In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Margot Norton.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton.
In this Episode, Margot discusses her background, including her move from New York to Berkeley and her previous roles at the Whitney Museum and the New Museum. She describes an upcoming exhibition titled 'To Exalt the Ephemeral,' which focuses on impermanent art. She shares the transformative potential of museums, her inspiration from artists like Pepón Osorio and Eva Hesse, and her experience working with UC Berkeley students. The exhibition highlights experimental materials, memory, photography, and ends with a video installation by Joan Jonas. Then of course, "Three Questions" with Margot sharing her curatorial career and inspirations.
About Curator Margot Norton:
Margot Norton is the Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). She is formerly the Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York. She organized the 2021 New Museum Triennial Soft Water Hard Stone, co-curated with Jamillah James. Norton joined the New Museum in 2011 and has worked on a number of exhibitions, curating and cocurating presentations by Carmen Argote, Diedrick Brackens, Sarah Lucas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, and Kaari Upson, among others. In 2017, she curated the Eighth Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavillion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E.. Before she joined the New Museum in 2011, Norton worked as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum, New York. She has contributed to and edited numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, and regularly lectures on contemporary art and curating. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York.
Find more from Margot HERE.
Follow Margot on Instagram: @MargotNorton
To learn more about BAMPFA's Exhibit, "To Exalt the Ephemeral" CLICK HERE.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily is a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2024-0813 - AIA - EP032 - Margot Norton
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 102. 5 FM every Friday at 9am and 7pm. Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Curator Margot Norton: I was just so struck by that tension that exists between being a museum wanting to preserve the legacy of an artist, wanting to be able to celebrate the work of an artist by conserving it at the same time as thinking about what those original intentions were.
Host Emily Wilson: That was Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Chief Curator, Margot Norton, the guest on this week's episode of Art is Awesome.
I'm your host, Emily Wilson. [00:01:00] I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people that I created this bi weekly podcast to highlight their work.
Margot Norton moved to Berkeley to be the chief curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in May of last year. Before that, Margot worked in New York City, where she grew up. She got her master's in curatorial studies at Columbia University. Then Margot went to work for the Whitney Museum as a curatorial assistant before going on to be the senior curator at the New Museumfor more than a decade,
I met Margot at her office at the museum in downtown Berkeley. She is working on a show opening August 14th To Exalt the Ephemeral. The entire curatorial staff in film as well as in art has been involved. [00:02:00] Margot talked about that show, how being a curator is like being a bridge and a sponge, getting to work with UC Berkeley and how growing up in New York formed her ideas about art.
Curator Margot Norton: I think the thing that drew me to museums was really the transformative potential of encountering works of art and exhibitions. And really having that context surrounding work and being able to kind of get a sense of What an artist was thinking, what the environment was that that artist was working and yeah, being able to imagine and kind of go beyond the space that you're in.
Host Emily Wilson: The art she saw growing up in New York influences her work today.
Curator Margot Norton: I'd actually say that that was really the very formative time in my life of when I started thinking about working with artists was actually through kind of going to [00:03:00]more like alternative spaces and artist friendly spaces. Spaces in the Lower East Side and in soho when I was like early tween and teen.
Just thinking about the ways that artists were really kind of pushing the boundaries and kind of thinking outside of what was being shown in institutional spaces at that time as well. That was the early nineties, just to date myself,
Host Emily Wilson: Margot talked about the work of Pepon Osorio at the Whitney Biennial in the nineties as an example of the transformative potential of museums.
Curator Margot Norton: The first time I saw his work was at the Whitney Biennial in 1993. It was his work that he made called Scene of the Crime, Whose Crime? I just remember being completely transported in that experience of seeing his work. It was basically a recreation of a Puerto Rican home in New York City that was very much inspired by his own home, homes of the neighbors of his, People that he was part of the community [00:04:00] with in the Bronx where he was living at that time, and it was called Scene of the Crime, Whose Crime, because it basically, you know, kind of recreates this very elaborate, almost like on the border between like something, you know, very much rooted in the everyday, but also. A little bit fantastical where there was a crime that had taken place as part of the scene.
