Episode 0010: Catherine Whitney - David Hockney and the Science of Art

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In this episode, Kendall talks with Catherine Whitney, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Catherine co-curated David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, currently on view at the Portland Art Museum through July 26.

Catherine traces her path into museum work back to her grandmother, who handed her an art kit the moment she walked in the door. She went to college as a studio art major (picking art over medicine partly to avoid calculus), then found herself pulled toward art history instead. After landing an administrative job in the conservation department at the National Gallery in DC, she moved into museum education, went to grad school, and eventually became an art dealer at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, representing Georgia O’Keeffe’s estate for close to 15 years. When her father got sick, she considered going back to school for medicine. Her brother, a doctor, talked her out of it: “Stay doing what you’re doing. You can change lives in your own way.” She returned to museum work, became a chief curator in the Midwest, and moved to Honolulu during COVID.

The two dig into what a curator actually does: building a narrative, then using the physical works and the exhibition space itself to tell that story, not unlike a director working with actors. Catherine and her colleague Catherine Love originally curated the Hockney show at HoMA, then Catherine returned as a contract curator to expand it for Portland, working with local design firm Plus and Greater Than to give the show an entirely different layout. They talk about the throughline of opposites and dualities in Hockney’s work (a theme critic Christopher Knight identified back in 1988) and how Hockney kept adopting new technology throughout his career, from a Xerox copier and Polaroid camera to iPads, iPhones, and the nine-camera rig he used to film the Yorkshire woods near his childhood home.

Hockney passed away about six weeks before this conversation was recorded. Kendall happened to visit the Portland show the morning after, before he’d heard the news, and the two talk about what it was like to experience the exhibition in that moment. Catherine never met Hockney, but got to know him secondhand through friends and collaborators who worked with him for decades.

The conversation turns to Catherine’s next project, Vital Connections: Art in the Brain, an exhibition she’s building with neuroscientists and clinicians to explore what recent research shows about how making and encountering art affects the brain: cognitive reserve, neuroplasticity, even physical longevity. She also talks about serving on the board of the Vilcek Foundation, which supports immigrant artists and biomedical researchers, and about her growing pull toward contemporary and underrepresented artists, including Native Hawaiian artists, after a career spent mostly with historic, deceased ones.

Question of the week:

Catherine turned the tables and asked Kendall two questions borrowed from other podcasts: who would you have breakfast with, living or dead, and if you could have a mythological creature as a pet, which one would you pick? Kendall’s answers: his great-grandmother, and a Pegasus.