{"id":2255,"date":"2011-09-05T01:35:24","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T01:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=2255"},"modified":"2019-11-22T15:38:55","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T15:38:55","slug":"three-questions-helen-molesworth-speaks-with-taylor-davis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=2255","title":{"rendered":"Three Questions: Helen Molesworth Speaks with Taylor Davis"},"content":{"rendered":"

This conversation took place at the ICA Boston on April 28, 2010. Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA, asked the artist Taylor Davis to interview the then newly appointed chief curator Helen Molesworth. The ICA members magazine, <\/span><\/em>New<\/span>, ran a small portion of this larger conversation. A longer edit of their dialogue follows here.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Taylor Davis:<\/strong> I was looking at curate<\/em> and \u201ccurate\u201d came up, the archaic definition of a minister with pastoral responsibility. I was surprised because the stereotypes\u2014a soft-handed, rosy-cheeked Anglican biking from cottage to cottage in some BBC version of the English countryside, and the slim-hipped, couture-wearing tastemaker jetting from one urban hotspot to another\u2014couldn\u2019t be farther apart.<\/p>\n

Helen Molesworth:<\/strong> I am already very happy that you think I am slim-hipped. [laughter]<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I\u2019m glad that I made you happy so far. And I just finished the first paragraph. . . . They couldn\u2019t seem farther apart, that was the point. Then I started thinking about artists you\u2019ve worked with, and a few came to my mind immediately (Sharon Hayes, William Pope.L, Moyra Davey, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and so on), and exhibitions you\u2019ve created so far (Work Ethic<\/em>, ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987\u20131993<\/em>, Part Object Part Sculpture<\/em>, and many more), and the perceived distance between responsibility to a community and curating contemporary art collapsed. I like this collapse very much. My questions come from thinking about possible similarities between what seem to be two very different cultural leaders. Now, I can ask you the questions one at a time, or I can just give you all three of them, and we can have a mishmash.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Maybe we should try one at a time, because already the two paragraphs are so dense.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>OK, do you want the hardest one first?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> I\u2019m going to leave that up to you.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>OK, then I\u2019m going to give you the hardest one first, because I think it\u2019s all connected. So, my first question is, Where does love fit in?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Where does love fit in?<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Can I interrupt you?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Yes, any stalling would be great here. [laughter]<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I gave you my little introduction about the curator and the curate. Obviously, these questions are pulled right out of that, but I was thinking a lot about this idea of when one is in a position of really giving to a community. When I was thinking of the curate, I was thinking that that\u2019s not an easy path to choose. And then when I thought of the curate and to curate, and the same root, \u201cto care,\u201d it just seems like, yes, of course love fits in, and in your projects it really seems that\u2019s true\u2014but how?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Well, love is something that I have been increasingly conscious of as a force or a motivation or a stake in my work. Let me drop back a little bit and say I feel like I fall in love with the art object; I am someone who is really moved by art objects. In the beginning, when I was a teenager and as a young person in college, I just loved<\/em> them. I remember being at MoMA as a high school student and coming across Giacometti\u2019s Woman with Her Throat Cut<\/em> and feeling like I was tumbling over myself in my head. The same used to happen in the tapestry room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I grew up in New York, so I grew up in a very rich field of museums. Then, because my post-college and graduate-school training happened in the late 80s and early 90s\u2014the heyday of what we now call theory or critical theory\u2014love was replaced with criticism. I got angry at a lot of art objects and really cut my teeth on them. The art objects I didn\u2019t like agitated me as much as the art objects I immediately fell in love with. I don\u2019t think then I could have talked about love in my work. It took me a long time to realize that criticism is a form of love. To be critical of a thing, in the hard sense, to articulate what it is not doing, or doing that is problematic, means that you hold in your head a standard of the good, whatever the value is\u2014the socially conscious, the pure, the beautiful\u2014whatever it is, you hold the value in your head. I came to feel that criticism is born of love, because you have expectations or desires that are not being met. The criticism that interested me the most, which was feminist and Marxist criticism, held certain ideals like democracy and equality, above any other values, like profit and patriarchy. In this way, the idea of the critical was bound up with my expectations and love for the ideal of democracy and my intense desire to see it better enacted. But\u2014this is retrospective, and there\u2019s no way I could have articulated this at the time\u2014then that part of my life ended. And that was simultaneous with me getting my first full-time curatorial job . . .