Hope & Dread, Episode 6: Take Me To Your Leader
Having examined the pressure mounting on institutions from the street, the public galleries and then from within - this penultimate museum-focused episode asks who’d want to run one? Hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman ask the director of the Met how comfortable that throne really is. Who should run the nation’s museums? Who’d want to, amidst a world of shifting certainties? Hope & Dread has the answers.
Tune in to find out.
New episodes available every Wednesday.
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Guests: Catherine Arias, Sarah Arison, Fred Bidwell, Deana Haggag, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Naima J. Keith, Jill Kraus, Mia Locks, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Dr. Kelli Morgan, Hank Willis Thomas and Amy Webb
By REUTERS/Michael Sohn/Pool
Transcript:
Deana Haggag:
I think being a museum director is a really hard job.
Max Hollein:
I’m very happy to be a museum director. I get very excited about having a cultural voice. But it is, indeed, challenging. And it’s complex.
Jill Kraus:
If you do not have a strong director and you do not have a strong board chair, this is when the problems arise. It’s hard to look at these kinds of things and always be objective about what’s going on.
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope & Dread. I’m Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.
Charlotte Burns:
We wanted to hear from people who are making change, and people who are resisting change. You’re joining us today as we ask, “who should direct our museums? Who would even want to?”
Those candid voices you heard at the top of the show belong to Max Hollein, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Deana Haggag, an arts administrator and funder who’s also one of three editorial advisors to Hope & Dread; and to the collector Jill Kraus, who’s a board member of New York’s MoMA and New Museum.
Charlotte Burns:
Museums are in a kind of crisis, as we’ve explored in the previous two episodes. What they’ve always been is different than what they need to become. So it naturally follows that the leaders of these museums might need to be different too.
Who even wants to run museums? It is a terrible job, or so said a rather well-known museum director to me recently -- anonymously, of course. He says everyone hates you and social media makes it all worse. “It’s like politics,” he says. “These days, it’s an awful job and because of that, we’re attracting the very worst people.”
And yet, our ideal museum leader ought to be strong and sensitive; patient, yet decisive; charming, but honest; fiscally sound and emotionally intuitive. Does this person even exist? We’ll find out.
First, here’s Deana Hagagg, asking some of the big questions a museum director should be able to grapple with:
Deana Haggag:
What is the future of the museum? Who does the museum serve? How does who the museum serve aligns with who pays for the museum to exist? Those questions are so complicated and it is so complex and there’s seemingly only wrong answers no matter where you turn.
Charlotte Burns:
Who are museums directors meant to be leading? It sounds like a simple question but the answer is complex.
Museum directors are often wedged between warring parties: the trustees, at whose pleasure the director serves; the increasingly disgruntled staff; bigger, louder sets of audiences. The director needs to manage the building and collections and of course, they need to lead the kind of institution that artists want to show their work in — after all, tokenism tends to get called out pretty quickly in today’s world.
We talked to the collector Sarah Arison. She’s president of the Arison Arts Foundation and Vice-Chair of the board of MoMA PS1 and a trustee of MoMA. She says the museum director’s job is:
Sarah Arison:
Moderating and mediating between everybody involved. Making sure that everybody's voice is heard and that everybody is united around the mission of the organization; making sure that that is the focus, and hopefully the director has the strength to really be the one who's making sure everybody at the table is heard.
Charlotte Burns:
Deana Haggag agrees.
Deana Haggag:
That translation is the museum director's job. We're watching some museum directors really rise to that challenge, gracefully. They’re in the muckiness of that thing, and then we're watching other museum directors just really not meet it at all, because either they have picked a side or they are failing to have complicated conversations with their bases, or they just are scared. They don't want the change because maybe the change makes them irrelevant in their post, which is complicated.
Charlotte Burns:
It is complicated. Directors can’t just sit in the middle of the see-saws between staff and trustees, audience and artists. They must also steward the relationship between the past and the future, between classical and contemporary art. And, as we’ve heard in episodes two and three of this series, history and art history are being re-thought, re-written and re-read.
