The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 2: Jessica Morgan
We’re back! In this episode, host Charlotte Burns talks to Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation. She has revitalized the institution, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, since arriving in 2015, bringing new energy and a distinct vision to the museum and creating change behind-the-scenes as much as she has to the work on display. In this episode, Jessica talks openly about the museum field, from funding structures to her future plans, from unions to boards. What if Jessica ran the art world? She tells us what she would do first.
From the left: Deana Haggag, Mia Locks, and Jay Sanders
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to the second season of The Art World: What If…?! A podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests]
In this episode, we’re joined by Jessica Morgan, who has been the director of the Dia Art Foundation since 2015. Jessica has revitalized the institution, bringing profound change and new energy to Dia. And she has done most of this quietly. That’s unusual.
We’re in an era where change is a buzzword and the smallest nod to reform typically gets press-released to the highest heavens. In contrast, under Jessica’s leadership, Dia has discreetly and thoughtfully been implementing new ways of thinking about art and art history, about museums and what they are for, and who they are for, committed to establishing a future for cultural institutions where the behind-the-scenes are as important as the work on display. Jessica offers a different model of leadership, more collegial and conversational, but intensely focused. It is important, she says, “to have a sense of purpose in an art world that’s become so unwieldy.” It’s no wonder that Jessica’s name is at the top of search committees every time there is an opening for museum directors.In this episode, we’ll talk about future plans, artists, funding structures, unions, and power in the art world.
Let’s dive in.
Charlotte Burns:
Shall we start personal or shall we start with museums? What do you think?
Jessica Morgan:
Maybe personal is good, actually.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay. I was reading that you were something of an unruly teenager. You said, “In London, it's easy to be very wild, particularly when you've got divorced parents and nobody's really watching over you.”
You got kicked out of school at 16 and then went to Westminster [School] where an art history teacher changed your life.
That's quite a dramatic story to set up the importance of art and art history in a museum director's life.
Jessica Morgan:
When I look back on my early years, it was a pretty dramatic shift from being almost entirely alienated from the educational system and feeling that it offered very little to me—and in fact actually, was a place of kind of control and hostility, a place where you were kind of denigrated, rather than elevated.
So it was a very dramatic shift to be in an environment, and I do very much credit one teacher in particular, where somebody actually had faith in you and saw potential and encouraged you to read things that were not on the syllabus, but they felt that you were capable of not only understanding them but actually would kind of gain greater insight through that type of learning.
Teachers are extraordinary people. They really have the capacity to change people's lives.
Charlotte Burns:
How much of a profound impact did that have on your sense of self and your sense of your own ambition and potential?
Jessica Morgan:
I was pretty dead set on becoming a hairdresser when I was 16 [Laughs]. And I think actually my family thought that was not such a bad idea given how poorly I was doing at school, that I was excited about ideas, and that ideas were something that I could contribute to or benefit from, and was a very profound shift in my thinking away from really focusing on having fun.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
[Laughs]
We’re still having some fun along the way.
It seems that there's a sort of pattern in your life of moving away from cliques and dominant kinds of thinking, whether that's your early educational years or when you were at [the University of] Cambridge, you talked about how you didn't feel totally at home there. You said, “I'm certainly not a posh English person, and I probably was a bit hostile towards that. Of course, I'd not spent my summers in Italy. I'd spent them working in the Groucho Club.”
Jessica Morgan:
Yeah, Cambridge was a bit of a, I don’t know. I think I made a bit of a mistake when I look back. I started off studying archeology, anthropology, and sociology, and it was fascinating. And then I made the huge mistake of shifting to art history, which is what I had wanted to study. The departments and the people and the environment were so dramatically different. I went from a kind of hubbub of quite politically and socially conscious group of students who were really engaged in their studies, and a very intense workload, to being in the art history department where it didn't take me long to recognize that most of the names of the kids, either their parents had written the books that we were studying or they had familiar names for some other reason and it was about a quarter of the amount of teaching that I'd been experiencing in my first year. In a way, it's sort of shocking to me how little was actually provided in terms of an education.
