Curating with eyes open to opportunities
‘I’ve always tried to step back and recognise that is an extraordinary place to have found myself…to look at who I’m working with, who I’m learning from and able to hear from, on a daily basis.”
Special guest, Tanya Barson, is Curatorial Senior Director at Hauser & Wirth, joins us to discuss her extensive career working across museum and private collections and projects.
In this week’s podcast we learn more about the challenges and opportunities to be found in curating extensive, constantly-evolving collections, the shifting role of curators and more of Barson’s direct experience in supporting acquisitions of Latin American art.
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Tanya Barson is Curatorial Senior Director at Hauser & Wirth, which she joined in 2021 after 25 years as a museum curator. She was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona 2016-2021; Curator of International Art, Tate Modern 2007-2016; Exhibitions and Collections Curator, Tate Liverpool 2004-2007; and Assistant Curator, Tate, Millbank, 1997-2004. She has curated important solo exhibitions such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation (2021); Christian Marclay: Compositions (2019); Melanie Smith: Farce and Artifice (2028), Rosemarie Castoro: Focus at Infinity (2017) and Martha Rosler: God Bless America (2017) all at MACBA; and Georgia O’Keeffe (2016); Mira Schendel (2013); Ellen Gallagher: Coral Cities (2007), Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People (2006), and Frida Kahlo (2005), and major thematic exhibitions Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (2010), Oiticica in London (2007) with Guy Brett, and Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain 1929-Now (2005), all either at Tate Modern or Tate Liverpool, among others.
Independent curating includes the exhibitions Life World: Photography from The CIAC Collection at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2017), and she has written on the work of artists including Gego, Doris Salcedo and Beatriz Milhazes and on modern and contemporary Latin American art more broadly. From 2002 to 2016 she worked alongside Tate’s Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art and with the Tate’s Latin American Acquisitions Committee to acquire work for the Tate Collection.
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