November 2024
Hilton Als
Hilton Als. Photo by Ali Smith
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and curator Hilton Als discusses his multifaceted career, the art of curation, and At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World at David Zwirner in Los Angeles.
Interview by Dan Golden
Dan Golden I’d love to start our conversation with a question about your range of creative roles: journalist, critic, curator, writer, professor. How do you balance all of these?
Hilton Als One of the things to remember is that it’s really all one thing, right? We’re always dealing with aesthetics on some level. Ultimately, these are all sorts of languages, and you want to understand which language is appropriate to the event or idea. So you’re dealing with where the language is best suited. And whether it’s a classroom or a piece of writing, you’re dealing ultimately with the impulse to communicate something. And I think when you have that impulse, you’re dealing with a joyful and welcoming world because you have all these opportunities to speak. I mean, it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches. Or I would say embarrassment of opportunities.
DG I read an interview with you where you talked about the luxury of working in the creative field.
HA Right. But remember, for a long time, this kind of work was the province of the wealthy. Working with art, speaking about it, writing, or anything else was part of the leisure class. So I feel that it’s such an incredible jump in our history that someone who is not a person of means can have a language that is remarkably and very movingly heard along with other dialogues. So it’s a very interesting thing I don’t take for granted.
DG I agree. That’s part of why I started Curator—to have conversations with people I respect who are doing meaningful creative work. Do you feel you exercise a different creative or critical muscle for each of your roles, or are they all aligned?
HA They’re all aligned. And they’re all different at the same time. When you’re part of the joy of curating, you’re dealing with a visceral response to visual information, first and foremost. But, like writing, curation is storytelling. And most curators, if they’re interesting, have a great interest or impulse to communicate something narratively, whether it’s emotional, right? The emotion of the curator meeting the artist, or just the curator, him or her, or themselves. So the storytelling part is the through line for what you’re asking me about. I have an interest in telling stories. And in that interest, there are different manifestations of storytelling.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
“We’re always dealing with aesthetics on some level. Ultimately, these are all sorts of languages, and you want to understand which language is appropriate to the event or idea.”
DG That leads to your role as a curator. How did you get started?
HA Many years ago, I had a very close friend, Darryl Turner (who recently passed away), and we shared a great interest in art. This was at a time when a lot of smaller galleries were able to survive. I wrote letters to some galleries saying we wanted to do shows. Two people who answered were Hudson at Feature and Simon Watson.
We ended up doing a few shows with Hudson, and one of the things that came out of that was an understanding that Darryl and I had no real interest in the hierarchy in art. The work we were doing and the artists we were interested in were always high-low.
The fascinating thing was that it was a weird moment for the art world. There had been the Pictures Generation, and despite the sort of democracy of it, there were still art-world people. And we were very defiantly not art-world people. We were interested in how to communicate, our love of magazines, newspapers, videos, and all the things that were really not considered even worth having at that time. So we would make environments, Darryl and I, and eventually, he wanted to move forward on his own as an artist. So, I stopped doing this (curatorial) work because I’d always associated it with him.
That is until Peter Doig asked me to do a show with him at Michael Werner Gallery in Berlin. That really kick-started me again into thinking about what was interesting to me curatorially. Then, Jenny Jaskey, the head of the Artist’s Institute, called me to curate some shows. After my experience with Peter, I felt it was something I could do, but it was always something I had conceded to the other curators. I didn’t trust my ego, and I wanted to stay humble in relation to the work.
When Jenny asked me to do these shows on my own, and they were successful, I realized that it was a different kind of language for me. Still, it was really my language—to express my inner life through objects, images, and atmospheres that were pretty much autobiographical. I really owe her a lot. It was a huge breakthrough for me.
And it wasn’t long after that David Zwirner called me and asked if I remembered a conversation we’d had at a party a few years before where I suggested he do a show about Alice Neel’s people of color. So, I came in, and it was amazing. David opened the doors, and I was going to do it in one room, and he asked, “Why are you doing it in one room? Take both gallery spaces on 19th Street.” And that’s how we started. It was really David who professionalized me in a way that gave me much wider attention.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
DG How did you first meet David?
HA I met him at either a party or an opening… David’s amazing because he remembers and clocks people in ways you wouldn’t be aware of yourself. He’s an incredible enthusiast for people’s ideas and energy. He’s a really remarkable guy.
DG Certain gallerists truly support art & creativity and others approach it purely as a business. It’s cool when you come across the ones who really love art and artists. I’d put Hudson in that category as well. So, collaborating with and curating for galleries has been a good experience for you.
