Curator Chat

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

Virginia Anderson
Curator of American Art and Department Head of American Painting & Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, www.artbma.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
At the Baltimore Museum of Art, I can’t wait to see our upcoming exhibition Joyce Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams, co-curated by my brilliant colleague, Cecilia Wichmann. Joyce is a force of nature and a fantastic visual artist who combines beautiful technique with such powerful imagery. I’m also excited to see the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism show at the Met on my next trip to New York.

What are you reading?
Always more than one book at a time! I’m in the midst of Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway and Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross’s Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, and I’m reading The Year I Flew Away by Marie Arnold with my 10-year-old.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I really liked the Boston-area painter Emily Eveleth’s show at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. It sounds absurd, but she paints doughnuts as though they were figurative portraits against rococo backgrounds, and her paint is absolutely luscious. For me, they felt like critiques of capitalist decadence and indifference: an ironic “let them eat cake” in visual form.

What are you researching at the moment?
I’ve been enjoying researching the women artists of the 1930s and 40s who made prints through the federally funded Graphic Arts Workshops for our current exhibition, Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA. Artists like Blanche Grambs, Ida Abelman, Miné Okubo and Florence Kent lived through extraordinary times and made radical and innovative works for the American public.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
My dream exhibition is one I’m currently working on about the sense of touch in 20th-century American art and considering how tactility, in terms of both the making and reception of art, might shape a more inclusive narrative for modern art history. How did artists engage with touch to make works that address subjects like memory, family and community, work, identity and activism? I hope to engage our visitors with an appreciation for the tactile qualities of art, and talk about the museum’s mandate to preserve and care for artworks—thus all those “please do not touch” signs!