The Brooklyn Rail

Melissa Chiu has been the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden since 2014. During that time, she has focused on bringing the museum and its collections into the twenty-first century, with direct attention to what she terms “radical accessibility.” Chiu joined Guggenheim President Emeritus Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro to discuss the growing attendance at the Hirshhorn, the revitalization of its sculpture garden, and how Chiu’s personal background and position as the museum’s first foreign-born director shapes the vision of the Hirshhorn and its community.

Jennifer Stockman: I’m particularly excited about our conversation, not only because I’ve been watching you from afar and a total fan of what you’ve achieved, but I also lived in DC for quite a long time, and felt synergistic with the program at the Hirshhorn even then, with modern and contemporary art of that time. So to see where it’s gone and where you’ve taken it has been most exciting.

You possess a remarkable depth of knowledge in Asian art and multiple cultures, making you one of the few, if not the only, museum directors in the US with such expertise. This unique perspective positions you as a valuable asset, particularly in leading a museum in Washington, DC, where the appreciation and understanding of Asian art and culture holds significant importance, although there seems to be a lack of knowledge and overall understanding. Can you tell us about your experience as director of the Asia Society, and how working with Asian artists and curating Asian art exhibitions has informed your leadership approach at the Hirshhorn?

Melissa Chiu: I might actually start with a little bit of my own background, because it informed how I got to Asia Society and my interest in Asian art. My father is Chinese and my mother is Australian. And when I was going through art school, I was always curious about the canon as it was taught to me. I knew that my father had come from Hong Kong, but I really knew nothing about that culture other than the family trips that I would take each year, and I was very interested in mainland China. So in the early 1990s, I traveled through China with my father. While there I became very interested in the underground art scene, and had the desire to go back and study more. Those things have informed my life and work in both wanting to understand where my family was from and also understanding the discipline that I was entering into, which was a pretty New York centric viewpoint. So that’s kind of where it all began.

From there I traveled the Asia Pacific region, at a moment in time when the Asia Pacific region was politically in formation through APEC, and Australia played a major role in that. I was supported through the Australian government to travel all through the region, do residencies, plan exhibitions, and from that I co-founded an artist-run space that was focused specifically on Asian Australian artists and training a generation of curators. At that time, there were no Asian Australian curators at any institution to speak of. And there were no real exhibition opportunities for Asian Australian artists. So if I think of my work today, in some ways it began there with that family interest first, and then understanding that with the art history and the art world we were in, there weren’t many places for people like myself. I was the first curator with a focus on contemporary Asian and Asian American art at an American institution. So I went from the multidisciplinary artists community of Gallery 4A to the Asia Society, which was founded in the fifties by John D. Rockefeller III as a postwar educational institution whose purpose was educating Americans about Asia. When I came to the Hirshhorn—a part of the Smithsonian Institution located on the National Mall—I was the first foreign-born director, someone who in some ways came from the outside. So I did bring those life experiences, but also, I think, an interest in and attention to who the museum was representing. One of the first things I did programmatically was to co-curate an exhibition of Shirin Neshat’s work. I realized that there had been fewer than a handful of major exhibitions by female artists at the Hirshhorn. So that was an important first exhibition and it happened to be right at the time of the Iran nuclear talks. In DC, it was hugely relevant because we curated the show around Shirin’s commentary on Iran from a diasporic position. So that could be said to have set the tenor of my own interest, but also where I felt the museum could go: towards being a truly national museum of modern art that is inclusive, and attentive to current affairs. We’re also one of the few free major museums of modern art in this country. I think that comes with a certain degree of responsibility.

Stockman: Because your Shirin Neshat exhibition had a political overtone given what was going on in DC at the time, has that been part of your mission as well, to soften geopolitical, divisive issues and use art as a bridge?

