Brett Littman
photo: Don Stahl
Brett Littman: Materials are Never Neutral
In conversation with Deanna Sirlin
Sterling Ruby, This Range, 2005, Lambda print flush-mounted on Sintra, one of seven parts, 22 ¼ x 29 ⅞ inches
I first met Brett Littman after a lecture he gave at the High Museum in 2017 in honor of the museum’s former director, Gudmund Vigtel. Littman was then the Director of the Drawing Center in New York City; his presentation was From Lascaux Caves to Autocad: A Brief History of Drawing. The arc of Littman’s lecture about drawing moved from one century to another, from the language of a drawing as part of the thought process of an artist to new thoughts about what a drawing could be. I found the presentation very noteworthy as Littman pushed the boundaries of what drawings are and could be, such as a print of a work by Sterling Ruby who embedded pigment and flowers onto a concrete shard – the image, a digital print, is a record of the process that produced it. Recently Littman was in Atlanta for the opening of The Art of Paper: Selections of Handmade Paper Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation at the Zuckerman Museum where we had the following conversation. Brett Littman is the Director of Shakkei Consulting ("borrowed landscape" in Japanese) a consulting firm that develops organizational strategy and solutions to complex curatorial, management, programmatic, operational, entrepreneurial and legacy issues.
Littman was the Senior Director, US of Carpenters Workshop Gallery from 2024 - 2025, Director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York from 2018 - 2023; Executive Director of The Drawing Center from 2007-2018; Deputy Director of MoMA PS1 from 2003-2007; Co-Director of Dieu Donné Papermill from 2001-2003 and Associate Director of UrbanGlass from 1996-2001.
The Art of Paper will be traveling to the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina (June 4 — November 30, 2026) and then on The Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin (February 8 – May 9, 2027) and the Parrish Museum, Water Mill, NY (September 19, 2027 – January 23, 2028).
Deanna Sirlin
Atlanta, Georgia
Duane Michals, Self–Portrait Asleep in a Tomb of Mereruka Sakkara, 1978 The Morgan Library & Museum, 2018.42. © Duane Michals, Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.
Deanna Sirlin: My first question is: What was the first work of art that truly changed your perception—something that unsettled or expanded the way you see?
Brett Littman: Growing up, my dad was an amateur photographer, and we had a darkroom in the house. So, I grew up around a lot of photo books. I’d say the book that caught my attention was by Duane Michals. I was very taken by his work at a very young age because, of course, the words—there was text—and a kind of narrative image and a sequence, so it felt like a story. I don’t know if I understood the whole context of everything he was doing, but I really appreciated his work early on. That was probably the first artwork that really made an impact on me as a young person.
DS: So, you went off to college in California. Was there anything in particular about that for you—escaping New York for the first time?
BL: I think I wanted to get out of New York. I mean, I went to UCSD to be a doctor—so I went pre-med—and quickly realized, after I got to O-Chem, that it really wasn’t my dream. And strangely, at UCSD, there was a whole community of New Yorkers, like David Antin and Eleanor Antin and Jerome Rothenberg—poets, artists. Allan Kaprow was there; Harold Cohen from the UK; and later Quincy Troupe showed up from Columbia, who had just finished the Miles Davis book. It was kind of an interesting thing. I was hanging out with mostly physics and chemistry and, you know, pre-med students.
DS: And then this whole other world opened up.
BL: It was already there but I wasn’t pursuing it as a career. I grew up in New York—I looked at a lot of art. I was interested in music. I probably gravitated more toward the creative people than the scientists. I ended up switching from pre-med to philosophy. And then from philosophy, I ended up in the poetry department, where I got a dual degree.
DS: Can I ask you about poets and philosophers? I’m curious about that connection.
BL: Well, the fundamental issue in philosophy is you’re always trying to figure out how we think, and language is the key to understanding that—unless we want to posit some kind of metaphysics, something beyond language. But I was coming out of a more continental, European 20th/21st-century understanding—very non-metaphysical, not rationalist necessarily, and not AI in the sense of measuring brain waves. To me, it was really about how language works. If you’re interested in Wittgenstein, you’re probably going to be interested in contemporary poetry, because in some ways the two things are very much related. And the contemporary poets—particularly at UCSD—there was a huge group of experimental and Language poets on faculty including Rae Armantrout, Fanny Howe, Jerome Rothenberg and Michael Davidson. There was a great reading series and the poets Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, bpNichol, Wynstan Curnow, Jackson Mac Low and Susan Howe came to read and guest teach. In any case, I really fell in with the poets because for me it was applying what I was learning in an abstract way in philosophy studies to day-to-day language. And those poets were very heavily engaged in contemporary theory as well and surely had studied Derrida, and were also thinking about applying it. That’s what made the connection for me.
DS: Do you still write poetry?
BL: You know, I haven’t written in a long time. I guess my mea culpa was when I met my wife, I wrote her quite a few contemporary haikus, and then I put together a little book of them because she was living in London and we weren’t seeing each other, so I would take the ferry home from the Noguchi Museum back to my apartment and I would just write haikus. I really enjoyed it. It was great. And she was quite touched, obviously. I had my friend design and print a little book, which I gave to her as a gift.
DS: This was a very private moment.