Charlotte Burns:
It seems like that was one of those formative experiences that led to you wanting to leave the UK. I've read somewhere that you were dying to get away, but you'd never felt particularly English, “I was always quite interested in not being one of them.”
At that time as well, you were sort of around the nascent YBA [Young British Artists] scene, especially working at the front desk of the Groucho Club, and yet you didn't really feel that much kinship with that movement. Around that time, that's when you applied for PhD fellowships and went to Yale [University].
What was it about that moment that made you think, “I don't belong here, I belong somewhere else”?
Jessica Morgan:
There's many factors. I mean, you can't talk about the UK without talking about class. My family was solidly middle class but my mother was Irish. A large part of my upbringing was with my Irish family in Ireland. My father was Welsh. So we were not English and as absurd as that may sound to many Americans, it’s actually quite a defining thing, as I'm sure you're familiar with.
And the class system is an overwhelmingly dominant—and, I don't wanna say oppressive, but confining for so many people, obviously far worse for others than me—system that I felt acutely aware of, perhaps because of my family's background, I don't know. It was something that I was super conscious of always. I mean, I think it's very hard to be back in the UK, even now I find as soon as I hear an accent, you know it, that there's a kind of tabulation that happens that all British people do, which is horrific, frankly.
It was very clear to me that the only way to escape that would be to go to somewhere where my voice and those kinds of assumptions that are made based on voice, would be reduced or perhaps even disappear in some way. I can't say that I had thought it through in quite such a logical way, but there was certainly a desire to be in a different type of society.
And the UK at that time, you know, this was the early 1990s, it was not an easy time, even if you were an educated middle-class person. It wasn't necessarily a great period of time to be looking for work. And there were also, you know, other factors that certainly, I think played a huge role in this, gender being a huge one.
Certainly, when I look back on the decisions that I made, they enabled me to enter into a profession that I would never have been able to enter into in the UK. It would've been extremely difficult. I mean, much more kind of closed and certainly a much more male environment, but that was also true of many other professions. The UK at that time was not welcoming of youth and it wasn't welcoming of women.
Charlotte Burns:
So much of what you're saying is really familiar to me. This sense of your geography is so present in England and it was really transformational for me to move to America and understand that an American's understanding of my accent was totally different than what it was in the UK.
You talked about gender and you talk about these people who've had this impact on your life. How much of that do you bring into your work? I'm struck by the focus you've had, obviously at Dia [Art Foundation], on female-identifying artists rewriting the canon essentially that Dia helped establish, or in your workplace. It's one of the truly rare happy institutions in the US to work at. How important is that? Obviously, that can be your mission, but you've brought people along with that and your values.
Jessica Morgan:
Hugely important. I mean, this is jumping forward in time to becoming a director and it was really about creating an environment that I would've loved to have worked in—and did have the opportunity to work in different places—but also where I felt one could truly, as leadership, make the decisions that perhaps I had not seen made in the past and set a path, really, for an institution.
Of course, nothing happens overnight. It takes many years and it takes a whole group of people, but to establish a direction for an institution that was not simply about the things that we tend to think of in the most obvious way, which is the sort of visible front of an institution: the program; the announcements; the kind of, mediated aspect of the institution. The behind-the-scenes is of course, really what makes it all possible.
Charlotte Burns:
When you joined Dia, the institution was at a moment where the kind of common consensus was that it was heading towards a slightly bleaker future. It was very, very difficult to fundraise, and there was this sense that its better days were behind it.
You've really turned that around. How aware of that were you when you were joining, and how much pressure did you feel?
Jessica Morgan:
Dia had been an important place to me particularly when I was in New York in the 90s. I could probably draw some of the floor plans of the exhibitions that I saw there. I found them so, so memorable and so extraordinary at the time.
And the context is so important because, of course, when I came back to the US after 12 years working at Tate Modern, New York was a very different place to what it had been when I left in 2002. The modern contemporary art scene, if we wanna call it that, was radically transformed. So it was also thinking about, “Okay, what is this institution? What's the vision that has always kept it, in some sense, as an identifiable institution? What does that mean now in the context of what is an almost absurdly flourishing contemporary and modern art scene in New York?”
