In 1970, some of the country’s most prominent artists felt dissatisfied with museum spaces. In rebellion, curator Willoughby Sharp and editor Liza Béar created Avalanche, a black-and-white magazine that included interviews with artists, photographs of them at work, transcripts of sound-based projects and a myriad of presentations of art that challenged the way it had long been displayed in museums.
They printed 13 editions over six years, until they ran out of money.
Kim Conaty, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art’s new executive director, wrote her graduate school dissertation on Avalanche, fascinated by the idea of alternative exhibition spaces — even as she built her career in traditional museums. Long intrigued by how art is displayed, Conaty dove into this creative project born of frustration with the very institutions to which she hoped to devote her life.
“The museum space is a space to be critiqued; it is a platform, and it’s a meaningful platform, and what you do with it matters,” she told the Valley News. “That is something that I always think about. It’s a precious space.”
Conaty’s work on Avalanche challenged her to approach museums more critically. She has worked to put on exhibits in “flexible” spaces, where she can show pieces of art that are harder than most to display. Conaty has an affinity for under-historicized artists, for work that has spent its life in shadows.
She looks at exhibits and asks herself, “What’s been left out?” Studying the artists in Avalanche — Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Joseph Beuys and Yvonne Rainer to name a few — and their rebellion against museums gave Conaty the thoughtful edge that has made her career so notable.
On Oct. 27, Conaty began her tenure as the museum’s executive director. She succeeds John Stomberg, who retired this summer after a decade leading the museum. She comes to the Upper Valley straight from New York, where she served as chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for two years.
She has traded New York — one of the art capitals of the world — for Hanover, the peaceful home to the largest art museum within a 100-mile radius.
‘Art was my window’
As a child, Conaty moved often: She lived all over the Northeast and, for two years, in Ohio. Between her sophomore and junior years of high school, she moved from Cincinnati to Fairfield, Connecticut, where she spent free periods in the art studio, hiding and drawing with an intense focus. She was quite good at drawing, Conaty said, not because of an innate skill but rather because she would devote hours to a single drawing, taking it home from school to continue her study — usually of the objects around her. Sometimes she would spend the better part of a day drawing a glass of water as the light changed around her, adjusting the shadows with her pencil as the sun moved up and down. It passed the time and tickled her analytical mind.
Conaty started at Middlebury College studying Spanish and on the pre-med track, hoping to become a pediatrician. But because she had chosen a liberal arts college, she had to take an art class. In her sophomore year, she chose an introductory art history survey course.
“My mind was blown,” Conaty said. “It was like there was a glitch happening … Color could mean a feeling, or a form could represent an emotion. I was completely intrigued by the puzzle that was before me, and by the visual information that didn’t make objective sense.”
Art grabbed her. She found that the work she studied in her art history class connected to everything else she was learning in college, that she could analyze a piece of art with the artist’s psychology, with social context, with the political background of the moment.
“Art was my window into so many other big, broad questions,” she said.
Conaty took more courses and ultimately graduated with an art history degree. Her mother and father, who worked, respectively, in schools and at General Electric, supported Conaty’s academic pursuits but didn’t think of her major as something she could really pursue as a career, Conaty said. Their daughter, however, had determined she would do just that.
In the summer of 1998, after her junior year of college, Conaty worked her first internship in the art world, at the Whitney Museum in New York — where she would later return and become chief curator. When she graduated a year later, she moved to New York to start her career, but found it difficult to get a job at a museum without any real experience. Eventually, Conaty took a role at an advertising firm, volunteering at the Whitney on weekends to keep up with the museum industry. Nine months later, she leveraged her newfound advertising experience into a marketing gig at the Guggenheim.
After two years out of undergrad, Conaty went back to school, this time to get a master’s in art history from Williams. There, she developed an interest in postwar German art, a fascination that carried her, after she earned her master’s degree, to Hamburg, Germany, on a Fulbright scholarship. She had applied for the grant to study Lovis Corinth, an “under-historicized” German impressionist painter and printmaker; Conaty has long been drawn to artists whose work has spent too little time under the spotlight. What Corinth led her toward, however, was bigger than just his work: He drew Conaty into a study of materialism, an interest which she carried through her Ph.D. at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, where she applied while in Hamburg.
It took Conaty more than 10 years to finish her Ph.D. After passing her exams, she took a full-time job at the Whitney, working on the 2008 Biennial. Every two years, the Whitney Biennial presents a survey of contemporary American art, projects that take years of planning and immense amounts of effort from the curators who create them. As soon as the exhibit was ready, Conaty received another job offer, this time to work under a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Christophe Cherix specialized in art on paper with a particular lean toward conceptual art, which grabbed Conaty’s attention. Cherix is now MoMA’s director.
Conaty started at MoMA as a curatorial assistant, then became an assistant curator. In 2015, she earned her first full curatorship at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. In 2016, Conaty finally finished her dissertation on Avalanche.
She returned to the Whitney from Brandeis in 2017 to become curator of drawings and prints, a role she held until she was promoted to chief curator in 2024.
‘Greater focus’
In Hanover, Conaty rarely has the opportunity to feel alone in a crowd — or even to find herself among one. Her husband and children are still in New York, holding their move to the Upper Valley until Conaty’s two boys finish out the school year.
Conaty’s new life is a New England Hopper painting: a white colonial house, a woman alone in the doorway. A moment of peace, entirely unlike the bustling city that Conaty comes from. She loves this part of the world, she said.
“You have an opportunity for greater focus here,” she said.
Conaty feels the significance of the Hood’s singularity, a platform that makes the museum a place for conversation about the arts, for community, for “close looking.” Here, there is no need to race from gallery to gallery, to squeeze the Whitney into the same weekend as the Met, or to visit it on the same day as MoMA and the Guggenheim. The Hood has a vast, diverse collection, and its singularity affords visitors the opportunity to approach its artwork and take their time. Conaty has long been conscious of the role space plays in art, in museums; in Hanover, she has so much space to work with.
The New York Times does a monthly “10-minute challenge” that asks readers to look at one piece of art for 10 minutes. Conaty loves this. It is, in a sense, reminiscent of Avalanche, the magazine she studied years ago, which challenged its readers to sit with, question and even travel with art. Now in her first executive director role — perhaps especially because it is in a museum, the quintessential and therefore controversial arena of art — Conaty has been asking herself: “How can we allow for those types of spaces that open your mind and offer new opportunities for contemplation?”
Because to Conaty, everybody — Dartmouth students, Upper Valley locals and visitors alike — needs a long moment with a work of art.
