Episode 037 Lauren Cornell

Show Notes

This week on the show we’re visiting with Lauren Cornell, chief curator at the Hessel Museum and director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard college. As a curator at Bard, the New Museum, Rhizome and beyond, Lauren has had a life-long dedication to time-based media art; as well as a passion for growing, shaping, and building arts institutions. Tune in to hear Lauren’s story, and the incredible exhibitions she has in store at Bard this summer.

Links from the conversation with Lauren
> Dara Birnbaum: Reaction https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/695-dara-birnbaum-reaction
> Martine Syms: Grio College https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/696-martine-syms-grio-college
> Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mass-effect

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin, and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we are delving back into the world of curation. 

[00:00:22] Lauren: Hi, I'm Lauren Cornell, chief curator at the Hessel Museum and director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard college. 

[00:00:32] Ben: I know I said we're diving back into curation, but Lauren is so much more than a curator as we'll hear she has a passion for building growing and shaping institutions. I first got to know Lauren more than 10 years ago when she was doing just that as executive director of Rhizome. Some of you may know, Rhizome is where I began my career. Lauren was my first boss in the field and I consider myself so lucky for that. She was so generous in the support, freedom and space she gave me to try out new ideas at Rhizome. Since her days there and the New Museum Lauren has gone on to do incredible things up at Bard and beyond and I am just so thrilled to share his story with you all today. Now, considering that Lauren is the director of a graduate program in curation. I thought what better way to kick things off this week, then with a sort of update to our growing definition of what is the job of a curator? 

[00:01:32] Lauren: Curatorial possibility is expansive and it's defined in many different ways in our field and its scope and limits are always being tested because the role really shifts depending on whether you're working for instance, with a collection or not, whether you're working with living artists or not, or whether you're at a scrappy sort of vibrant small scale organization. Or at an encyclopedic museum, your sort of role and duties would change at all of those different contexts. It also changes depending on what medium you focus on, on what your method or approach is in terms of how you work with artists and partners. For instance the team that's organizing documenta this year is a large collective ruangrupa. Being a curator also changes depending on where you are in the world. So what kind of social, political, and financial conditions circumscribe your capacities to work and maneuver and support artists. So working in Istanbul right now is really different than working in Rio right now, working in Houston and Seoul, all these places have really different ecosystems and enable different ways for people to navigate. So those are just some examples of situations that make for quite an expanded international field with many curatorial approaches. Sometimes they're in productive conflict with one another. And it's why a stable definition of a curator outside of facilitating a public encounter with art is kind of hard to come by. 

[00:03:12] Ben: Before we dive in fully and hear Lauren's origin story, I have a quick favor to ask all of you, if you are enjoying the show and I hope you are, could you pretty please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts? It really helps other people discover the show and it helps in my fundraising efforts to ensure that we have a budget to equitably compensate artist guests. Thank you so much to those of you that have already left glowing reviews. You are the best. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Lauren Cornell.

