Marcia Tucker 1977: 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 free-lance art critic, writer, and lecturer.

Tucker talks about the organization of the New Museum in New York City in this interview from 1977, a few months prior to the opening. "What artists don’t like about the museums is that the museums don’t like artists. They don’t like artists because they can’t be controlled, preserved, categorized or tucked away. Also, museum people say that artists are egocentric. Of course they are, think of the nature of the enterprise! They have to both make it and support it themselves," Tucker says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1977 and re-edited in 2006.