BL: It was, but in some ways, it was also about this kind of heightened sense of living—because that’s what poetry does for me. Philosophy can do that too, maybe in a different way, but it’s that hyper-attention to the details of life—sometimes, you know, like a leaf falling. Of course, I’m also very influenced by Japanese aesthetics. The haiku is a nice vehicle: short. I used the 5–7–5 syllabic structure, but I didn’t write them in a traditional way. They’re not necessarily about nature or changing seasons. They may not even be about love or loss. It could be about seeing a reflection in a glass …
DS: It’s what you were paying attention to.
BL: Yes, exactly. This kind of hyper-attention.
John Perreault reviewing a de Kooning show for The Village Voice. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/The Village Voice
DS: When did you meet John Perreault?
BL: John and I met when I became the development associate at UrbanGlass, and that must have been in 1996. I had come from Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, where I was also doing fundraising. I came back to New York after going to San Diego, and then living in San Antonio—where I made films for two years and also started doing nonprofit work. When I came back to New York, I really wanted to work at St. Ann’s or BAM. I was very interested in experimental theater, music, film.
DS: What year was this?
BL: I came back to New York in 1993. I ended up working in the corporate world for about a year and a half—I hated it. I really just didn’t want to do that. Then I went to Brooklyn College, which was a very multicultural theater, but not avant-garde by any stretch of the imagination.
What I learned was —as you know—I wasn’t trained as a curator. I don’t have any degree in art history or a PhD. I like being around creative people. I’m very good at math. I’m a good writer. I’m very organized. Fundraising was a good way to put that all together because I could write about art and make budgets. And it was needed—desperately needed. I was a person who had a skill set that was useful, and I used that to kind of move my way through jobs. I went to UrbanGlass. John decided to interview me for a job, as the woman who was working there before was leaving. To be frank, I knew nothing about glass. I mean, maybe I’d seen someone make, like, a lampworked animal, and I hadn’t even been to Venice. I didn’t know—but I saw people blowing glass and I thought, okay, it looks interesting. I knew I could raise money.
John during the interview said, “You went to UCSD.” And I said, “Yes.” And he goes, “Who do you know?” I said, I studied with these poets and Mel Freilicher was someone I used to hang out with. And he said, “My partner Jeff was Mel’s boyfriend. And I taught at UCSD. And I also am a poet.” And I said, “No—I didn’t know that. I knew you as an art critic, but I didn’t know you were a poet, and I didn’t know you had a connection to UCSD.” We spent the next 30 minutes talking about poetry and UCSD. And at the end he just said, “You’re hired, when can you can start?”
DS: But back to this relationship—between poetry and art criticism. Because I think it’s foundational; some of the really great art criticism has been written by poets.
BL: I would agree.
DS: I’m really interested in that connection—and I’m not sure it’s still happening. Was it of a moment?
BL: Interestingly, I just read Nathan Kernan’s new book, A Day Like Any Other, about James Schuyler—a very, very good book which really goes through James’s relationships, not only with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, and W. H. Auden—who was his lover early on—and, of course, all the painters that he wrote about (and slept with), and was part of their universe, including Joe Brainard, Fairfield Porter, and Jane Freilicher. And then I reread the book of his art criticism published by Black Sparrow Press, which I’ve always really loved. Very short poetic review —he was writing for Art News, ArtReview… I can’t remember where else: Art in America, maybe. In any case, they were very compact, very beautiful—really going deep about what it means to paint.
The only person I would say recently who can write in that way—with that kind of intelligence—is, interestingly, David Salle. He’s not a poet, but he writes poetically about painting—about decisions in painting—and I think that’s what Schuyler could do. He wasn’t a painter himself; he wasn’t an artist, but he could understand the moves—because, in some ways, being around Fairfield and watching painters paint . . . You know, he did the one with Alex Katz—the famous “Painter Painting a Painting.” And I think that’s something I always appreciated and liked.
Poetry—as I was saying—is really about honing in. That idea of finding the right word sometimes, or understanding the rhythm, or even the phonemes—the actual vowels and consonants that make the word up—so that you can hear the beat.
So, it’s a really perfect parallel to painting.
You know, of course, today we’re very deep into a different kind of criticism. I’m not saying it’s lighter or heavier, more important or less important. Interestingly, I’ve given James Schuyler’s collected art criticism to some younger museum colleagues—PhD art history candidates—and they hated it. They told me how terrible they thought it was: how weak a writer he was, how he wasn’t doing anything interesting for them.
DS: It is generational.
BL: It is generational, and I’m not of that generation, yet I feel connected to it. And it changed the way that I wrote because I had a non-academic background and in interest in poetry. John Perreault encouraged me to write—after he understood my background. And he also encouraged me to write about craft, which I didn’t know much about. But there weren’t many other people my age who wanted to write about it, so it gave me a pretty open field to write about ceramics, glass, metalwork. He introduced me to the editors of all those magazines at the time—American Ceramics, Metalsmith (Susan Ramljak was there, I think). There was also GLASS Magazine that we published, so I was able to write there. And then, of course, there were all the shelter magazines like Wallpaper and Surface that wanted people to write about glass. So, I was able to do that.
At first, my writing was more tied to philosophical ideas—it was a clunky as I was I trying to approach aesthetics through the theory I had learned. John was pretty critical of that kind of writing—and he really edited me down. The first couple of times, he said, “You’re not writing for Artforum or October. This is different. You should really strive for clarity.” That advice was very helpful.
