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- [00:00]
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- [00:28]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. An exhibition of artist Carol Beauvais work fills the Guggenheim's quarter mile long spiral rotunda, and it runs for only a couple of more weeks. Known for her monumental steel compositions, the New York Times calls Carol Beauvais one of the country's most imaginative and esteemed sculptors. The new show moves in reverse chronological order, reflecting on how Bovet's work has changed throughout the years. On the lowest level of the rotunda, it features colorful towering sculptures made in 2026. Then, as you make your way up the spiral near the top, you'll see her early 2000 installations. The exhibition will be on display at the Guggenheim through Sunday, Aug. 2. Artist Carol Beauvais and Guggenheim curator Kathryn Brinson, who organized the exhibition, joined me to discuss it. Here's our conversation. Catherine it's such a distinct layout at the Guggenheim. What were some of your earliest conversations with Carol about how you would line the walls with her work?
- [01:43]
Kathryn Brinson
We've been working on this for a long time, for many, many, many years. I mean, of course it always takes some years to put together a major exhibition at the museum, but this one really has labor of love and an ongoing conversation between us. So early on there were different manifestations. At one point, I remember we work in models. We have a series of round models where each of the ramps is laid out on a giant tabletop and we play with miniature versions of the work. And I remember there was one version in the models that was completely achronological with these very intuitive pairings of the work. But ultimately we felt like the unwinding through time was really effective. So you step into the current creative moment for the artist and then you trace back the origins of how she got to the current moment. But there was also an element of necessity in that the very recent works that you mentioned are large and very heavy. So it was great to have those at the bottom of the spiral. And, and you have this natural feeling of ascension as the work's materiality lightens as you rise through the spiral up towards the light that's coming in from the skylight.
- [03:11]
Alison Stewart
Carol oh, please.
- [03:12]
Carol Beauvais
Sorry. I was just gonna say that it's the Intention and the meaning of the building, that there's a spiritual ascension. And so that, yeah, the story of my work backwards, getting lighter. Yeah, it just seemed to sift things in this chronological direction. But I, We. We have actually been working on the show for about 10 years, but not full time. There were some, like, periods where it was more in the back of the refrigerator and there was Covid and the last 10 years, of course. But we've had a lot of time to really think about it. And I suspected that you were wanted reverse chronological all along and that. And like, as a curator, I just want to say you're just so great, just such a genius. And really, like, let me play in the sandbox for like eight years and
- [04:20]
Kathryn Brinson
then
- [04:22]
Carol Beauvais
applied a little bit of gentle pressure, firm pressure, as one need to sort of like to direct in your very authoritative and sensitive way.
- [04:35]
Kathryn Brinson
Well, it has been a joy to be in that sandbox, Just pure joy. And Carol's generosity of spirit has shone through every moment of our work together over the course of that decade. But no, I do think it really helps to have some element of structure that the really broad audience that we have at the Guggenheim can kind of orient themselves through. And this was the one that had a sense of, as Carol said, revelation. Even this sort of ecstatic ascension, which does go back to this founding idea from Hilara Bay, our first director, and Frank Lloyd Wright, that the Guggenheim spiral should be a temple of spirit where you have this really luminous communion with art and architecture and your own imagination and have that really transcendent encounter.
- [05:31]
Alison Stewart
How did you decide what work you would pick to be part of this exhibition, Carol?
- [05:39]
Carol Beauvais
Because it was such a long period of development, a lot of the work was made for the show. So the most recent work is at the bottom, is new, and it was built for the building. And one of the features in the building is this two story high room. So I wanted something that was really tall, it was the right scale for that, for that room.
- [06:15]
Alison Stewart
When you look at that piece and that sort of that first gallery, it has two different perspectives because you can be in it and then you go up a little bit and you can look over the side at it down. Did you think about the perspectives from people who would be looking at it from the top versus people looking at it from the bottom?
- [06:33]
Carol Beauvais
Yes, I work in models, but I work in one to one models. So I built that room in my studio so that I could get on. I mean, in some ways it was very lightly inscribed. You know, I didn't have to build the entire room. But I knew where the walls were. And then there's a platform where I could stand and see what the perspective was from the higher level. But, you know, otherwise without. So the architecture is modeled, but the objects are improvised in relation to that negative space.
- [07:14]
Kathryn Brinson
I would also add that Carol really works with space as much as she works with objects. And I've never known an artist be so sensitive to sight lines and the optical experience of being in a body in an unraveling spiral. And the way her decisions really surface the weirdness of the building. It's a really unusual experience.
- [07:39]
Carol Beauvais
It's true. And I think that people, I mean, people don't talk about the space that much. I mean, but if we could insure it or something, like, if it had some kind of like commercial, you know, comprehensibility, it would be a different story. And like, because it sort of is nothing and it resists language, then it doesn't really get talked about. But thank you. Because it is so. It's so important. So, yeah, the space. And also our body in space. And so, yeah, then some of the other building blocks, aside from wanting to make something for this particular room, was to welcome the viewer and have some resting points on the ramp. I always feel, I mean, I'm a sitting down in museum zealot. It's like, this is my cause.
- [08:41]
Alison Stewart
Right.