HA I feel very spoiled because I love doing the work. The gallerists I work with, like David Zwirner and Victoria Miro, are less concerned than museums would be about credentials and all that—they are interested in how my eye looks at something or how I express it in language. It’s a freer system because the show is your work.
“Curation is storytelling. And most curators, if they’re interesting, have a great interest or impulse to communicate something narratively.”
DG Let’s talk about Alice Neel. Do you remember your first encounter with her work?
HA I was introduced to her work in a class called Art of the Sixties at Columbia University, taught by a brilliant historian, Kenneth Silver, who’s now at NYU. When Ken projected one of Alice Neel’s paintings on a screen, I was so taken by the psychic reality of her subjects. People looked at you via Alice like they were about to jump off the canvas. The energy that she recorded and evoked was incredible.
I went to the library and found a catalog of her Whitney retrospective from 1974, and I was amazed by how many people of color she had painted. I was looking at this work in 1982, and finding an artist interested in people of color was still very unusual. But it wasn’t just that that was fascinating to me. It was that she was recording worlds that I knew and had grown up in.
I never lost sight of her and would read about her when books or whatever came out. Despite the kind of hard psychic reality of her paintings, something about her was really familiar. And in terms of her wanting to connect and understand people, I really identified with that as a writer. When I became involved with the Village Voice and The New Yorker, I was writing about people, learning how to observe them, and letting them tell me who they were. Alice Neel is an incredible conduit to that way of thinking and looking.
I also learned a lot from Diane Arbus during that time. Alice and Diane shapeshifted themselves so that the subjects could be themselves. They didn’t ask the subject to change. Another thing that I loved about Neel’s work was her humility in the face of many different things, including subjects, poverty, and obscurity. She just kept working, and I really admired all those things.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
Detail, Alice Neel, Richard Gibbs, 1968, © The Estate of Alice Neel, courtesy The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner
DG Neel was only acknowledged on a larger scale once she was in her 60s or 70s when she did portraits of Warhol and Henry Geldzahler, and Mayor Koch. Do you know how those relationships formed?
HA Well, it was New York. And so I think it’s important to point out that the people who were really with her in the early 60s and mid-60s when she began to be more known were gay men, working-class gay men like Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Frank O’Hara, who were real champions of that work.
If Leo Castelli had walked in then, I have a feeling she wouldn’t have been interested. Neel was interested in the cultural worker as the proletariat. I don’t think, as a communist, that she was particularly interested in money for sure. She wanted to paint things. But I think being part of a bohemian queer community pushed her out into the larger world of museum curators and other subjects.
DG Can you share a bit about curating At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World at David Zwirner in Los Angeles.
HA It was an idea I had almost right after the opening of Uptown, the Alice Neel exhibition I curated for David Zwirner in New York in 2017. I knew her famous paintings of Warhol, Jackie Curtis, etc., but I had a feeling given her work assets, she must have done many more paintings of queer people. So, in excavating with the estate and the Zwirner team, we identified and secured enough to make the show. I want people to know this woman is a woman of ideas and wonderful productivity.
Installation view, At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, September 7—November 2, 2024. Photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy David Zwirner
DG In addition to writing the text for the exhibition catalog, you commissioned several other writers to provide scholarship, right?
HA Yes. For this one, I really wanted younger writers to respond. There shouldn’t be just one voice about Alice. So the texts are by brilliant graduate students who I’ve worked with who are now curators themselves.
DG Before we sign off, I’d love to know what is on your radar and what you’ve been thinking about.
HA I’m interested in artists being rediscovered, like Suzanne Jackson, who is showing at Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca. I’m also excited by the things Ebony Haynes is doing at 52 Walker. She’s showing the work of EJ Hill, an incredible young artist whose work I love.
I’ve been thinking we should go back to drawing and looking at the artist’s hand, working intimately with pencil and paper. We can learn an enormous amount by looking at Warhol’s portrait of Ethel Skull 36 times. It’s just one of the great portraits of the 20th century.
So you know, I’m just poking around seeing, which is another form of recording. You just go out and see what’s there. And you can never go wrong reading Baldwin or Proust.
DG Thank you for your time, Hilton. It’s been great talking with you.
HA Thank you so much. And I wish you the best with everything else.
Hilton Als. Photo by Ali Smith
At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World
Curated by Hilton Als
David Zwirner
Los Angeles
September 7—November 2, 2024
Hilton Als is an award-winning writer, curator, and scholar known for his impactful contributions to art and literature. His curatorial work includes the exhibitions God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin and Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum. Als is also an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, with a distinguished teaching career at institutions including Princeton University, Smith College, Yale University, and Wesleyan University. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1994, his work spans essays, critiques, and cultural projects. Als resides in New York City.