Isamu Noguchi in his 10th Street, Long Island City, Queens Studio, 1964, Photograph by Dan Budnik. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 07281.
DS: Something that’s really interesting about your career is that your work has been about the substance of the artwork: glass, paper, the borderline between design and art. When did that first happen—at UrbanGlass? That idea that these glass objects, which came out of that Scandinavian tradition of high craft … I think that all those craft definitions have totally broken down.
BL: I came out of a generation heavily influenced by alternative music—punk rock, world music, alternative jazz and contemporary classical —it is where we cut our teeth. I guess that made me I like the “gray areas” more than the mainstream. I like the things that don’t necessarily fit in nicely. And in New York, the good news was you could have a lot of exposure to that kind of stuff if you’re interested in it. I would say my music tastes were pretty broad. It wasn’t just rock and roll; it was everything from the Replacements to classical music, to the jazz my parents listened to—Coltrane records and Mingus records. Probably it was music that pushed the boundary for me first, in terms of understanding what that “gray area” could be.
DS: It pushed the boundaries, but did it also break the boundaries? They started getting broken down.
BL: I guess I didn’t really care so much about specialization. Even in college, I studied philosophy, but then I was in the poetry department. Then I was hanging out with filmmakers. Then musicians. I just wanted to be around people who wanted to create things. I wasn’t so concerned whether you were a painter, a poet, a musician . . .
DS: Where does it stop? Are landscape architects part of this?
BL: Yeah—absolutely. I’d say the arc of my career—if there’s anything that defines it—is that you pointed right to it: materiality and process are very much part of how I think about what artists do.
DS: Is it what you love?
BL: I see it. I understand it. I’ve talked to so many artists about it. In some ways it’s a choice point—I can understand that you stand in front of paper and all of a sudden, you’ve got to deal with paper. Maybe many artists—even in this show—have never dealt with handmade paper before. So, then you have to work with a master papermaker, go in the studio, play around, experiment, fail, and succeed. And I watched those failures and success happen.
DS: Can we talk just a little about Isamu Noguchi, because it’s not exactly the same with him. And you spent a long time at the museum.
BL: I was there five years. I think what attracted me to Noguchi was that he was one of the great polymaths of the 20th century. He was pretty fearless about moving between boundaries and not really caring. I think that, fundamentally, at the end of the day, his question is: what is sculpture? And he was always trying to answer that question. That question could be answered in what we traditionally call design; it could be answered in the fine art arena; it could be answered in the landscape architecture arena.
DS: Did they ever give him trouble?
BL: Of course. When he was the American representative to the Venice Biennale in 1986, his exhibition was panned because he put a lot of Akari lamps in the exhibition, and he called the show “What Is Sculpture?” Most people said, “Oh, you’re making a showroom not an art exhibition. Why are you making a commercial showroom for your lamps?” And he said, “I’m not. The lamps are sculptures. I call them Akari. They’re light sculptures.” But, you know, I think for Noguchi it did drag his career down. People couldn’t really find the right place to put him.
DS: They couldn’t get a handle on him.
BL: Unfortunately, a lot of really interesting parts of his career then fell by the wayside. For instance, his most important collaborations—which I think informed a lot of his thinking—were with Martha Graham. And of course, with Buckminster Fuller, too. He met Fuller in 1928—at a bar, I think, and they connected. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao (who was the first director of the Noguchi Museum) started an architecture firm. Their firm was based at the museum site before it became a museum. They rented part of the top floor, and they ran their architecture firm out of the space that Noguchi had—which later turned into the museum.
Graham and Noguchi probably were lovers at one point; they remained very close for over 50 years. Noguchi made some of his most interesting sculptural works thinking about the stage and thinking about bodies moving around sculpture. I think that gave him a very good understanding of spatialization. He went to do sculpture parks—starting in Jerusalem at the Billy Rose Art Garden—or later when he was thinking about his own garden, those ideas became really quite prevalent and important. He was very good at that. He knew how to place things next to each other—
Shoji Sadao, left, with Buckminster Fuller at the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Fuller created the center’s dome, one of many projects on which Mr. Sadao worked with him. Photo Credit: Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
DS: There was the idea of the human presence.
BL: The human presence—and sometimes the absence of humans, you know. It could be the tree next to a stone next to a mountain, which is important.
DS: Have you ever seen the playground here in Atlanta?
BL: I have. It’s the only one in the U.S. that actually got made. I mean, there’s the Slide Mantra (1980-96) in Miami, but that’s not—it's active, but it’s not really a whole playground. I particularly like Noguchi’s ideas about play. Later in his life, there were two areas: the idea of playgrounds—which he obsessed over since very early on, about 1929-1930, when he kept proposing things to Robert Moses, who really hated him; and he got rejected, rejected, and rejected again—and then, of course, the other thing was water: he became very interested in fountains, especially in the ’70s into the ’80s before he passed away. There were a lot of very interesting thoughts around works that would include water. He was only able to execute two major water works in Japan, which still exist in Sapporo and Osaka.
DS: Do you think it’s the same for him—the materiality?