[00:03:42] Lauren: I had always been really interested in independent film. Even from a really young age, in fact, friends will often tease me that I sort of missed pop culture in the nineties because I was so focused on independent culture and I have some serious gaps in popular culture, but I was, privileged to grow up in New York City and spend a lot of time going to museums, even going to the New York underground film festival from a young age. I suppose my career really began with a hodgepodge of part-time positions in New York City in the early oughts within experimental film and video and even public access television. I was really drawn to experimental film and video, and I also saw myself as somewhat of a media activist and I volunteered in 1999 and 2000 at these public access organizations called Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish Television. Their missions came from a sort of earlier era in media . Really, and their missions were to distribute alternative documentaries and alternative media on TV, which was a notion that was exciting to me because I grew up before streaming video on the internet existed. So I, worked there and worked on the production of documentaries of various quality, tried to get documentaries distributed all around the country. I think those organizations were really great in that they were sort of training grounds for filmmakers and curators and artists and people who went on also to do different things in the arts. When I went to Oberlin college, I ran the independent film festival there with several friends. Oberlin is an enormously arts and music driven college. It's a very special place in that it really centers, centers, the arts and almost creates a kind of pressure on you where if you're not, in a band or making art, you can't participate. I feel very fondly of the time and of the people who went there with me. One of my closest friends there was Cory Arcangel, Jacob Ciocci both of them, went on to be defining media artists. Cathy Park Hong, who is an incredible writer, was somebody who I really admired there. And I remember, first seeing her art, which was text-based at the time and she was kind of this prototype of what an artist could be. And yeah, so I think that a lot of kind of doors were open to me just in terms of connecting with artists and understanding and having relationships with artists that were meaningful at Oberlin. I didn't understand what a curator was then it sounded like a really pretentious word to me I remember, but I was surrounded by artists there. What drew me to curating is likely what draws many people to the humanities more broadly, which is an interest in art's capacity to comprehend our life and time. Even if that comprehension is fragmentary or elusive or kind of nonsensical or wild. And so much of my career has been about connecting people around art particularly emerging or new art and ideas, and really being rewarded by that. But I think what really distinguishes my path is that I've always been a director of some sort and also a curator. So for instance, in 2004, not so long after I graduated from Oberlin college I ran a cinema, what was then called a micro cinema in Brooklyn, dedicated to experimental film, video and performance. It was called Ocularis. It was a collectively run space, the last person to direct it was Thomas Beard who went on to found Light Industry with Ed Halter which also comes out of what was called the micro cinema movement. And this job where I was a staff of one really gave me the opportunity to understand that curating could extend to shaping institutional structures, not just the selection of artists, because I was working with a collective to build and shape the organization just as we were designing the curatorial program. I was holding a lot of other part-time jobs like hosting a vegan restaurant at night and working at the Whitney part-time on Andy Warhol's catalog raisonne of his screen tests. The catalog raisonne was actually an incredible privilege because I worked with this great scholar on Warhols films and her name was Kalley Angel she's passed away. She just had an encyclopedic knowledge of the screen tests, which are these short portraits that Warhol made of people that he knew at the time. And they create this kind of map of downtown New York at the time. She wrote these kind of short descriptions of each one and she was very sensitive of writing about the, materials of each film. And it was a really incredible book. I learned a lot from that project. I learned a lot from her. I was going through vast amounts of notes and materials and preparing her research over years for her to write individual entries. You know, looking at the information about each screen test when it was shot, what it was shot on, what the material was, what the date was, gathering biographical information, and then presenting that to her so that she had it at the ready to write on. I was also doing other sort of bibliographic research. It was a real exercise yeah in research and precision, but I did enjoy it. And a lot of the time was spent listening to her tell stories about these different people and being a kind of companion to her. And I enjoyed listening to her. At the time in the early aughts, there was a more defined kind of film and video scene, there was film festivals and micro cinemas. And during that moment, there was a kind of transition where a lot of that work becomes absorbed into galleries. But there was a more distinct kind of scene in the early aughts of film festivals and really the, organizations that were specifically supporting time-based works outside of museums. And I was really working within those spaces and curating contemporary, experimental film and video makers and interested in media artists. At the same time, I was particularly captivated by early video artists groups like Radical Software, the Videofreex, Nam June Paik and artists who had seen video and the introduction of the Portapak and public access as a way to really remap communication and culture. And I wanted to find out who were the artists who were grappling with some of those questions now, as the internet was becoming more dominant in our lives and that led me to gravitating more around Rhizome. I had started writing for the organization. They had a biweekly column that they called Net Art News. I started writing for the organization and being involved with them while I was the director of the micro cinema I mentioned. And led me to, to learning more about media art and becoming passionate about it. Mark Tribe had stepped down as director, he was the founding director of Rhizome and Rachel Green who wrote a still really important book on Internet art had stepped up as interim director and she'd been the editor of Rhizome in its early days. When she departed they did a big search and the organization was at a really pivotal point and I had to, present them with a vision of where the organization could go, and I was really surprised that I got the job, frankly. I think that they took a chance on me. And I think that I have been really inspired by the fact that they took a chance on me in my own career. And I think it has really inspired me to want to take a chance on other young people and to really, you know, be a mentor because it was really important for me. It really gave me a big boost in my career. 

