This article is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2024 Pride Month sequence, that includes interviews with art-world queer and trans elders all through June.
Norman Kleeblatt has been a distinguished curator in New York City’s museum scene for many years. His exhibitions on the Jewish Museum, the place he began as a curatorial assistant in 1981 and went on to function the establishment’s chief curator from 2005 to 2017, have exercised an essential affect on the sphere.
His 1987 exhibition The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice explored the connection between artwork and politics by analyzing visible responses to the scandalous Dreyfus Affair. It even earned him an award from the French authorities. His 1996 exhibition Too Jewish? challenged widespread concepts round Jewishness and was an essential contribution to bigger conversations throughout the period relating to our understanding of multiculturalism. More not too long ago his examinations of Abstract Expressionism within the 2008 exhibition Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976 and his 2014 From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945–1952 each energized our conception of a motion that was foundational to the modern artwork world.
His considerate method comes by in his curating, and he at all times appears to discover a technique to lengthen conversations in new and attention-grabbing methods, and that’s what I most get pleasure from about him and his work. In this interview, we talk about his life, work, and perception as one of the influential LGBTQ+ curators in New York.
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Hyperallergic: You have an uncommon and what I might contemplate a “very New York” popping out story in that you simply did issues your approach. Do you thoughts sharing your expertise?
Norman Kleeblatt: Though maybe a traditional “New York-specific” twist, I feel courting normally and popping out particularly mirrored the tradition and zeitgeist of the 1970s. My era grew up with the separation — segregation may be a greater time period — of LGBTQ+ from straight society: tons unstated and hidden underneath the cloud of homophobia. The language used on the time would at the moment be thought-about microaggressions. Quite a lot of what was instilled by household and straight society appeared pure and secure; on the one hand, that was engaging. On the opposite, different choices could be tough if not harmful.
By the top of the 1970s, a sizeable variety of my male mates and acquaintances initially had been in relationships with girls; many I knew, like me, had been married. Stonewall in 1969 permitted a brand new angle towards sexuality in each queer and straight communities. A sure libertinism (sexual and in any other case) pervaded the last decade. For the second a part of the last decade, I used to be capable of have relationships with each ladies and men, typically causally, usually with emotional attachments. I’m not speaking about competing, emotionally fraught homosexual/straight triangles, not like the relations uncovered in such influential movies as Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) or the latest film Passages (2023). In my case on the time, I had separate relationships, one with a person and one a girl. With the onset of AIDS, and its terrifying, life-threatening dangers, such freedoms and couplings ended abruptly. By 1980, I had begun a long-term relationship with Peter, the one who is now my husband.
H: And you’re Jewish and served because the longtime director of the Jewish Museum, so I’m curious the way you noticed your identities usually interacting within the artwork group. Did you’re feeling a battle or had been you capable of negotiate that simply? I’m asking significantly as a result of many people are sometimes negotiating comparable realities with numerous communities we really feel part of.
NK: I used to be chief curator on the Jewish Museum from 2005–2017. I started in a part-time curatorial place in 1981 quickly after Joan Rosenbaum was appointed director. A baby of refugees from Nazi Germany, I grew up in New Jersey, did my undergrad at Rutgers, then graduate work at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Honestly this was a second in my life that, as a homosexual man, I felt most alienated, questioning my Jewish id. What half, if any, did “Jewish” have in both my private life or my skilled profession?
Slowly I, together with {many professional} colleagues, realized that identities had been difficult, usually contradictory. Complexity and contradiction are two ideas which were central to my private experiences {and professional} practices. For instance, Deborah Kass, who can also be queer and Jewish, and I started an intense dialog about this matter. Others who ultimately participated in my exhibition Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities provided their very own voices/experiences/questions/conundrums. With little preliminary intent or manipulation, a substantial variety of the artists I included occurred to be homosexual: Greg Bordowitz, Cary Leibowitz, Rhonda Lieberman, Sandi DuBowski, and Deb Kass had been amongst them. Humor and irony, even ironic self-deprecation (are these Jewish or homosexual traits/stereotypes?) had been a part of the present’s artists’ modes of self-presentations. These had been mentioned as such by critics who wrote concerning the exhibition.
