic Willsdon, who was at SFMOMA at the time. I received a Warhol Curatorial Fellowship for that exhibition. So, we were able to bring all the artists out from all these cities, and I travelled to the different countries to do research. We reserved a portion [of the grant] for travel and programmatic funds. So, the artists came to San Francisco, and we did a public program and a roundtable conversation that was recorded and then reproduced in the book. For me, in hindsight, it was emblematic of a time that was more open, of a kind of internationalism that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

VZ: I agree, this kind of intercultural dialogue is lacking in the art world. I think recently, we have been siloing ourselves again.

AD: Yeah. This exhibition happened before the rise of the Tea Party[7] in the right wing, which formed oppositionally to cosmopolitanism, as cosmopolitanism is something that embraces hospitality and the Other, and the importance of difference. Whereas the Tea Party was about America first, and now that idea is still very present in the United States. Obama was President and what a beautiful time that was; things opened-up in an important way in the US, especially after Bush. That was an important show for me personally, just in terms of expanding my horizons and transcultural understanding and getting to travel to see the world in a way that I hadn't before.

VZ: How did you settle on those cities to be the focus of the exhibition?

AD: In the beginning, I didn't really know which cities I was going to focus on. I had identified countries where burgeoning communities and artistic scenes were developing. I went to Bogotá, Cali, Cartagena, and Medellín in Colombia. Then I decided to focus on Cali after visiting all those places and talking to a lot of people. In Romania, I went to Bucharest, Iași, and Cluj-Napoca, and then settled on Cluj.

VZ: What an incredible opportunity to engage with all those cultures and artistic centres. Before we end the interview, I wanted to ask about your experience in Nevada. Throughout your career, you have been all over the world and have worked and settled in progressive metropolises, such as San Francisco and New York. You are now working in Reno, Nevada, which, even though it is an area that is considered blue, it is purple, pretty much split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats. What has been your experience there with your current or future curatorial projects?

AD: To talk about that, I have to go back in time and talk about creating the Feminist Art Coalition.[8]

VZ: This was during your time at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), correct?

AD: Yes. So, the idea came about after Donald Trump was elected in 2017, when I was totally devastated, as a lot of people were. There were two times in my life where I woke up crying in the middle of the night: one was when Donald Trump was elected, and the other time was when my apartment burned down. I just thought, I've got to do something. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I've got to do something. So, I reached out to a bunch of colleagues in the field and pitched this idea of a massive feminist project. We didn't have the name for it at the time but wanted to try and get as many museums around the country to band together to do projects that were feminist-related, around the time of the next election in 2020. We had three years, so enough lead time to try and organize it, because working in museums you have to start three to five years out in order to make anything like that happen. We started meeting and everyone was very supportive. Then we got another Warhol curatorial fellowship, which funded it.

The Feminist Art Coalition was a platform for political and cultural action, mainly consisting of a website that listed all of the projects that had committed to hosting a feminist project during the fall of 2020. Unfortunately, the pandemic intervened… We actually got over 100 institutions to sign on to do something synchronised, which was supposed to have happened between September and November of 2020. The pandemic hit in March, so then everyone's schedules were upended. Most of the projects did happen in the end, but they were distributed over different time periods than initially intended.

Trump’s election was also an awakening for me about how New York and L.A. had become such ossified art centres, and the right wing was identifying people in these cities as “liberal elites.” So, I started to think about the need to do something to counter this problematic sense of elitism associated with cultural capitals. My interest in moving away from the areas identified with the coastal elite started to develop, and I became more interested in building bridges. That is where the idea of living in a place like Nevada started to emerge, and the importance in trying to reach out across the political divide. We have become so culturally polarised. I think the most urgent political work we can do right now is to try to build bridges, which is hard to do, but I think this elitist stereotype is really problematic politically.

VZ: And very prevalent, too. So, to end our conversation. Tell me about a future project. I remember last year you were telling me about an exhibition that is going to take over the whole building of the Nevada Museum of Art.