[00:13:03] Ben: From an outsider perspective, in my view, Rhizome grew and changed and evolved, really considerably while you were its director. It seemed like it gained a lot of, like mainstream art world credibility under your leadership. But I don't know if that's how you see it. So I'm curious just to hear, you know, what was rhizome like when you arrived and what was it like when you left?

[00:13:27] Lauren: Well, you were a big part of that time, Ben full disclosure and but that's important to say because it was a time of really big change. That was also a really great team effort and I really do look back so fondly on the amazing colleagues that we had. It was a really special time. To sum up what happened during that time, I'd say there was a really big mission and scope reset. You know, rhizome went from being a more kind of, you know, think about its name. Rhizome is this is the name is taken from a root that spreads laterally and it went from being more of a lateral kind of joyfully and anarchically chaotic community platform in the nineties that served net art with a distinctly anti-institutional ethos, from that time to being a bigger, more structured and more curated organization that ushered in a new generation of artists that had grown up with the web. And that importantly embraced what we now call the second kind of wave or the second generation of internet art with a different spirit and mode. And this is a period that my anthology with Ed Halter covers through so many excellent writers, think about all of the innovations that were introduced. I was there from 2005 to 2012. YouTube was just introduced the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Tumblr Tinder, Grindr, Twitter, all of these different major social media platforms that reshaped our lives were introduced during that time and pop culture really was changing from something that was requiring, not just observation but participation and all of those forms and behaviors of participation were new. And our argument in mass effect is that art in that time goes in a lot of different directions. Art that was engaged with the internet stays online, but it also disperses into objects sometimes that was cyclical sort of dispersed into objects, but went back online again. Artists were really tangling with the implications of all of these big platforms, this sort of newfound freedoms that they offer but also their new sort of problems and the way that they conditioned speech and behavior and the surveillance that they brought and the new restrictions that they brought. So this was a whole sort of new artistic paradigm that the organization had to evolve to meet and to welcome. It's really important with nonprofit arts organizations that they evolve and adapt to new moments and not just around, the past and what things used to be like. And we did that through really evolving our editorial program. We had so many great writers who were tracking and talking about these things, we had so many artists writing for the site sharing their perspectives. And then another sort of major new direction something that you played a big role in was laying the groundwork for a real kind of modern preservation program. So thinking about, even with all of this velocity of change that was happening, how do we really start thinking about how to preserve this field? Because something that happens so much is that this field loses its history. And so, starting to really think about how we hold on to these works.

[00:17:10] Ben: What do you think was your favorite project during your Rhizome years? Because there were so many, and it's really remarkable to me that, there are curatorial programs or public programs that you conceived of that are still in existence today. I mean, so many years later. I'm thinking about like Seven on Seven, what is that like to see the thing that you built still thriving?

[00:17:35] Lauren: It's nice. You know, I think I don't feel a sense of, that's my program, you know, it came out of a team initiative. I co-founded it with John Borthwick, Peter Rojas and Fred Benenson. And it was inspired by this long running problem that had bedeviled Rhizome. And these are three tech guys who are all on Rhizome's board. And the problem was how does Rhizome as an organization connect artists more with technologists? And this was also in this particular moment when, New York City was being called, like the new Silicon Valley, et cetera. So the idea was to pair artists and technologists and put them together for a brief period of time and see what they would come up with together. Everyone was very excited to participate. And some great things came out of it. In the first year, the artist Taryn Simon worked with Aaron Swartz, the programmer, free culture advocate who not too long after, unfortunately took his life but came up with this great program Image Atlas that showed how different geographic search engines turned up different results for the same keyword. So they were revealing how algorithms responded differently to the same search term depending on where they were located. So a lot of really interesting projects came out of it and I think the artists and technologists were really eager to work with each other. And I was really impressed too, because they were really putting a lot on the line to sort of be vulnerable to each other, to try something out, to then have to present it in public. There is a lot of risk associated with that but a lot of projects came out of it then the pairs or maybe an individual continued to work on. So that was great. But I think a lot of also like deeper questions came out of it about also why it's hard for these fields to work together. And I think it was summed up well by the artist Mike Bell Smith who said technologists look for solutions and artists create problems. I think that's a kind of fundamental issue or kind of oil and water problem between these two fields, but Seven on Seven created a kind of forced engagement for them to work together. I really do see a lot of my director work as bringing people together and amplifying a lot of really smart people who have things that they want to do and projects that are important to them. And seven on seven after me has changed, they did change some sort of structural things about it. And I've always been really interested to watch it develop. And I feel really proud of where Rhizome is right now. I was just actually spending time with their new director of development, Makayla who is such a dynamo and yeah, it just gives me really like great pride to see where the organization is.

