What It's Like to Be A Contemporary Artist

What It's Like To...

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Whether you feel intimidated by art--or visit every museum you can--you will appreciate Nina Katchadourian. Nina approaches the world with wonder and curiosity. She is a world-renowned contemporary artist (her work has been shown all over the world, including at the Met and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, and the Palais de Tokyo, among many other locales), but her approach to art is so down-to-earth, humorous, and deceptively simple that it is accessible to everyone. Nina often focuses on what is figuratively (or even literally) underfoot: one of her works was about dust in MoMA. Nina has a show at the Morgan Library in New York through May 28, 2023. She is also a professor at New York University. Interacting with Nina's work--and listening to her in this episode--will help you see not just art, but also your everyday world, in a new way.
In this episode:

• How Nina's curiosity guides her into various art projects (03:35)
• Describing the genesis of "Sorted Books" (04:40)
• How she came to focus on dust at MoMA (07:48)
• We overlook a lot of things that are more worthy of attention than we think (13:48)
• Nina's path from high school to professional artist (15:25)
• Why artists need to be nimble and balance "work" with "work work" (19:32)
• Nina's various "other" jobs--and how they informed her art (21:29)
• Nina's process starting something new (29:26)
• How "on hold" music became a piece of art (30:05)
• Behind the scenes of "Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style"(33:32)
• Humor as a tool in art (37:03)
• How Nina goes through the world, "finding" material (42:23)

Want to know more about Nina?

• Check out her website (a lot of the works we talk about in the episode are featured here): http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/
• Find out about her show at The Morgan: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/nina-katchadourian
• See more of her work here: https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/nina-katchadourian/
• Follow her on Instagram: @ninakatchadourian

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