She was drawn to Tuttle in part, she says, after being “dumbstruck” on seeing his 1967 work Tenth Cloth Octagonal, made of pink fabric, in 1994. “I felt it was important, and I didn’t know why,” she recalls, noting that it takes roughly a generation for consensus to be reached about a particular artist’s place in history. Of course, interest in art of the here and now has spiraled out of control, as has its price, making it increasingly difficult for museums to build their collections. Once museums played a key role in lending their imprimatur to an artist’s reputation, but nowadays the path from studio to auction block is neither long nor winding. Grynsztejn believes the MCA can compete by supporting projects that lie on the periphery of the market—due to either scale or message—by commissioning new work and most vitally, she says, “by protecting artists during experimental periods when they want to change or step outside the predictable language.”
“We make citizens, and the market makes consumers,” Grynsztejn explains. “The collector thinks, Is this a good investment? We think, Is this a good idea?”
Olga Viso
When Olga Viso came of age as a curator in the early Nineties, during the heyday of identity politics in the art world, the Florida-born daughter of Cuban émigrés considered herself a Latina curator, not a curator of Latin-American art. But others assumed they were one and the same. “Just anything Latin came my way,” she recalls of her early stints at the High Museum in Atlanta and the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach. She disliked being typecast, and it bothered her when artists who didn’t share the same culture or language were lumped together as if they did. “To me it was much more subversive to integrate those artists’ voices into the larger international landscape,” Viso says.Now a much admired expert on Latin-American art and a rising star among museum directors, Viso, 42, heads the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, one of the country’s most adventurous hubs for contemporary work. Striking in a lacy black skirt and gray silk cowl-neck sweater, her wide brown eyes set off by her jet black hair, she admits to a weakness for the underdog and a blind spot for cultural borders. “I’ve always been interested in artists who’ve been under-recognized and misunderstood,” she says.
One thing Viso herself has rarely misunderstood, however, is how to make an impact. At the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., she rose swiftly through the ranks after joining as an assistant curator in 1995. Viso became director 10 years later, favoring challenging shows over crowd-pleasers. “She has a great large vision about things,” says Benezra, of SFMOMA, who hired Viso at the Hirshhorn when he was its chief curator. The pair worked together on the 1999 show “Regarding Beauty,” “which at that time,” recalls Benezra, “was a four-letter word in the art world.” A landmark retrospective in 2004 of the Cuban-American conceptual artist Ana Mendieta, until then best known for having fallen (or having been pushed by her husband, artist Carl Andre) to her death, included images of Mendieta dragging her bloodied hands down a wall and a rape scene.
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