Chiu: It’s certainly something that I was very interested in at Asia Society: to have been able to commission and work on the first exhibition of antiquities from Vietnam since normalization, or a major exhibition of Gandharan Buddhist art from Pakistan right at the time of Osama bin Laden’s assassination. These were all very difficult projects that required not just a level of cultural diplomacy, but I think cultural understanding, and this idea of political rapprochement: art not necessarily as serving political means, but as a kind of first step. Here at the Hirshhorn, it’s a different kind of institution from the Asia Society. But I think what I am interested in is the kind of broader global context: what role can art play within that conversation, knowing sometimes that art can be that first step even before a political relationship?

Joachim Pissarro: In 1999 I found myself blessed with an invitation to become a visiting professor at Sydney University. And this was the time of the first Asia Pacific Triennial, which was not just incredibly groundbreaking, but eye opening. Suddenly I was shifted from one world to another, and discovered a whole universe that I had not been exposed to. And I want to parallel this with the time I was teaching at Yale. There was a remarkable first generation Chinese graduate student, and we were discussing the concept of the canon. And she looked at one of those general art history books and said, if we look at the list of contents, we have about fifty pages to treat five millennia of Chinese history. But she said, look, there’s also 150 pages, therefore three times as much, to discuss one hundred years of French art. And she was remarkably serene and peaceful, saying this. She said, my goal, our generation, American and Chinese students, is that we’re simply going to reverse this asymmetry, this ridiculous imbalance. So with this in mind, to think you were the first curator in America focusing on Asian contemporary art in 2001, the beginning of the twenty-first century, it’s both wonderful and shocking at the same time. How is it possible that Westerners were not exposed to the largest continent and longest living culture in the world? I wonder whether you would want to say a few words about that, and also how you felt about the transition from a curatorial position focusing on the largest continent on Earth and its culture, to an all-embracing institution whose role and mission is more universal and doesn’t have a particular identity.

Chiu: I think it is indeed hard to imagine that in 2001, when I arrived in New York for the Asia Society position, there were no such positions within American museums at that time. I was surprised coming from Australia, and from having worked in the Asia Pacific region, that there was a genuine lack of knowledge about that region, an idea of it not even being a place where contemporary art existed. That’s what surprised me. You spoke of the APTs—those triennials began in 1993 and were groundbreaking. Most major institutions now have collected contemporary Asian art and have curatorial expertise. We’re in an interesting moment, because there is much more receptivity and openness to what we might call political art. But now we enter into different conversations about how we talk about those cultures, how we talk about difference within institutions, which are turning their attention more towards history, language, and systems of power. We’re in a different moment, but one that is just as revolutionary in some ways. So the transition from the Asia Society to the Hirshhorn, in some ways it’s similar and in others it’s not. I think one of the interests that I had when I came to the Hirshhorn was in that it’s a modern art museum, so what should our focus be? And how should we operate? How should we think about our place in the world, amongst our peers? For us, it’s really about the artists that speak to our time. We’re looking for artists who can offer us insights into this particular moment. Like all of these decisions, it’s subjective, but that can vary from Shirin Neshat to Charline von Heyl, who’s pushing her painting practice or pushing the idea of painting, or could be Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who’s working with technology and our own human experience of the world through that. So it’s varied. But I would say that we’re also rethinking how we attend to our mission in a way that is modern and contemporary. I think there are opportunities for us to redefine our consideration of the twentieth century, of that history, and to figure out how we need to be ready for a new century, the twenty-first century.

Stockman: You mentioned the Hirshhorn being part of the Smithsonian. There are seventeen unique museums as part of that constellation in DC. Washington, DC is probably one of the largest museum cities in the world, yet I don’t think many people in the United States or from around the world even know how to navigate through all of the richness that the city holds and encompasses in the collections. Do you speak with your peer museums within that constellation, and really work on differentiating and exchanging collections, or co-exhibitions you can do together? How does that work internally?

Chiu: I think the best way of thinking about it is that it’s collaboration by desire or need. So, for example, we recently collaborated with the National Museum of American History. It was an event where they were collaborating with the State Department Office of Art in Embassies on an exhibition, and at the same time, Jenny Holzer did a projection on the Hirshhorn Museum of quotes throughout history on democracy, and we made the decision to project on both museums at the same time. So there was then a collaboration and a link to the content in a way. We also often lend to Smithsonian museums and have shared collections at various times. So there is a spirit of collaboration and partnership between the museums. It tends to work organically.

