Curating the West

Each Month We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World.

Kate Green, Ph.D.
Chief Curator & Nancy E. Meinig Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
Philbrook Museum of Art
Tulsa, OK
(918) 748-5300
www.philbrook.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I am tremendously excited for Philbrook’s next major exhibition, opening October 2023. Trade and Transformation, curated by the amazing Kalyn Fay Barnoski (Cherokee Nation enrollee, Muscogee Creek Descent), assistant curator of Native Art, examines how objects become embedded with cultural meaning by makers, and how as these objects are traded and travel they transform other cultures. The exhibition looks across time, bringing together Philbrook’s historical collections from around the globe—African, Asian, Indigenous—with works by contemporary superstars, including artists Nick Cave, Jeffrey Gibson, Mona Hatoum and Yinka Shonibare.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I was just in St. Louis for the opening of Counterpublic, a contemporary art triennial that takes place in public spaces: empty lots, storefronts, markets. I was there for the opening, and crisscrossed the city with friends to see and talk about artworks that explored the past, present and future of St. Louis: a pavilion by Torkwase Dyson in a Black neighborhood that has been exploited by developers, a musical performance by Raven Chacon meditating on Native sound, and by Tulsa mother and son Anita and Nicosee Fields, geometric sculptures with sound on an ancient burial mound recently returned to Osage hands. On my way out of town I saw a billboard by artist Anna Tsouhlarakis that summed it up: When You Listen the Land Speaks.

What are you researching at the moment?
Right now, I am researching Philbrook’s wide-ranging collection of 16,000 objects spanning thousands of years of global history. As we shape the next era of collecting for the museum and rethink how to best share our collection across our extraordinary 25-acre campus, we are asking ourselves: What are the collection’s strengths and how can we better showcase and tell those stories? How can we diversify our collection to reflect the range of cultures in our community and beyond, and present installations that encourage audiences of all sorts to feel even more comfortable and excited to be in the museum? It is deeply rewarding work.

What are you reading?
In January, I began my role at Philbrook and moved to Tulsa, and just started unpacking boxes. It has been a busy four months! The pile by my bed includes books related to Oklahoma history, including Sam Anderson’s Boomtown and David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as Mesha Maren’s Perpetual West, a novel set on the El Paso/Juarez border, and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, a work of fiction revolving around a Cameroonian immigrant. And then of course there is the unending backlog of New Yorker magazines.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
It is my dream for Philbrook Museum of Art to realize a major touring exhibition that looks at Native art past, present and future. Given our important collections of historical and contemporary Native arts—among the most important nationally—as well as community, collection and cultural context, we are uniquely positioned to give shape to this kind of important endeavor and to share in it not only with audiences locally but also those nationally. We are working to make that happen! —