[00:20:44] Ben: Yeah, it's really cool. It's kind of scary, to think back to how long ago that time was now, you know, I remember when you had a booth at the armory show that one year. I'm curious for you, what is it like a decade after this really weird moment where it's like, wait, what you're selling a GIF? How do you do that? Why are you doing that? You know, I'm curious what it's like for you personally, to see all of this fervor around NFTs and whatnot, where there's now crypto enthusiasts who are just like, yeah, duh just bought an image for like $1.5 million, no big deal. What is that like for you to see that.

[00:21:22] Lauren: I guess I would say I'm pretty hype resistant as a human. I'm proud that the first NFT came out of Seven on Seven and that the artist Kevin McCoy had sold that NFT, and actually just this week, got to thank Rafaël Rozendaal in person for giving such a generous gift to rhizome from a sale of his NFT. But I was thinking about it this morning, actually, because oftentimes when I would give talks about digital art when I was at Rhizome to audiences who didn't know about digital art at all, my talk would be, you know, about the history and the ideas and the different artists and, the different works, at the end of the talk, the first-hand that would go up would be someone who would ask how do you sell it? How do you buy it? And to me, I would think, you know, it's so interesting because they really missed the point because there's a kind of, you know, anti market, situation and ethos in this work But there's always been a kind of frustration around digital art because it can't be sold. Video on the other hand people have figured out how to sell that and how to make it scarce, right, how to add a scarcity logic to it. So I think, with the NFT, there's a kind of, okay, we've cracked it aspect. But I think, you know, I have been around for now, I guess this is the sort of third tech wave that I've seen. I sort of came into Rhizome in the aftermath of the first dot com bust, which was a pretty heavy hangover of some failed aspirations, and a lot of money withdrawn from the field. And I was there when web 2.0, picked up the field and gave it a lot of energy again. And this is a new wave and I guess what the question is to me after the bubble bursts, because it will, what will be useful for art about NFTs and cryptocurrencies. And I think it's important to keep that kind of critical space open because for a long time not just, members of the public or, collectors, but digital artists have been looking for ways to have contracts around their work. And yeah, I mean, there's other things popping up right now, too. I saw a group called Fair Chain, there was an article in the New York Times. Artists are exploring applications in the secondary market for ways to gain royalties around their work. So I think the question is, what are going to be applications of NFTs and crypto after the bubble bursts. 

[00:23:57] Ben: So post Rhizome, post New Museum, you are now the Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum at Bard, and you also lead the graduate program in curatorial studies. What led to that big change? What led you to Bard and these roles?

