In Favor of One’s Time: Locating the Curatorial Practices of Kynaston McShine, 1959–1999
Virginia Commonwealth University, 2024
Advisor: Tobias Wofford
Reader: Kathleen Chapman
Committee: Massa Lemu, Michael Taylor, Catherine Roach
Abstract
For decades Kynaston McShine’s exhibitions have been the subject of intense interest in modern and contemporary art and curatorial studies, but the subjective core of his curatorial projects has been markedly understudied. As the first person of African descent to hold a ranking curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art (1959–65; 1968–2008) and the Jewish Museum (1965–68), McShine occupied a contentious space for his entire career. A figure of scrutiny and speculation in critical and scholarly literature, McShine himself remains largely mythologized—his race, Caribbean background, and subjectivity as probable but unaddressed factors shaping his fifty-year career in the predominantly white, Anglo-European art world. Accounts of his work frequently marginalize the crucial role that his personal history and lived experiences played in his curatorial practice during the mid-to-late twentieth century.
This dissertation seeks to address these erasures by exploring McShine, and the figure of the curator, as complex and intersectional—with practices informed by layers of personal histories as much as the art discourses framed in each exhibition. By considering the three exhibitions that have largely defined his career and the art historical record, it seeks to demonstrate that McShine’s life story, which took him from Trinidad to MoMA, is intertwined in now-canonical mid-to-late twentieth century avant-garde aesthetic formations. My discussion focuses on exhibitions that McShine organized between 1966 and 1999: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, 1966 (The Jewish Museum, New York); Information, 1970 (MoMA, New York); and The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, 1999 (MoMA, New York). The earliest and latest of these exhibitions bracket the period in which McShine was the only person of African descent to hold a ranking curatorial position at his respective institutions, the Jewish Museum and MoMA in New York. The concept of authorship is central to this project. I am concerned with what it means to be an author of an art museum exhibition, and in particular to be an author of exhibitions at two paradigmatic museum institutions in New York, as was the case with McShine. Bridging art history and curatorial studies within the context of internationalism and diaspora, I cast McShine’s work as a discursive practice that variously challenged the art establishment, thereby opening possibilities and rules for exhibition-making and the curatorial vocation.