<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>And that was?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> At the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2000. I became a professionalized subject in the service of an institution. Even though I had worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the education department, and I had had a teaching job, there was something about a full-fledged entrance into the labor force, into work life, that was a very profound shift for me. One of the things I began to realize there was that I really, really loved museums; they were, for me, libidinal places, erotic places, they were places to flirt and fall in love (which actually happened to me, I fell in love with someone in the museum). Museums were filled with of objects born of other people\u2019s love and desire. I was very aware of what a charged, psychic space it was. And I was also aware of how fucked up museums are, how badly they had behaved, and that a lot of the animosity that people had toward them was justified. I felt like one of the things I wanted to do was try and fight for what I loved about them. Again, that was nascent in 2000; now I feel much more conscious of what I\u2019m doing when I\u2019m working and when the artists that I work for\u2014with\u2014<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I like that you almost said \u201cthe artists I work for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Yes, and we could get to that, because I do feel like I work for artists. I work for and with them; it\u2019s an interesting dynamic.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I\u2019m only interrupting you with that observation because it feels, from my experience of listening to you talk with the artists you invited to speak while you were at Harvard, that you were really with<\/em> them. You were not taking some hierarchal position with them of \u201cthe great presenter.\u201d Also, in your conversations with them, there was wonder, there was discovery.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> That\u2019s really nice to hear. One of the things that a curator does, or that I try and do in my work, is offer the opportunity to be with someone for a while, to actually think alongside someone else. Not to think like<\/em> them, that\u2019s a version of empathy that is narcissistic. I have never liked the image of \u201cputting yourself in someone else\u2019s shoes.\u201d If you put yourself in their shoes, then they don\u2019t have shoes! There is the evidence of my kind of dumb, literal, Amelia Bedelia\u2013quality of mind. What I want to do is stand next to them, to try and see what they see, and that, to me, goes back to love. Trying to understand and to value love is one of the primary motivations for what I do. That has meant that my work often arises out of a very personal problem, which I then try to make open and available to others, in essence a translation from the personal into the political or the public. For me this has feminist implications, and it has also meant that I have committed to a group of artists over time. I\u2019m not known in the field for being the discoverer of new talent. That\u2019s not me. I got my posse. I\u2019m loyal. I try to hang with you. I feel like we\u2019re going somewhere together, and I don\u2019t know where it\u2019s going to be.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>If somebody didn\u2019t know you and your work they could, upon hearing you say that, think that you chose your posse for reasons of aesthetic comfort. But to me it feels like you have chosen artists who at first confounded you. You often seem like you are thinking \u201cI can\u2019t believe I\u2019m standing here right now saying I love this painting, because I didn\u2019t know how to get my mind around it at first.\u201d It seems to me that this is one of the qualities that allows you to open up the art for other people. You are open about the process of really trying to get your head around an artist\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> That\u2019s so true! I think that comes from two places. I remember seeing a show of Robert Gober\u2019s plaster sinks in, I don\u2019t know, Andrea Rosen or Paula Cooper gallery, in the SoHo days, and I was incensed. I was the prototypical young, angry, Whitney Independent Study Curatorial Program student. I was furious, you know, what a rip-off! What about Duchamp! Now I\u2019m an enormous admirer of Bob\u2019s work, and his work has been so important to me over the years. But it was only through the process of understanding my antipathy to those objects that I came to find them as extraordinary and as moving as I do. I learned to trust the power of a negative reaction as much as a positive one\u2014anything that can get you that riled up has aimed itself at both the intellectual and psychic arenas. We need better ways of accounting for the disturbances art produces in the psychic arena. I try to keep myself open and available to that disturbance and not see it as a way to be dismissive of work. The theoretical work that has helped me with this quality of art and the art experience is the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In particular, his notion of what is ethically at stake in our relationship with the other.