Max Hollein:
Well, I think we all agree that history in a certain way is, of course, constructed, or the narrative about it. I remember when I got interviewed for the job by the trustees of the Met, someone asked, "Tell us something about our collection that we don't know." And so obviously they expected me to go into some kind of finesse of, I don't know, Flemish paintings of the 16th-century, or something like that.
But basically what I said was, "I think what you don't know is that maybe half of the collection of the Met doesn't tell the truth. It's basically propaganda for one thing or the other." So the idea that basically objects at the Met encapsulate the truth, the one way how you can look at history, or what has happened, is, of course, fraught.
Charlotte Burns:
Truth continues to be as slippery as an eel. The artist Hank Willis Thomas offers an example of this. Imagine, he says, walking through the doors of the Met — whose director we just heard from — and wondering how and why the narrative of civilizations has been arranged.
Hank Willis Thomas:
So if you go to the Met in New York, for instance, you walk in and you go to the right, there's Egyptian art and then, if you go in and go to the left, you see Mesopotamian art and Greek art. Then, after the Greek art, is African art. That is a very bold political statement that museums have created where Egypt is not part of Africa, that it's somehow closer to Mesopotamia and Greece than it is the continent that's actually on.
So I’ve began to realize that a lot of the way that we're taught about the world is through the cultural institutions that tell the history of not only art but of politics. So, in a way, all art is really in conversation with the future and for that reason, it is also political.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, at least if you’re showing historical material, the artists can’t publicly disagree with your interpretation of their work. In the contemporary realm, things are very different.
Museums may feel the temptation to craft simple narratives, believing them to be more digestible for audiences; but most artists don’t want their work reduced in that way. Here’s the artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden:
I take the position of real change not occurring without conflict. I don't think that I execute my work with the idea of it being prescriptive or changing and fixing something. If anything, it troubles things. What if I just want to have something just completely blow your mind out and you have to figure out how to pick up your own pieces?
Charlotte Burns:
Museums should be wary of their biases, Tiona says.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden:
When you enter into these institutional spaces, they have systems that try to force feed it through a certain system to make it make sense and to make it safe at the end of the day.
Charlotte Burns:
If museums try to package work to make it palatable or safe, as Tiona says, they might fail to continue attracting the kinds of artists whose work really has something to say.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden:
I’ve had a lot of eagerness for my work in this moment now with people who have a desire to do those things and I turn all of it down. And they're very shocked, because they're very prestigious things in many ways, but I'm like, "I'm not interested in the work being utilized in this way.” It seems very false and it's so easy to derail and the way that these things are locked in a particular kind of history through publication, et cetera, I don't ever want anybody who's interested in my work to think that was what I was trying to do. I'm not trying to teach you anything.
Charlotte Burns:
A recent example, Tiona says, was the reaction to a work of hers that was featured in a group exhibition at the New Museum. The show, called “Grief and Grievance”, dealt with mourning and commemoration in response to the racist violence experienced by Black communities across America.
Tiona’s work, called THE FULL SEVERITY OF COMPASSION, featured a cattle chute. To her, it was both an everyday object that she saw all the time growing up in rural Arkansas — but also an object that speaks to the relationship between violence and touch, to a last embrace before slaughter.
But the feedback she received spoke more about racial bias in the art system than anything else.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden:
I got emails from white curators, writers, “oh, this work, the ropes remind me of slavery.” And I'm just like, "I am not thinking about fucking slavery." You get to just tell on your telling yourself, this is what you're thinking about this. And I was like, "If you want to think of me as cattle, that says something more about you than myself, because I'm not even thinking about that.”
I mean, it's a tough time. I think there is a push and it's a false push, because of fear, for people to make sense of things and a very, very unfortunate demand on, again, oppressed people to hold hands and create booklets to make people understand things in an hour. Things that have existed in my 40-year-old life, they want to know in one hour and they want me to write it and they want me to talk about it. And I'm like, "Hell no." That's my firm position.
Charlotte Burns:
Nobody wants to feel like they’re rolling along on a cultural conveyor belt, including the audience. The next voice you’ll hear is Amy Webb. She is the CEO of the Future Today Institute, and author of The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. For her, museum leaders need to rethink the consumer experience.
