Shamim Momin

INTERVIEW BY AMY KELLNER

PHOTOS BY KRISTIAN BENGTSSON

After 12 years as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where she co-curated the 2004 and 2008 Biennials, Shamim Momin packed up and moved to the other side of the country. In 2009, she cofounded the

Los Angeles Nomadic Division

, a nonprofit art organization devoted to site-specific and public art that she calls a “museum without walls.” So far, LAND has done fun and exciting stuff, from screening art films by Guadalajara-based artist Gonzalo Lebrijaon on giant advertising billboards on Sunset Boulevard to commissioning works from over 50 artists (all good ones, too) based on rock concert posters that were shown at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

I want to thank Shamim for squeezing our interview in right before getting on a plane for a whole bunch of traveling. She is a busy lady.

Vice: You’re leaving for London today?

Shamim Momim:

London, then Dublin, and then Stockholm. A bit of a juggle, but it should be pretty cool.

Is that all for work?

Yeah, London is for the Frieze Art Fair. Dublin is an invitation through the cultural council and then, as it happens, another friend and supporter who is based in Stockholm organized the latter part because he knew I’d be out there already, and he’s been trying to get me to see some of the artists and foundations over there. So it all worked out back to back.

Do you always travel so much?

I travel pretty much constantly. In my mind, it’s essential to get a good grasp on what’s going on. The contemporary art world is so much more international now, and specific places have different sensibilities, so I think it’s important to be as mobile as possible. I’ve always felt that way, but now given the way that LAND functions, it’s that much more important since all our exhibitions will be—as the name implies—nomadic. I love traveling, though, so it works out pretty well.

You were at the Whitney for 12 years before you started LAND last year. What prompted you to leave?

Well, there were a lot of different reasons. One of them—like you just said—was because I was there for 12 years, and at some point you need to extend yourself beyond your comfort zone. I also felt that the artists I was working with and the art that I was most interested in seemed to require a different kind of space and way of working than the museum can always provide. I thought it might be an interesting moment to create something that could solve that gap.

Were you always into art?

I’ve always been interested in art. My family traveled a lot growing up and they always made sure that we saw a lot of cultural arenas. Originally I was planning on being a scientist, either a physicist or a chemist. Then in my senior year of high school I took an art history class just because it sounded like fun. I wanted a break from all the other things and it turned out to be everything I could ever want in one discipline. Art is essentially about everything. It’s about everything human, but also in the literal sense, depending on what the project is, you can find yourself learning about death metal or oil paint or candles or whatever it might be. You’re reinventing your knowledge and reapplying it to ideas about people and how we work and interact with each other. That’s why I got into art history.

And what got you interested in curating specifically?

I went to Williams College, which has a great art history program from which a lot of museum folk come. I spent a summer working for the director at the college museum, and that’s how I found out about curating. I hadn’t really thought about that as a possibility before, but it seemed to suit my personality better than being an academic, because you’re always starting new projects. A curator is different in the sense that one of your main responsibilities is communication—how you translate what you see in the artwork, what you feel is important about it, to an audience. To amplify the things you think are interesting to a broader public. I really like that interaction with people and communicating about the things that I’m passionate about. It never gets boring.

What was the first show you ever curated?

I did the Whitney Independent Study Program my first year out of college. The program was started in the late 60s and at that time it was kind of radical because it mixed curators, artists, and scholars together in this one program where you get to exchange discourse. I did the curatorial area, and as the culmination of that program you curate a show at one of the Whitney’s spaces. That would technically be the first show I curated.

What was the show?

It was called “Consensus and Conflict,” examining the presence of the American flag in art as it changed over the course of the century. It was a long time ago.

Is there an elaborate process you have to go through to show an artist at a museum?

You have to present it before the curatorial committee in a formal presentation, explaining why it matters, why it’s of interest, why it fits with the programming, why now, and all of that stuff. Everybody weighs in on it and hopefully it gets scheduled. It’s an incredibly elaborate process of how things come to fruition. It would take forever and ever to explain, but that’s the basic gist of it. Luckily I was able to spend the rest of my time seeing artists and getting to know how they worked in their studio, which has had a major impact on my curatorial practice. I feel like it’s a real privilege to be able to spend time in the studio with artists and get a feel for how things take shape. It’s that whole process that is, to me, the totality of the artwork.

Do you notice your interest leaning toward a certain medium?

In general I would say I work more with sculptural installation and objects than I do with, say, strict painting. But artists work in so many different media now. That’s what LAND is about—any one artist could be working in any number of media: sculptural installations, painting, music, and all kinds of hybrid forms of those things. I don’t think of it in terms of medium anymore. I totally understand why people do, but one of the things we’re trying to introduce to people with this organization is thinking about the artwork as the idea and the breadth of practice that it can encompass. Especially now, so many artists are functioning in all these different modes that are all equally important to them. They might have a studio practice, which is painting, but they might also have a collaborative band, or run a school, or do publications or whatever. That was a critical aspect of the 2008 Whitney Biennial that I co-curated. We used the Park Avenue Armory to show all the performative, durational, evolving practices that wouldn’t have made as much sense in the galleries proper.

