How to Curate a Life: Lessons From 3 Art World Tastemakers

·43 min·3 clips

Alexandra explains how unscrewing a 1950s Pouvet chair taught her more about design than any classroom ever could.

1. This episode of The Art Angle is recorded live at TEFAF New York's 'Thrill of the Chase' panel, hosted by William Van Meter, featuring three cultural figures who bridge art and design. 2. The three panelists are Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, founder of Salon 94 on the Upper East Side; Adam Charlotte-Hyman, co-founder of Charlotte-Hyman and Herrero and curator of Glass Subjects at R & Company; and Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt. 3. The panel's central question is what makes an object irresistible — whether it's beauty, rarity, or the story it tells. 4. Jeanne grew up with an art-dealer father who only believed in Donald Judd and white walls, so she spent her youth sneaking objects into their house; her gallery Salon 94 is named after the Florine Stettheimer and Gertrude Stein salon tradition. 5. Alexandra grew up in Miami in the 1980s, influenced by Isamu Noguchi's Bayfront Park, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Surrounded Islands, and extensive thrift shopping with her grandmother for Bob Mackie ball gowns from snowbirds' estate sales. 6. Adam grew up in a musical and visual creative household, with a mother who paints and a father who is a toy designer; he met his architecture partner at RISD in Providence, where one was in the architecture program and the other in furniture. 7. Adam describes his current exhibition Glass Subjects at R & Company as an homage to Serge Roche, a 1920s-30s Paris dealer who ran a destination mirror gallery built around a single surviving silver chair from Versailles' Hall of Mirrors — the rest of the silver furniture having been melted down to fund the American Revolution. 8. The show includes works by Paul Sepulveda, Pistoletto, and Niki de Saint Phalle, all artists who used mirrors as portals or psychological tools; Niki de Saint Phalle lived in a house of cracked mosaic mirrors and underwent laughing therapy. 9. Alexandra describes her first major Cooper Hewitt exhibition as the Willie Smith retrospective, framing Smith as the first designer to commission artist T-shirts from Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Arman, and Keith Haring as a means of making art accessible through fashion. 10. Smith's 1984 runway show featured scenography by Nam June Paik, had Whitney Houston walking the runway, and showed gender-nonconforming clothing decades before that vocabulary existed; he died of AIDS in 1987. 11. The host notes that Willie Smith is 'glaringly' absent from a current Black Dandy exhibition, a critical observation Alexandra says she had also noticed the previous evening. 12. Adam describes his scenographic design for Kami Henrot's show at Hauser & Wirth: a recycled rubber floor — the type found in playgrounds — rolled through the entire gallery, with forced-perspective lines that compress as the viewer moves deeper, making objects seem farther away than they are. 13. The effect was intended to recreate the childhood experience of being surrounded by giant, incomprehensible objects, and Adam spent seven to eight months on the design while Henrot had worked on the sculptures for years. 14. Alexandra discusses the Cooper Hewitt's acquisition of work by Tobias Wong, a critical designer from the Cooper Union whose practice from 2000 to 2010 defined American critical design and whose work she says contextualizes what is coming out of American design schools today. 15. She describes the institution's acquisition philosophy: looking at gaps, building narratives of lineage from the 1970s through the present, and thinking about how an object will be understood in 100 or 200 years. 16. Jeanne describes her white whale object: a David Hammons elephant-dung-with-chain sculpture she first saw as a child in the basement of Jack Tilton Gallery, learned about from Hammons himself — who had his girlfriend jump the Bronx Zoo fence to collect the dung, meditating on the image of zoo elephants led across the Brooklyn Bridge — and eventually purchased from a collector decades later. 17. Adam's white whale is a Gabriella Crespi brass shell candlestick — a cast of her parents' candlestick with two welded shells — first seen in an old Domus magazine, tracked across three subsequent publications over years, and finally found mislabeled in an auction app alert as 'shell candlestick' without Crespi's name. 18. The panel closes with audience questions about surrealism as a contemporary design movement, with Alexandra citing environmental consciousness as the more active shared movement across fashion, furniture, and architecture. 19. The conversation is intimate and personal, with all three panelists sharing specific memories of objects, collectors, and makers rather than abstract principles. 20. Best for designers, curators, and collectors interested in how taste is formed, how exhibitions get made, and the personal histories of objects.

As heard by us

A brisk art-world panel makes curation feel like advocacy, memory, and the pleasure of the chase.

A live Art Angle panel uses New York Art Week's fair atmosphere to talk about taste, stewardship, and the thrill of pursuing art and design. William Van Meter frames the fair as a place defined by stories as much as sales, then turns to panelists whose work crosses galleries,…

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If you like a live panel where art, design, fashion, and collecting all collide, this one delivers.

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