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Can you elaborate?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> I think Levinas has a very radical account of the other and of love. For Levinas, saying \u201cI love you\u201d is as ethical a statement as it is a libidinal one. According to him, one doesn\u2019t fall in love with an other because they are like<\/em> you, because the other is never like you, they are always different from you. Hence, you fall in love with an other because they are not<\/em> like you. So, for Levinas, the ethical contract between the self and the other is not \u201cI accept you because you are like me,\u201d which is the condition of \u201ccommunity\u201d or mainstream bourgeois liberal politics. Because this line of thinking leads to people \u201caccepting\u201d or \u201ctolerating\u201d other people. Rather, for Levinas love means something like: \u201cI cannot know you, I will never be able to know you.\u201d And all of our relationships, and particularly our most intimate relationships, start with that as their premise. This means that love does not emanate from a fantasy of knowing or being similar to the other, but rather love comes from an acknowledgment of your radical unknowableness to me. A relation built upon that is, for Levinas, the foundation of ethics. We know this in a pedestrian way: it is easy to help people or be nice to people we think we share a great deal with, people we think we know. But can we do that when we don\u2019t know them, when we feel acutely different from them? For instance, this is a way of saying not that queers and straights who want to get married are \u201cthe same,\u201d it would be a way of talking about how queer marriages might be different from straight ones, and fighting for them because<\/em> they are different. Levinas\u2019s ideas have become a very powerful way for me to think about art, my relationships with other people, my relationship with institutions, my work in the public sphere.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>My second question is, Where does service fit in?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> There are a couple of different versions of service. The other day Jill Medvedow, the director of the ICA, said something that we all know to be true, but she said it in a way that really crystallized things for me. She said the ICA is a 501(c)(3), meaning the government has granted us tax-exempt status. Why? Because we do something that the market cannot or will not do. Now, I know this. But somehow that she could say it in a budget meeting really made my chest open, and I had a kind of energy to move through the financial madness we are all living through. So when people donate to a 501(c)(3) they get a tax deduction because they are supporting a nonmarket function in their culture, and they support that nonmarket function because they understand\u2014or we are trying to help them understand\u2014that what museums do is work toward some idea of the public good, separate and distinct from the market\u2019s logic of profit. So the idea of service comes up for me in a couple of ways. One is I feel very acutely aware of my service to the institution that I work for, my service to the artists, and my service to something like the general public. All of these things then have to get held in some relationship to my own personal psychic investment in what I do.<\/p>\n

Service to the institution is something that has gotten really lost in the rise of the fancy curator\u2014this couture-wearing, slim-hipped, frequent-flyer-miles accumulator (here I am guilty on all charges). The more the role of the curator has become impresariolike, or starlike the less the field at large has a discourse about how we serve our institutions. And by \u201cserve those institutions\u201d I mean what do we do in a daily way that goes toward making the institutions we work in more hospitable places to work, more hospitable places to view art, and more hospitable places for the production, distribution, and reception of culture. That\u2019s not only making a great show, that\u2019s actually developing a good system for writing labels, or picking up a piece of trash on the gallery floor, or mentoring junior colleagues, or fighting for raises for the support staff, in essence trying to approach all of the mundane, bureaucratic crap with the creative energy and joy that you bring to your intellectual work.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Right. You\u2019re not saying, \u201cYou guys deal with this other stuff. I have my eye on the prize.