This March, the New Museum reopened its 60,000-square-foot expansion with "New Humans: Memories of the Future," a sprawling meditation on the technological past, present, and future that included eerie floating jellyfish-drones, World War I prosthetics, and a video installation of a deepfake Kim Kardashian describing war in Sri Lanka. After that exhibit closed this fall, the New Museum put up the multidisciplinary artist Arthur Jafa's first museum survey in the United States, including huge video installations and photographic collage that interrogate and reframe the way Black lives are depicted in images.
Both of these must-see exhibitions share a probing, sharply current perspective that urge the viewer to question the cultural and technological mores that shape the world. Both were projects of Massimiliano Gioni, the Italian visionary who, in July, was announced as the New Museum's new director—only the third in its 49-year history—taking over for Lisa Phillips, who spent 26 years at the helm. Gioni, 52, has spent much of his celebrated career at the New Museum, joining in 2003 as director of special exhibitions before becoming its artistic director in 2014. He's a longtime East Village resident, but he has a global perspective too, as a former curator of biennales around the world, including in Venice, Gwangju, and Berlin.
Hell Gate videochatted with Gioni on an evening in late October about his perspective on art, his youth as a graffiti writer, and the polemical mission of the New Museum. "The New Museum is a place where, yes we show great art and artists, but as vehicles to understand the world we're in," he said. "There is less art for art's sake in our building than in others, I think."
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Hell Gate: You've been in New York for exactly 20 years, is that correct?
Massimiliano Gioni: Actually, longer, because I came at the end of '99 and then I lived here until 2003. But the accent doesn't wash out.
I read in the Arthur Jafa exhibition catalog that you were a graffiti writer. What type of graffiti were you doing?
I was an aspiring graffiti artist in Italy and I even got arrested—I must say I was lucky that I got arrested in Italy, not in New York, much rougher—and I was still underage when that happened. Fortunately it didn't go down on my permanent record as they say. It was all Keith Haring's and Rammellzee's and even Basquiat's fault. The funny story is, graffiti art had an early exposure in Italy of all places. Not many people know that Jean-Michel Basquiat's first gallery show happened actually in the city of Modena at Emilio Mazzoli before it even happened in New York at Annina Nosei's. Probably the first museum show for graffiti art happened in Italy in the early '80s. It was called Arte di Frontiera, Frontier Art. I was too young to have seen the actual show, but the catalog of that show was my bible for growing up as a kid.
It was very much connected to certain fantasies I had about New York, probably, and also being born outside of a big city. I probably kind of identified with a slightly outsider's position. But that book with all the photos of, you know, A-One and Lee Quiñones and Crash and Lady Pink and all those guys. And then, of course, early SAMO was very inspiring. And then Keith Haring was, you know, for as many kids of my age, a kind of gateway drug. It was like the surrealists, and then Keith Haring.