Mia Matthias

Courtesy of Mia Matthias and MoMA

Mia Matthias is a curator and writer. Mia is an Assistant Curator at Glenstone Museum. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mia worked on Jason Moran (2019); Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop (2020); Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself and the accompanying performance commission, Disturbing the View (2021); My Barbarian (2021); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’ s Kept (2022). Mia was a joint Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2018-19. Mia is a graduate of New York University.

GM: What was your path to becoming an arts professional?

MM: My journey began with internships at small arts nonprofits and taking courses that involved visiting galleries and speaking with artists. Those experiences were very hands-on and changed my understanding of the possibilities of presenting art. Before that, I viewed museums and galleries as quite static spaces. After graduating, I worked at an arts advisory and then an auction house. I had the opportunity to write about specific artists and artworks, and found I enjoyed the in-depth research and wanted to shift toward the more sustained engagement that comes with organizing exhibitions. This led me to the joint fellowship between two museums: MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The fellowship was crucial in my development; it solidified my interest in curatorial work and I was able to work with brilliant scholars, curators, and artists. Importantly, it demystified the process of exhibition-making, which can be purposefully opaque and inaccessible. It was a game changer to have people invested in showing me how to produce thoughtful programming. At MoMA, I worked on a presentation of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures with Paulina Pobocha. The level of care and research that went into every decision -- from plinth sizes to selecting archival materials -- was extremely thorough and set a standard for rigor that I bring to every project. At the Studio Museum, we devoted a significant amount of time and resources to fostering community investment in the institution and collection and building relationships with other cultural centers throughout Harlem. I want to bring that level of audience understanding and specificity to everything I do. Most importantly, through the fellowship I built a community that has been crucial to my ability to sustain myself in this field. I then found myself gravitating to more dynamic and interdisciplinary presentations, which brought me to the Whitney Museum.

GM: What was your experience assisting on exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art?

MM: I was able to work on a number of incredible shows at the Whitney, all of which were formative in my development as a curator. I had a lot of admiration for Adrienne Edwards’s curatorial practice before I started working with her at the museum. My first experience was working on the formidable Jason Moran (2019) exhibition, which had originated at the Walker Museum in Minneapolis under Adrienne with Danielle A. Jackson, another curator who I admire greatly. (Continued)

Installation view of the exhibition "Constantin Brancusi Sculpture" , Museum of Modern Art; July 22, 2018 - February 18, 2019. Photograph by Denis Doorly.

Dave McKenzie, Disturbing the View, 2021. Performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 1, 2021. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photograph © Paula Court

The exhibition featured weekly in-gallery performances and taught me an incredible amount about effective activations. I really couldn’t have asked for a better crash course in producing performances within the context of museums, and I’m so grateful to have worked with an incredible team – Raul Zbengheci, Danielle Sheli Levy, and Mik Berry. We were there six days a week working on bespoke mini concerts. Unbeknownst to us, the pandemic was around the corner, so the experience feels even more special because of how unfeasible it would have been even a few months later. I later worked on Dave McKenzie’s durational and site-specific performance commission, Disturbing the View (2021), which required a completely different approach. The performance traveled throughout the building and changed shape with each iteration. With that experience, it was important to understand when to take a more hands-off approach and allow for an unmediated encounter between the artist and audiences. With My Barbarian (2021), the exhibition itself became a performance of sorts, a theatrical display made dynamic through a highly-choreographed display of video, light, and art objects. In addition to their exhibition and incredible performance series, I learned so much from working with them on producing their first monograph. Finally, the 2022 Biennial integrated performance into the exhibition beautifully, in a way that allows for a sense of chance – one can return to the exhibition several times and find that it has transformed. All

of these experiences have been incredibly rewarding and each required a bespoke approach to presentation and contextualization.

GM: In your opinion, what could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics?

MM: Art institutions need to be more willing to undermine their own precedents. There’s too often a desire to bring Black artists into institutions in order to fulfill a specific agenda, then resist when those artists want to shift the existing structures that were created to exclude them. There’s a tension between institutional statements purporting a desire for ambiguous change, versus any willingness to be malleable or open to new ideas or feedback. (Continued)

Installation view of My Barbarian (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 29, 2021–February 27, 2022). On projection screens: Shakuntala Du Bois, 2012. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

That tension partly comes from institutions prioritizing self-preservation above all else, and perceiving radical change as a threat to their existence. In recent conversations with friends and colleagues, we’ ve begun to question whether or not traditional institutions are useful contexts for presenting exhibitions and programming. These institutions need to understand that it is a privilege when Black artists are willing to engage with them – not the other way around – and behave accordingly. Either change or become obsolete; either way, self-preservation won’t work.

GM: You are currently transitioning to a role as Assistant Curator of Glenstone Museum. What are you looking forward to doing within this position?

MM: I’m really excited about working with Glenstone’s incredible collection, and I find their commitment to supporting artists in-depth really inspiring. Oftentimes, institutions sacrifice intimacy as they scale upward, but the team at Glenstone very much prioritizes artist and community relationships, and I am eager to be a part of that conversation. After several years of working at incredible institutions in New York City, I’m also looking forward to working in new contexts and serving an expanded community. I will be building relationships with artists in the collection, realizing exhibitions, and producing rigorous scholarship around their work. Their institutional pace is ideal in that it will allow me to work closely with artists over a long period of time to while also being flexible enough for presentations, programming, and publications that feel current and relevant. It’s also important to me to continue working with artists and writing outside of institutional contexts.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.