You can see like there's like a sheet on top of a body and there's all these kind of clues as to what might have taken place, but also kind of mysteriously within the scene are all these cameras and film equipment. And then, of course, there's this like kind of caution tape in front of it. But. There's this way that the eye kind of moved through this installation where you're almost like a detective and being placed in this position of trying to identify, you know, what the film equipment is doing there.
Is this a crime that's being committed or is this the media kind of portraying something that might stereotypically take place in this type of home? And, you know, how does this work kind of act as a mirror [00:05:00] that would Also make us think about what our own biases would be when we are performing this act of, you know, being a detective and looking at the scene.
Host Emily Wilson: A big reason Margot took the job at BAMPFA was to work with UC Berkeley. She brought out Argentinian artist, Gabriel Chaile, who makes large scale Adobe sculptures for a solo show at the museum. This was great for the UC students, she says.
Curator Margot Norton: He actually started working in the. sculpture studio on campus with the students and spoke to the students about the history of his family working with this material and how to work with this material and together creating the work that would be later brought to the museum that he would finish on site.
That opportunity I felt was very meaningful for the artists as well as for the students here because Gabriel also was really motivated [00:06:00] by how he could also be able to open minds of artists, work with artists, but also give back. And I think that's something that a lot of artists are very excited about too, not just necessarily becoming big market stars and showing their works in international exhibitions, but also having that opportunity, I think, to really engage with why they started making this work in the first place and how they can see, get that experience, that hands on experience of working with an artist. You know, who's showing at a museum.
I don't really think I had any experiences like that in university, plenty of slides, you know, but that to me is extremely exciting.
Host Emily Wilson: Margo says she thinks of her work as being like both a bridge and a sponge.
Curator Margot Norton: Being a curator, the first part, the bridge part is that you're always kind of acting as this kind of go between or, you know, creating these pathways between artists and the public between the public and the [00:07:00] institution between the institution and the artist, there's always these kind of relationships that you're able to kind of connect and go between that in terms of being a sponge. I think that. I approach it at least as, you know, really going out and seeing and engaging with as much as possible.
Seeing what sticks, seeing what you keep returning to, seeing what keeps haunting you, and being able to also kind of work with that artist. It definitely does take a lot of soaking up, soaking up information, soaking up, you know, how that artist is seeing things. It's seeing their vision, but also kind of thinking about all of those constituencies, the many publics that the museum serve, the many folks within the institutional setting where you're working and really doing everything in your potential to make that work shine.
Host Emily Wilson: Margot says many artists who showed their work at Berkeley early in their careers went on to international recognition, [00:08:00] like Joan Jonas, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown. and Bruce Conner. Another of those artists was a factor in deciding on the next exhibition.
Curator Margot Norton: Eva Hesse is another one that I adore. We're going to feature her work in the next collection exhibition coming up, To Exalt the Ephemeral: the Impermanent Collection, which is an exhibition that I am working on with the entire art curatorial departments here at the museum.
Host Emily Wilson: Norton was inspired by Hesse's show at the Guggenheim, Expanded Expansion.
Curator Margot Norton: When I saw this exhibition, there was a great video that they had produced that was alongside the show, which featured Hessa talking about her work. And in this interview that she had in this archival footage, she was asked, what is the conservation like on your work?
Do you care if your work is conserved? And she answered saying, no, she does not care if her work is conserved. And that she [00:09:00] thinks of her work as having a life like everybody does. And I was just so struck by that tension that exists between being a museum, wanting to preserve the legacy of an artist, wanting to be able to celebrate the work of an artist by conserving it at the same time as thinking about what those original intentions were and how so many artists create artwork, not necessarily thinking about permanence as a part of the work.
