Chrissie iles biography of albert

CI: I tried to find a new space for the artists and the gallery. Hackney Council offered us several spaces, but they were only available for a year and the artists needed something more stable. After visiting a number of buildings in the East End no long term space could be found, and the artists went their different ways. CI: I learnt a lot about how to work with artists; how to put the artist first and listen to them closely, and that nothing is too much trouble; Robin once spent three days lighting one painting to get it exactly right.

What was your time like there? CI: David Elliott was crucial to my curatorial development. He mentored me and took scholarship and pedagogical exchange very seriously. He encouraged me to read and learn, and his critiques of my catalogue essays were like seminars. He introduced me to all the artists, scholars and cultural figures who came to the museum, and to Oxford.

Once he sent me in his place to a conference of museum directors in Paris. He just threw me in at the deep end. He had, and still has, a strong intellectual curiosity. He is also a risk-taker culturally, curating the first shows of Mayakovsky, and of Rodchenko outside Russia, as well as shows of art from China after Tiananmen Square, and from South Africa.

Desmond Tutu came to the opening. I learnt a lot from reading their proposals and quietly listening to their ideas. All this took place in the middle of an intellectually rigorous academic community who did not take contemporary art very seriously. I learnt to be an ambassador for art, representing the museum in at various Oxford College events, surrounded by older white male scientists, mathematicians and philosophers.

It was useful to learn how to defend contemporary art and articulate why it is so important. SM: During this time you curated exhibitions such as Signs of the Times: Film, Video and Slide Installations in the s and Scream and Scream Again: Film and Art that laid the groundwork for recent exhibitions such as Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art in your current role at the Whitney.

How do you arrive at your curatorial ideas? CI: I learnt from those early experiences how to give the experimental ways in which artists work a voice within the institution, and how to map out those histories. What is the role of the museum? How can you be an interlocutor between one and the other? You have a responsibility to the art, to the artist, to the public, and to history.

I learnt early on that the more deeply you are immersed in an ongoing dialogue with the artists, the more clearly you understand the realities of how artists live, think and work, and that enables you to care for the art and protect the intentions of the artist within the institutional parameters of the museum. At the same time you need to have a critical eye, and avoid becoming seduced by trends, the pressures of the art market, or distracting subjectivities; those all pass, in time.

If you have an in-depth knowledge of your field, you are able to calibrate the delicate balance between taste and expertise. When you are building a collection, each work has to speak to audiences across history, when the specific social surroundings of any cultural moment have melted away. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York certainly did in when it declined a collection of six hundred works by modern American artists offered to it by Mrs Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, so she went away and founded the chrissie iles biography of albert that now bears her name.

Since then it has grown into the astounding institution it is now. It has been at the Whitney in particular that Chrissie Iles has acquired her world-wide reputation. There is time today to single out only one or two highlights. It was followed in by co-curating the Whitney Biennial, the biggest show of current American art held every two years.

The Whitney Biennial is a notoriously unruly beast: critics wait for it like a pride of sabre-toothed tigers salivating at the sight of their prey. But this time they were non-plussed: they could only find positive things to say about it, and declared it the best in living memory. It was so successful she was asked to co-curate the next one in Wilcox to name a few at random.

And as well there has been a prolific output of scores of publications, with many more to come, among them a major monograph on art and film.

Chrissie iles biography of albert

So what of her time here when she was a student? In fact, nothing extravagantly out of the ordinary, but she says it was Bristol that made it all possible in the first place and we are happy to take the credit for that. InIles curated Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art —the first survey exhibition of historical film and video installation in America.

The exhibition was met with broad critical acclaim; frieze ' s Michael Wilson called it a "triumph", lauding the "gutsy attempt by the museum's curator of film and video, Chrissie Iles, to make newly visible a critical period in the development of a now commonplace form" and pulling "off the seemingly impossible by allowing illusion to retain its power while simultaneously revealing its source.

Iles was a judge for the Turner Prizewhich was awarded to Grayson Perry. Iles became the first Art History graduate to be presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Bristol University in Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.