Amy Webb:
What is my customer journey supposed to be, in this place, at this moment? Am I just supposed to be shuffled through this place, and then arrive in a gift shop at the end, and maybe become a member, or donate money? Or am I supposed to leave having my ... Like, was I supposed to re-perceive the world; was I supposed to learn something? What is it that I was supposed to have accomplished?
And I think that's the missing piece. As all of these institutions think about their growth in the future and what mission and purpose they're serving in the future, they really have to think hard about individual people and how individual people perceive the world, and what it is that they should be feeling and experiencing and questioning and everything else. Otherwise, honestly, if you're not doing that, then you're a very pretty warehouse.
Charlotte Burns:
What, then, what do we want museums to be? How pretty? How gritty? Which way should directors steer?
We heard from the Director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, in our fourth episode, “Burning Down the House?” Here she is again arguing that museums need to be less precious.
Sandra Jackson-Dumont:
We want them to be commonplace. We want them to be places where people can go because it's a part of their daily walk. It's as common as going grocery shopping.
I feel like they can be the most dynamic and critical places for people to form their own ideas. And that is not necessarily the history of how academia has worked. That's not the history of how museums have worked. And I think that that is something that is coming forth, where we are places to prompt dialogue, not to just tell people what to think.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, this is a critical question for today’s episode — what is a museum today? What is it needed to be? What do you think?
Allan Schwartzman:
I think that what a museum is and how it functions and what it needs to be are rapidly in process of evolving. There's an accelerated need right now to recognize that what a museum is, who it serves, how it can best serve them, where it fits within society, within a city, it needs to be rethought; because your audiences are different, your support base is different.
Museums have historically always been responsive to value, to historical value, sometimes to financial value, to opportunity of things that are coming their way and how they feel it's best to be responsible to the objects and to display them. But what they haven't been is proactive: they haven't thought to step back, view how the cultural conditions have changed, and to think forward on how they need to consider how they function, how they're structured, how their decisions are made. Who makes decisions for the public? How is it structured within a staff that's no longer 50 people, but maybe 1,000 people? Most have not been particularly good at that in recent years.
There was a brief period, mostly in the 1960s, first half of the 1970s, when there was room for curatorial activism, but there really has been no place for institutional activism. The institution sees itself as custodial. And I think it's this institutional activism which is the part that museums are now having difficulty facing.
Whether they choose proactively to examine who they are and how they need to change to accommodate and best serve a much more significant ongoing public role, or the extent to which they jump forward and start to look at where they see things going and how they can prepare the institution to accommodate growth and to be on the forefront of thinking, rather than back-footed to respond. I think this is the tension today, and also the opportunity.
Museums could not radically step outside of their own histories into more expansive notions of history. And so, the past couple of years have been a shocking awakening by so many to the exclusionary, and what oftentimes becomes a contemptuous relationship of a mainstream. Which in our times, the mainstream has been defined and organized around the market, to an inclusive nature of culture. So, art has changed. How it functions has. How it functions will change so much more in the coming decades I believe, but the museums have not.
Charlotte Burns:
This series is about power shifting and times changing and so, with that, the skills required of a director have changed, too.
The classic route to the director’s desk is from the curatorial department. But some recent, high-profile positions have been filled from elsewhere.
Sandra is an example of a new museum leader — one who’s making waves and setting a new, ambitious agenda. Before this, she was the Chair of Education and Public Programs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where she successfully attracted youngsters and communities not traditionally viewed as target visitors.
Her appointment as Director of the Lucas Museum has been meaningful for others in the field, illuminating a new path to the director’s chair. Here’s Naima [J.] Keith, Vice President of Education & Public Programs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Naima J. Keith:
I am optimistic and excited that someone like Sandra is now leading a museum, and demonstrating that educators are brilliant, and see a museum holistically; bring a different perspective to running a museum. Sandra has also curated exhibitions, and she's a dynamic, amazing woman, and I think, a trailblazer in that way, where again, coming directly from being the head of education to a museum director, I think hopefully will open more doors for my colleagues. For them not just to consider applying for and really going for museum director roles, but also boards to consider educators.
