Curator Chat

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

Barbara Haskell
Curator
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY • www.whitney.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I am looking forward to the September rotation of At the Dawn of a New Age, the exhibition I organized at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Starting in September, the works that are currently in the show will be replaced by others. The rotation will provide a further opportunity to reframe the understanding of early 20th-century modernism by introducing more artists who were well known in their time but have been largely forgotten.

What are you reading?
I am reading about the Transcendental Painting Group, a band of artists in Santa Fe and Taos in the late 1930s and early 1940s who were committed to creating and promoting hard-edged, geometric painting imbued with metaphysical content.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently?
For me, the simultaneous presentation of the 2022 Whitney Biennial and the museum’s survey of America’s early 20th-century avant garde is fascinating in revealing the diametrically opposite moods and concerns of the two periods.

What are you researching at the moment?
I am researching the art and life of Horace Pippin, who was one of America’s foremost early 20th-century Black artists. Wounded in World War I and largely self-taught, he used sophisticated compositional strategies to depict everyday Black life and the dynamics of race and segregation in America.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
I would like to see a host of exhibitions that reexamine art of the first half of the 20th-century, whether of individual artists or groups of artists with shared formal or thematic concerns. Horace Pippin and Ben Shahn are examples of individual artists, but there are countless others whose art is relevant to today.