BL: Noguchi talks about the stone speaking to him. It’s a very Japanese way of thinking—very Shinto—that everything is kind of vibrating—deer, trees—everything is, in a way, communicating with you, and you have to communicate with it. I appreciate that kind of way of engaging in the world—a hyper-aware sensitivity to what’s around. I’m not a religious person. I’m not even sure I’m a spiritual person at this point. But when I walk through nature … I think this is what Noguchi is kind of hinting at. He spent a lot of time in Japanese gardens—walking through gardens, which I think are like machines to hyper-focus you on the landscape: how you walk, how you breathe, how you take in smell. Every turn and twist is a new vista. And this is why one of your questions was about my consultancy, and why I called it Shakkei—because the idea of the borrowed landscape (shakkei), which I’m taking heavily from Noguchi, is a good way to process the world. It’s a good way to kind of understand how we should be.
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Sara Flores, Untitled (Shao Maya Pei Kené), 2025, Vegetal dyes on wild-cotton canvas, 85 9/16 x 58 11/16 inches courtesy, Whitecube, London UK
James Siena, Anion, 2023, Acrylic and graphite on linen,
75 x 59 inches, courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery, NYC
DS: You've worked with a lot of artists. Is there anyone that was particularly meaningful, challenging, joyful?
BL: There are very few times in one's career where you can kind of say, “I got there first,” and really put your finger on something before other people are willing to take that risk or they just don't see it.
There's a place called the Shipibo Conibo Center up in Harlem, and there's an Italian guy, Matteo Norzi, who runs it and who kept on inviting me there. He shows the work of artists from Peru, particularly associated with the Shipibo Conibo groups. And they are very engaged with shamanism with ayahuasca. I'm not super intrigued by psychotropic drugs, but I truly understand that world. I went to see these paintings by Sarah Flores, and I really was taken by them. They were very, very interesting. They looked like cybernetic code. They were like chip diagrams. I asked Matteo to tell me a little bit more and the process. He said she “hears” the paintings and they are downloaded from the clouds—not the internet cloud, the ones in the sky. He also told me they are made to heal people who look at them. They are also made from natural colors found from plants and materials in the Peruvian jungle. I really appreciated this kind of approach to making art.
I just kept on looking at them and I thought, okay, I know that there are things in the tourist trade that probably look similar, but these were very powerful, and they also kind of were vibrating. They have this real feeling of energy. And I sat on it and I thought about it for quite a while.
I was invited by the Austrian Cultural Forum to do a show, and I decided to work with the idea of Robin Evans––I don't know if you ever read The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (1995)––the architecture critic who basically said that drawing can't describe architecture because architecture is all about the places where drawing breaks down, the spatialization that you can't draw. The kind of uncanny spaces, darkness, shadows, things that are not in an axonometric drawing that you can't really describe. I did a show called The Projective Drawing, where I tried to take visual works that, in a way, you couldn’t really describe using language. A little bit of a play on this idea of how we describe things. And in the traditional ways of the poetics of the hand, because maybe what the drawing is can only be understood in the broader context. I showed Flores’s work there, and that was the first time it was ever in a contemporary art space.
And since that time, she will now represent Peru in the Venice Biennale next month and has had a really wonderful, beautiful ascendant moment where White Cube is showing her work and she's showing in the contemporary art space. It's very moving and amazing to be there. You know, there was no pressure. Sometimes there's a slow burn and it just took the right context, the right place.
I put her work next to James Sienna's work, I put it next to Katrín Sigurdardóttir, an Icelandic artist I know; Seher Shah, an artist from Pakistan who was living in India, and some Austrian artists. I really wanted to create a context in which her work could exist. And the other artists really loved her work. She couldn't come because she couldn't even get a visa. There’s always an issue with the ayahuasca, and the government wouldn't allow her to come. Now, fortunately, she has come to the United States the first time, but, you know, she's 73 years old, and she's literally been living in the jungle in a hut. Now, she could have a nice apartment in New York if she wanted to.
DS: Have you met her?
BL: Recently, I did. At that time, I hadn't. I've traveled in Peru, but I haven't gone into those regions where she lives.
DS: That's great.
BL: Sara is one story like that. What I've learned is that I'm not really a trendy curator. I'm not a person who is trying to find the youngest, hottest, most saleable person. I tend to sit on things for a long period of time. Another artist like that for me was Yüksel Arslan a Turkish artist, I had met in Paris in 1993. When I got to The Drawing Center, I decided I wanted to do a show with him. He also ended up in the Venice Biennale. No one would review that show at the Drawing Center, but every artist that came in was like, what is this stuff? This is crazy. I want to buy it. I want to know about it. It was amazing because through that, there was so much word of mouth. And then all of a sudden, curators are showing up and they're asking me about him, how do you know him? And I say, I met him in Paris in 1993, and I've just been thinking about him since.
Leon Gollub was another one. I didn't meet Leon. I saw Leon around New York early in my career, but I never really talked to him. Martina Batan, who worked at Feldman Gallery in Soho introduced me to his drawings at Art Basel Miami in 2007. There was one drawing called “Alarmed Dog Encounters Pink” that I really fell in love with. And that started a three-year investigation into those drawings, and, eventually, I did a big show in 2010 that won the Art Critics Award. I got to know the family very well. I got to know Nancy Spero very well. Those are the kinds of experiences that I enjoyed.
