Dylan Rocks
There's a lot of curatorial do-si-do going on this summer, what with new curators being announced at the Whitney and the Frick in New York, and with veteran Henry curator Sheryl Conkelton taking over (part-time, for now) Ginger Gregg Duggan's post at the Bellevue Art Museum.
Such announcements are rarely a surprise. Experience and track records play such a large role in these selections, and the rumor mill is so well established that usually everyone knows who's been selected long before the official announcement.
Which is why the recent selection of Dylan Neuwirth to replace Meg Shiffler (who is leaving this month to attend Bard College's curatorial studies program) as director of visual art at Consolidated Works is such a lovely shock. Although I knew that he had assisted Shiffler in curating a couple of shows over the last few years, Neuwirth is better known to me (see "The Buzz Factor," The Stranger, Nov 21, 2002) as an idiosyncratic artist, given to organizing events in strange spaces and creating projects that work outside the art world's usual parameters. Such as his glam-rock alter ego Gold Hick (who presided over a strangely minimal installation in a tattoo parlor last February). Such as his hiphop single about Greg Lundgren's anti-work organization Artists for a Work Free America. Such as Black Cross, his brand of T-shirts and undies that recruits wearers, consciously or not, for his anarchic imaginary army. I once caught sight of a voluptuous blonde sashaying down First Avenue in a Black Cross T-shirt and wondered if she knew.
This last project, the press release for Neuwirth's appointment noted, will be featured this fall in Lucky, a women's shopping magazine. Which, again, is not your usual credential for a director of visual art at a major institution. But this, I think, is precisely what Shiffler and Matthew Richter, ConWorks' executive director, were after. "Dylan is fearless," Shiffler told me recently, and I agree.
Neuwirth was plucked from a field of five candidates, after an extensive interview process that included selecting artists for a hypothetical show called, in true ConWorks style, Instinct. And instinct, it seems, is a lot of what this is about. Shiffler had some art gallery background when Richter invited her to head ConWorks' visual art program, but her strength was in folk art, and her education was in theater.
Shiffler's mark will remain on ConWorks programming through next winter, with an exhibition by Jason Puccinelli in the fall, and then another show for the winter season, both of which Neuwirth will help bring to light. (Look in these pages next week for my effusive and slightly teary farewell to Meg Shiffler.)
Someone once lamented that it's hard to pick your successor for a job you loved--officially you want the best person for the job, but secretly you want someone who will carry on your agenda and not do it quite as well as you did. Congratulations to Neuwirth and Shiffler and Richter for blasting that thinking to bits.