But as with my extra difficult popping out, my query to myself was whether or not and easy methods to be an “out Jew.” This would have had direct implications for my curatorial observe, particularly as a curator on the Jewish Museum. I feel that the collision of those two identities added yet one more stage of complexity to my observe. At the time, what did Jewish and/or queer individuals must do with artwork, with curating? This was not an insignificant query. I received the job within the 1980s, when multiculturalism and id politics started to develop into a critical a part of the conversations about artwork and advanced into a bunch of significant museum reveals addressing such points. The 1993 Whitney Biennial was a serious second of multi-dimensional exploration. Distilling that to a broad, gauged “Jewish” angle was the foremost focus of the beforehand talked about 1996 exhibition Too Jewish?. The query mark within the title is reflective of the way in which I’ve at all times labored on exhibitions and analysis: Always start with a query. Keep asking questions. Offer alternate options, not solutions.
H: I love your curiosity in questioning, which does really feel like it will possibly operate as a sort of queering, but in addition, as you talked about, be linked to different traditions, like your individual Jewish mental heritage. What questions do you would like queer individuals within the artwork group would ask extra or examine extra?
NK: I hesitate to categorize or essentialize the traits as both good, unhealthy, or detached of queers, Jews, and so many different partial identities. Yet in fact the thought of questioning is a helpful deal with, no less than for me. What I wish to query is how the experiences of queers, Jews, and so many different teams could have led to the behaviors of self-interrogation.
Putting that into my mental, artwork historic, and curatorial method advanced however evidently it is also a part of how I feel. Perhaps the primary instance of questioning in my curatorial function is the 1987 present I organized, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice. Going by the works on paper within the Jewish Museum’s assortment, I found a bunch of no less than 30 posters titled Musée des Horreurs (Museum of Horrors). As its eponymous title claimed, the pictures had been ghastly. Horrible is just not an satisfactory time period to explain them. Zola as a pig; Dreyfus as a snake. Yet additionally they had been seductive visually — maybe an excessive amount of so.
Still they offered the bottom zero for a yearslong holy grail to take a look at the notorious Affair, which rocked French society and worldwide relations reflecting the disparate viewpoints of mental, political, inventive, literary, even filmic manufacturing.
Another instance is when Kenneth Silver and I co-curated the 1998 monographic Chaim Soutine exhibition. Our huge query was the place the Lithuanian-born “French expressionist” may match into the artwork historic matrix. We assigned ourselves your entire battery of criticism that had been written concerning the artist from the early 1920s to the 1980s. As we sat down collectively to debate and analyze what we learn, we realized that there have been in actual fact three totally different “Soutines” characterised (dare I say concocted?) within the literature. Wondering how which may come by within the exhibition, we truly ended up creating three totally different galleries, with three totally different architectures for the three totally different Soutine characterizations we uncovered.
Likewise, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940–1976 originated from the questions of easy methods to create a special method to exhibiting and analyzing this seminal interval of American artwork. More particularly: Can one arrange an exhibition by the lens of the competing critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg?
Then, in 2014, I labored on one other present that got here instantly out of Action/Abstraction. Here Abstract Expressionism was examined by a particular, extremely centered lens. From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945–1952 featured two painters who had been traditionally underappreciated. Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, a girl and an African American, shared a surprisingly comparable visible language throughout this era. The exhibition checked out ways in which every artist’s method joined abstraction with cultural specificity.
H: Can you inform us a couple of formative artwork expertise that influences you till today, one thing that continues to tell your work and life?