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Carol Beauvais
And I think that it, like actually is. It can be part of the transformation of the world. Because when you're physically welcomed into a space, when you're accommodated as a human being who has a body, that means you're white, like you exist like that we recognize each other, that we can then have sympathy for ourselves and sympathy for each other. Right. So it's a really basic but also just incredibly important accommodation.
- [09:21]
Alison Stewart
Yeah. It's funny to see the couches. I was like, that wasn't here last
- [09:24]
Carol Beauvais
time I was here.
- [09:26]
Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with artist Carol Beauvais alongside Guillaume Gunheim curator Katherine Brinson. They're talk about a new exhibit. New exhibition that includes everything from assemblages of paperback books on wooden shelves to paper collages to towering steel sculptures, all belonging to the artist Carol Beauvais. Catherine, in an interview with Vogue magazine, you said traditionally steel sculpture was thought as a very masculine endeavor. How does Carol disrupt that?
- [09:56]
Kathryn Brinson
Yeah, I. I mean, I want to be careful to not be too simplistic about a kind of gender based binary. But I think something we've talked about a lot is this idea of effortlessness in Carol's Work, you know, again, this need to not. Not impress upon the viewer how difficult the process was, how, you know, immense the material is. Instead, that is almost deliberately erased. And it's made, as you said, much more human. People often respond to the collage sculptures, which are these manipulated steel forms, as having something of the body about them, perhaps, you know, a draped fabric. Some people perceive them to be made of paper or a crumpled piece of paper. So, you know, you're really not inviting that tradition of, as you said, domination or a demand for attention. It's more of a entangling you imaginatively in that moment, which I think is a very different effect.
- [11:26]
Alison Stewart
Carol, how do you know when a sculpture is finished?
- [11:37]
Carol Beauvais
I have a voice in my stomach that says it's finished.
- [11:42]
Alison Stewart
You just know.
- [11:43]
Carol Beauvais
I mean, I hear the voice.
- [11:46]
Kathryn Brinson
Intuition.
- [11:47]
Carol Beauvais
Yeah, but do you mind if I tag something on? Hook something onto this idea that, you know, a lot of the sculptures have, are illusionistic and they look soft, but they're hard. And so people really want to. People want to verify the material by, you know, touching them, which I am so flattered by, because that means it's working. It's like that you actually, you're drawn to it. You want to touch it. And again, like, I've, as I've already stated, like, I believe in people being whole and having a. Being an embodied awareness, but not everybody, if people touch the sculptures, then they're going to get damaged. So this is why we have a tactile gallery I was going to ask about and the museum, so you can go touch. You can verify what the surface would be like and explore with your hands and manipulate the materials and like, sort of like, feel what they would be.
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Alison Stewart
Kath, I was gonna ask about the touching library. Describe the touching library, which is part of the exhibit. Exactly.
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Kathryn Brinson
It absolutely is a very core part of the exhibit. So if anyone's visited the Guggenheim before, you might remember that halfway through the second ramp, there's a little keyhole shaped door. It's very Alice in Wonderland. And it's always this very cozy little library room, a reading room, where we have supplemental material to help you understand the shows and take a breath. But Carol has really transformed it into this wholly interactive space. So not only can you touch a peacock feather or a piece of driftwood or a piece. The painted surface of the. Of the manipulated steel elements, you can also create some of the beadwork that's featured. There's a little mini hydraulic press that both adults and kids have been very delighted by so far. You can read the books that are featured in Carol's early bookshelf sculptures because it is very tempting to interact with the. That material, although they very much become sculptural elements in those early assemblages. So, you know, Carol and I have talked a lot about how, while, as mentioned, it is very necessary that we keep our work safe and don't encourage touching just because the surfaces are really, really fragile, to achieve that illusion of a suede like skin, like finish in the paint takes an enormous amount of effort. But there can feel like this sense of subtle loss or frustration that you can't fully bodily interact with things. So we hope to redirect that. That desire to the tactile library, as we're calling it. And I have to say the response has been surprisingly glowing. Just the sheer novelty of being able to have that insight into what it feels like to work with materials in the studio. Carol's really generously provided all of this material from her studio. And even, even your colleague, as we were, as we were waiting to join you, was speaking so eloquently about the experience of the tactile library. So we were very happy to hear it.
- [15:26]
Alison Stewart
You see these things at the top of the. Of the rotunda of, like, driftwood and peacock feathers. And then you remember, six floors down, I was looking at these huge sculptures. When you look at it as a whole, I'm just curious, like, what do you feel about your work when you see it as a whole 25 years?
- [15:44]
Carol Beauvais
I mean, I'm really. I was scared to look at the early work. And of course, as an artist, I always want to look. We want to look at the latest thing, you know, and this was part of Catherine's wise counsel, where she was like, okay, so you've been playing for a while, and now why don't we do this chronology? And also she really advocated for this storytelling of how. Of demonstrating how one thing folds into or unravels back. Yeah, yeah. One thing leads to the next or unravels, depending on which way you're going. And that she told me, I hadn't really told. Thought about it because I don't think about myself from the outside, but that people, I don't know, some people that she knows think that there was a radical pivot in my work, and she wanted to demonstrate that there actually wasn't. That actually one thing just follows from the next.
- [16:44]
Alison Stewart
That was my conversation with artist Carol Bouvet and Guggenheim curator Kathryn Brinson. The exhibition runs through Sunday, August 2nd. And that is all of it for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here next time.
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