Margot Norton

Courtesy of Scott Rudd and The New Museum

Margot Norton is Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at the New Museum, New York. Most recently, she curated “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” and the 2021 edition of the New Museum Triennial: "Soft Water Hard Stone" , co-curated with Jamillah James. Norton joined the New Museum in 2011 and has curated exhibitions with Carmen Argote, Judith Bernstein, Diedrick Brackens, Pia Camil, Sarah Charlesworth, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Nathaniel Mellors, Laure Prouvost, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, and Kaari Upson. In October 2017, she curated “Sequences VIII: Elastic Hours” , the Eighth Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavillion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E.. Before joining the New Museum, Norton was a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has contributed to and edited numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, and regularly lectures on contemporary art and curating. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in November 2021.

GM: What was your path to becoming a curator, as well as your current job at The New Museum?

MN: I grew up in New York City and going to museums and art spaces here. I had a poetry teacher who was influential in taking me and my class to shows in alternative spaces in SoHo and the Lower East Side. I studied art history in undergrad, and after I graduated, I worked at various places, including a commercial gallery, a nonprofit gallery, and an auction house. I ended up doing my Master’s in Curatorial Studies at Columbia University, concurrently working part-time for a commercial gallery. Following graduation, I worked at the gallery full time while looking into working at a museum. I ended up working at the Whitney Museum for three years as a curatorial assistant, working on the 2010 Whitney Biennial and in the Prints and Drawings Departments. I curated a show on my own in the Whitney ’s lobby gallery with artist Dianna Molzan before getting hired at The New Museum as an Assistant Curator in 2011.

GM: What is your background in curating exhibitions relating to performance art and/or media art?

MN: I have several notable experiences working with media art and performance. In 2017, I curated the eighth edition of a time-based media festival in Iceland called the Sequences Real Time Art Festival. The show I curated was called “Sequences VIII: Elastic Hours. ” I loved how the festival was called a “ real time” festival and how that juxtaposes with unreal time. In Iceland, the experience of time is very different than in the United States because the daylight hours shift so dramatically over the course of the year – from full daylight in summer to darkness in the winter. During October, when the festival happened, the daylight was one hour longer in the beginning of the week than it was at the end. The festival took over diverse spaces across Reykjavik, from an exhibition of Joan Jonas’s work at an artist-run space called the Living Art Museum to a performance in a hotel room by Anna K.E. and Florian Meisenberg. [There were] other performances by David Horvitz, Florence Lam, Aki Sasamoto, and Cally Spooner in more established venues, including the Reykjavík Art Museum and National Gallery of Iceland. I also curated another project in Iceland, which was a program for their public television station RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. The program was called Næturvarp (Night Transmissions), and I programmed art videos in the middle of the night for two weeks, which ran from 12 PM to 7 AM. I titled the program “Electronic Intimacy ” based on our increasingly intimate relationships to screens, and every night had a different theme. I got such interesting feedback for that project; since it was on the main public station, it was playing in all the gyms and hospitals. People would be working out at 5 AM and seeing Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses (1981–87), or seeing Chris Burden rolling over shattered glass in Through the Night Softly (1973). (Laughs) At the New Museum I’ ve curated many shows involving media art and performance, including exhibitions with Ragnar Kjartansson (2014), Laure Prouvost (2014), Pipilotti Rist (2016), Kaari Upson (2017), and Mika Rottenberg (2019).

GM: Can you discuss your experience curating “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” (2021) at The New Museum?

MN: Lynn is somebody who I’ ve always admired; she was actually in my thesis exhibition that I curated while in grad school. She’s been an icon for me and so many people of my generation. Some of her works that were made so long ago seem so relevant now, and it’s amazing to see how she was thinking about those things so early on. Lynn is someone who I wanted to work with since I started at the New Museum; I was finally able to work with her for this show, which was such a joy and honor. She had a major retrospective in 2014 at the ZKM Center for Media Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, that was called “Civic Radar” and traveled to several institutions in Germany and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. For our show, it was important to us that it be a survey and focus on a theme, which is how “Twisted” emerged. We focused on the relationship between technology and the self. It was also based on her fascination with DNA and this idea of coded and malleable identities. In our show, everything exhibited had to relate to the figure of the cyborg in some way. We included works from early in her career up until the present, including a work that we commissioned for the exhibition, Twisted Gravity (2021). These were etched water women figures connected to tanks of water that were purified throughout the exhibition using a new technology developed by the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Lynn definitely has more of a presence on the West coast, in the Bay Area specifically. My experience of her work was seeing one project at a time in a gallery or group exhibition, and it is powerful to see it come together.

“Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” , 2021. Exhibition view: The New Museum, New York. Photos by Diana Lasagni and Courtesy of The New Museum

GM: Can you discuss your experience co-curating (with Jamillah James) the 2021 New Museum Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone”?

MN: Jamillah James and I were appointed curators of the Triennial in 2018, so it’s been a little over three years that we’ ve been working on the exhibition. When we started our discussions about the show, it was important to us that we not start with a theme already in mind, but rather let the theme emerge from the research process. We spent the first year allowing our studio visits and conversations along the way guide our research. During the summer of 2019, we settled on exploring this idea of perceived solidity. Many artists we looked at were exploring this idea that the structures that we once thought to be forever or unchanging, were being revealed to be precarious or on the verge of collapse. I was in Brazil during a research trip and one of the artists in the exhibition, Gabriela Mureb, told me about the proverb that informed a work of hers and would later form the basis of the exhibition’s title, “Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole. ” The proverb elicits ideas of persistence and resistance, but also transformation. It was through these conversations with the artists and Jamillah that formed how the exhibition would come together.

GM: That’s amazing and incredible. It’s also cool that you’re from New York and work at The New Museum in New York City, and Jamillah works at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. You each bring your own East Coast and West Coast perspective, but the Triennial also focuses heavily on international artists and bringing their work and perspectives to New York.

MN: Totally. Jamillah is amazing, and such an incredible collaborator. We had already transitioned to this remote working environment because we were Skyping every week prior to the pandemic, later switching to Zoom. (Continued)

Installation view of Harry Gould Harvey IV's work in “2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard

Stone” , 2021. Exhibition view: The New Museum, New York. Photo by Diana Lasagni and Courtesy of The New Museum

“2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone” , 2021. Exhibition view: The New Museum, New York. Photo by Diana Lasagni and Courtesy of The New Museum

The show only includes a handful of artists from LA and New York, and it was important for us to focus on areas throughout the U.S. and Canada that are often overlooked in these international exhibitions. There are 23 countries represented out of the 40 artists and collectives in the show. For me, the Triennial has always been this incredible platform to introduce the voices of artists that were new to me and most audiences. It’s such an incredible opportunity to have the time and resources available to do this kind of research and provide the majority of these artists with their first major presentation in a U.S. museum.

GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics?

MN: There’s been a lot more attention given to media and performance, with departments now dedicated to them in bigger museums and new curatorial hires specializing in those areas. The pandemic has been really hard on performance in terms of gatherings and with the restrictions now required. There’s still a long way to go, however. Lynn was working in sound in the sixties, performance and video in the seventies, and web-based work in the nineties, and certainly did not have institutions embrace her practice at that time. People had no idea what she was doing! (Laughs) It’s taken this long for institutions to catch up and they still have a long way to go. Similarly, there’s a lot of artists that are working today in ways that are yet to be recognized institutionally, and it’s going to take a while for institutions to catch up in terms of how to properly embrace them.