Stockman: What is the attendance to the museums in DC at large, and what is your attendance?

Chiu: Our attendance is just around a million visitors a year. The plan is for that to increase threefold with our revitalized sculpture garden. We commissioned Hiroshi Sugimoto to redesign our sculpture garden, which is the only museum presence directly on the mall, where there are thirty five million visitors every year. The idea is to link the National Mall to the sculpture garden to the museum. The anticipated attendance growth is really driven by us being able to open up the sculpture garden to those visitors in a more intentional way.

Stockman: Can you mention some of the works that will be in the sculpture garden?

Chiu: We really thought a lot about what a sculpture garden should be in the twenty-first century. Our main idea was to make it fully an extension of the museum and the kinds of programming that we might do. The Hirshhorn history was born from sculpture actually; Mr. Hirshhorn began with a sculpture collection that was shown at the Guggenheim Museum in 1962, so it’s examples of Rodin, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, David Smith, Matisse. It’s a wonderful, exemplary collection of modern sculpture. The sculpture garden will also have designated spaces for performance art, and a large open field gallery for commissioning new large-scale sculpture on a rotational basis. So the idea was to make it an active gallery space.

Pissarro: I did not know, I confess, that you selected Sugimoto as an architect for the sculpture garden. Very few people know that Sugimoto has an extraordinary activity as an architect. Everybody knows the photography, but not many people have been to Naoshima, where he conceived and built this extraordinary shrine.

Chiu: In that work, he really created a live seascape with architecture. That’s why we invited him to redesign the sculpture garden, because of his approach to architecture. When I saw the shrine, and then saw other works that he was doing in interiors and architecture, that’s how we came to him. The project needed someone who was attentive to the history of our sculpture garden. It needed someone who was sensitive to the best way to display works of art outside.

Pissarro: Can you tell us a little bit about how the collection grew from Mr. Hirshhorn’s vision of a particular sculpture collection to what it is today with you at the helm of this institution?

Chiu: We are in some ways the stewards of Mr. Hirshhorn’s collecting vision. He was a New Yorker, actually, although born in Latvia. He came to the United States when he was a child, and was the twelfth of thirteen children. So I always kind of say, he had something to prove. [Laughs] But he loved art and began to collect it. It was really his relationships with artists that allowed him to collect in depth. He had very strong relationships with artists like Henry Moore, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, and there are others who he collected in depth, whether it’s Josef Albers or Milton Avery. It was a collection that was born of his interests. But we’re fortunate that he did collect in that way because it has allowed us to now have classic postwar American European examples and gave us a very good foundation for our current collecting with living artists. But it was the history with the Guggenheim, and that first exhibition, that prompted the Smithsonian secretary to approach Mr. Hirshhorn with the idea of donating his collection. It was an invitation to the White House, as the story goes; S. Dillon Ripley, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, with Lady Bird Johnson’s help, invited him to the White House for lunch with the President and the First Lady, and he agreed to donate his collection to found the Hirshhorn Museum, knowing that Congress many years earlier had designated that the Smithsonian had to have a museum of modern art. This was one way that they were able to act on it. So then Mr. Hirshhorn gave essentially the best of his collection, twelve thousand works, to found the museum. I think the best part of looking at this history was the inauguration speech that Mr. Hirshhorn gave. When I arrived at the Hirshhorn, I found the inaugural plaque of Mr. Hirshhorn’s words that speak very poignantly about the fact that he was an immigrant and achieved here in the United States what he thinks he could never have achieved anywhere else. This was his way of giving back to his home country. So that kind of statement from an immigrant at the inauguration speech, which was then placed on a plaque and we put it up in the lobby, right at the moment of a lot of immigration debates, was an important step actually, in both acknowledging the Hirshhorn history, and also in some ways, our own museum’s acknowledgement that a large majority of the artists in the Hirshhorn collection were immigrants.

