Doro Globus
Making a Great Exhibition
Dan Golden speaks with the author about her new children’s book, Making a Great Exhibition, recently published by David Zwirner Books.
Doro Globus is the managing director of David Zwirner Books and has worked in art publishing for fifteen years. She has edited a wide variety of books from Michael Bracewell: The Space Between (2012) to About Bridget Riley: Selected Writings 1999–2016 (2017) and has written on Dawn Ades, Bridget Riley, Fred Wilson, and others.
Congratulations on the publication of your new children’s book, Making a Great Exhibition! How did you come up with the idea for it?
Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about the project and asking such fantastic questions! I have my now six-year-old son, Tristan, to thank for encouraging me to make a book for children. He has been fascinated by my job – all of the book dummies, color proofs, and finished books I bring home –and kept asking me to make one for kids. I spend a lot of time reading art and children’s books, so I have influences from both camps. One of my son’s favorite books, when he was younger, is Whose Tools?, which very much helped me in thinking through the structure of Making a Great Exhibition. Whose Tools? introduces six kinds of craftspeople and the tools they use in each stage of building a house, and I thought this could be applied to the making of artworks and exhibitions.
I want my kids to understand how many people are involved in making things that we experience only as a final product: for example, dinner in a restaurant or their favorite movie. I hope that future generations can see that behind every success is a group of highly skilled people who made it possible. I have also found that children’s books do a great job at explaining how things work if they have to do with science or engineering – we have a whole book on how a toilet works! – but they often don’t treat creative outlets in the same way.
I’d love to learn about you and your background in art and publishing.
I often claim to have been raised in a museum! My mother – who is now retired – was a curator. I used to do my homework in the various museums where she worked. I visited exhibitions growing up, went to openings, and was generally very comfortable in those spaces. I majored in English and the history of art and architecture as an undergraduate and then came to London to study contemporary art and curating at a master's level.
After working directly with many artists, I was hired by the now-late gallerist Karsten Schubert to work for his publishing imprint, Ridinghouse. It was tiny when I started, producing 3 to 4 books a year. We were publishing upwards of 25 titles a year by the time I left. I learned an incredible amount from Karsten and am greatly indebted to him for setting me on my path. During my early years at Ridinghouse, I learned how to tell an artist's story, how to make artists feel comfortable with the process of creating a book, what to look for on the printing press, and beyond. Karsten championed artists who were often left out of the canon of art history, which meant that when we made a publication, its importance to the artist's legacy and the artist as an individual was profound. I have carried this ethos throughout my career, and I take my work incredibly seriously. At Ridinghouse, I began to notice that artists, curators, and galleries were putting time and energy into making outstanding publications that did not have distribution beyond their own audiences. I proposed to Karsten that we start using Ridinghouse as a home for these books, which gave them broad distribution. Working for a small press and doing everything from meeting with designers to selling books at book fairs gave me an extensive understanding of publishing.
You are the managing director of David Zwirner Books. How did you originally connect with Zwirner and what are some typical projects you work on there?
I collaborated with David Zwirner Books on several Bridget Riley titles while working with Karsten. (At the time, Karsten was Bridget's agent, so we worked closely with galleries and museums that showed her work.) When it was time to move on from Ridinghouse, I met with Angela Choon, senior partner at David Zwirner London, to get her thoughts on my next steps, and it just grew quickly from there.
As managing director of David Zwirner Books, I am involved in the micro and macro of the publishing imprint. The gallery's fantastic roster of artists and exhibitions is the program's starting point and gives us plenty of rich and diverse material. I help shape the list with David and Lucas Zwirner, and the artist managers. The individual titles are created together with an incredibly talented team of editors and production experts, and, of course, I work very closely with our distribution partners and colleagues on our marketing team. I love the start-to-finish approach to publishing that someone involved with the cover image selection or caption placement then needs to talk about the book and get the sales reps excited to bring it into bookstores.
Can you share a bit about the development process of the book?
