EXHIBITIONS & COMMISSIONS

In 2013 Christopher Wool was invited to present a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The curator, Katherine Brinson, the studio, and I worked several years in advance to select works, identify lenders, secure loans and sponsorship. I also helped do research for the exhibition catalog, sourcing archival material, ephemera, and images. The show traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. The artist debuted his first large scale sculpture in this exhibition, after which it was on short term view in Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain Plaza. I negotiated the loan terms and conditions with the City Parks office.

The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA is the only museum in this country dedicated to installation art. In 2013 Janine Antoni was invited to exhibit her work on three floors of the museum. Always working site- specific, Antoni took great pains to adapt to the unusual exhibition space, an old row house. An artist often changes their plans in the course of working on the show, but the changes are problematic when they require more funds and the budget has already been set. We had to do a bit of negotiating with the museum’s leadership to secure compensation for Antoni and to ensure the highest quality presentation.

Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist was invited to create a work to accompany a performance by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. This was a first for the artist, who typically shows her work in the context of galleries and museums- highly controllable contexts. Never before had her work shown with live accompaniment and to her this was a big risk. In the end she was delighted with the experience and the outcome, but required me to provide extensive creative and emotional support during the development of the pieces. Additionally, I negotiated the terms of the commission and worked together with the artist and DSO to secure the right to perform the music piece Rist had selected.

Organized by the renowned curator Ute Eskildsen for The Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, Joel Sternfeld enjoyed the first European retrospective of his work in 2011. We sourced around 130 works from the artist and from private collections. The exhibition representing three decades of Sternfeld’s pictures, went on tour for several years with stops in Amsterdam, Berlin and Vienna. I sold works to the Albertina Museum in Vienna from the exhibition.

This was Larry Clark’s first French retrospective held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Fraught with “drama” from the get-go, I played intermediary between Clark and the curator throughout the project- facilitating the selection of works, securing loans from private collectors, and arranging for the production of a special print edition to be sold to the museum’s supporters. With a huge fan base in France the exhibition got a lot of media attention. In addition to the aforementioned, I helped design the exhibition catalog, attended a hearing in French court when the show was threatened to be closed by a conservative religious group, and most importantly, played bodyguard when Clark was mobbed by the press.

Paul McCarthy, the radical California based performance and installation artist, filmmaker and sculptor, was invited to participate in the 2004 Whitney Biennale. He proposed turning the museum building into a pedestal for a towering inflatable sculpture. Titled P.M.H.M. Sculpture on Pedestal -- Bound to Fail (2004), it required unusual measures to be realized. This included working with the museum to produce engineering schematics for the project approval by the community board and the city, arranging for the street to be shut down on a Saturday so a crane could bring the piece to the roof, and mediating the fallout when the neighbors complained about the lighting of the sculpture at night.