[00:24:14] Lauren: Johanna Burton, who is now the director of MOCA LA hired me as visiting faculty at CCS Bard while I was at the New Museum, which meant I taught a course while I had my full-time job. I first had a course called Curating the Network, which looked at artistic and curatorial strategies at different moments of media emergence across electronic art, video, and different iterations of digital art, and also looked at the patterns and rhythms between these moments. That was in 2010, then I got involved with a graduate committee here, which is a kind of main academic body that reviews student work also a very part time commitment. But over the years, I came to really appreciate the institution as a place to critically reflect on our field and also really push new ideas and possibilities. The students here are amazing and so are the faculty, not just saying that, and when the position of director of the graduate program opened up. I was really eager to apply, but I also negotiated for a chief curator position and a dual role, which I got. For those of you who don't know the Center for Curatorial Studies, it is a now rather large facility on Bard college campus. And it was founded in 1990 as a smaller facility, by our founding patron Marieluise Hessel, who is a philanthropist and eminent collector and the Bard college president Leon Botstein. At that time, it was founded as a graduate school, one of the first dedicated to curatorial studies and it's grown over its 30 year history to include a lot of other, resources. So now it includes an incredible library and archive run by Ann Butler who was previously at Fales and she's developed an incredible study collection here. The library includes around 35,000 volumes related to curatorial studies and art history. The archive has papers related to gallerists scholars, curators, writers, and our students do primary research. So does the public, into these, their estates. And then a museum, which was founded by our executive director in 2006. And then we also have a permanent collection, the Hessel collection, which is in our basement. And the graduate program now sits as kind of our central program, with the curriculum tied to all of these resources. We are dedicated to experimental and innovative exhibitions and original research because we're really a research center and you see that commitment in shows organized by our graduate students through to the guest curators that we invite. And I hope also in my own curatorial work and actually our graduate student shows open this weekend. So their culminating shows of their master's degree they open this Saturday 14 exhibitions organized by the 14 students in the class of 2022. And I have to tell you, I'm very proud of these shows. And as soon as we are done with this wonderful exchange, I am going to run right back out onto the floors and see how everything is going. We're now finishing a five week installation, overseen by my brilliant colleague, Ian Sullivan, our director of exhibitions and operations. The shows really live up to the mission of the graduate program, which is really original research, like I said, and advancing the field. And I'm feeling a little bittersweet because these students are going to graduate and I want to say that they're really great humans I've been through the majority of the pandemic with this class and the sort of overall theme of these 14 shows is resilience and adaptation and they really were resilient and adaptive. They really kept going and thinking deeply and also being really super respectful of everyone and everything happening. The other key program here at CCS is our graduate program, which I'm referencing Which is a two-year program in curatorial studies that balances academic research with practical work. So students, for instance, in their first year, they're taking foundational courses in the history of exhibitions, our history theory and philosophy, while at the same time, they're learning how to organize exhibitions, every single aspect of an exhibition. We really slow it down and think about think about how to do it and ask questions about it and make the process transparent. Think about it from an ethical standpoint, et cetera. And from an institutional standpoint, from a political stance students organize a show from our collection in their first year, and they're charged to come up with a fresh reading on the Hessel collection. And then in their first year, they also start working on the shows I'm referring to today, which is their graduate thesis shows, which can be anything that they want to show from our collection. A show of work's not in our collection performance commission archival research based, and that is accompanied by a scholarly paper. So it's quite a dynamic center here. I'm also sort of speaking as if we're on an island, but we're part of a broader campus with great connections to other programs, the film program, the human rights program. 

[00:29:49] Ben: I gather you have a pretty exciting summer coming up at the museum and you were kind enough to share with me a draft of your early essay on a show that you're curating with Dara Birnbaum. So I was hoping you could tell us a bit about that show and what you have coming up this summer.

