Elisabeth Sussman – Curator – Whitney Museum of American Art

Click the icon to play the podcast

In our 3-9-07 ARTSCAPE interview, Elisabeth Sussman discusses the Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Spring

The exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure includes Matta-Clark’s major works and celebrates the brilliance and radical nature of his work in a number of different mediums: sculptural objects (most notably from building cuts), drawings, films, photographs, notebooks, and documentary material. During the brief but amazingly productive period of almost a decade that he was active as an artist, from 1969 until 1978, Matta-Clark became legendary and began to exert a powerful fascination, especially on other artists and architects, which has grown deeper since his tragically early death in 1978, at the age of 35.

Elisabeth Sussman is Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art where Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” opened in February 2007, and where she will be co-curating an upcoming exhibition on the work of William Eggleston. She has organized a number of other Whitney exhibitions including Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1991); Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996), with David Armstrong; Keith Haring (1997); and the Museum’s 1993 Biennial Exhibition.

Ms. Sussman has recently co-curated two exhibitions on the work of Eva Hesse: one of her drawings with The Drawing Center and another of her sculpture with the Jewish Museum, both in New York. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ms. Sussman co-organized, with Renate Petzinger of the Museum Wiesbaden, a full retrospective on the work of Eva Hesse. The exhibition received the International Art Critics Association First Prize for the best monographic exhibition outside of New York in 2001 and 2002.

For SFMOMA, Elisabeth Sussman also organized, with Sandra Phillips, a retrospective of the work of Diane Arbus. The catalogue for the Arbus exhibition has received the 2004 Infinity Award for Publication of the International Center of Photography.

Elisabeth Sussman was a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1999. She was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2003. She is the author of many publications, including Lisette Model (Phaidon, 2001) and will be contributing essays on Robert Gober for the Schaulager and Lee Bontecou for another upcoming exhibition catalogue.

The first full-scale retrospective in twenty years of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on February 22, 2007. Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure – which traveled subsequently to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles – includes Matta-Clark’s major works and presents numerous projects.