The Hirshhorn Museum Is Collecting Famous Artists’ Video Diaries About Their Lives in Isolation. Watch 5 of Them Here

Major museums are confronting a
tricky balancing act right now. They’re tasked with keeping their
exhibitions relevant to the public, even while closed, and with
inventing new ways to capture this historical moment for
posterity. 

The Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, has found a way to do both
simultaneously. Through a new initiative called “Artists in
Quarantine,” the museum is soliciting diaristic video snippets from
creators around the world.

“We felt a responsibility to
respond to an unprecedented historical moment by giving a voice to
our community of artists,” the museum’s director, Melissa Chiu,
tells Artnet. “Our intention is to capture a chronicle of this
moment with intimacy and authenticity.”

Chiu, who conceived the idea
just days after the museum closed in March, commissioned the artist
Theaster Gates to realize the project with her. Gates’s video,
which features the artist wandering around his vacant studio
reflecting on his relationship to the space, is among the first of
five videos released today on the the Hirshhorn’s websites. The
others are contributions from artists Ragnar Kjartansson, Shirin
Neshat, Tony Oursler, and Christine Sun Kim.

“It gives me a lot of pleasure
to imagine that I can move freely between spaces,” Gates says in
the minute-long clip. “It’s a freedom akin to making
art.”

“We were thinking about the fact
that this would be remembered as an important historical moment and
about what the museum could do—as well as our responsibility—to
play an active role in recording it. We knew that we wanted to
start with capturing artists’ voices firsthand,” Chiu says, calling
the project “an evolving, living archive of this
moment.”

So far, the museum has reached
out to more than 100 artists and collected dozens of videos in
return, including submissions from Hank Willis Thomas, Marilyn
Minter, and Mariko Mori. Moving forward, it will roll them out on
YouTube and its social
media channels twice per week. The videos will also be entered into
the museum’s permanent collection—an artifact of this moment in
time. 

“There is no doubt that this
moment will have an impact on art-making for years to come, not to
mention the art world’s ecology,” says Chiu. “Where before this
crisis the role of the museum may have been to gather people with
the idea that a direct encounter with art can be transformative,
right now we see museums as gathering visitors virtually to provide
respite from these challenging times.”

See the other videos below.

The post The Hirshhorn Museum Is Collecting Famous Artists’
Video Diaries About Their Lives in Isolation. Watch 5 of Them
Here appeared first on artnet News.