Tête-à-Tête: Huguette Caland

Brigitte Caland teaches at the Arabic and Near Eastern languages department at the American University of Beirut. She has a PhD in Literature and Civilizations from INALCO Paris. She is a trained chef interested in food history. In 2016 she created Discovering Abbasid Food, a dinner at the Bristol Hotel, Beirut, during AUB’s conference Insatiable Appetite: Food as a Cultural Signifier. From 2009-11 she conceived and cooked a series of meals inspired by literary and historical texts at restaurant Melisse, Santa Monica, California. Since 2005 she has managed the estate of her mother Huguette Caland and co-curated several exhibitions of her work.

Curator and art historian Claire Gilman is Chief Curator at The Drawing Center in New York. She has organized projects that range from the first solo museum shows of artists like Torkwase Dyson, Natalie Frank, Eddie Martinez, and Curtis Talwst Santiago, to new considerations of work by established artists such as Cecily Brown, Rashid Johnson, and Terry Winters, as well as conceptually-driven group shows by Elijah Burgher, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Gilman holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has written for Art Journal, CAA Reviews, Documents, Frieze, October and has authored numerous essays for art books and museum exhibitions. Her book Drawing in the Present Tense, co-authored with Roger Malbert, is forthcoming from Thames and Hudson.

New York-based art critic Eleanor Heartney is the author of numerous books on contemporary art. Heartney is a Contributing Editor for Art in America and has written extensively for publications including Artnews, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is author of several noteworthy books about art, such as Art & Today (2008), Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2004), co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art (2007) (winner of the Susan Koppelman Award), and most recently, Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2019). She is an Editor-at-Large for the Rail.