One other shift, which has happened to my art writing after many years is that I include myself more into the narrative. Since the experiences that I described above often were of long duration before anything happened, like an exhibition, I feel that describing that arc of the thinking process and the passing to time, of changing one's mind, and being thwarted in the pursuit of the work is important and plays a role in my own “art history.” I’m very comfortable as a storyteller. I'm perfectly fine with that. I'm not an art historian. Maybe I'm am not even an art critic. I may be more like an art writer. It's hard to say.
DS: What's the difference?
BL: Well, criticism might have more footnotes, might be more grounded in academic pursuits—in a kind of philosophy. I want something that's more about feel, about putting someone in a position to understand something, and to stand in front of something and feel comfortable, because I think that's one of the problems with contemporary art—that people just don't feel comfortable. When I give tours, the thing that I'm always trying to achieve is someone saying to me, “You know, I never thought about it from the perspective that you're presenting,” and that's really interesting to me.
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DS: That's great.
Leon Golub, Alarmed Dog Encountering Pink!, (2004) / © Estate of Leon Golub / Vaga, New York
BL: That's also what I'm trying to do in my writing: I want to give you the tools. Maybe I'm good at making some connections to other disciplines, because I am pretty catholic in my interests and the way that I approach things in culture in general.
But in terms of what our criticism is, I don't know. Is it the Clement Greenberg school? Where are we today? What is it that we need from our criticism? I think most of it is kind of rehashed PR language.
DS: Actually, I think it's become very political.
BL: Yes, the other part is that has a political agenda.
DS: A little knowledge is very dangerous. That's my problem with a lot of art criticism.
BL: The best review that I've ever gotten of something that I've done was by Peter Schjeldahl reviewing Leon Golub [for The New Yorker]. It's the most beautiful and most erudite piece of writing; he just cuts like a knife through all the bullshit and goes right for the jugular. Basically, he said the thing that I thought someone should say, which is why the hell show Leon Golub now, and what does that mean? He really understood it. I did two walkthroughs with him. I spent time with him. I didn't push any agenda. It was very interesting to watch him think because of the questions he was asking me and the things that he was pointing out. I really learned a lot from that process.
That's the kind of piece that I save. I've cut it out of the magazine. I would frame it and put it on my wall because it's such a great piece of writing. Peter could do that. This is the poet-critic who could do it well.
DS: Another poet whose art writing I loved was John Ashbury.
BL: Yes, Ashbury would be another one.
DS: It has to do with the description. You know, back to substance. I think he really addressed substance. Which you’ve been doing through your whole career.
BL: And Frank O'Hara too, I think, could write well. I’ve tried ekphrasis, where I've invited poets to write about specific works. That to me is less interesting, but I wanted to bring poets into the conversation around art. I commissioned a lot of fiction writers to write at The Drawing Center. Colm Tóibín did a beautiful piece about Sean Scully, but it actually has nothing to do with Sean Scully. His painting just appears over a piano. It's a wonderful piece. I got Daniel Kehlmann, who just wrote The Director, to write about Guillermo Kuitca, because he had written about maps and Guillermo had done a lot of work around maps. It's beautifully interactive. In my generation, though, I don't think that there have been so many poets that are moving into writing about art.
DS: What are we going to do about this?
BL: Well, to be honest, I think this is what we have to do. We're going to have to change our institutions because, you know, in some ways, the problem is that we have contemporary art, we have places that focus on writing, and we have places that focus on craft. We have encyclopedic museums, but they close out on certain things. The most interesting places for me are probably going to be those in which it's a larger umbrella under which many different kinds of people could be operating. Call me idealistic, a kind of romantic. I do think that we need to get back to a time where painters are reading and writers are looking at visual art and filmmakers are talking to musicians and musicians are talking to painters.
DS: When did that stop?
BL: I think in the late 60s, early 70s. I think that was the end of that moment. It also, of course, became geographical. Maybe in places like San Francisco, which had smaller communities, it might have continued a little longer. Buffalo, surely, because they had the poetics department and Hallwalls and all the people—like Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo—were communicating with some of the experimental poets and video artists. So, there were places. But we don't have Black Mountain. I don't think we're going to have that again. We don’t really have the kind of infrastructures that allow for that cross-pollination. And in universities—I mean, even in my time, in the ’80s, I was a weird one because I’d go see the visual artists. I’d go see Allan Kaprow and just knock on the door: “Hey, I know who you are. Can I hang out with you? I'm in the philosophy department.” No one was there, so I would just talk to him. Or when Iannis Xenakis, the musician, came to campus. I saw he had office hours. I just went. I didn’t understand anything he was talking about, but I was intrigued by him. When John Cage came to campus, my friend and I went to see his piece. He collaborated with an artist who made an ice sculpture with rocks that would melt over a prepared piano. It was a big piece of ice, and it took 24 hours to melt, and of course, the rocks would fall down, and the piano would sound, and it was wonderful—us and John Cage in the room at 2:00 in the morning listening to the cadence of the rocks hitting the piano strings.
DS: There are these moments. You know, they're sort of hidden. I'm glad you're talking about them.
BL: It felt to me like that unfortunately after that period of time, the poets only hung out with the poets. The filmmakers that I knew, I mean, maybe they were interested in music but they mostly wanted to talk about film.
DS: Do you think young artists now are not doing this?