NK: I imagine formative artwork experiences proceed so long as a person is compos mentis. I imagine that’s why I proceed to look, hear, expertise, and query artwork. I’m talking of artwork within the broadest, most basic phrases — together with music, literature, movie, structure, and so on., and so on. In some senses I’m an addict, consistently looking for new emotions and methods of expression. Seeing previous and current as a continuum is essential in the way in which I method artwork and historical past.
instance for me is a two-part encounter. My first in-person encounter with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, in Alsace, France, was pivotal, in fact. From the time I first noticed a photograph of that masterpiece, Colmar had been a prime cease on my pilgrimage record. My first go to to the Musée Unterlinden was within the mid 1980s, on the height of the AIDS epidemic. The lifeless Christ’s pores and skin on the middle panel is contaminated with lesions of the kind that had been the seen results of a illness prevalent on the time Grünewald painted it. Known as ergotism, or St. Anthony’s hearth, it was a painful illness that got here from fungal-infected rye flour. [It was] painted as an altarpiece for a monastery/hospital the place equally contaminated sufferers’ beds had been wheeled into the chapel to wish and obtain some sort of non secular therapeutic from the sight of Christ having suffered comparable agony. The lesions seemed remarkably just like the Kaposi sarcoma suffered by many AIDS sufferers. Comparable to the mortal pores and skin illness of the 16th century, the AIDS analogy appeared blatantly evident to me. Yet the thought of making a method of psychological/non secular therapeutic felt alien to how our modern society handled these struggling.
More than a decade later an identical visible encounter occurred for me once I first noticed AA Bronson’s billboard-size {photograph} titled “June 5, 1994” (1994/1999) on the opening of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. AA staged his not too long ago deceased sitter — who had been one in every of his companions within the famous artist group General Idea within the hours shortly after Felix Partz’s dying from AIDS-related causes. Terrifying, it stopped me in my tracks. I centered, shut down, just about disregarded the excitement of throngs of different guests.
As against Grünewald’s lifeless Christ, [it was] as profound, possibly much more so, by specializing in a particular beloved, modern, identified particular person who was not an icon of non secular veneration. But Felix too was now a logo and made all us viewers weak — a harrowing reminder of the continued struggling and devastating losses from AIDS. AA felt the “dead walk among us, [the living].”
H: How would you characterize the methods museums have modified through the years and do you suppose they’ve develop into extra inclusive?
NK: Of course, there was motion on this path, with museums taking note of exhibiting and filling gaps in collections, particularly of artists which were ignored by Western artwork historical past. However, the initiatives appear centered on one- or two-dimensional traits as if there are “to-include” lists that may merely be ticked off. How do establishments start to open up purviews and discourses to the extra extremely faceted nature and complexity of particular person identities, particularly amongst cultural producers? Inevitably it will take time. Looking again, at one time organizations noticed hope in multiculturalism. Soon that turned mentioned as an unfulfilled promise. Then curators like Okwui Enwezor began opening discourse within the West to broader concepts round globalism. I bear in mind his Documenta in 2000, which helped audiences observe dialogues and disparities between and amongst its broad-ranging contributors. It conveyed in a way the complexity of every particular person, [that] every artist had quite a few difficult elements
One of the problems with museums at the moment is that there’s speak of variety, fairness, inclusion (DEI), however nonetheless a lot much less vary amongst higher employees than could be anticipated. And then there’s museum admission, which is usually at or close to $30 per visiting grownup. Not insignificant for a working- or middle-class household of 4, and even one. The acknowledgement of financial and/or class distinction is much less thought-about than different elements of the DEI quadrant.
H: Can you inform us about queer life in New York throughout the ’70s and ’80s and the way that’s modified? Do you’ve gotten any nostalgia for that older scene?
NK: It’s humorous that we started this interview with our dialogue of a slowly evolving “New York” popping out, and now that I consider it, my very own popping out was sluggish, quiet, distinctive to me by comparability.
The late ’70s was a time of nice private and sexual freedom in addition to experimentation, which I skilled at a distance. I solely started to return out within the very late 1970s, when there was a brand new openness of homosexual life — and as I mentioned earlier than, sexual permissiveness normally. I met individuals on the health club, within the grocery retailer, the bus cease, and on the sidewalk. An encounter may start sexually and develop right into a friendship.