For me, perhaps most importantly, was the fact that we still had a mission and a vision. And I think most people had lost sight of that. It was simply because Dia had been very quiet that, you know, there hadn't been a significant amount of program. Obviously, the spaces in Chelsea had closed. Quite simply, a lot of it was about doing more. Who are we as an institution? This is the question we ask at Dia all the time: “What is Dia?” Fundamentally, a large part of that is about this relationship to time and temporality, and then thinking of course about how I would say extremely limited pool of artists that we'd been working with in terms of the collection, although not necessarily, in terms of the exhibitions, because certainly under Lynne Cooke there was some great work with women artists.
But, you know, what were the ways in which one can really challenge the boundaries? It was more, “Oh gosh,” you know, “Where do we start and who we can begin with,” and how we can begin to intelligently and thoughtfully remain true to who we are.
Charlotte Burns:
I don't think people always understand how vast Dia is. How many sites right now does Dia comprise?
Jessica Morgan:
So we now have 12 sites. The most recent edition was Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018), which is a work that's on long-term loan to Dia but is one of our sites.
Yes, I mean that in itself also as an incoming director, it takes quite literally years to get to know all of those places and all the people who have over the years made them possible. Back to this question of, you know, building an institution, the people at Dia are so important because they have quite literally in many cases built some of these artworks. The Lightning Field (1977) [by Walter De Maria] was built by Robert Weathers who worked for us for over four decades. He's actually just retiring now. The [New York] Earth Room (1977) [by Walter De Maria], Bill Dilworth was the caretaker again for multiple decades. So not only getting to know these works, getting to know the artists, but also the people who have looked after them, have protected them, was a huge part of my early years here.
Charlotte Burns:
You talked about the people there and I'm gonna bring us back to this idea of the workplace. Dia from all accounts, from the staff I speak to, they're saying it's a happy workplace. That's not the norm right now in most institutions culturally around the world.
A recent report titled Workplace Equity and Organizational Culture in US Art Museums, which was released last October by Museums Moving Forward a group co-founded by Mia Locks, one of our illustrious editorial advisors.
It was the first of its kind qualitative data analysis of workplace culture in museums across America and the results are dispiriting: 68% of art museum workers have considered leaving the field. 74% can't cover their basic living expenses. It takes an average of 12 years before people receive promotions and turnover is very high. How do you think about that?
Jessica Morgan:
I was very happily involved with the Museums Moving Forward conversations from the beginning and greatly appreciated everything that I learned with that group, and continue to learn.
It was very clear to me at every institution that I worked in, that the folks who welcome you, how they welcome you—which has a lot to do with how they feel about where they're working—are significant participants in this process of producing a cultural space that is a welcoming social space as well.
My approach to the institution has always been about the people who work there making the institution. If anything, I would criticize myself and other curators for often putting up the show and then walking away just at the point where this is something that's becoming a living being.
The challenge for Dia, of course, is precisely that we have these many sites, so how do we think about also maintaining that ethos in very different environments; downtown New York versus the Hudson Valley and so on. And so really being thoughtful about what those training processes are and what the resources are that we're giving to our team as well.
I'd also say that there, you know, there were areas in our institution that had been neglected, predominantly Learning and Engagement. When I started we had one person who was working part-time with a group of artist educators and we now have seven full-time team members and around 40 artist educators who work with us. So it's been an extraordinary period of growth for that work.
But also many of those people now work with us, so it's been a source of employment. One of the things that we focused on is prioritizing internal movement through the institution. I could point to, you know, literally dozens of people in our team of around now close to 200 who've worked in the institution, and have moved into different types of career paths. I like to think that most people who work here don't feel that they are stuck in a role that has no future and that moving in different directions is a real potential here.
Charlotte Burns:
I'm sure there are museum workers listening to this who are thinking, “That's not my life.” What are the key things to have in place to have a more productive, positive relationship between organization, staff, and leadership?