Charlotte Burns:
The heads of education departments deal with large staff, tight budgets, the school system, internal politics and, vitally, the public. Reminds you of some of the key criteria for a top museum job, perhaps?
Power within the institution is at stake — and with it the future of the museum, its next-generation leaders and next-generation plans. And people within the museum are keen to play their role in that future.
Naima J. Keith:
I talk to my education colleagues often, and there's still a desire to have a bigger seat at the table. I think right now sometimes we have more of a folding chair, slash three-legged chair, something that's —
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, like the Thanksgiving table that you break out the stool in.
Naima J. Keith:
Exactly. I do appreciate that I, at LACMA, feel like I have a normal, regular seat at the table. But I know a lot of my colleagues do feel, because they often maybe don't report directly to the director, I do, but they may report to two or three levels down, it just, again, depends on the structure of the institution. So there's certainly, I think, need for a bigger seat at the table.
Charlotte Burns:
Naima is interesting because she’s shifted from curation to education. She started as a curator but, as Deputy Director at the California African American Museum she looked after both departments. Naima took on her current role at LACMA after speaking with its director Michael Govan. They shared a goal of better bridging curatorial and education.
Naima J. Keith:
There are these silos in museums; there's often a kind of hierarchy that exists and oftentimes because curators are producing the content, curators are often kind of placed higher in the food chain. So we started thinking and talking a lot about what it would mean to break down those silos, and what that would look like.
Charlotte Burns:
Who better than educators to help navigate the next-gen, anyway? They regularly deal with teenagers, after all. Here’s Catherine Arias, the Head of Education and Visitor Engagement at LA MoCA.
Catherine Arias:
Art museums, we're a little bit late to the party because we haven't had really robust conversations, maybe outside of the education department. I'm thinking about actually conversations with teens — because teens will totally go there — about how art gets instrumentalized to prop up wealth or to prop up that art can become a signifier of status or prestige.
Charlotte Burns:
Catherine’s point about being late to the party is an interesting one — other museums have had to take a stance, she says. Science museums have had to take a position on climate change. Historical museums on the sites of former plantations have had to deal with that history. It’s only now, really, that art museums are being asked what position they represent.
All the politics of the director’s job are tough. But Catherine Arias — who has worked at [LA] MoCA since 1999, a museum that has certainly seen its fair share of volatility — has a healthy perspective.
Catherine Arias:
For me during some of the most challenging or fraught times that I've been there, I remember having these conversations where I would just go down to the galleries and talk to the gallery staff, and realize that 98% of the people who are getting tickets to come to look at the art, did not care who was in the director's office, did not care who the chief curator was, had no sense of what I like to call the “palace intrigue”, they just didn't care. They were still coming into the museum to spend time with their friends or their family, or they were trying to figure out why three stacked bands of color was art, or they were trying to figure out how they could get inspired by being in front of live art objects.
Charlotte Burns:
Allan, do you think there’s been a shift in power within the museums, away from curatorial?
Allan Schwartzman:
In the 1960s and early '70s in New York, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all had curators who were activist curators. They were directly in touch with radical ways in which artists were rethinking art in their studios and they brought that living evolution directly into the museum.
That faded out with a certain generation of curator at the same time that a new and extremely robust market for contemporary art began to emerge around 1980. So as the market picks up, the programming in the museum for the most part becomes more and more reflective of a growing, powerful marketplace that parallels a strong world of investment, whose investors, the people collecting art, are also the board members.
We have now been, in recent decades and we're especially directly facing in this moment, another substantial shift. And it's from curatorial to education and coming in contact more directly with the public and, quite frankly, more in touch with the general culture.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also the shift of power. So, the model you're talking about in the '60s and '70s of this activist curator shifted as the market became more powerful. Now there's another shift, which is the public, the audience that the money's allowed to bring in through the growth that the money facilitated, and the power shifting again. Meanwhile, of course, curators are still... They may have a slightly better seat at the table, but it's still an underpaid. It's still not exactly a velvet armchair.
Allan Schwartzman:
Well, indeed. More and more frequently, it's become central to many curators' roles to accompany collectors as they travel to major exhibitions. They're usually staying at different hotels. They're invited to some of the dinners, but not all of them. And so, their role has become a more subservient one. I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. But the curator is no longer in an independent realm of being empowered to think things through.