Stockman: It was so prescient when you think about it, for Hirshhorn to be asked to donate his collection to the nation. That is very rare, to have a private citizen give their collection to the nation. And then the government paid for the construction of the building. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how the architect was chosen?

Chiu: The building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, who was with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill at the time. There’s no such thing as a white cube space in this building; it’s all circular, which lends itself to a certain reading of exhibitions and art. Often people describe the building as windowless. But that may mean that they haven’t been in the building, because the building actually has windows, but they’re all internal in the inner well.

I think it lends itself to unique encounters with art. When I first joined the museum, I was very curious to find out which exhibitions our curatorial team thought were successful in the space. And the exhibitions that the team identified were all exhibitions that offered a panoramic view of the space, meaning it was not broken up into smaller rooms, but offered the whole expanse of the space as a continuous circular wall: the Warhol “Shadows” series, Sugimoto’s seascapes. So that signaled to me early on in my tenure that in some ways you couldn’t fight the building, and the best shows would be those that worked within or were created for the building. That’s actually what prompted the Mark Bradford commission that is still on display. My approach to Mark was, can you consider doing a painting for the entire wall span, the inner circle gallery, which is over three hundred linear feet. So he created a work that was so perfect for our building and our location on the National Mall, because it’s all about the Civil War, and his interpretation of the Civil War through abstraction. He worked from and was inspired by a cyclorama of Pickett’s Charge, and created his own extraordinary response to that Civil War history. This was at a time when there was a national debate about what to do around monuments to Civil War heroes, and Mark weighed into that debate very publicly, but in some ways, his statement is also this artwork.

Pissarro: I’m struck by the parallel between the way you describe this structure of the Hirshhorn, designed by Gordon Bunshaft, and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim, where the history of the Hirshhorn in fact began. Apparently, Frank Lloyd Wright said something along the lines of, “I wanted to construct a building that would win over the art, that would surpass the arts.” And I’m very impressed by the way that you describe Mark Bradford’s incredible work. And he’s so—conflicting is too strong a word, but it’s kind of an involving engagement with the architecture and almost fighting the architecture to some degree. That’s a very unusual situation, which you can’t replicate almost anywhere except those two institutions.

We’ve spoken about your dialogue between at least three continents, Asia, Australia, and America, and more. But there’s a much closer to home engagement, which is the one between DC and New York, which will also interest our audience. You have been coming back and forth and keeping the dialogue very strong. You are obviously doing a lot of fundraising, like all museum directors are, and how are you finding your situation? You are a national institution, therefore, you could be going to Minneapolis or LA or Miami; the nation is your village. But you have chosen New York City as an important pool. Can you explain to us how that works? And what kind of competition you’re encountering in this endeavor?

Chiu: Well, there’s no doubt that a big part of the Hirshhorn history is actually in New York. Mr. Hirshhorn was a New Yorker; his home was in Connecticut, his business was in New York City. He acquired a lot of works in New York City at the galleries. So when I came from New York to DC, and then realized that connection, it helped me to understand that it was okay to have programs, to work with others, to find support outside of DC. I think the value proposition for the Hirshhorn is that it’s offering an experience and encounter with art for many who would not ever ordinarily go to a modern art museum. The audience demographic of our visitors is completely different from many other museums. Most of our visitors are drawn from all over the United States, some international, but for a lot of them, they’ve come for the mall, for the Smithsonian, and they discover the Hirshhorn.

Stockman: And they’re curious.

Chiu: They’re curious. So we talk a lot about what our tone of voice is in all of our signage, how we welcome visitors, how we describe the art. That's how the Hirshhorn Eye video guide was created. It was this idea: what would make a very challenging work of contemporary art more accessible? And our response was: the artist. The artist speaking about making the work might be of interest to someone who doesn’t know anything about contemporary art. So with the Hirshhorn Eye, you point your phone at an artwork and a video of the artist talking about making the work comes up. Just one or two minutes even. But it then builds a human connection to the making of the work. It’s not abstracted, it’s actually a person who made this work. Our whole mission is: how do we encourage a curious encounter with art?