Working with alternative spaces and public art as you do now must be pretty different from working at the Whitney.

It’s important to me to take all the best things about an institutional practice—high quality and thoughtful process—and bring it to different arenas where people can experience artwork in different ways and maybe it’ll feel more like their everyday existence. That’s not to say that it’s all like pleasant, happy artwork they’re going to like. It’s the kind of the work that I showed at the Whitney, but brought into new spaces, where they’d need to engage it in different ways.

What kind of reactions do you get to the public art?

We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. A lot of the work we show is not like the standard Jeff Koons puppy, like a big monumental thing. It’s often much harder to get across. But it’s been really encouraging because it seems like the right moment to address this kind of work. Since we’ve started we’ve gotten offers to do events all over the place. More than we could possibly do, which is too bad.

Do you have any dream projects that you want to do?

I do, but I don’t want to jinx it, since it might actually happen.

OK, what are one or two of your favorite shows that you’ve done?

God, it’s hard to say. I like them all. We just did a crazy film shoot that was projected as part of an art festival on the Santa Monica pier called "Glow." It was with the artist Yoshua Okón. It’s essentially a pit bull musical. Well, not quite a musical because it wasn’t set to music, but it was choreographed. It was 15 owners and their pit bulls dancing around this amazing courtyard. The shoot took two days and resulted in a pretty extraordinary video. That’s the perfect example of something I like because I now know a ton about the history of pit bulls and pit bull rituals.

Pit bull rituals?

Yeah, well, largely in relationship to pit bull fights. None of these dogs are fighters because it’s illegal, but there are lucky rituals that the owners do, like bathing the dogs in milk and training them to do certain kinds of activities that are supposed to be both good for their fighting skills, and also lucky. Much like any sportsperson would have all their private good-luck rituals. So that was partially what inspired the project for him, these kind of luck procedures people would do.

I’ve noticed you show a lot of female artists; are you interested in feminism in art? Like, you did the Alex Bag show at the Whitney. I’m such a fan of hers.

She’s amazing. She’s kind of crazy, but in the best way. She’s a total genius. That’s an example of one of the hair-raising things about doing conventional projects, because that piece arrived to the opening a half hour after it started. [

laughs

] She was working on it up until that last second. It was pretty stressful.

Does that happen a lot?

There are always last-minute details. That was extreme, but there’s always something that needs to be solved at the very last second. I actually really enjoy that.

And the thing about feminism? It seems like identity politics in art was such a big thing in the 90s and it’s all but disappeared now.

Right. I certainly feel very strongly about gender issues. I think people went through a long phase of being embarrassed to be associated with that language, insisting, “No, no, I’m not a feminist.” I understand that a lot of them were just saying that they didn’t agree with the way the terms were laid out, but it’s kind of an idiotic thing to say. In my mind, you can’t be a female and not have an opinion of that sort of thing. But some of that was engendered by the way people talked about it, and how blunt and all-consuming it can be. Much like postmodernism or multiculturalism or whatever philosophy-of-the-day was happening, it would take over every aspect of the communication, and in my mind did a disservice to the work because it made it only about that. In whatever case—race or gender or culture or so forth. In my mind, the best thing I can do is just show the artist without making a big deal out of it, like, “Look how many female artists I show.” Just make it a normal thing and that should be understood.

I interviewed Michelle Maccarone recently, and she was telling me how, even though everything in a gallery looks so perfect, you don’t realize that behind the scenes it’s all people covered in dirt, hauling boxes around. Is it like that at a museum too?

At a big museum, you have so many different departments and rules about the art that you don’t actually haul the boxes yourself or even move the artwork. Curators aren’t allowed to. But I really like that nose-to-the-grindstone type of dirty work. One of my favorite projects I’ve done was a show in Miami called "The Station." I remember sitting in a bathtub and scrubbing the labels off about 400 beer bottles because one of the shipments hadn’t come in and we needed them to build a sculpture. And it’s kind of fun. Everyone pitches in and does whatever it takes to get it done. That being said, you are doing all of that so that there’s no glitch in the external experience of it.

Is the art world glamorous?

You get to travel a lot; you get to interact with different people from all different backgrounds and ways of living. Of course there are the associated parties and all of those things. It has a certain amount of glamour. I think it’s more about the excitement for me. What I like is people, and being engaged in their lives and curious about what they’re doing. It seriously is a 24-hour-a-day job, but I always say that I’m lucky to be around the people I’d want to be around anyway. These are the people I would want to be friends with. It’s not like I finish my job and go home and meet up with my other friends. It’s pretty intense, but it’s a privilege to have that.

Were you psyched to be in Oprah magazine as a “woman on the rise”?

[

laughs

] It was a fun shoot. They were really professional and lovely. And yeah, of course it was obviously flattering to be included in that. I believe in that kind of communication. You don’t want to have your personality overshadow the mission of what you’re doing, but when you’re starting something new you have to have a voice. A lot of people who would never read

Artforum

or the Arts section of the

New York Times

saw that and looked up the organization. People like my mom’s hairdresser went and looked at some art because of it, and that’s cool to me.

If you haven't already, go to LAND's site to see what they're up to.