Host Emily Wilson: Margot talked about this show when she interviewed for the job at BAMPFA
Curator Margot Norton: I was thinking about how strong our collection is in non object based work through the, you know, Steven Lieber conceptual collection and the archives and the amount of experimentation and embrace of artists that were working in non traditional ways, even since the founding The museum at that time, I really do think that it was something that our museum was embracing really before so [00:10:00] many others did.
This is also true in terms of the film collection here. Not many museums were collecting film at that time. To have such a rich film archive as part of our museum collection was something that was also really important to its founding.
Host Emily Wilson: The team at BAMPFA went through the more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in the collection to put together to exalt the ephemeral.
The show starts with performance and also looks at experimental materials.
Curator Margot Norton: I feel like I keep seeing more and more works that are made with organic materials or materials that dissolve and decay and change over time. But we're also kind of thinking about this in many other ways, like incorporating the.
Some of the incredible Buddhist scrolls that we have and, you know, Japanese and Chinese paintings that are kind of thinking about the morality and in other ways, but also thinking about atmospheric shifts and kind of celebrating, you know, the many changes that are happening to the [00:11:00]environments around us.
And photography also plays a key role in the exhibition. We have a section devoted to photography and light and, you know, light is the material that creates as well as it destroys when you think about photography, because it's creating the image. And of course, more and more exposure to light eventually fades itself, and, and we are featuring many rotations in the exhibition, so that works on paper do get rotated throughout, but you know, it's an interesting thing to think about that every time something is seen, it also is decaying simultaneously. This is a part of what it means to, to work at a museum.
Host Emily Wilson: Another section in the show is devoted to memory.
Curator Margot Norton: A lot of works in the collection that were also created during the time of the AIDS crisis. You know, works by Naylin Blake and Felix Gonzalez Torres and beautiful works by Ree Morton that are in the collection. And, you know, also some of our African American quilt collection that was [00:12:00] working with them.
from deceased loved ones, thinking about memorialization in that way. So the show is very expansive across many different media and actually ends with a immersive video installation by Joan Jonas that we also have in our collection. So it's very expansive in terms of the way that it approaches this topic.
It's been really exciting to get a chance to work with these objects and see what will develop.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, Three Questions, where I asked the same three questions. They're slightly different for Margot, since she's a curator. I asked her, when did you know you were a curator? What's some work that made a big impression on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Curator Margot Norton: I knew I wanted to be a curator. When I was in grad school [00:13:00] and I was heavily into theory and everything I was learning at that time and went to see an exhibition at a museum and Really transformed by being around objects through the context and the deep research that that exhibition entailed and, um, really feeling a way of understanding the world's things that happened in the world, things that happened in the past, things that are happening now, things that will continue to happen in a way that for me, felt unparalleled to the experience of seeing artwork in a museum exhibition.
A work that had an impact on me and still has an impact on me and I still think about all the time is actually the work of an artist named Alice Neel. She was [00:14:00] someone that I first saw when I was younger and I feel just, you know, continually inspired by. I saw a recent exhibition of her work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York that was absolutely amazing and I think she's somebody who was truly kind of not even just ahead of her time but kind of separate from it.
There's something about her work that I think is really feels resonant for me and kind of continues to resonate in different ways with time.
One of the most incredible things about living in the Bay Area is just the beauty everywhere. I feel completely in awe every day, almost dazzled by it. I think it's an incredibly fertile environment for being able to explore all of the crazy ideas that I come [00:15:00] up with all the time being surrounded by the beauty here is I, I mean, I'm still stunned by it.
I feel like I'm one of those people where that I would see in New York who take pictures of buildings, except I'm taking pictures of plants just continually like, uh, you know.
Host Emily Wilson: That was Margot Norton, the chief curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Thank you so much to her and to you for listening to Art is Awesome. Margot and the entire curatorial team at the museum have been working on a show highlighting impermanent work, To Exalt the Ephemeral. It's a year long exhibition opening August 14th.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's [00:16:00] created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by By Charlene go to of go to productions. It's carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9 AM and 7 PM. Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with incompetent music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at art is awesome podcast or visit our website. Till next [00:17:00]time.