Hope & Dread Extra: Kathy Halbreich
Hope & Dread Extra: Kathy Halbreich features a conversation with Kathy Halbreich, the executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, about why she has put artists at the center of her vision of creating change.
Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.
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Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.
Allan Schwartzman:
And I’m Allan Schwartzman.
Charlotte Burns:
Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.
Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.
Today we’re bringing you more from Kathy Halbreich, who talks about giving power to artists—and how that might change our conception of what art is.
Kathy is one of the most consequential museum leaders of recent times and she’s now the executive director of an artist foundation—the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. So we started our interview by asking her the biggest differences in running these two kinds of institutions.
Kathy Halbreich:
Well, in a certain sense, a foundation isn't the same kind of public institution that a museum is. We have a different audience, I think. And certainly not the comprehensive audience that museums aspire to. Boards, at least mine, don't have to raise money, which is a significant difference than museum boards. Which really not only have the responsibility, the fiduciary responsibility but also have a huge fundraising responsibility in order to keep these museums afloat. And we give money away rather than ask for it.
Charlotte Burns:
You've created an artist council at Rauschenberg, which is a really interesting approach. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that? Why you did it; how it works.
Kathy Halbreich:
When I first came to the foundation—and the foundation is named for an artist, founded by an artist and supported by the legacy of that artist—I kind of looked around and thought, where are the artists of today within this institution? And why wouldn't I turn to them for insight into what the fields, plural, needed?
There was a wonderful woman who had supported me at MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], Wallis Annenberg, who wanted to make sure I could do some things at Rauschenberg like I had done at MoMA. And she gave me some funds. And with those funds, I established an artist council of roughly 12 artists, all disciplines, different generations, different aesthetic perspectives. And with very little effort, I convinced the board to allow the artists council to distribute, as they saw fit, a quarter of our philanthropy funds each year.
And giving artists this agency is, in my mind, just common sense. I actually am shocked it's considered innovative at all.
And it is proven to be very wide-ranging. Yes, they have supported small arts organizations as the foundation also does. So yes, we have funded The Underground Museum. We've also funded Participant, a very rigorously experimental gallery in New York. But the other thing the artists council has done is reach out to organizations like Public Assistants, which is a group of queer people of color who are working within their community, providing everything from mural workshops to bicycle repair workshops, to political activism.
The artists’ council is anonymous. And that is a bit to protect them from being lobbied or excoriated. But one of the artists council members suggested we fund an organization called Moms 4 Housing, which is in Oakland, California. It started out as a group of women and their children who had no home, and they began to squat in abandoned buildings. There are four times the number of abandoned buildings in Oakland as there are people without homes.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh my God.
Kathy Halbreich:
So, the possibility for actually housing people is there. And these women seized that possibility, even though initially it could have been construed as illegal. They now are a 501(c)(3), much to my surprise. They are now training each other on renovation skills. They're now, with help of their community, beginning to acquire buildings for women and their children. It seems like such a basic right. And they had really not received much foundation support in the past.
And so I think, again, artists with their ability, their antenna, but also their willingness to take risks, it helps the foundation take risks. It helps us live our mission, which is to support new, even untested ideas. And who better to lead us than artists?
And actually, I'd also say, given the state of our world, there may be joy in giving, but it's not fun. Making decisions about the potential of other people or institutions’ survival is not fun. And it is about as serious work as I can imagine. That being said, I also don't care if we make a mistake. I don't care if one of the organizations we fund doesn't do what they thought they would do, changes course. It's okay with me. And I guess maybe this comes from having sat on the other side of the desk and asked for money for, I don’t know, 50 years.
So, I don't think it's fun running a foundation, but it is enormously rewarding and satisfying. I do think an artist foundation—particularly one founded by Robert Rauschenberg, the only directive, basically, he gave us was permission. He was a genuinely rule-breaking experimental, socially-engaged man of conscience. And if you follow those values, you have clues as to how to move forward. Not every artist allows you that, but for me, that's one of the reasons why I was interested in this foundation, as opposed to maybe any other, other than Warhol. I mean, these guys, they allowed for people to be creative rather than to follow the rules. And would I want to be a museum director now? No, I've been it three times. But do I have faith in museums? Absolutely.
