Alicia G. Longwell is the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, Art and Education, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. She has organized numerous survey and solo exhibitions on Marsden Hartley, Frederick Kiesler, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Shields, and Jack Youngerman. Longwell received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where her dissertation topic was John Graham, the subject of a retrospective she organized for the Parrish Art Museum in 2017.

ALICIA LONGWELL

I always say they are almost like bellwethers. They pick up on trends, pick up on anxieties, pick up on things in the world almost before the rest of us do. And artists get up, eat their cornflakes, go to work. They really do. And it's this creative process, which as Chuck Close once debunked and said, "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us get up and work." It's not always inspiration, but another great quote of his is that he always, anytime he sees a lot of painting like going to a museum, he's always astonished by the transcendent moment when you realize that this is just colored dirt and pigment laid on the surface with what's arguably just a stick. There's such a metaphysical moment when these images are created on a surface. In three dimension on a flat surface, it's kind of a head-scratcher to start. So great art has a transcendent moment.

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This is the entry galleries of the inaugural gallery to our permanent collection installation here. I'm the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief curator here at the museum, I and have a special interest, of course, in our collection. We reinstall it every year on the anniversary of moving in November 2012. This was newly opened in 2012 We look at different overall themes every year when we reinstall the collection and this year it is Every Picture Tells a Story, which fits in quite well with many of the ideas that are sort of in currency. I was interested to see you talking about our politics here in the U.S., and politicians are storytellers, you know, because they bring in their own lives and that is something what we do. I think painters as well, artists, sculptors, printmakers, they bring in something of their own lives as well and so, thereby the story hangs. But, this year especially with this series of paintings by David Salle, which are called the Michelangelo series. It was a commission to come up with his own themes from some of the major themes in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel.

This is an excerpt of a 7,000 word interview which will be published and podcasted across a network of participating university journals and national arts/literary magazines.

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