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Right. I think curatorial work is, and I hate this language, but it is a team activity. I think where a lot of institutions screw up is when they get Pollyanna-ish about the idea of teamwork. But teams are very hierarchical and regimented. Teams are units within which everyone has a different skill set. I\u2019m a big Celtics fan. You don\u2019t see Kevin Garnett in the back court, figuring out how to run the court . . . that\u2019s Rajon Rondo\u2019s job! That\u2019s how things work on a team. People have different skills; there is a captain and a coach, and a general manager, and owners. Museums are similar. When teams work well it\u2019s because everyone\u2019s doing the job and knows how to do that job and understands that they share a common goal.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I work at MassArt, which is a publically funded art school, and I love bringing my students to the ICA. My students are your public. But you also have a public that is not young art students. You have a public that has strong ideas about what art is. Some of the shows that you\u2019ve done are really tough for someone who expects to be looking at things that they consider beautiful. How do you think of them? I\u2019m thinking about the ACT UP<\/em> show. Can you do a show like that here? And if you do, how do you invite that public in? Or how do you serve that public?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> You have to be as honest with the public as you are with the artist. I don\u2019t take it as self-evident that the viewing public is as consumed with the hegemony of Minimalism as you or I are. I just don\u2019t think that it\u2019s their issue. But I do think that the viewing public has decided, on a Thursday night, or Saturday, or maybe even on a Tuesday afternoon, to come here to spend $15 to get in because they want something. I think they want an experience of otherness, pleasure, beauty, provocation, interest, and novelty that they can\u2019t get in other sectors of the culture. Because they have plenty of leisure opportunities, and, for most of the public, we are a leisure opportunity. But my working assumption is that when they choose a museum as their leisure activity what they want is something that\u2019s going to massage their brains. I think that\u2019s really important to the general public, to try to be more transparent, and I think that\u2019s about a lot of talking, and I\u2019m not afraid of text in the galleries. It\u2019s about assuming that the people who are here want to be here. We have a voluntary audience.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>What about wall labels?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> I like them. I like reading them when I go to museums. But I hate the wall labels at the Met. When I\u2019m looking at some wacked-out picture from 1642, and thinking, \u201cWow, this is so cool,\u201d then I see a label, I get excited, because I want to know what\u2019s going on in the image. However, usually what I\u2019m told is that in the conservation lab they found something underneath something else or, even worse, that some rich lady paid for it. This is not helpful to me.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I ask the question because I sometimes hear a tone in wall labels, like, \u201cYou\u2019re kind of an idiot and I\u2019m going to talk to you like a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Well, that\u2019s a problem Wall labels are either written in a dense curatorial speak that is dumb, or they suffer from the idea that the general viewer is a ninth-grader.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I\u2019m connecting it to your idea about being more transparent with the audience, and part of it would mean respecting that. If they come to the museum and know how to read and are curious about the thing that they are reading, they don\u2019t need a cheerleader.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> So true. But our country has completely abandoned the public education system, which is now in a state of crisis and massive disrepair. One ramification is that most people, by the time they get to college, have not had a significant art experience. Even though we live in the most visually saturated time in our culture, most people are what I would call functionally illiterate in the realm of the visual. They actually don\u2019t understand what they\u2019re looking at, even though they are looking right at it. If I do a rudimentary analysis of a picture, for instance, if I show a public audience how perspective works, by showing them the orthogonals and a vanishing point, they start to look orgasmic! Museums have been asked tacitly to fill in the gaps of the public education system: they are trying to compensate for this huge paucity in the educational sphere. Many of those ninth-grade labels are written from a space of earnest intentions. To my way of thinking, this is one of the major crises that arts institutions face right now\u2014we are no longer being asked to supplement the public education system, we are being asked to fill in, wholesale, for what it is not doing.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Is that why there is a position now called the curator of education?