 

Fig. 6 + 7 – New Time: Art and Feminism in the 21st Century, August 28, 2021 - January 30, 2022: UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Impart Photography

 

AD: Yeah, I’m working on it now. It's called Into the Time Horizon, which is about environmentalism and the climate crisis. The idea for it started percolating while I was working on New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21^st Century (figs. 6 and 7),[9] which was a survey of feminist artistic practices from 2000 to 2020; it was the exhibition I did for the Feminist Art Coalition. Working on that project, I became more interested in eco-feminism, especially given the climate crisis is increasingly visible and urgent. So, my interest in environmentalism increased. When I arrived at the Nevada Museum of Art, I talked to the director, David Walker, about how I might be able to contribute to the institution, and I told him I wanted to create a Green Team and focus on the environment and sustainability. The museum already had the Center for Art + Environment[10] and had already been looking at art’s relationship to the environment for over a decade. The museum also focuses on Indigenous artists—especially Indigenous artists of the Great Basin—which I was interested in focusing on as well. So, it was a beautiful fit. Since then, we’ve been doing a lot of work on sustainability and integrating it into the museum’s program. Into the Time Horizon will be an expansive exhibition, the largest I've ever done, with about 190 artists covering 120,000 square feet. There’s a lot of work to do still!


- - -

Let America Be America Again

by Langston Hughes

 

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

 

(America never was America to me.)

 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

 

(It never was America to me.)

 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

 

(There's never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

 

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

 

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

 

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay!

Of owning everything for one's own greed!

 

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.

I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am the Negro, servant to you all.

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—

Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.

 

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That's made America the land it has become.

O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home—

For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,

And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa's strand I came

To build a "homeland of the free."

 

The free?

 

Who said the free? Not me?

Surely not me? The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike?

The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we've dreamed

And all the songs we've sung

And all the hopes we've held

And all the flags we've hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay—

Except the dream that's almost dead today.

 

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

 

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

 

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!

 

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

Link to poem: https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again

Apsara DiQuinzio is senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art, where she oversees the contemporary program. Over the course of DiQuinzio’s twenty-year career as a curator, she has organised over fifty exhibitions of art, including solo exhibitions with leading contemporary artists such as Michael Armitage, Trisha Donnelly, Vincent Fecteau, Arthur Jafa, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Christina Quarles, R.H. Quaytman, and Paul Sietsema, among many others. Previously, she was the senior curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where she managed the internationally renowned MATRIX exhibition series. She has also held curatorial positions at SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to founding the Feminist Art Coalition in 2017, she is the curator and editor of Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity; New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21^st Century; Ron Nagle: Handsome Drifter; Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static, Charles Howard: A Margin of Chaos; Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art; and The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality. Furthermore, she has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues and has written for Artforum, Mousse, The Exhibitionist, and Cura.

Vivian Zavataro is the Executive and Creative Director of the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas (United States). She is a museologist who specialises in contemporary art, community engagement, and audience-centric curatorial practices. Zavataro has successfully led museums through fundraising campaigns, strategic planning, accreditation processes, exhibition and program development, and financial evaluations.

Before accepting her appointment at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Zavataro was the Director and Chief Curator of the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno. During her tenure, she grew the museum’s annual budget and staff, created a robust internship program, increase and diversified the museum’s audience, mentored staff in museum practices and policies, and initiated important partnerships with local institutions and other colleges on campus.

Prior to her leadership roles, Zavataro worked in different capacities at renowned arts organisations, such as documenta in Kassel, Germany, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, SFMOMA in San Francisco, California, and the J. Paul Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, California. Her exhibitions have been funded by major U.S. American entities, such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art. She holds a Master’s in Heritage and Museum Studies from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a Master’s in Advanced Studies in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland and is currently pursuing her PhD in Practice in Curating at the University of Reading, United Kingdom.