Jessica Morgan:
Fostering an environment of course, and being very deliberate about that and I think being very proactive and encouraging. So much of that is about listening and hearing people and being responsive. Not just listening, but actually doing.
One of the things that surprised me enormously when I first came to work at Dia is the level of unity around the mission of the institution, and perhaps also that reflection of the way we work with artists is reflected in the way that we work with the team. But also a general agreement in that what we are doing has purpose, which is just so fundamentally important of course for everybody in the institution.
I think that's quite rare actually and that's certainly to do with scale, but I think it's also to do with the uniqueness of the institution and something that has gotten lost in a lot of places; that there is less of a sense of who you are and why your institution is different. What is the aspect of your institution that sets it apart from others?
It's something I think about a great deal in terms of our field and what's happening and the sort of general similitude that we've seen creeping into most institutions over the last few years where one has a sense that an exhibition that happens at one place could well happen in another.
There's something very powerful about Dia that there's so many things that we don't do. Many of which I think are incredible, and I miss, quite frankly. When I left Tate, I was working largely on the Middle East and South Asia and also with an exhibition program that was largely figurative and I've had to kind of abandon a large part of my interest in order to focus on what we were doing here.
But it is very helpful to be somewhere where you have a sense of purpose in the face of an art world that has become so immense and so unwieldy, and frankly, also so driven by fashion, commerce, and external forces. So I think there's a pride, even, in what we do and there is something tangibly specific about it that I think we can all get behind. And that creates a feeling of unity as well.
Charlotte Burns:
When you joined in 2015, there was a board of 11 and you wrote that the institution lacked breadth and depth of funding. You've since grown the board to 28, and you've written of the trustees that: “They're with us to learn and discover, not to confirm pre-existing predilections. As we've changed, so has our support, and our original trustees have been an essential mainstay for this evolution.”
I'm really interested in how you did that. You've had a different agenda than many other institutions. One of the first things you did was say, we are not gonna do this massive scheduled building project. You scrapped that and instead did the much less obviously sexy thing of fixing up existing spaces that Dia had. You've become a much more diverse institution. You're layering the idea of what Dia's focus is across time, moving out with Cameron's work, for instance, from the 1960s and 1970s. So how did you do that?
Jessica Morgan:
It was really hard [Laughs]. It’s all I can say and it continues to be. You know, Dia is not a household name, by any stretch of the imagination. We barely have openings, so there's absolutely no point in getting involved with us for social glamor or even events, and most of the artists we show, most people have never heard of them. But there's a way in which we've attracted people who are curious and want to learn and not simply have their assumptions reaffirmed. But it was difficult.
Certainly the international nature of the board, I think, reflects my own work historically. I always have been appreciative of how important it is to have different voices around the table in order not to have any kind of echo chamber. At this point, 21 of them actually are people that joined during the time that I've been here. And importantly six of them are artists or arts workers, which is an unusually high number for any institution and I think that speaks volumes about the voices that we want in the conversations about our future and about what we're doing.
And quite frankly, in New York, there was a lack of interest in Dia by a philanthropic class, if we wanna call it that. What I heard repeatedly from people is, “Oh, I've, you know, I've been to Dia Beacon, I saw it once, I don't need to go again.” We were not the offering that people were looking for in New York. So, it was clear to me that I had to look outside of the folks who were perhaps more familiar arts supporters.
But it was also exciting to think about that and to think about the fact that Dia as an institution has 12 sites spread across the US, one in Germany and that the people who were interested in being involved saw that and in fact, that was actually what appealed to them, was that it had this kind of breadth, and therefore, perhaps, openness.
There's also the fact that so many things that we don't do, but what we do do sort of follows different lines. Of course, the land art, which is very specific and very extraordinary thing, which we've quite intentionally tried to critically, as well as respecting and preserving and continuing to sort of bring new light to the historic land art that we are custodians for. In fact, one of the first major acquisitions that we made was actually bringing Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76)—the first female land artist to enter our collection. We've sort of tried to bring into a different context with projects like Cameron's.