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Yes. The curator of education started as a way so that the people who worked in the education department could have a voice at the table. I think the first curator of education was Connie Wolf at the Whitney Museum. Her title gained her access to curatorial meetings. It was a way of cutting across the institutional hierarchy and creating an interdisciplinary conversation.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Are you ready for your third question?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> We didn\u2019t do service to artists, which is huge.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>That\u2019s the biggest thing. No, it\u2019s not! But it is! [laughter]<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> But it is. The rise of the star curator often put the curator above the artist. Service to the artist is huge, because you have to create the conditions and possibilities for artists to learn. You have to imagine that art students are your audience. You have to imagine that artists are your audience. You have to work to create an institution that is hospitable to artists when their work comes into it. We have to make sure that we don\u2019t treat artists like service providers, but that we treat them as equal partners on the playing field. In addition, we have to ask the public to become\u2014this is very difficult\u2014to become more aware of what they want from their encounter with an art object. We need to ask them to be a little more aware of the category of person that we call \u201cartist\u201d and the extraordinary demands we place on them.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>It\u2019s funny that I forgot to ask you about the service-to-artists thing. I\u2019m an artist, and I think it\u2019s uncomfortable for me. I can ask you about the institutions and the students . . . but the artist part, that\u2019s raw.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> It\u2019s really raw. We ask artists, and by \u201cwe\u201d I mean the culture, to do things we don\u2019t ask anyone else to do. No one else in the culture is asked to have a mid-career survey. Nobody else is asked to take everything they\u2019ve made or done or thought, up until an arbitrary point in time, the time we\u2019re<\/em> ready to show it, and subject it to public review. If somebody asked me to do that, I\u2019d be under the desk in a heartbeat. We ask you to go to your studio and work and then sell the stuff. We ask you to not make too much money, but not give the work away. We ask you to be the vehicle of expression that we cannot be.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>You ask us to make things in a language we have partially invented and then be able to explain it in English or whatever language . . .<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> We demand constant<\/em> self-explanation from you. The only other people we demand this of are our sports stars. But we also know that they will only speak to us\u2014this is the greatness of Bull Durham<\/em>\u2014in sports talk.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Well, thank you for serving us. Alright, well, I want to move on to the third question, which is connected of course. How do you look for something when you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re looking for?<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> How do you look for something when you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re looking for?<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>You\u2019re supposed to be finding stuff to put into those museum galleries. And you can\u2019t possibly know ahead of time everything that you\u2019re going to put in. You\u2019re looking for something, you\u2019re looking for an experience, you\u2019re looking for love, you\u2019re looking for some kind of exchange from or with an artist. But you\u2019re also trying to bring things that I haven\u2019t seen before. You said, \u201cOh, I\u2019m not the person who\u2019s sniffing out the newest one,\u201d but you\u2019re looking . . .<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> That\u2019s a good question, I\u2019m not sure I know the answer. A little book of advice to curators came out in the early aughts, a small volume of well-known, important curators giving words of wisdom to younger curators. I devoured this book early in my career. It was like a self-help book for curators! Andrea Miller-Keller, who\u2019s a curator I have a great amount of respect for\u2014she pretty much invented the project room at the Wadsworth Atheneum, where she gave many extraordinary people their first shows\u2014and one of her aphorisms was, \u201cDon\u2019t pause in front of weak work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Scary.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Ouch! I first read that around the time I was starting to go to these big art fairs. And I got it: wow, don\u2019t pause in front of weak work. Just keep moving, pause in front of strong work even if you don\u2019t like it, even if you don\u2019t understand it, even if it\u2019s not to your taste, even if it\u2019s not going to work in any of the rooms that you have to fill, stop in front of the strong stuff and walk by the weak stuff. And that is harsh. I don\u2019t stop. Now, how I figure out what is weak and what is strong, that is a harder question. Because your question really goes to: What are the criteria, how do I ascribe value?