[00:30:08] Lauren: Dara Birnbaum is constantly referred to as a pioneer of video art. Something that I do in my essay, my essay kind of writes against different terms that have been applied to her. I look at these long running terms that have been applied to her, I look at the term pioneer, I look at feminism, and I look at this notion of reaction, which is the title of the show. I criticize the term pioneer because it has these kind of settler colonial associations, which are not appropriate in general, but also just given her work isn't about conquest it's really about deconstruction and deep reading and decentering of power. Dara is seen as an essential kind of mythical figure in the history of video and conceptual art, but surprisingly, she hasn't had a retrospective in the US. She's had one in Europe. So this is her first US retrospective it's called Reaction. It opens here at the Hessel on June 25th and it runs through late November and it really focuses on her key installations and some single channel works and it's chronological. It really tells the story of her first getting a Portapak and experimenting with it and, starting to do installation, starting to really think through the medium of TV figuring out her method, what she calls talking back to TV. Moving into more politically engaged works of the late eighties and nineties where she's really contesting American foreign policy and wars abroad and how they're represented on the news in the US. It really gets at her lifelong interest in shaking us out of a kind of state of being a passive consumer of TV and information and media. That's a kind of lifelong preoccupation of hers is really to get us to think about ourselves as viewers and participants in our media environment and what our role is. And what we're taking in and what we're spitting out and how we can be active. So I think her work has a lot to teach us right now because we're so complicit in so many different media environments as we move through our day. So I'm really hoping the show will bring a broader and deeper appreciation of her work to new publics. I think a challenge of it will be that, it's for instance, presented at a college to a post TV generation, not a lot of young people understand viscerally the context that Dara was first responding to, which was a really limited number of television stations controlled by an elite of affluent white men who controlled program. People forget what TV was like TV actually went to sleep at midnight in the late sixties and would come back on, at 6:00 AM and, with sort of counterculture and anti-war protests, raging, and the civil rights movement marching forward there was really mundane programming on TV. And so I think, a challenge of this show is really how to evoke the era and the times that Dara came into being as an artist. So that is one show that's being presented this summer. And that takes up half of the Hessel museum and it's taken three years of my life working very closely with Dara Birnbaum on it, developing it, she's been involved every step of the way along with her studio team, Tyler Maxin and Maya Fell. I am now also gearing up to do a solo show with Martine Syms called Grio College which is going to be new and recent works by Martine. I've been thinking a lot about Martine and writing a lot about Martine and I've been thinking about early collaborations with her because I've worked with her for a long time. We worked together at Rhizome and I've been thinking about this online project that she did through a platform called First Look, which was a Rhizome and New Museum joint platform. I think we gave her some seed funding to do it. It was an online project called reading Trayvon Martin. It was a personal and public online bibliography for the criminal case, following the murder of Trayvon Martin, in February, 2012 and the site tracked articles and essays related to the case that Martine had read and bookmarked and each, entry was presented as a headline with an accompanying link, but all were missing a timestamp source and tags. So they were all sort of very much of the time, but also kind of out of time and reflecting this sort of enduring preoccupation and dedication. I've been thinking a lot about this piece because in 10 years Martine has just evolved so dynamically, she just finished a feature film this year. She's gone on to do major multi-channel installations and is working with AI but really kind of carried a lot of these early research-based methods and some core concerns with her. So, I think I'm feeling both in awe with her and really also enjoying having a relationship with an artist that lasts over a long time. Together I hope that Dara and Martine will tell a story about video art and its development and sort of also contextualize one another. I also want to mention that we have another show happening that's been in the works for a long time as well, and it's called Black Melancholia and it's organized by my colleague Nana Adusei-Poku who's an associate professor here at CCS and it brings together the work of 28 artists. And it in Nana's words expands and complicates the notion of melancholy in Western art history and it includes commissions as well as painting, sculpture, film, photography, works on paper and sound from the late 19th century to the present and sort of opens a dialogue with traditional art historical discourses around the representation of melancholia. So that's gonna be a really amazing show as well. 

[00:37:15] Ben: Wow. It seems like your posting at Bard has been an opportunity to, in some ways return to your roots, working with somebody like Dara, who is more of the generation of, you know, media activism and Paper Tiger TV and whatnot, but it's also allowed you to really expand your curatorial practice, beyond what you were doing at Rhizome and the New Museum. I'm curious what that's been like for you.