I would also say that this shift occurs at the same time that art gets less and less radical. So it’s not like the challenge isn't just within the institution, it's within everything.
One would be hard-pressed to identify many, if really any, shows in museums over the last 20 or so years where the curating of the show radically challenged and radically rethought what art we look at and how we perceive it.
Almost all of them anticipate the market. Even those curators who have staked their identity on being the first to exhibit a particular artist in a museum. In most instances, they're a few months or a year ahead of the market, where it's about to happen anyway. But curators in recent decades who have had their ear to the ground that much more have been in a less powerful position.
And I would just add one thing, which is what we've also seen over recent decades is that so many of the more "authoritative" or the more “empowered” curators within the field have stepped away from institutions. They work independently.
Charlotte Burns:
So, all this begs the question, just how dysfunctional are our museums? How disempowered are the curators?
We’re going to focus next on one of our interviewees, Dr. Kelli Morgan. Kelli Morgan was hired by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in 2018, tasked with diversifying the galleries. She resigned in 2020; she sent a letter to the CEO, HR director, board members and leading figures in the Indianapolis art scene.
She says discrimination was pervasive within the institution, not only in its treatment of staff but, in its support of art created by minorities and in its failure to fully serve local audiences.
In her letter, she outlined key concerns including what she called a "racist rant" by a board member that left her in tears. She said the situation was so toxic that the pandemic quarantine “provided some much needed relief."
The then-CEO Charles Venable said he regretted her decision. He said the museum was taking steps to become more diverse while strengthening its finances; but that change takes time.
Then, in February 2021, Newfields came under fire again because of a job description for a new director. Candidates should “attract a broader and more diverse audience whilst maintaining the museum’s traditional core, white art audience.” That’s a case of saying the quiet part out loud — and in print.
Venable said in an interview that terminology was deliberate, with “white” indicating the museum wouldn’t abandon its existing audience. Nonetheless, the institution would remove the word in the coming days after a national outcry. Shortly after, Venable resigned and the museum issued a DEAI report, announcing a $20 million endowment. Kelli Morgan dismissed these actions, telling a reporter: “Honestly, it’s all fluff.”
Kelli wrote about her experience at the museum in an essay which was called, “To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today”. I asked what compelled her to speak out.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
It's really a piece that I wrote to reveal to the general public what I like to say is happening behind the curtain in art museums. I didn't think people really knew the type of discrimination and the type of abuse, the type of really sordid undermining that's happening not just to BIPOC museum professionals, but just museum professionals, period. But because I've experienced a lot of it, that has been very literally race-based, I wanted to talk a lot about what was going on; what was happening to Black curators and I think, other curators of color.
It is the unspoken truth; it's the thing that we all know is happening. It's the abuse and discrimination that we're all facing. But we're socialized or in certain cases, in extreme cases, very literally threatened into being silent about.
Charlotte Burns:
Were you scared of retribution?
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
I was initially, then I was like, "Whatever." And the reason why, Charlotte, is because I said, “They know I'm telling the truth”. The majority of the field knows that I'm not lying. What are they going to do?
But this is more getting this out in the public eye, or bringing more visibility to this and the history of it — due to the fact that there are scores of museum professionals who have said it in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The fact that museum education was created, to a degree, to address these issues. And that still, it didn't change anything. All of that, I felt was just way more important, than whether or not I got another job as a curator at an institution.
Charlotte Burns:
What Kelli is describing is vicious. And it’s also much more than a horrible but individual experience. In her essay, Kelli writes about being on a Zoom call at the start of the pandemic with around 60 or 70 other Black museum professionals; during which the truth sank in that almost all of them had experienced something on that spectrum — from undermining to outright bullying — regardless of their years of experience or relative seniority. It was systemic.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
I do think it's important, again, for the world to kind of know that even the most important and prominent Black curators, Black museum professionals, are experiencing the same thing; grad students, curatorial assistants, fellows at institutions around the country. It just was a moment for me where I was like, "Wow, it doesn't matter where we are, or how good we are at our jobs." How do we create strategies to get around that?