Charlotte Burns:
Can you tell people who don't know about the work, what it is?
Jessica Morgan:
Sure. It's a work that consists of a plot of land that Cameron acquired in South Edisto, an island off South Carolina, that was the original site identified for the 40 acres and a mule edict. So offering freed slaves in order to support themselves from. It was something that was very quickly rescinded by [President Andrew] Jackson. The terms in which that land was given were altered in such a way that freed slaves were longer able to own the land and work on it according to the original agreement. Cameron acquired a property on South Edisto and set it up in such a way that the value of that land will never accrue. It is valueless.
It's a conceptual artwork. One can visit it but it's really, primarily, as is the case for so many of Cameron's works, a legal document.
So that was the most recent work that we brought in at this point, aside from really thinking about the legacies specifically of female land artists who have been largely overlooked, most of the forays that we would consider taking into a kind of permanent work would necessarily grapple with the questions that Cameron's work has brought up. People ask all the time, would we, you know, have a new site? Well yet, we have explored this but I think, you know, we would want to do it extremely thoughtfully at this point, given this history.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
Dia has seen a 280% increase in the number of female-identifying artists in its collection. When Julia Halperin and I did our report in 2022, Dia did phenomenally above average, with female artists; 63% of its acquisitions between 2008 and 2020 were works by women. It's an enormous pivot: Eleven artists who formed the basis of the collection in 1974 were all men.
The work you've been collecting by Black American artists, you've been making much more concerted efforts to improve the holdings of the institution in that realm. And I know that you're also focusing on Latinx artists, which you've said is an area of immense omission.
How do you bring about change in your collection?
Jessica Morgan:
It is such a period of immense wealth of radical experimentation that it certainly was in no way hard to think about the artists who would open doors and bring new voices, bring opportunities for us when we thought about the collection, and that is certainly part of it.
One hundred percent, gender and race were key important factors in our thinking about how we were changing the collection, but also who were the artists who were actually working in radical formats that continue to bring new ideas?
I think, you know, perhaps there was an assumption that we would feel like everybody was sending proposals for painters who looked a bit like Agnes Martin. This is not interesting. What was interesting to us, but, you know, who were the other artists who were experimenting in a way with this kind of same sense of life mission, perhaps in terms of their dedication to their work.
So it's a long period of research or in some cases, it was many years of acquisitions. Senga Nengudi, who's on view right now, it was a long process of working with Senga and thinking about the bodies of work that have not been shown. The question for us is sort of, how do those artists want to represent themselves? Should they still be alive? Which, you know, is the ideal case for us, is working with a living artist to think about how they want to be represented in the collection, usually over a series of rooms, usually over a series of bodies of work.
I’m thinking here also of Melvin Edwards. Mel spent a great deal of time in the galleries thinking about how he would recreate works that he had envisioned only in drawing form back in the early 1970s and how he would situate those in the galleries, in the series of galleries that hold his work.
I would say also at the beginning, we knew that we were doing this work, we knew that we were having conversations with artists but it would also take some years before it was really apparent to people what was happening at the institution. I think it took around three years before people began to see real change and even longer before I think it's become cemented. And even then, there are still a lot of people who imagine that if they come up to Dia Beacon, all they're gonna see is Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. So it's a path, a journey that we're on in a very dedicated fashion that now what's exciting is that how many of the artists that we brought into the collection open the door to think about another group of artists that perhaps we might not have thought about previously because we didn't have that kind of linking or approach that would make it possible, make sense, really.
Charlotte Burns:
You just mentioned Mel Edwards there. You said when writing about Mel's work that it became clear that there were multiple drawings and concepts for other work that were never realized due to a lack of invitation, gallery representation, and market. And I was interested to ask you that kind of triumvirate of institutional invitation, gallery representation, and market. Where do you see the power right now? It used to be the case that it was the institutional invitation. Gallery representation now feels more consolidated. The market feels much, much bigger, but maybe much more conservative.
Jessica Morgan:
[Sigh] Whose perspective are we asking about? You know? I think we all know where the power, if we're talking about a market power, we all know where that lies.