BL: When I go on studio visits and I talk about books and films that I've seen I end up writing down long lists of things for people because they haven't seen any of it or they haven't read any of it. I'm not trying to show off. I don't care. But my mind works like a kind of Spotify relational database. I see something and, oh, that reminds me of the Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of 10 film (1977). Oh, you've never seen that. Well, the reason why I'm saying that is because you're going from macro to micro and you're looking at the idea of size and space.
DS: And they're thinking about something else.
BL: Yeah, and they're like, “No, I was just looking on the internet and I just was, you know, whatever.” We're very much engaged in a visual culture that is kind of circumspect. It's now its own referent, and it can basically be a closed circle. Visual work is interesting to me, but it's not enough. Because, again, I don't believe the culture can sit independent of other things. And this is coming from my philosophy background, and particularly phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. If you want to define where meaning is coming from, it's basically between your body and the world.
DS: Isn’t that the same as shakkei, the name of your company from the Japanese that means “borrowed landscape”?
BL: The spaces between, it's the in between, and that's what I've been interested in, and that's where I think my interest in pursuing relationships with multiple disciplines comes from. I talk a lot to architects. I've become very close with some major architects and I do enjoy my conversation with architects a lot. I find them to be quite fascinating because they're thinking about space. They're thinking about light.
DS: I always thought that architecture was big sculpture.
BL: Well, what did Richard Serra say? Sculpture is architecture without plumbing. It could be the reverse. But architects could also be pedantic. They have other concerns, they have other problems, but the best ones are really thinking about the relationship between the inner and the outer, nature, the environment, the site itself.
DS: And how you move within it.
BL: And how you move within it. To me, the experience that is the most important in museums is how you move through the space. But people don't think about that anymore. It's a social space; it has to be somehow socially useful. I'm more interested in that revelatory moment. You turn a corner, you see something. I've had it a couple of times. Can't say that happens a lot.
DS: Tell me about experience in a museum where you turned a corner and there was a work that was significant to you.
Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, Photo: Hufton+Crow © Studio Daniel Libeskind
BL: The best experience I ever had walking through a museum, or a space, was the Daniel Liebeskind Holocaust Museum in Berlin before it actually had any objects in it. And I will tell you that it was a very profound experience, more moving than when it did have objects. And, of course, the Holocaust is a quite freighted experience anyway.
The space had a kind of gravitas and a feel and the light and the conditions to the light. And there's that huge door that you open that's like, I don't know, 25 feet, into this large room that has a sliver of light penetrating the wall. I walked out of there in tears. It's one of the only times that I've had that kind of visceral experience.
DS: And it was without the objects.
BL: Without the objects.
DS: And then when you think about Liebeskind’s Denver Museum, it doesn't quite hold.
BL: No, for me it is a failure! I've had some funny experiences in the Denver Museum. The problem with Liebeskind as a museum person is that you can’t have these pointy structures going up 85 feet because there’ll be dust bunnies and all kinds of issues about getting a crane to get a light fixed. It's not very practical.
You know, I also installed in Zaha Hadid's building for the Broad Museum in East Lansing. I did a painting show; the walls are 45-degree angles. We had to build a wall. I was thinking about Frederick Kiesler because he had made the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery, and he put baseball bats, and he put the paintings on the end of the baseball bats. I was thinking of all possibilities, but the artist was just looking, and he said, “The paintings can't be like that; they have to be at 90-degree angles.” I said to the director, “I’m going to have to build a wall.” “Oh, Zaha doesn’t allow me to build walls.” I said, “Well, if you're going to want to show painters (this was one of the first shows in the new building)—I'm sorry, but you're going to have to build the wall. I'm going to need an interior wall because we can't show the paintings otherwise.”
DS: What do you think about the Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao?
BL: I like Bilbao as an object. I've been there. It's quite stunning when you see it down the street.
DS: It's a big sculpture; it’s a gorgeous sculpture.
BL: My ex-wife used to install there when she was at the Guggenheim. I went to see the Joseph Beuys installations that she did––the giant stag piece that's 20 feet high in the “fish gallery.” It looked like a miniature, and I just thought, it's great to have a hangar, like an airplane hangar space, to show large sculpture, but Serra’s really the only one that could fill that space. It made everything else look like a Lego toy.
DS: It’s interesting you brought up Serra, because I was just thinking about how the way we think about him has changed. You and I were probably in New York when Tilted Arc was there—the great controversy—and how the public was adamantly against it.
BL: I would bike by that every day because I came over the Brooklyn Bridge to go to high school. I thought it was just junk. I didn’t understand it at all. I surely wasn’t on his side.
DS: No, I wasn’t either. What year was this—early ’80s, right?
BL: ’82.
DS: And then you fast-forward 40 years—wow, right?
BL: Serra works best when he’s got a fairly tight ceiling at the top of the piece and it has that very disorienting effect. Anything outdoors—where you have the release—doesn’t work. It showed well at Gagosian. It showed well at MoMA. At Dia, it’s almost perfect: the right ceiling height and the right kind of lighting environment for those works—kind of moody. It gets dark, it gets light. But when it’s outdoors, or when it’s too expansive, it doesn’t work. There’s a constriction with him that you need.
The Art of Paper: Selections of Handmade Paper Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation exhibition
at the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University. Kennesaw, GA. 2026. Photo by Mike Jensen
DS: You’ve just curated a show that’s traveling—from Jordan Schnitzer’s collection. Why paper pulp?
