Questions of Practice

Questions of Practice: Curator Paul Schimmel on Curating and Theater

Paul Schimmel on curating and theater. Filmed at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage by Jorge Cousineau.

With the expansion of spectacle-driven biennials, issues of staging, sequencing, and audience choreography are now at the forefront of curatorial discourse. Paul Schimmel, who for decades presided over the curatorial department at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, responds to the question: “Do you think exhibition-making bears any resemblance to theater directing?”

Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 1990 to 2012, has organized over 52 exhibitions, among them ambitious surveys such as Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974–1981 (2011), Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s (1992), and Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962 (2012). Art critic Christopher Knight opined in the Los Angeles Times last June, “No curator working in the United States today has a more impressive record of exhibitions and acquisitions in the field of art since 1950 than Schimmel.”