Charlotte Burns:
We're at a moment where a lot of people in museums don't seem extremely happy. There's a culture of fear within institutions. Do you think that that's been a long time coming?
Kathy Halbreich:
I think the cracks in the museum system are more visible today just as they are in the larger society. The systemic racism, the kind of whiteness of our major institutions. In fact, the history I learned was predominantly a White one. So I carry that forward as do most of my colleagues who were trained in this country. So I think it's a particular moment, but I don't think any of this is new.
I agree with you. I think these are fraught moments for institutions. I guess because I'm a melancholy optimist at heart, I also think the smart institutions and the smart leaders will figure out a way to make use of this turmoil and tumult.
I don't think change happens smoothly. I think there are ruptures in history that, if we look back, suggest a way forward for us.
Charlotte Burns:
What is the way forward that you would suggest from this moment?
Kathy Halbreich:
Well, I think one of the things we've learned is that no one person can answer that question. And so maybe the way forward institutionally is a slight displacement of the rigid hierarchies that have existed. Definitely, a way forward is to be more self-aware about which audience you serve and why. I think there will also be a need to be very forthright in terms articulating the changes and going about making them.
For example, I think if one staff remains all White, change is almost impossible. It doesn't matter what works you're acquiring. Because, really, change happens not only in a collection but in the philosophical structure that's developed through conversation among colleagues.
I believe in hierarchy. I believe in experience and expertise, but it's not a code for a club. The hierarchy I would champion is a more porous one. It would include asking, for example, more junior staff how they construct their world and how they see the institution prospering for everyone.
And I think I'm sensitive, given my own age, that I may be too old to understand certain things. I may be too old to have experienced the experiences people today are.
I didn't, for example, grow up in the age of the internet or social media, or even, I'm afraid to say computers. And I think all of those changes are also in the air and the rapidity with which we can communicate with each other—call people to demonstrations, for example—I think has changed us forever. And I think I know a lot, but there are certain threads in the narrative that I'm not familiar with.
And I guess what worries me about the art world, which I profoundly love, is that it doesn't seem to be able to deal with great subtlety. It needs always to be certain. I guess I believe that uncertainty is the human condition. And one of the things I love about art and artists is the imperative of improvisation, of trying things out, of not knowing the way forward.
I guess what I would say about change at this moment in time is that it's ethically correct. It may be punishing, difficult. I have felt complicit in the systemic racism which has shaped my country. There's no way around that. And I think, in my own small ways, I've been aware of it for quite a long time and tried to make some difference in the institutions that I worked with. But they're baby steps.
But museums are not evil places. They're complex places. They need to change. They will change. And the word relevant, which you used earlier, always confuses me. Because what's relevant in one moment is out of date the next. So, I'm not really interested in being relevant. Prescient, maybe, but not relevant. I think we have to learn how to ask ourselves the right questions and deploy the right language in order to begin to figure out how to move forward.
Charlotte Burns:
The show is called Hope & Dread. When you look ahead, what do you feel?
Kathy Halbreich:
Well, given the fact that Donald Trump is no longer president, but that the Republican Party has lost its moral spine, I have some ongoing dread, but I also have some sense that we will persevere as a species if we have some faith in our capacity to be better, and some energy to be better, to not forget that each of us is part of this system and each of us has to participate in certain ways to change the system that we know has been very punishing for many of our citizens. But, I do think that all, maybe, I can do is small acts of kindness. And that's been my mantra.
Charlotte Burns:
For more from Kathy tune into episode five of Hope & Dread, “Infernal Affairs”, episode 10 “The Business of Art” and episode 12 “Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?”. And of course, if you want to know more about the ins and outs of institutions and philanthropy, go to episodes five “Infernal Affairs”, six “Take Me To Your Leader” and seven “Executive Session.”
Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts.
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 has been provided by Julia Hernandez.
And our theme music is by the inimitable Philip Glass.