<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>I guess so.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> It\u2019s a poetic and nice way of asking the hard question, which is, How do you end up making the choices to show what you show? I\u2019ve certainly shown work that I didn\u2019t personally support, but I thought it was good for the institution, that the work itself had integrity, that I could get behind the work\u2019s integrity even if I could not get behind the work\u2019s implications for me personally.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>The other side of that question goes back to Levinas\u2019s definition of the other. If you look at the question from another angle, it also has to do with how when you\u2019re alone, you want to fall in love.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> Yes, that\u2019s a terrible way of saying it, but it\u2019s true. When I\u2019m at the fair or the biennial or the gallery, I am alone, and I want to fall in love. This is really interesting to me, because of course what our conversation presupposes is that looking at art is a solitary activity. This is largely true for me. I really like to look at art by myself, or I like to look at art with my partner. One of the things I notice about the public in a museum is that a lot of people come to look at art together, and they talk. Crazy! [laughter] I think that many artists and curators and critics imagine that the viewer is alone, and that\u2019s an interesting thing to imagine, an interesting supposition about what can happen with the viewer and the object and the exchange between them.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>From this artist\u2019s perspective, I like thinking that if they\u2019re looking at a certain sculpture that I\u2019ve made, that I\u2019ve got the balls to put out there, they\u2019re in the company of that object, that sculpture. And I actually don\u2019t mind if there\u2019s two of them in the company of that sculpture. There is something to be said for the idea that the thing the artist has made supplies a kind of a presence that can make that viewer feel less alone.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> I think that\u2019s right. I think that that\u2019s why people go to museums. They go to museums in part not to be alone, but not necessarily to be with others. They go to be in the company of objects that are animate. That\u2019s what\u2019s really spooky about museums\u2014some of the objects are dead. When you go to the Met, some of the objects are dead. When you go to the Basel Art Fair, the objects aren\u2019t quite dead in the same way, but they\u2019re not animate. Maybe that\u2019s a way of talking about what I\u2019m looking for, even though I don\u2019t know what it is. One of the central qualities of the things that I think I fall in love with is a kind of mystical interpolation that happens, where the object calls out, \u201cHey, you!\u201d and I don\u2019t know how that happens and what kind of conversation or dialogue or exchange or experience that \u201cHey, you!\u201d elicits. I learned from one of my professors in graduate school, Hal Foster, that works of art offer us models of subjectivity. For instance, I found the Marina Abramovic show at MoMA very disturbing.<\/p>\n

Davis: <\/strong>Oh my god, yeah.<\/p>\n

Molesworth:<\/strong> And it was disturbing to me because the model of subjectivity on view was that history doesn\u2019t exist, that memory doesn\u2019t exist. The show acted as if everything is the same, always and forever throughout time, and that there is a truth. And I find it absolutely terrifying that we are not allowed to have the patina of age or the mis-recollection of what happened in those performances. Rather, we were offered a version of a stable and unchanging truth. I found it heartbreaking. And the only thing I want to do is mount an Eva Hesse show in response. It\u2019s like claymation: Marina Abramovic vs. Eva Hesse . . . and Hesse wins! [laughter] Hesse\u2019s model of subjectivity is so much more contingent and porous and permeable and fragile and ambiguous and melancholic, and all of the things that I value.<\/p>\n

\n

Recent and forthcoming exhibitions for <\/span>Taylor Davis<\/span><\/strong> includes shows at the Horton Gallery, White Columns, Triple Candie, and Exit Art in New York; the Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp; and Samson Projects and the ICA, Boston. In 2004 her work was included in the Whitney Biennial. She has received grants and awards from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Association of International Art Critics Award (2002 and 2007), the St. Botolph Foundation, the ICA, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She recently completed a Radcliffe Fellowship.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Helen Molesworth and Taylor Davis<\/p>\n

This conversation took place at the ICA Boston on April 28, 2010. Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA, asked the artist Taylor Davis to interview the then newly appointed chief curator Helen Molesworth. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversations",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}