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 in 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 specific 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; CoDirector 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 in 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? There’s a young poet I work with—their name is E Hughes—and they’re getting a PhD in philosophy at Emory, but they’ve also published two books of poetry. 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 MacLow 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 Perfoming 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 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 his 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 the kind of 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 who where —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 byalternative 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—had 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 Akaris 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, even 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. When 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 exists in Sapporoand 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 kind of 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.