Stockman: Art arouses curiosity, delves into uncharted territories, facilitates learning, and creates the joy of discovery. When I visited your museum two months ago, I saw the most fascinating exhibition on contemporary Chinese photography called A Window Suddenly Opens which showcased artists working from 1993–2022. Of course the 1990s was a breakthrough period for China. I’m interested in what type of exhibition you would envision showing today in order to create an “olive branch,” if you will, to China, to try to soften relations and create greater understanding between our two countries, which I think everybody would agree is needed right now?

Chiu: That’s a great question, Jennifer, because we authored the exhibition that we have on display right now. It’s an interesting story, because it’s a donation of a whole collection of works of photography from 1993 through to today from a single donor, Larry Warsh. And there aren’t a lot of projects going on between the US and China right now. It’s so different from ten years ago. I mean, it couldn’t be more different. And so, to do a show today would not be easy. It wouldn’t be easy because the environment around the two countries’ political situation is not so friendly. It’s not to say that it’s impossible. But I think you’d have to consider very carefully what that show should do.

Pissarro: I wonder whether we could ask you, given your past experience, to look maybe somewhat critically or to share your thoughts about the situation in China, which is certainly a unique one. The statistics, as you know, are somewhat bewildering. Between 2010 and 2020, around two thousand new museums broke ground in China alone—that is about six times more than the number of museums created in Europe and America between 1800 and 1900. Now, at the same time, those museums tend to be empty shells, and have struggled with defining what their function is, or their programming. So I’m curious about how you see the present and maybe future situation of the museological map in China, in relation to where we are today.

Chiu: I’m glad you asked this question, because it was an issue that I was very involved in thinking through when I was at Asia Society. A number of years ago, the Chinese government announced that it was planning to build one thousand new museums in the next decade. So with that in mind, I thought that there was an opportunity for partnership between US museums and Chinese museums, because American museums have been collection-building for close to half a century. Most American museums have a very small percentage on display at any given time. At the same time, you have a sizable number of Chinese museums with a lot of architectural space. And so if you could put the two together… So I actually initiated a series of US-China museum dialogues that brought those museum directors in China to the US. And so we met in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai on two or three occasions, and we published a series of white papers on what those partnerships could look like. Loans were made that would never have happened before. But I still continue even years after to believe that there is actually a great deal that can be done in partnership between museums that are in China and beyond, whether it is in the US or even Europe, because most museums in this country have collections that for the most part are not on display, they’re in storage. So my hope is that one day something actually comes from those initial conversations.

Pissarro: I’m curious—what is the percentage of the collection that the Hirshhorn is able to display at any given moment? What’s the size of the collection to begin with?

Chiu: We’re at fourteen thousand works or something like that. So it’s a very small percentage at any given time.

Pissarro: Like most museums, under ten percent.

Chiu: Yeah, this is the real debate. Most museums it is less than ten percent. But I think for any museum, the stewardship of its collection, and how we share more of it is a perennial question. And it’s one that we’re thinking about carefully as well, because if you have a mission to share more of your collection, and programming, then this is really an interesting quandary.

Stockman: And collectors are indeed rethinking donating their collections to museums, if they’ll just be sitting in storage for decades and never shown to the public. This fundamental reason is what has led to a remarkable transformation of the artistic landscape, as we witness the proliferation of many private foundations being established both within the United States and across the globe. How does the Hirshhorn deal with this phenomenon?

Chiu: A number of public institutions also started as private institutions, right? If you think of the New York ecology, you know, Guggenheim, Whitney, even MoMA were founded by private individuals. That's how things seem to happen here in the US. It starts with a vision and it evolves into something more public.

Stockman: On the note of private foundations such as Glenstone, Emily and Mitchell Rales have created a campus of incredible architecture, sculpture, landscape, and art which has been promised to the National Gallery of Art. Are these the type of private collections you compete for with the NGA? Did they consider donating their collection to the Hirshhorn? We’d be interested in understanding how they made that decision.

