Marcia Tucker 1974: An Interview

Marcia Tucker was the founding director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 1977 to 1999, during which time she organized major exhibitions like The Time of Our Lives (1999), A Labor of Love (1996), and Bad Girls (1994), and edited the series Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art, five books which the New Museum also published. Tucker considered the museum a “laboratory” organization where both art and the practices of the institution itself were always in question. At her prior post as Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1969 to 1977, Tucker organized major surveys of Bruce Nauman, Lee Krasner, James Rosenquist, Joan Mitchell, and Richard Tuttle, among others. After leaving the New Museum, and until her death in 2006, Tucker worked as a freelance art critic, writer, and lecturer.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1974 and re-edited in 2006.