Growing up, Viso had hoped to become an artist. She attended art school for painting and graphic design but decided to become a curator after interning at the High Museum while studying for a graduate degree in art history at Emory. Living artists, she says, are her raison d’être. Guillermo Kuitca recalls watching her rearrange photocopied images of his works as they prepared an initial draft of his survey, which will tour the U.S. in 2009. “You couldn’t predict the choices she’d make,” he says. “There was a kind of combustion in the way she organized them.”
The days are long gone when museum directors had time to curate shows, and Viso concedes that the skill set now required for the job includes “CEO, Ph.D., magician and celebrity.” What drew her to the Walker, she says, was its international focus on the visual arts, performing arts and film. Viso wants to see greater cross-pollination among its different departments. To artists, the walls of a museum and the traditional divisions among painting, sculpture and other media just aren’t that important anymore. “We have to be as forward thinking as the artists we present,” says Viso, citing a plan to “break down the silos between departments” by reinstalling the permanent collection to better showcase the Walker’s history of collaborations between artists, choreographers, composers and filmmakers. “Not just multidisciplinary, but interdisciplinary so that we see the connections from the start of a project, not after it’s created.”
In that same spirit, Viso is taking on the role of reformer, intending to rally her peers to establish ground rules for navigating the complex “ethical issues,” as she calls them, that have arisen from the exploding contemporary art market. Chief among them are the museum community’s somewhat symbiotic relationships with dealers and collectors, especially when dealers help underwrite exhibitions of artists they represent, and the growing reliance on joint purchases with collectors, necessitated by the skyrocketing cost of art. “The field needs to change the way it operates,” she says. “It takes a generational shift to achieve it.”
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