{"id":177365,"date":"2026-03-27T17:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T17:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/177365\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T17:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T17:04:08","slug":"curator-robert-wiesenberger-on-brooklyns-art-world-ambitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/177365\/","title":{"rendered":"Curator Robert Wiesenberger On Brooklyn\u2019s Art World Ambitions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"A<\/a>Robert Wiesenberger. Photo: Erin Johnson<\/p>\n

Last month, the Brooklyn Museum announced that Robert Wiesenberger<\/a> has joined its contemporary art team as its Barbara and John Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. Though one of the city\u2019s smaller institutions, the Brooklyn Museum holds a prominent place in the art world, having raised the profile of artists like Kehinde Wiley<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been in this job for a few weeks now. What\u2019s surprised you most about the Brooklyn Museum as you\u2019ve learned about it from the inside?<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Your job involves growing the collection. What gaps do you see in the Brooklyn Museum\u2019s contemporary collection, or where are the areas for improvement, and how do you propose filling them?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a great collection and has its strengths. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s provincial, in this area, to look to collect more world-class artists who call Brooklyn home. It\u2019s also important to follow artists\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Does the current market moment present an opportunity for institutions?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m no market pundit, but the current moment\u2014which is pretty grim for all living things\u2014presents 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.<\/p>\n

Another part of your job is developing \u201cThe Brooklyn Artists Exhibition<\/a>,\u201d which debuted in 2024. How would you like to see it evolve?<\/p>\n

The next edition of this show certainly won\u2019t be larger than the last, which featured 200 artists to celebrate the museum\u2019s bicentennial. It will be more focused, though its exact shape is to be determined. I\u2019m doing studio visits, which I love, and learning from artists about the artists they care most about.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re coming to the Brooklyn Museum from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. What were some of your favorite exhibitions that you staged there?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m proud of the show on view there now, of the Paris-based artist Raffaella della Olga<\/a>, who uses modified typewriters to make unique artist\u2019s books. The work is beautiful and intimate and weaves together old and new media. I\u2019m also proud of a show with the late German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed<\/a>, which was her first museum solo presentation (she has an exhibition at New York\u2019s Anton Kern gallery this spring). Lin made strange and moving work about animals and the human-animal relationship.<\/p>\n

That job also had you teaching. Did you find that the educational component of your job informed your curation?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Your biography says one recurrent area of your research is \u201cecology and the more-than-human world.\u201d What does that mean? How do you think your work in this regard will inform your tenure in Brooklyn?<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

More Arts Interviews<\/p>\n

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