We have to very firmly believe in the work that we're doing in institutions and we have to believe in the change that it will potentially bring about and that we are restoring histories, creating histories, writing histories, contributing to what we all know has been an extremely partial history of art thus far. And I think the work that's been done by so many of my colleagues over the last decade or so, and obviously, before that as well, has been so significant and so important. But I don't think anyone could lose sight of how important that work is. We're about to publish the second book that Dorothea Rockburne at the age of 92 has ever had in her entire career.
Charlotte Burns:
Wow.
Jessica Morgan:
I mean, it beggars belief. Truly.
Meg Webster, she's taking over the galleries that were occupied by [John] Chamberlain ever since Beacon opened. A phenomenal artist, incredible artist. We will be doing a catalog with her. It will be the first book by Meg Webster, who is 80, about to be 80. It's just, it's absurd, you know?
And yes, Mel's work, Senga’s work, we can say the same thing for artists of color, women artists. It's an abomination, honestly.
And so in a way, I resist even getting into the conversation about where the power lies, because we have to stay so focused on what we're doing and continue to ask the questions, continue to do the research, not to accept the given history. It is the responsibility of every curator, to question, to go back, to look again, to ask the questions that need to be asked. It's still absolutely vital. It's shocking to me over and over again how little work is done to really elevate these incredible voices, who we all know are just as good…
Charlotte Burns:
…If not better.
Jessica Morgan:
If not, in many cases, better, you know, than the people we hear from, which also saddens me that people speak of fatigue or a, you know, it's, “Oh, do we have to do this again? Another overlooked Black artist, another overlooked women artist.” It's like, “No, sorry.” You know, it's like, “This is the work that we need to do,” and it should be exciting and it should be revelatory, and it should be the thing that compels us all forward because what a sorry place we're going to be in if we truly just have to see yet another [Mark] Rothko show and another [Gerhard] Richter show and another [Pablo] Picasso show. I mean, I just wanna slit my wrist honestly.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
Obviously, this is a moment of great change in the art world. It's a generational shift.
You know, in New York there are institutions changing leaders, from the [Solomon R.] Guggenheim [Museum], the Whitney, change expected at [the Museum of Modern Art] MoMA, the New Museum [of Contemporary Art], perhaps the Studio Museum, institutions around America and Europe are changing leaders.
Your name comes up all the time as someone who is top of the list, top of the picks for these boards, for these museums. You graciously seem to say no and stay where you are. Can you talk about your future plans? What might be exciting for you? Is there anything you can comment on around that and search committees that might reach out to you and advice you might give them?
Jessica Morgan:
I mean, it's flattering to think that people think of you or the, I think that might also be a symptom of the same problems that we have with the Picasso, Rothko shows that people are very lazy and they put the same names on a list and don't think about all the other brilliant people out there in the world who would be better than you. I think that it's a radically challenging time for institutions. There is an immense amount of pressure, rightly so, from our publics, from our communities to change, to be more transparent, to have more communication around what we do and why we do it.
There's also a struggle, let's face it, in most institutions between the forms of funding that enable the institution to exist and the aspirations of the institution to be a public space, responding to the environment in which we work and we live.
I would say I deeply miss the sense of a civic contribution of working in an institution that is civically supported. In the case of when I worked at Tate Modern, for instance, where you feel you're working for an institution that represents and is funded by the people of that country with the knowledge that this is a necessary part of our being, of our society.
It was wonderful during the pandemic to receive support from the government. I wish that would continue because actually, it was incredibly meaningful to me just on the sense like, “Okay, we are seen as a valuable part of society.” We need to exist. We contribute. We contribute to mental health, we contribute to people's daily lives. We deeply contribute to learning.
And these are the things I struggle with a little bit when I think about the future of institutions, here, specifically. These are fundamental contradictions that are very hard to move beyond, which I think is what all of us are struggling with to some degree.
Charlotte Burns:
To go to the Museums Moving Forward report there's a real gap between what the leaders of institutions and what the staff feel is driving the institution. How do you think about bridging that gap?