Chiu: I think you’ll have to ask them. [Laughter]

Pissarro: It’s a beautiful gift. I was very struck when they decided to do that. As you say, Melissa, we should ask them, but I’m assuming, when people are thinking about DC, the first institution we tend to think about artistically speaking is the National Gallery of Art (NGA). And what you’re doing for the Hirshhorn is absolutely fabulous. But there is definitely a certain gap in terms of the perception of the general public; they tend to focus perhaps too closely on the NGA. I’m certain that you’re going to change this to a very great degree, but it's part of your challenge, isn’t it, to maybe reduce the visibility gap between the two institutions?

Chiu: We all occupy our own spaces in some ways, and I don’t see it as a competitive relationship at all. Because our focus is to do with living artists. Yes, we have a modern collection, but a great deal of our programming is around giving voice, providing a platform for the work of living artists. And so that could be Theaster Gates’s four year project of “Processions,” a series of performances that he did with us as a board member. Or it could be Laurie Anderson’s major exhibition and series of performances that she did throughout a one year duration. So I see the Hirshhorn as very different from others. And the more art that’s available to visitors, the better. Whether it’s a private or public museum or not, I think for us, the more people who have access to art the better. It’s not an exclusivity arrangement. We talk a lot about radical accessibility at the Hirshhorn. How can we be as accessible as possible, while presenting sometimes challenging art?

Pissarro: You’ve just mentioned that your programming is focused very heavily on present living artistic voices. What’s the relationship between your programming between major artists like Mark Bradford and Laurie Anderson versus emerging artists who have received relatively little attention yet in the art establishment?

Chiu: I think for us, it’s about finding a balance between modern and contemporary, established artists and rising artists. And for us the real priority is to figure out how to show those artists at the right time. So for example, we recently had on display Baseera Khan’s work; we worked with her through our television project with the Smithsonian Channel and MTV. So for us, it’s about finding the right place within the museum and the right time for artists. In some ways, it’s quite an organic approach.

Pissarro: Many, many things are going to keep resounding in our minds, after this great, great talk. And one concept I’m going to keep with me is that of radical accessibility. This is a concept with a lot of mileage in the fabric of present day museum culture. I’d like to keep thinking about its positive repercussions.

Chiu: It started out as being a term that we used a lot in our Artlab, which is a teen education program, and then it evolved and we began to use it with our sculpture garden; we wanted the sculpture garden not to be static, but to have all of the education activities that we have within the museum. And now we use that term for a lot of the projects that we do that are unusual for museums, whether it’s the appointment of J Balvin, the Colombian pop star, as our cultural ambassador, or our television collaboration with Paramount Plus. So we use it a lot to say, you shouldn’t have to even come to DC to have access to some of the work that we do at the Hirshhorn.

Stockman: Maybe we could end by asking one last question about what you envision or would like your legacy to be at the Hirshhorn?

Chiu: The legacy question! [Laughs] I’ve never had that before. [Laughs] You know, I often say to artists who we’re working with, “don’t worry, nobody ever remembers us. They only remember you as artists.” It’s true. If I think back to other museum directors here, I think of Jim Demetrion, actually, whose tenure was sixteen years and who was responsible for a lot of our collection-building. He de-accessioned some significant Henry Moore works and others that we had in duplicate. And he acquired some extraordinary works, whether it was Warhols or Bacons or other artworks. So if I think about what I might have contributed, I’d like to think of it in terms of greater inclusivity of artists, artists from different parts of the world, different backgrounds. And also, this idea of really making it a national institution that’s free, open to all, and allows millions of visitors to perhaps even have their first encounter that might even change their life with art.

Pissarro: That’s a magnificent answer.

Stockman: You know, it’s funny, one of my first encounters back in the day when I was a young adult in Washington, DC was at the Hirshhorn, and it did change my own journey, and how I felt about art. It had more of an impact than I realized until our interview today. So thank you for that.

Pissarro: It’s a beautiful, beautiful answer. And I think one that many museum people close or far should bear in mind.

Chiu: You know, we forget in the day to day, but a friend of mine said to me, “you’re so fortunate.” I said, “Oh, why?” She said, “Your job brings happiness to people.” [Laughs] And I had never thought of that.