[00:37:37] Lauren: I think when I left the New Museum, I had group show fatigue. I'd done a lot of argument driven group shows, like Free in 2009, which is this kind of critique of free culture. Everyone thought the show was free, which shows a sort of a bad title. I worked on two triennials the last one in 2015 with Ryan Trecartin which had 50 artists and a lot of new commissions, on a really fast timeline and I was really craving working with artists sort of slowly and in-depth, which I've had the opportunity to do and our rotation here of exhibitions is also somewhat slower because we do our student shows during this sort of academic year, from December through the spring, and then myself and guest curators and faculty organize shows. So I curate around one or two shows a year and I spend quite a bit of time developing each one, and really thinking about what exhibition would not only make a contribution to the public and to the artist but also to our own institution and students, because it's a teaching museum. The first show that I did here is kind of a good example. It was an exhibition with the artist, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, sort of one of my favorite shows that I've ever done that I feel like about 10 people saw for some reason. And he is a really fantastic artist who's based in Rio originally from Spain, the show was called A Transparent Leaf Instead of The Mouth and it included a cross section of his work. So he makes 16 millimeter film, drawing, holography, and installation. He had studied to be a biologist when he was young and he's really kind of inspired by this question, in his words, who is a subject of full right, who belongs to us? That's the most essential political question, this notion of us distinction and belonging. So in this show, we did a very experimental installation. You can look online to see it, but included all this work in the centerpiece was a new installation, which was this massive terrarium glass structure with local vegetation inside of it. It was Daniel's vision to have stick insects from various different regions, foreign to the Hudson valley and foreign to each other, living inside peacably. And in order to make that work we had to work with a team of scientists over a long period of time to figure that out, get loans of insects from the Smithsonian and other places. And it was a really big learning curve for me in order to create this work. But we did create this original ecosystem where insects that were foreign to this area and to each other lived together peaceably without mass death, without escaping into the landscape, and then were shipped back home. I think that the show is meant to like destabilize the viewer in terms of thinking like who has consciousness, who doesn't and you know, how do we draw the lines between subject and object if that makes sense. And then, you know, even though I've had an expanded terrain, I've continued to work with media artists and, I did an exhibition of the artist Sky Hopinka, also centered around a big new commission. The show was called Centers of Somewhere and it was his first museum survey show. His work is sort of recognized for work that centers around sort of personal positions of indigenous homeland and exploring language as a container for culture. His films are often subtitled in English and made a new incredible new piece, it was a three channel piece called Here You Are Before The Trees that explored the indigenous histories of the Hudson valley, as they are connected to other regions in the U S and each channel focused on a different aspect of this area, including the history and ongoing presence of the Stockbridge Munsee band of Mohican Indians, who are relocated from the Hudson valley region to Wisconsin near his tribal Homeland. Something that I've had also the chance to do here is, kind of, do some sort of revision and expansion around the history of video art to think about, this history in it's early days is often written in a very white and male way and to think about who else was there, how can that be expanded? I did the first solo US museum show of Nil Yalter who's an incredible Turkish video artist whose work sort of fell through various different cracks and genres and it was sort of a pleasure to push her more into some art, historical narrative she'd been in Connie Butler's WACK! show, but hadn't had kind of her own moment and I think there's a lot of work being done in this area. There's right now, this incredible Ulysses Jenkins show that my friend Meg Onli, co-curated with Erin Christovale at the Hammer right now really, really important show. I also did a painting show with Leidy Churchman, so I really had a chance yes to expand and always really thinking about the Hessel Museum and our history and our students and what's important to the artist and the public, but I always come back to my core interests. I really am a lifer when it comes to moving image and media. 

[00:43:12] Ben: Given that you're an educator and somebody who is constantly mentoring up and coming young curators, is there any advice that you have for aspiring curators or maybe curators listening to the show who are just starting off their careers?

[00:43:27] Lauren: I do, I have a lot of advice. I would say. One, you know, don't wait for opportunities, start organizing on your own if you can. Get together with friends and artists that you care about and start showing their work. Another thing I would say is, the art world is confusing and strange and not transparent, don't be afraid to ask a lot of questions and seek transparency and answers. That's really fine to do and no question is dumb or inappropriate. So ask a lot of questions and try to figure things out. And maybe a third thing is to remember that everybody has imposter syndrome and really think about what you want to do and what you have to offer and go with. 

[00:44:20] Ben: I love that. That's so good. Lauren, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and chat, you know, we go way back, but it's always so great to get a chance to reconnect and get to know more about you.

[00:44:31] Lauren: Ben it's such a pleasure to talk with you. I love seeing what you're doing and working on and I'm so happy to be part of it. So thank you so much. 

[00:44:40] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining us for this week's show. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, and you want to help support our work and the show's mission of equitably compensating artists, you can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence. Or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts, you can do so at artandobsolescence.com slash donate. And there, you can also find the show notes and full transcript as well as highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.