Jessica Morgan:
I'll be honest, I think most of us are doing a terrible job. I like to think that we're hopefully getting better, but, there's a very long way to go in terms of actually really being less opaque in the workings of the institution.
There are a lot of often smaller institutions that are paving the way for a very different type of institutional behavior. I'm not sure that can necessarily all be modeled in different scales but I do think we all need to think deeply about what is it about your institution that is trying to say something different at this moment in time that is relevant, significant, and is taking us forward, as a cultural sphere?
It certainly isn't that we should all be doing the same thing in the same way, because we speak to very different communities and have very different histories. For me, that's the most exciting, challenging thing is how you continue to learn, how you continue to question yourself and think about what it is that you're not doing that you should be doing, or what it is that you are doing that you should be doing better. But that looks different and should look different in each institution.
Charlotte Burns:
The majority of workers at the Dia Foundation voted to form a union in 2022: 101 in favor six against, it's part of the United Auto Workers, one of the oldest unions in the US, which also represents other museums.
How is that shaping the institution presently and as it moves forward in thinking about its future?
Jessica Morgan:
We're in the midst of negotiations, which, I think, I hope, everyone would say I've been going pretty well. I think it's been a fascinating move to witness. I also think it's extraordinary to have a President of the United States who's actually a supporter of the unions at a moment like this. I don't think it's anything anyone could have predicted in this country. Union membership was such a significant part of my understanding of the workforce in the UK but to come to America and witness a period of time where you've actually seen an uptick in union membership and union support and the understanding in, you know, a country that is so fundamentally based on individualism and, you know, frankly a deeply selfish understanding of one's place in the world as opposed to, thinking about community and society. To see this uptick is remarkable. It makes complete sense to me that we would be seeing that in our environments as well.
Charlotte Burns:
One of the underlying concepts we've been talking about here is this idea of pace and sustainability, which of course, links to climate. Dia is situated right by the Hudson River, Dia Beacon. I'm sure you think a lot about what that means as we witness water levels changing.
Jessica Morgan:
It's actually one of the extraordinary things about Dia—and none of us who work here today can take credit for it because it's how we were founded—is that Dia was built on such a sustainable model. I mean, the idea of having permanent artworks, long-term view that we barely build a wall for any exhibition. Hence shipping is basically moving something from the lower level to the upper level at Dia Beacon. In general, when we work with artists, now we're working on commissions, not a model that's built on shipping artwork and moving artwork. We're a daylight museum. Dia Beacon literally closes at four o'clock right now because the light goes down at that time and we close the doors. These are extraordinary things and most importantly, we work for the long-term.
But that said, yes, we are adjacent to the Hudson River, in Dia Beacon, and it's something we've thought through a great deal over the last few years and have worked, carefully on a landscaping project, which is not only enabling us to open up our back landscape to visitors, which has been a frustrating, omission but one that will also address the fact, that we are adjacent to the river. and susceptible to climate change, as you know, we are all inevitably facing rising water levels in this region.
Charlotte Burns:
So let's get to some ‘what ifs’. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and what's the one that motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
Jessica Morgan:
I think it is thinking about whether we are doing what we should be doing and probably worrying about things that I think we should be doing that we're not doing. Those can range from minutiae to much bigger picture. Making sure that I'm still fully alert to all those things and still engaged with all of those things. I think questioning myself and my own, you know, it's been nine years now at Dia. The last thing I want is to be relaxed into a position where you're not still in that process of questioning and hopefully, listening to everybody to make sure that we are, you know, responding in the way that we should be to the ambitions of our team and the way in which we feel our communities expect us to evolve.
Charlotte Burns:
What if, do you see a natural tenure ending for you at Dia? Do you think there's a natural point when directors should move on?
Jessica Morgan:
I do, I really do. Yeah. Also for myself, I think, you know, at some point I will want to do something different. I'm not entirely sure it's necessarily another museum. Maybe, I don't know. We'll see.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
I was gonna ask you that. What if you could create your dream job, what would it be, Jessica? Barring the one you've got, obviously.
