Curious About the Curator? Learn More About Laura Joseph
Dr. Laura Wertheim Joseph joined the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in August as the Director of Curatorial Affairs. In her new role at the O’Keeffe, Joseph will provide strategic leadership for the Museum’s collections, exhibitions and research initiatives. This includes taking the helm on the reinstallation and artistic direction of the Museum’s collection in the dramatically expanded New O’Keeffe, which is currently under construction. She will also lead all collections management, conservation, digital experience, research, and curatorial efforts at the Museum.
Shortly after her arrival in Santa Fe, we sat down with Joseph to talk about growing up in New Mexico, returning to the Land of Enchantment, and some of Joseph’s artistic inspiration and accomplishments in between.
GOKM: Tell us about how you grew up in New Mexico and what drew you back to the state.
Laura Joseph: I was born in Albuquerque and spent my formative years there. I moved away to attend college in 2002 and have mostly been away for 20 years. What I realized over that time was New Mexico in many ways had stayed with me. The painter Franz Kline once told another artist Hazel Belvo, “You never shake your original landscape,” and I believe that now.
Despite not having been here for a very long time, there is something about the way this place feels. To harken a back to O’Keeffe—I realized the light, the smell, the air, the natural beauty of New Mexico shaped me in a profound way, and I missed it.
The longer I was away, the more I also realized the complexity of this place. That’s something that is intertwined with my life and I’ve been able to reflect on now, as a parent of my young daughter, Viola. Introducing her and my husband to this place is special and meaningful to me.
GOKM: What role, if any, did O’Keeffe have on your childhood or adolescence?
LJ: Ultimately, both O’Keeffe’s artwork and her lifestyle struck me from a young age. She captured the way this place felt and the way it looked. With time, as I’ve grown and as I’ve studied, I’ve learned that how Indigenous and Hispano traditions and people were left out of O’Keeffe’s images, but she did capture how New Mexico feels. How a place can affect people emotionally appealed to me as a young person.
I was also interested in the way she managed herself and the complexity between the person she was and the person she presented to the world. Even as a young girl, I understood she was very intentional about how she curated her image. She was a woman finding success in a male-dominated American art field and she navigated the sexualization and the gendering of her work as she wanted.
These were seeds that were planted in my mind as a little girl, but they grew into research interests of mine. Although O’Keeffe wasn’t the center of my research, she was certainly the foundation.
GOKM: Have you always had an interest in art or art history?
LJ: For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in a creative life. With O’Keeffe, my fascination was more than her as an artist, but her artistic way of living. Myself, I am not an artist but I have attempted in my own life, to think about my way of living.
I didn’t find my way to art history until later in my life but I was always using art as a way to understand bigger questions in the world. Art has always been there for me in finding my way.
GOKM: What curatorial work are you most proud of in your career?
LJ: That’s a good question and I’m going to answer it in a roundabout way.
Every project I’ve done, has always led me to the next project. I’ve learned and accumulated knowledge that has helped me get to something new. In A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, I worked with a team from Mary and Leigh Block Museum and it was an important project for me because it was so collaborative. I learned how to work in a field often driven by a singular voice telling a story. That was important for the exhibition because Moorman was a figure who was sidelined, and her contributions were not recognized partially because of the inability of the field to realize how her supportive labor was critical to a lot of better-known male avant-garde artists. She was a central figure in the avant-garde movement, but you had to look at Moorman in a different light to see it. It took a group effort to get it right.
That project eventually led me to my most recent curatorial project at the Minnesota Museum of American Art which was Hazel Belvo: For Love, which I co-curated with Dakota Hoska, who is Oglala Lakȟóta and one of Hazel’s students. Hazel is an incredible artist who, at 90 years old, had not been the subject of a retrospective. I had the opportunity to work with her, in collaboration with Dakota, to tell her life story through art.
She has had to negotiate being the wife of George Morrison, the Ojibwe artist whose prominence is rising, and being his primary legacy keeper which has overshadowed her own practice. The exhibition focused on how art has been so integral in her life—she has made work at the birth of her children, at the deathbed of her son, when she’s traveling or just eating meals. The ways in which art and life are completely integrated for her are beautiful. It was really a joy and an honor to work on both of those projects and I’m reminded how I could not have accomplished to one without the other.
GOKM: We are hearing you speak a lot about collaboration. How do you envision continuing that work at the O’Keeffe?
LJ: Collaboration is inherent to who I am as a person and therefore, who I am as a curator. Art often focuses on an individual and an individual’s effort. But for me when a group of people are involved, it brings forth a more interesting story.
There is an incredible team here with so much knowledge. Part of my process is to listen and learn first. There are stories of O’Keeffe that they might tell, there is a story of O’Keeffe that I might tell. Only collaboration can bring about a rich narrative that can address her complexities and honor her at the same time.
I am excited for the challenge of prioritizing what stories we want to tell first and what will more time. I’m excited for the new space and more space –I think the expanded galleries will allow for more perspectives to coexist. It makes the possibilities “both/and” rather than “either/or” when it comes to both honoring and complicating O’Keeffe’s legacy.