Much as I attempted to keep away from emotional attachment, by 1980 I used to be in a live-in relationship with Peter (now my husband). Together we continued and cherished our earlier relationships with straight mates — in actual fact we nonetheless trusted them for emotional help. We additionally started to develop a coterie of homosexual mates, principally {couples}, who had come from straight relationships and marriages, and had somewhat shortly entered into dedicated relationships with males. Of course, the 1980s framed the AIDS disaster as painful, complicated, terrifying.
Discussions amongst homosexual mates pinpointed AIDS. There was so little data, a lot misinformation and confusion on the time. Despair reigned as we listened to information and watched mates endure and die of AIDS. In most instances, we had been capable of be there for them bodily and psychologically. But I bear in mind one good friend with AIDS within the mid-1980s shunning former mates, together with me. I felt helpless.
Then in fact, most of us noticed ourselves as extremely weak, and sometimes developed false psychosomatic signs. Our straight mates and fogeys had been as upset and as confused as we had been. I can’t say I wax nostalgic, due to the psychological difficulties for me personally and the truth that homophobia exploded in society writ giant. Today, I do know I stay in a bubble of acceptance for my gayness and recognition of my marriage. But in at the moment’s political surroundings, that’s as soon as once more threatened.
H: That’s comprehensible, and the distinction between the 1970s and ’80s should’ve been intense. How do you suppose that interval impacted the artwork group and its establishments? When did the primary homosexual or LGBTQ+ exhibitions begin to seem repeatedly?
NK: One essential occasion was the start of Day Without Art in December 1989.
I headed planning on the Jewish Museum, and it provided an essential, significant technique to interact the AIDS disaster with our skilled organizations and academic missions. The planning introduced employees from many departments along with a purpose of providing training and a spot of remembrance, and sure, mourning for household and mates affected by, residing with, or misplaced to AIDS. The sense of objective was essential for employees and contributors. Tom Sokolowski [who helped establish the national day of action and mourning] thought-about our program essentially the most personally affecting one in every of all of the 1989 applications in New York.
As to LGBTQ+ exhibitions, I clearly bear in mind Dan Cameron’s 1982 contribution, Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art on the New Museum (when the New Museum was nonetheless housed within the New School on 14th Street and Fifth Avenue). It was courageous and provocative, and received fairly a little bit of consideration and even criticism concerning the “formal” elements of the works and “quality” of the featured artwork. Some of this critique was from the homosexual writers. It was a vastly essential occasion, together with such artists as Scott Burton, Gilbert and George, Jody Pinto, Harmony Hammond, and Betty Damon, amongst others. Yet a lot as I used to be looking for to seek out myself within the exhibition (silly as which may appear), I used to be onerous pressed to narrate to anybody work personally.
H: What would you want to inform youthful LGBTQ+ people who find themselves planning to enter the sphere of artwork? Perhaps one thing you’ll’ve favored to listen to as you began by yourself journey in artwork?
NK: I couldn’t think about giving a youthful LGBTQ+ individual totally different basic recommendation than I might give to a youthful straight one.
Goals, which ought to be versatile, have to be outlined; dedication and focus are important. I’ve had the pleasure of working with quite a few assistants and interns through the years, quite a lot of whom I nonetheless contemplate good mates. Each of their instances was particular person by way of objectives, timetables, monetary conditions, and beginning factors.
For all, get as a lot expertise as attainable. Learn from the expertise. Become invaluable to mentors and supervisors. Listen to conversations of pros at work. Find the ear of a sympathetic mentor. Become an professional within the venture on which you’re working. Note that this may require you to assign your self studying homework. I did and to today I’m nonetheless benefiting from this recommendation.
Most essential, discontinue positions that aren’t helpful psychologically. They received’t provide help to professionally. Not least, anticipate and hope for plenty of good luck.