Art · The Creative Process: Artists, Curators, Museum Directors Talk Art, Life & Creativity

Hans-Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed in New York. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Obrist has curated more than 300 exhibitions and lectured internationally at academic and art institutions. He is a contributing editor to Artforum, AnOther Magazine, 032C, a writes for...

“Picasso is a symbol of the creative process. Always in metamorphosis. Always in transformation. Sometimes when you become wealthy and famous, you stop having the energy of the creative process, but if you see the whole span of his career, you have 50,000 works of art in all mediums. So the main mission of the museum is to display like a kaleidoscope, and we have always a new angle, a new directio...

Laurent Le Bon, President of Musée Picasso in Paris at the time of this interview, is now the President of the Centre Pompidou. The Musée Picasso holds over 5,000 of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s artworks and tens of thousands of sketches, photos, and many scripts, making the collection an impressive and holistic representation of Picasso’s career. Centre Pompidou houses the largest museum for mo...

“This museum, this institution has a long history and actually, the idea of a museum goes back to maybe 100 years ago when Civil War veterans wanted a monument recognizing the service and the sacrifice of African Americans during the war effort. It wasn't until the mid-late 80s when congressman John Lewis with some other colleagues started to bring forth the idea that the Smithsonian needed to hav...

Dr. Dwandalyn Reece is a storyteller, ethnomusicologist, and museum professional. Reece studied American Studies and Music at Scripps College, American Culture and Museum Practice at the University of Michigan, and Musical Performance at New York University. Her research and projects include exhibitions at the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New Jersey Stat...

“In origami design, historically people have always used their intuition. They probably started by folding traditional shapes or folding designs by others, developed an intuitive understanding of how the paper behaves and then from there they can explore that intuition to create new shapes. That was the way design worked for years and years, that was the way it worked for me, but I eventually hit...

Robert J. Lang has been working with origami for over fifty years and is now recognized as one of the world’s leading masters of the art and one of the pioneers of the marriage of origami with mathematics and technology. He has consulted on applications of origami to medical devices, airbag design, and space telescopes, is the author or co-author of twenty-one books and numerous technical articles...

Debra Kerr is the Executive Director of Intuit - the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. She was previously at the John G. Shedd Aquarium for 17 years - she is a past board member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, past chair and instructor for its Professional Development Committee and management courses, past chair of the zoo and aquarium committee for the International Asso...

Debra Kerr is the Executive Director of Intuit - the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. She was previously at the John G. Shedd Aquarium for 17 years - she is a past board member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, past chair and instructor for its Professional Development Committee and management courses, past chair of the zoo and aquarium committee for the International Asso...

Museum director, curator, and cultural producer at large, Chris Dercon is the President of the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, an umbrella group of national museums in France. His career in major cultural institutions across Europe spans several decades. From 2011 to 2016, he was director of London's Tate Modern. He has been program director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and has served as...

Museum director, curator, and cultural producer at large, Chris Dercon is the President of the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, an umbrella group of national museums in France. His career in major cultural institutions across Europe spans several decades. From 2011 to 2016, he was director of London's Tate Modern. He has been program director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and has served as...

Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., Susan Fisher Sterling has built her career and the stature of the museum around the message of equity for women through excellence in the arts. Unusual for the museum field, Sterling has dedicated her entire career to advancing NMWA’s mission. As an associate curator, curator of modern and contemporary art, and then c...

Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., Susan Fisher Sterling has built her career and the stature of the museum around the message of equity for women through excellence in the arts. Unusual for the museum field, Sterling has dedicated her entire career to advancing NMWA’s mission. As an associate curator, curator of modern and contemporary art, and then c...

Dr. Nicole Fleetwood is an educator and author whose work explores Black cultural history, visual, media, and gender studies and mass incarceration. She earned her B.Phil from Miami University and her Ph. D. from Stanford University. Fleetwood currently serves as an Associate Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University and is a member of their press editorial committee. She...

"That's what my work is about. Women owning agency. Any kind. And that's what makes you really excited. Having agency. Sexual agency. Owning sexuality not being the object of it." Marilyn Minter lives and works in New York. In 2006, Minter was in the Whitney Biennial and collaborated with Creative Time to install billboards throughout Chelsea in NYC. Her video Green Pink Caviar was shown in the lo...

Marilyn Minter lives and works in New York. In 2006, Minter was in the Whitney Biennial and collaborated with Creative Time to install billboards throughout Chelsea in NYC. Her video Green Pink Caviar was shown in the lobby of the MoMA from 2010-11 and on digital billboards in Los Angeles and New York. In 2013, Minter was featured in the exhibition Riotous Baroque, which traveled from Kunsthaus Zü...

John Marciari is Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum. Marciari oversees a collection that is renowned throughout the world. Drawings and Prints is one of the largest of the Morgan’s curatorial departments and its approximately 25,000 works span the fourteenth century through the nineteenth century. The department is especial...

“Now I think we’re in another culture war. I think we’re in, as we see the realm of cancel culture in social media and this very polarising war between the liberal left and the conservative right. I think that we’re in another culture and a lot of it is centering around gender and race. If you look at what’s happened to black women athletes in the last couples of months, the censuring of their bod...

Professor Micol Hebron is a video and performance artist who works out of Los Angeles. Professor Hebron has studied at UCSD, Academia di Belle Arti at Università di Venezia, and UCLA. She founded Gallery B12, a cooperative artists-run exhibition and lecture space in Hollywood. Hebron co-produced the Full Nelson Festival a showcase of international performance art and, in 2004, founded the LA Art G...

Doctor in English studies and lecturer at the University of Paris-Diderot until 2002, Bénédicte Alliot was Director of the French Institute of South Africa in Johannesburg (2002-2006), then Cultural Attaché at the French Embassy in New Delhi, India (2006-2010). She then headed the Cultural Seasons unit at the Institut Français in Paris. Since early 2016, Bénédicte Alliot has been the Executive Dir...

Doctor in English studies and lecturer at the University of Paris-Diderot until 2002, Bénédicte Alliot was Director of the French Institute of South Africa in Johannesburg (2002-2006), then Cultural Attaché at the French Embassy in New Delhi, India (2006-2010). She then headed the Cultural Seasons unit at the Institut Français in Paris. Since early 2016, Bénédicte Alliot has been the Executive Dir...

"The truth of the matter is that there are some people who are born to be creative and they're going to be artists. And the importance of fostering that is necessary, because if we each fulfill our purpose as humans, then society is better off for it. So in other words, if I had been anything else other than what I have become, I would have only been living up to half of my potential. And so that'...

Reem Bassous received her Bachelor of Arts from The Lebanese American University in Beirut. Lebanon and her master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University in Washington DC. She started teaching drawing and painting in 2001 at The George Washington University, taught at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa for 9 years, and is currently an instructor at Leeward Community College at the Univ...

"You know, I've always liked, since I started painting, particular landscapes, I like to see work as the artist wants it to be seen. I'm curious about the creative process to a certain extent, but I'm much more interested in the effect of the final work. And the underpainting for me is always important because I believe that there is a bit of a thin dimension on the surface of all of these paintin...

Award-winning landscape artist April Gornik’s paintings and drawings of land, sky and sea are anchored in observed reality and a world synthesized, abstracted, remembered and imagined. Award-winning artist April Gornik has work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and other collections. Retrospectives of her art have traveled to museums in the U.S. and Canada. She has shown at the Whitn...