Interview with Valerie Cassel Oliver

This interview was conducted on August 11, 2005, in the administrative offices of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

ROWELL: You are native to Houston, which is not London, Paris, or New York as a site of numerous world-renown museums and art galleries. But Houston has a vibrant museum culture—as far as I can tell, the most exciting and inclusive one in the U. S. American South. How did you come to this profession? What attracted you to curatorial work? This is almost like asking a black male opera singer, “Why did you select opera as a profession?” As you know, there are so few black males allowed on stage. Opera houses in this country have long kept black men from appearing in significant roles on stage. There are so very few black curators in major museums in this country—another long and shameful history that major U. S. American museums would like to deny. Why did you decide to become a curator?

OLIVER: I fell into the profession. It was not a deliberate or conscious decision to pursue a career in museums. I had been exposed to museums as a child, but never really knew the specific roles or careers that existed. I took a long and circuitous route to becoming a curator. I studied communications as an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin and; then worked in public relations. Even when I worked at the Black Arts Alliance, a multi-disciplinary arts organization in Austin, programming for their gallery, it never really dawned upon me that what I was doing was curatorial in nature. I left Austin in 1988 to participate in an arts administrative fellowship at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. I had also enrolled in Howard University’s graduate program in art history.

So, I got this opportunity to train academically while supporting the work of artists in the field through part-time work at the Endowment. They employed me full-time after I finished the program at Howard, but when controversy over public funding resulted in massive funding cuts, I was laid off. The silver lining was that it paved the way for me to move to Chicago where directed the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This was such an incredible experience because I operated a public forum in which I could ask questions and then invite artists from all disciplines, walks of life and cultural backgrounds, to participate in the answering of those questions. I restructured the program around a series of topics, themes and questions.

Unbeknownst to me I had begun developing a sort of curatorial framework for myself, but with artist voices instead of objects. Out of the blue in 1999, Max Anderson, then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, called and asked me to join a team of curators to mount the 2000 Whitney Biennial exhibition. I said to him at the time, “Are you sure you have the right person? I’m not a curator. I don’t work with objects. I work with ideas and with artists’ voices.” He said, “Well, then you’re doing curatorial work.” I had no frame of reference for understanding the principles of what curatorial practice was; I just simply never really connected the dots. Working on Whitney Biennial with curators like Jane Farver, Larry Rinder, and Michael Auping, gave me an expanded understanding of what I was doing and of how my practice would evolve. I then came to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston 2000 and the rest is history.

ROWELL: How did your work in Chicago help to prepare you for the work you in which you are now engaged as a curator? Will you also talk about how your study of art history at Howard University also contributed to you development as a curator of contemporary art?

OLIVER: At Howard I studied art history, anthropology, and theology. I wanted a multidisciplinary, multi-dimensional approach to understanding WHY artists created what they created. I was and am still interested in how art shapes our...