BL: I was the co-director of Dieu Donné from 2001 to 2003, so I have experience working with paper. And of course, we ran one of the studios that made a lot of the works that make up this “medium,” especially with contemporary artists. In some ways it’s interesting to look backward to look forwards. Sue Gosin, the founder of Dieu Donné, invited me to join Cynthia Nourse Thompson and her on this project. Jordan Schnitzer, miraculously, has about 1,000 works of handmade-paper art. It’s probably the biggest collection of this type of work in the world, and surely better than any museum we could have worked from. As a curator, sometimes, one-stop shopping is fantastic because the breadth and the historical range is incredible—he has Louise Nevelson, the earliest Robert Rauschenberg that could be considered a handmade paperwork (with Ken Tyler) that we have in the show.
DS: Well, I’ll tell you the one that knocked me out, which is the Helen Frankenthaler.
BL: Yeah—the Frankenthaler is absolutely spectacular.
DS: Spectacular! Who even knew she made that piece?
BL: She actually worked a bit with handmade paper and, and in some ways, Frankenthaler is a perfect example of pulp as form, because even in her painting it’s that very diluted, poured color.
DS: But it’s actually, process-wise, completely the opposite, isn’t it?
BL: It is—but the idea is that she could pour pulp and use color in the same way. But instead of it being on top of the canvas, it was the form. It’s the actual thing. Because when you press paper, it’s all the same fibers, it’s all the same thing––it’s just dyed. What is interesting for me about the show—and what I really want to point out—is that when we say “handmade paper,” paper art, people tend to think of paper as a substrate: something we draw on, print on, use. But beyond its materiality, it’s also a method of communication—a tool for communicating. Traditionally, of course, it’s the tool for the Bible and printed language. We could go back to Sumerian tablets; clay tablets could be a kind of “paper” used to process and disseminate information.
That said, handmade paper—strangely—comes out of the same time frame as the studio glass movement, in the same place, in Wisconsin. Harvey Littleton and the people who were working on American Studio Glass were coming from that place in that moment.
DS: They were separated then.
BL: Separated, but the zeitgeist was the same: “We’re going to take it back from the factories. We’re going to make it in the garage.” It’s the garage band concept. “We’re going to do it. We can take what Weyerhaeuser Paper is doing in Tacoma, make molds, we can make little beaters—we can make handmade paper and then work with artists and experiment.”
DS: But then the artists had to make that leap as well.
BL: There were people doing it earlier working with artists in the ’40s and ’50s, particularly some of the AbEx people. I think Robert Motherwell did some things early on. Douglas Morse Howell worked with quite a few artists. He was on Long Island and eventually linked up with ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions). He was making paper for them and getting artists to go to their print studio. The printmakers and the papermakers were really pushing, and they kind of merged together. It’s a fascinating story—an American story, in a way, because the studio paper movement doesn’t really start in Europe. It’s here. It’s about taking control of the means of production—like it was in glass, like it was in ceramics. Like Peter Voulkos and those guys: “We don’t want to work in industrial ceramics—we’re just going to make pottery in our house, in smaller studios.” Ken Price—that kind of vibe. We want to do what we want to do.
DS: It’s funny because American stories are not in fashion.
BL: This show is about American innovation: all the studios we’re showing, all the collaborators we’re showing—this is a purely American system.
DS: One of the other pieces that surprised me was the William Kentridge.
BL: I don’t want to say I was responsible for that, but I had met Kentridge’s publisher, David Krut, from South Africa. I bought a Kentridge print from him when I started at Dieu Donné, and David said, “William’s going to teach at Columbia. He likes paper—why don’t you invite him to Dieu Donné?” So, I wrote him an email. I didn’t hear anything. I pushed; I wrote again. And finally, he basically said, “Thanks—I’m very busy. I don’t really have a lot of time.” And I said, “I know you like paper. Could you just come down to the studio for 15 or 20 minutes? Just look—feel it.” I was thinking about watermarks. I asked him, “Do you know how to make a watermark?” He said “No, I’ve never given that any thought.”
We showed him some historical watermark paper. He asked, “How do you do that?” And my co-director, Mina Takahashi (our artistic director), explained: you put a wire or an occlusion on the mold so that when you pull the mold, that area doesn’t fill with pulp—it creates an erased space.
He said, “Okay—could you send me three molds up to Columbia?” So, we did. About two weeks later, these beautiful wire sculptures were attached to the molds when they came back. We pulled them, it looked like a blank piece of paper—until you held it up. It was probably the least successful edition we ever made, because no one wanted to buy a portfolio of blank-looking papers—and you had to buy a light table or light box to display them.
But it was so beautiful to watch that process. I’m not great friends with Kentridge, but I did get him to come. Watching his mind turn it over in that 20-minute visit … Andy Goldsworthy also did that to me once when I worked with him on a Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center. We walked around Rockefeller Center, and I was talking to him about these flagpoles. I just watched him, and in basically 20 minutes he had a full proposal—totally ready to go. It was amazing. Astounding.
DS: It was almost like the ideas were just waiting for the right way or place.
BL: I would say that Kentridge—that was a real aha moment, one of the great moments for me personally. I just took a risk.
DS: Is he the one non-American in the show?
