A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID WIESNER
On February 4, 2021, William Valerio, Woodmere’s Patricia Van Burgh Allison Director and Chief Executive Officer; Rick Ortwein, Deputy Director of Exhibitions; Rachel Hruszkewycz, Assistant Curator; and Hildy Tow, the Robert McNeil, Jr. Curator of Education, spoke with David Wiesner, the juror of the Museum’s 79th Annual Juried Exhibition. WILLIAM VALERIO: When the Museum shut down
David, we are thrilled to finally talk about and
on March 13, 2020, we thought we were facing a
install your Annual. We are including a selection of
two-week closure. As we came to understand the
your drawings for Spot, the app you developed,
severity of the pandemic, it became clear that the
and Spot itself will be on a monitor. Tell us about
79th Annual Juried Exhibition would have to be
this project.
postponed. The disruption to exhibition schedules and museum activity was one of many upheavals. So much changed in life as we knew it. The exhibition is the result of a process that evolves over the course of a year. As with previous iterations, the period from January to March was an important time in the annual cycle. We released the call to artists on January 13, 2020, with submissions closing about a month later, on February 10. Selections were made in the weeks that followed. Artists were notified of their acceptance on March 9. Then, everything changed. We postponed the show for a year, and here we are almost a year later recording this conversation via Zoom. The opening is now set for June 5, 2021. It’s so interesting that looking at works selected for the show in a time before COVID-19, we perceive them now in new ways. The pandemic affected us all differently, but experiences of isolation, loss, and fear inevitably shape perspective, outlook, and, as a result, interpretation of art.
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WOODMERE ART MUSEUM
Spot: Cat World, 2015, by David Wiesner (Courtesy of the artist)
