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Robert Wiesenberger On Thinking Relationally and Brooklyn’s Art World Ambitions

In conversation with Observer, the Brooklyn Museum's new senior curator of contemporary art explains why museums like his matter more than ever.

Last month, the Brooklyn Museum announced that Robert Wiesenberger has joined its contemporary art team as its Barbara and John Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. Though one of the city’s smaller institutions, the Brooklyn Museum holds a prominent place in the art world, having raised the profile of artists like Kehinde Wiley. Wiesenberger comes to Brooklyn from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and we caught up with him to hear about his plans for the new gig.

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You’ve been in this job for a few weeks now. What’s surprised you most about the Brooklyn Museum as you’ve learned about it from the inside?

The breadth of the collection and sheer size of the museum surprised me, and the fact that it was originally planned to be four times larger. I’m also thrilled by the daily experience of walking through the beautifully renovated Arts of Asia galleries to get to my office every day. I don’t think that will get old! Even better to see school groups there, talking or sketching. Experiences like that, when I was a kid, are why I do what I do now.

Your job involves growing the collection. What gaps do you see in the Brooklyn Museum’s contemporary collection, or where are the areas for improvement, and how do you propose filling them?

It’s a great collection and has its strengths. I don’t think it’s provincial, in this area, to look to collect more world-class artists who call Brooklyn home. It’s also important to follow artists’ lead in considering some of the defining issues of our time, like the collapse of the natural systems that sustain us or what it means to be human in a technologically mediated age. I want to look at more of the hybrid practices that thrive in this city, between art, design, sound, experimental publishing and so on.

Does the current market moment present an opportunity for institutions?

I’m no market pundit, but the current moment—which is pretty grim for all living things—presents an opportunity for museums as places of curiosity, wonder, beauty, connection, exchange, sustained attention, criticality and relatively less commercial pressure. Museums need to evolve, but what defines them is also in short supply. I believe in these institutions generally and the Brooklyn Museum in particular, which is an energizing and uniquely beloved place in this community and far beyond.

Another part of your job is developing “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” which debuted in 2024. How would you like to see it evolve?

The next edition of this show certainly won’t be larger than the last, which featured 200 artists to celebrate the museum’s bicentennial. It will be more focused, though its exact shape is to be determined. I’m doing studio visits, which I love, and learning from artists about the artists they care most about.

You’re coming to the Brooklyn Museum from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. What were some of your favorite exhibitions that you staged there?

I’m proud of the show on view there now, of the Paris-based artist Raffaella della Olga, who uses modified typewriters to make unique artist’s books. The work is beautiful and intimate and weaves together old and new media. I’m also proud of a show with the late German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed, which was her first museum solo presentation (she has an exhibition at New York’s Anton Kern gallery this spring). Lin made strange and moving work about animals and the human-animal relationship.

That job also had you teaching. Did you find that the educational component of your job informed your curation?

Definitely! Seminars and workshops were testing grounds for ideas, brilliant grad students contributed directly to projects and fostering lively discussion is a big part of what curators can do in the gallery.

Your biography says one recurrent area of your research is “ecology and the more-than-human world.” What does that mean? How do you think your work in this regard will inform your tenure in Brooklyn?

It means thinking relationally about the systems in which we live, both natural and artificial, as so many artists are doing. Environmental and social issues are deeply intertwined, and the forces that extract from and exploit the natural world do the same to people (likewise, those least responsible for environmental shocks, globally and locally, are usually hit first and hardest by them). New York City is surprisingly biodiverse, and the dynamics of cities are often discussed in ecological terms. I’m eager to work with artists exploring these questions, whether inside the museum galleries or next door at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The skills of sensing, thinking and feeling that museums sharpen are vital now, as artists are addressing multiple forms of intelligence and how to live and even thrive on a dying planet.

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SEE ALSO: Meet the Collector: Dwight Cleveland On Turning Hollywood Ephemera into Museum-Worthy History

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