Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

Dr. Amy Galpin
Chief Curator
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
Miami, FL, (305) 348-2890, frost.fiu.edu

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
This weekend I am seeing Dennis Scholl’s new film Lifeline: Clyfford Still. Still is such an enigma, and I am fascinated to see what Scholl and his team uncovered. In terms of exhibitions, Natural Forces: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington opens at the Denver Art Museum this spring. I am interested in viewing paintings by these two legendary artists presented side by side and evaluating how landscape functions as subject in the work.

What are you reading?
A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N.D.B. Connolly.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I caught the amazing Marsden Hartley show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Humlebaek, Denmark, before it closed. Recently, I saw Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and I heard Dr. Jeffreen Hayes speak about Augusta Savage at the Norton Museum of Art. Gamin (circa 1929) by Augusta Savage is in the Norton’s collection.

What are you researching at the moment?
I am thinking quite a bit about artistic relationships between the United States and Cuba from the mid-19th century through the 1950s. Specifically, I have been researching how Cuba was represented by artists like Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, William Glackens, among others and sifting through turn of the century Harper’s Weekly illustrations.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I’ve been obsessing over Roy DeCarava’s photographs lately and haven’t had the opportunity to view more than a handful at once. I would love to see a big show. —