Charlotte Burns:
Nobody should have to get around that: museum leaders should, of course, support their staff as they fulfill the work of the institution. But we know that’s not happening in every museum in America. And where it’s not, some staff are cooperating together against leadership. Here’s more from Kelli.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
We worked as a cooperative across departments. And when you work like that, you care about your colleagues and you care about your colleagues' ideas, opinions. So whenever there was something coming down from the senior level that was going to disrupt what we had collectively put together, we moved as a whole around it, or we would do the bait-and-switch; where we would have somebody distracting senior staff over here while five or six of us are over here, doing this other thing. It's guerrilla warfare, basically. That's a really harsh analogy, but it kind of is.
Charlotte Burns:
Guerilla warfare within the museum sounds like the title of a hellscape movie. But, we know from lots of our interviews that these failures of leadership are not uncommon. This is all about power, after all.
Dr. Kelli Morgan:
The retribution is very real, and is one of the reasons why I am so candid, and I do all the interviews because I don't know, I just feel like: one, is to encourage people. That you can say it, you can tell the truth and be okay. Two, that they bank on that fear.
Like I said, you may lose a job but you won't lose... My integrity and my morality just mean more to me, than the art market.
Charlotte Burns:
Culture is not a bauble: it’s a conversation with the future, it’s about power. The narrative is what’s being fought over here and the stakes are high.
Where does this leave our directors and our next generation of leaders? We should look beyond the obvious places, says Mia Locks. An independent curator who’s also one of our three editorial advisors on Hope & Dread.
Mia Locks:
Are there leaders out there? Yes, for sure, and I think that a lot of those people are not the ones you're going to read about; they're not the ones that have press people to help them place them in articles about their success. They're the people that are just doing the stuff, they're probably even kind of intentionally evading the limelight, or if they do get a spotlight on them, they're ushering in all the people that are on their team, or whatever. They're not the people that we think they are. So yes, I do think we need those leaders, and I do think they're out there. I just think they may not look like the leaders that we think of, when we think about the kind of ‘80s corporate model, right? They're not that person at the top of the pyramid.
Charlotte Burns:
Where is the real power in museums, you might ask? Where do we go next? You guessed it: we’re going to follow the money.
In the next episode, we’ll talk to some of America’s cultural philanthropists — the wealthy donors and trustees who support the nation’s museums. And we’ll ask the question: Who governs the governors? Who wields the real power? And do the trustees think the model needs retooling?
Meanwhile, taking us out of this week’s show is someone you’ll hear more from next week. The collector Fred Bidwell is on the board of the Cleveland Museum of Art and he’s the Executive Director of FRONT International. He says board members need to:
Fred Bidwell:
Embrace change rather than resist it, empower the senior leadership and the staff of museums to plan for and make change. There's incredible talent and passion within staff that hasn't been empowered in the past; it hasn't really been listened to in the past.
They've been sort of stuck in the set of very hierarchical 18th- to 19th-century model for museum management, that's been incredibly frustrating as it's become more and more dislocated from contemporary reality. So, boards need to let that talent loose. After all, let's remember that we're in the visitor experience business, and yet, management and boards at museums have been incredibly disconnected from their own visitors and haven’t felt accountable to them. So, this is a great time to sort of reorient priorities.
Charlotte Burns:
Are museum boards open to change?
Fred Bidwell:
All I know is the bubble that I live in, but I'm guessing that the boards that I'm on have a lot in common with museum boards around the country. There's a mixture of people who really just want to keep the status quo, believe in the past models and would like to preserve it. And those who understand that really there has to be change. I think the boards and senior staff who recognize that change is good, it's desirable and it's necessary, will be successful. Those who don't are going to struggle.
CREDITS and GOODBYES
Tune into Hope & Dread every Wednesday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts.
Follow us on social media for related show content, and tell us what you think @artand_media.
Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound.
Additional research and support has been provided by Calder Singer, Catherine Sensenig, Ali Nemerov and Paige Scanlan.
Theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.
Podcast Art: REUTERS/Michael Sohn/Pool
