KATHLEEN FORDE

Kathleen Forde is a curator based in NYC and Istanbul. In Istambul, she is the Artistic Director in an advisory capacity for Borusan Contemporary, a newly founded collection-based media arts museum. Concurrently she is working with various institutions both nationally and abroad on exhibitions and performance rooted in media arts. From 2005 to 2012, Forde was the curator of Time Based Arts at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, an institution dedicated to the presentation and production of adventurous multidisciplinary work spanning new media installation to experimental performance.

Italo Calvino. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1993.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a book of lectures written by Italo Calvino that he was never able to deliver, having passed away before giving them in 1985. The memos discuss his categories of the key values of literature, including Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and Consistency.

What impresses me most about this book is Calvino’s ability to be incredibly focused on a seemingly narrow topic and yet so expansive at the same time. My favorite chapter is “Lightness.” In it, he explores the concept of lightness with more weightiness and lack of frivolity than one can imagine. With references ranging from Dante to Borges, as well as Kafka to Medusa and Don Quixote, this book continues to provoke me to attempt to unravel as many layers from the smallest of onions all of the time.

John Cage: RolyWholyover a Circus. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.

In 1994, as an overly enthusiastic intern at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was mesmerized by the unorthodox curation of John Cage‘s retrospective exhibition “RolyWholyover: a Circus.” The accompanying “catalogue” was an integral part of the uniqueness of that exhibition and a big part of its lasting impression.

The catalogue is an art object in and of itself, an aluminum box with simply the name of the artist/show silkscreened minimally on its cover. A perfect stash of 50 pieces of ephemera selected by Cage and the curators are lain inside. It includes new essays as well as reprints of texts that Cage found influential. Writings and handwritten letters, photos, musical scores, recipes, advice on healthy eating and reproductions of his work also fill the box. It is a perfect tribute to Cage’s aesthetics and spirit, as well as a complex joy for the reader to unfold.

Marcia Tucker. A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Marcia Tucker’s memoir A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World is an entertaining tale of the energy of the New York art world in the 1960s. Likewise, it is a poignant story told not only by the founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art and first female curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but also by a woman who was aware she was terminally ill while penning the autobiography.

Regardless and perhaps in spite of the context, Marcia was a force of nature and a fearless artist-centric curator who chose to err on the side of potential failure rather than a lack of curatorial chutzpah or the exploration of new terrain. Reading this book simply inspires one to remember that it is more rewarding to go for the passionate unknown than to follow the comfort of a less risky path.