BL: Jordan collects everything—so there could be prints by all kinds of people. But papermaking, so far has been very much focused on the U.S. There are places now in Europe and Japan that do it, but not quite as experimental.
DS: Do you think this pulp stuff has its own physicality and integrity, and aesthetic that’s akin to the way glass does?
BL: The interesting thing about pulp is that it can do many things. It doesn’t have one overarching aesthetic—and it shouldn’t.
DS: It’s a medium.
BL: It’s a medium, and it can be used to cast, so it can look like something else.
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Mel Bochner, Blah, Blah, Blah, 2023. Cast and pigmented paper. Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. © Mel Bochner. Photography by Aaron Wessling.
DS: Like the Mel Bochner.
BL: Like the Bochner. It can have dimensions; it can be embossed or watermarked. You can pour paper pulp almost like bronze.
DS: What’s your favorite piece in the show? I told you my two!
BL: I cannot really say. I wanted to make choices that would give people a sense of the breadth of the medium. In some cases, I also had to look for pieces that would fit the curatorial thesis.
I separated the show into a couple of different areas, because I’m assuming people coming to the Zuckerman Museum may or may not know anything about handmade paper. They may not have ever seen handmade paper made. They may not even care about handmade paper. But what I want them to understand is that this medium is very facile—it can really do a lot. It has a little bit of a didactic sensibility—without knocking you over the head.
I hope someone comes in because they’re interested—and we have a great list of artists. They can see things made by fantastic contemporary artists, top-name, blue-chip artists who’ve worked in the medium. But then they’ll leave and go, “Wow, I never even felt the paper. I just thought it was something to write on or to draw on.”
DS: So, what’s next?
BL: Yeah—that’s a good question.
I’ve taken a break from being a museum director, and I would like to do that again. I really loved doing it, and I think I was good at it. And I think that, in general, my way of working—which is a broad, deep understanding of culture—might be useful in the current environment we’re in. I think my political—and in a way, utopian—aspirations for what art can do have diminished a little bit. I’m not pushing those buttons as much. That said, I believe in creativity. I believe that it’s essential to the human condition—and it’s very beneficial for people.
I do enjoy my consultancy; it’s interesting because you wake up every day and it’s a different problem you’re trying to solve. I like working with artists’ estates, and I’ve definitely enjoyed having the experience to think about legacy and to do a deep dive into one artist, or an artist’s body of work—and to think about how that positions itself in the 21st century. Legacy is important, and it’s often the thing that’s most mismanaged, to be frank, with the most unreasonable expectations.
Every artist foundation is like, “I want my artist to have a show at MoMA.” Well—that’s not going to happen with every artist, and it shouldn’t happen with every artist. Or: “We should be showing at Gagosian. We’re only showing in a small gallery.” Listen—legacy work is about lots of different things. It’s about the values that the artist propagated. It’s about what they said and wrote. It’s sometimes about who they knew, and the context they were in. And there are a lot of ways of promoting that without it all being commercially driven.
DS: How do you know when something is authentic—when you’re looking at something new for the first time?
BL: The things that have interested me… they’ve often bothered me. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. Something doesn’t sit right, or I don’t quite understand it, or it rubs me the wrong way.
DS: Or it puts you off kilter?
BL: For me, that’s a strategy of engagement—and maybe it is about authenticity—in the sense that it’s not easily digestible. There’s something there that feels like it needs more than just a quick glance to take it in. That’s my subjective view of authenticity: there’s a desire to know more. The artist is positing something—it doesn’t have to be a puzzle; it doesn’t have to be totally opaque—but there’s something there that pushes you to go further. Whether that’s that day, or 10 years from now, or 50 years from now, I don’t know. But that’s the hook for me. I look at tons of art—I’m sure you do, too. My general view of something is about two or three seconds; I’m a fast looker. I’ll run through a show, and then I’ll come back to something I want to see again. And those are the things that generally stay with me.
DS: What you need to go back to?
BL: The things I want to go back to.
DS: Maybe in this show you were going back.
BL: I was. The whole show is about going back. It’s about the things that stuck in my mind from the years at Dieu Donné.
Brett Littman is the Director of Shakkei Consulting (“borrowed landscape” in Japanese) a consulting firm that develops organizational specific strategy and solutions for non-profits and artist estates. He was the Director of the Noguchi Museum, 2018 – 2023; Executive Director of The Drawing Center, 2007–2018; Deputy Director of MoMA PS1, 2003–2007; Co-Director of Dieu Donné Papermill, 2001–2003 and Associate Director of Urban Glass, 1996–2001. Littman has personally curated more than thirty exhibitions over the last 16 years, dealing with visual art, outsider art, craft, design, architecture, poetry, music, science, and literature and was named the curator of Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center for 2019 and 2020.
Brett Littman
Photo: Deanna Sirlin
Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer from Brooklyn, New York currently living and working in Georgia. She received an MFA from Queens College, CUNY where she studied with Robert Pincus-Witten, Charles Cajori and Benny Andrews. She has received numerous honors, including a Rothko Foundation Symposium Residency, a grant from the United States State Department, a Yaddo Foundation Residency and a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Award for its Art Writing Mentorship Program. Her book She's Got What It Takes: American Women Artists in Dialogue was published by Charta Art Books, Milan, IT and New York City, NY www.deannasirlin.com
Deanna Sirlin
Photo:David Clifton-Strawn