I had been wanting to expand David Zwirner Books' offerings to include children's books for some time now and thought it would be good to start with a broader introduction to the art world before focusing on specific artists. David Zwirner was very encouraging about the idea and let me run with it. With a very clear idea in mind, I started meeting with illustrators and getting a sense of how they would approach the project. When I met Rose Blake, I knew that I had found a great partner for the book. We then brought on board the brilliant design team from A Practice for Everyday Life – who are actually included in the illustrations! The lead designers are both parents, and I felt they could help us bridge the art book-style with a book for children. We were also fortunate to work with David Zwirner Books' fantastic production team, who pulled out all of the stops in realizing the brilliant, eye-catching colors!
What are your hopes for this book?
I must admit I have a lot of hopes for this book! I hope that it finds its way into classrooms and helps children learn that they have options beyond “traditional” careers. That it makes museums and galleries feel more accessible to those outside the “traditional” art world. And overall, that it helps children to understand that collaboration and creativity are essential values. It has been truly amazing—the first printing included German and Italian editions, and we will be adding more languages for the second printing next month!
In addition to the great text, the illustrations in the book are fantastic—so full of wonderful shapes and colors and artistic details that art aficionados will appreciate. Can you talk a bit about how you found/selected the illustrator and what the process was like collaborating?
As it was a completely new field for David Zwirner Books and me, I spent a lot of time researching illustrators. I was looking for someone who could appeal to children but also maybe to readers of The New Yorker. I came across Rose Blake’s illustrations in A History of Pictures for Children by David Hockney and Martin Gayford, and I was completely blown away. As soon as I met her, I knew I’d found a fantastic partner.
I wrote out a list of the stages of making an exhibition and the characters and tools I wanted to include. We story-boarded the book together, and then I assembled a group of photographs I have taken in my 15+ years of working in the arts for Rose to take cues from: studio details, shipping crates, art handlers installing works, printing presses, celebratory dinners, and so on. We loved working on the spread that shows the ideas in the artists’ heads – the items they are influenced by really come from Rose’s and my interests. The Donald Judd Writings, published by David Zwirner Books, was from me, of course, and the house music was definitely her!
It was important that Rose had a lot of creative freedom: she is an artist who is a visual storyteller, so I did not want to be too prescriptive about what she should draw. From my understanding, this is quite a different way for an author and illustrator to work on a children’s book, but I think it was really successful and inspiring for both of us.
Now that you’ve written your first children’s book, do you have plans for a follow-up?
Yes! I am very excited about the potential for growth in a number of directions. I am interested to see if any of our artists or estates would like to develop a title geared towards a younger age group. I would also love to grow a series of books that draws back the curtain on how many things in the creative realm are made, including a film, a play, an album, or even a dinner at a restaurant!
How do you balance your own creative work with your role as Managing Director?
The beauty of working in a creative environment is that there is inspiration everywhere. For David Zwirner Books, I am always looking at our artists and their exhibitions and brainstorming writers to identify different ways to tell these artists’ stories and share their work. I see books everywhere! The children’s book aspect is a wonderful combination of my two jobs and two passions: art books and my kids. That said, I do carve out time specifically for my creative work. I don’t start work until 10 am, and this gives me a couple of hours each morning to sketch out ideas and write proposals. Indeed, there are not enough hours in the day, but I am so lucky to be working in a field I love and respect and to have opportunities to follow through on my own ideas.
What’s next for you?
We have, perhaps, one of our strongest lists at David Zwirner Books coming up for 2022. As we strive to build our audience base and encourage access to artists, we have partnered with Hatje Cantz on a graphic novel that tells the story of Hilma af Klint (as you may know, we are currently showing Hilma af Klint: The Tree of Knowledge in New York). The author and illustrator Philipp Deines has created a unique and enticing publication, and we are looking forward to sharing it with an English-speaking audience. We will be launching the Clarion series, which follows the program of our newly opened New York gallery, 52 Walker, curated by Ebony L. Haynes; our first title will feature Kandis Williams’s inaugural exhibition. We will also be working with Hilton Als on a publication that looks at the influence of Toni Morrison on artists and visual culture. I’m incredibly excited that David Zwirner Books is also copublishing with Fraenkel Gallery Diane Arbus Documents, which will reproduce the reception history of Arbus’s work in facsimile form. We have been working closely with Doon Arbus and Neil Selkirk to help them realize this fantastic, complex publication that will feel like holding an archive in you.
Doro Globus, 2021