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Conceived by Locust Projects and ArtCenter / SouthFlorida the Talks (Top Curator on Contemporary Art) are a series of meetings in which art curators from different museums of contemporary art in the United States of America tell how art has entered their life, what it represents and what their vision is in this regard. Helen Molesworth, officiated the first meeting of the second season.
Independent curator of contemporary art museums Helen Molesworth has a very personal concept of art: an antidote to the ills of the world. Born four years after the entry of Aunt Sister Marie Jones into an order of Dominican cloistered nuns, she was given her name . She develops her relationship with art in an intense, devotional way, like the one a nun has for God. A relationship that reflects the sense of community and acceptance of Catholic-Christian culture and that has its origins in the conflict between faith and art departing from it until you find your own size. For her, every conversation about religion was considered a ‘bad idea’ because it repels conventions, authorities and bureaucracy, and manages to focus the sense that God and art have the same purpose, a clear equation, enlightening, that will find its basis in the statement made by her wife Susan: “Every time you can hear God replace it in your mind with Art”, that finds its highest expression in the word empathy.
Art as a term of correlation with life, as a mirror through which to see society, which with the digital age has had the chance to completely change the perspective of experiencing art and seeing it. The digital age that made its way after two great social revolutions: the first with the founder of pictorial realism, the French Courbet who abandons any ideological and historical reference to devote himself to the small phenomena of everyday life and the second with the publication of images on magazines that have disseminated art worldwide.
Helen didn’t know exactly what her life would have been like, but she had a clear idea right from the start that art would play a fundamental role in her life. Born in Alabama in 1971, she graduated in art history from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. An intense love story with art, lived since she was a child, she used to go to museums with her parents and that represented for her the place to take refuge from the voracity and brutality of life: the utopian place where people can understand everything and behave accordingly. Then the work commitment, the Harvard Art Museum, the Wexner Center for Arts in Ohio, the role of curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston before and in the one at the Wallace Gallery of the State University later, the one as senior critic at Yale School of Art and as a teacher at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, passing through head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Harvard Art Museum, curator of the contemporary art section at the Baltimore Museum of Art where she decided to radically change the permanent exhibition inspired by the writings of Bell Hooks, in favor of ideologically provocative images of Kara Wallker and Lorna Simpson. Until the last, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles where she was fired from one day to the next because her artistic choices were not appreciated. Choices for which she has demonstrated a brave and intelligent idealism, driven by the desire to change the rules of art, it does not matter if the system is contrary: her moral integrity, her experience and her vision have made facts speak for her rather than words.
Her speech is true and sincere, passing through the concept of art as circular and cyclical, in a relationship between knowledge and meaning, in which it is possible to identify with the artist, create empathy and generate networks that refer to other deeper contents . A speech that touches the intimate strings of Helen and her wife Susan Dackerman, also an art curator, which closes with a very moving image of her aunt who, surrounded by her sisters, to whom she wanted to pay homage with a painting shortly before her passing. A hand-embroidered piece with the image of Blue Bonnets, the flower that accompanied her along Texan roads when she sat in the back seat as a child and accompanied her grandmother to see her aunt.