Jessica Morgan:
Perhaps putting oneself in a different place. I suppose thinking about ways in which you can make change through philanthropy, whether there's a role to be played there.
I feel deeply invested in the natural environment. I guess a fantasy would be running some park system, but I think they'd be out of their mind, anybody to approach me about that because I know literally nothing about it.
I guess it's about what are these spaces and places that are so important for us in our future and in our everyday? Museums are one of them, but for me, parks and landscapes are another, for sure.
But I'm still very deeply invested in what we do, what institutions do, and what they can offer and hopefully all the change that they can still bring about. It has been such an exciting period of time to see the change that I've witnessed here in New York over the last few years. I mean, it's really incredible and it's been wonderful to be part and to continue to be part of a group of directors and curators and cultural workers here who are so thoughtful about ways in which they want to see our work change.
And that's very exciting. I still have hope for all of that. I'd love to think that there might be new forms of institutions emerging. Sadly, I feel like what we generally see are extremely conservative, privately-run versions of what I consider to be at this point a kind of redundant idea of the institution.
Charlotte Burns:
In what way?
Jessica Morgan:
Creating exclusive spaces that are catering to populaces, but also artists who are already very well served. And that's not what we need, obviously.
I’d love to make Dia free.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, what if you could?
Jessica Morgan:
All of our sites are free apart from Dia Beacon. I'm very proud of that. I'm fully aware that just removing the obstacle of admission is not the only way to increase access, but it is a huge obstacle.
Charlotte Burns:
What if you were running the art world, Jessica, what would you do? I guess free admission would be up there, and I'm imagining a change in the funding structure?
Jessica Morgan:
Yeah, I mean, you know, everybody in America has always rolled their eyebrows whenever I talk about real funding support in the US coming from the government, and that a) it's impossible and b) it's so wound up in politics.
Although sadly we've seen the same thing happen in the UK in recent years as well. The expression “arm's length”, which refers to the separation between politics and governmental support of arts institutions has not been what it was.
But I still think that there's something to be said for the feeling that the people who are visiting your institution have helped pay for it. And actually, what's kind of hilarious is that I think most people do think that! Most people here actually do think that their tax dollars do go to support museums when they don't. So, there's an appetite for that as well. It would be wonderful if somebody would actually take that on.
All these conversations, whether it's unionization, the change that we want to see in our institutions, the change in structures, the change in pay and equity within the institution, these are all interconnected, of course, you know?
Sometimes I get frustrated that they're not connected back to the economics of the institution, which let's face it, economics undergirds all of these things that we've been talking about today.
Charlotte Burns:
Is that something you would take on, that sort of lobbying of government?
Jessica Morgan:
Oh, no, I think I'd be terrible at that.
I'm not American for a start. I don't feel like I have the right to do that. I would love to. I would love to see, you know, that the way that we've seen these sort of incredible movements, the incredible activism, incredible demonstration around institutions—some of which I know has been incredibly destructive for institutions and I think not a good thing. I’m not saying all activism is a good thing. What we are missing is an understanding of the structural operations and what exactly it should be that people are focusing on as opposed to looking at the surface. Dig deeper and think about what is really undergirding the problems that are being identified. Because I don't think that the real problems are being identified.
Charlotte Burns:
Not the systemic structures.
Jessica Morgan:
Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
Jessica, that's a great note to leave us on.
Thank you so much for making so much time in this conversation. I really appreciate it.
Jessica Morgan:
Pleasure, Charlotte.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
My huge thanks to Jessica Morgan.
Next time on The Art World: What If…?! we’ll be talking to the artist Alvaro Barrington. I can’t wait.
Alvaro Barrington:
People, I think, feel that they're being lied to by the media, by leadership. Any poll that you look at will tell you that folks have deep distrust of many structures but they'll line up forever for a Taylor Swift concert or a Beyoncé concert or a Van Gogh experience. And I think there's things that I need to learn from that, as an artist. Art has to be more in people's lives.
Charlotte Burns:
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the 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.
Follow the show on social media @artand_media.