Issue 10, Shape of Influence

Adrienne Edwards

Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography YOUN KIM

Questions about how performance moves through the museum shape much of Adrienne Edwards’s thinking. Live work becomes an institutional test, shaped by timing, resources, and the conditions of the space itself. In this conversation, Edwards reflects on how museums hold performance, how audiences move within it, and how attention to presence defines the experience.

PLUS MAGAZINE Your work has consistently engaged with performance. Do you recall the first performance that stayed with you, and when it became clear that movement, sound, and presence could function as a way of thinking, not just a form to be presented?

ADRIENNE EDWARDS There are performances you encounter as a child that spark an early interest in art, culture, and expression. That interest came into clearer focus in my early 20s, just after I arrived in New York for graduate school. I saw Ralph Lemon perform what would later become the first work in his Geography trilogy. At the time, it was presented at 651 Arts as part of BAM, in what is now the BAM Harvey Theater, which remains one of my favorite theaters in the city. That performance completely moved me. You could feel him questioning everything within a single dance, drawing together multiple points of reference without resolving them. Years later, through working with Ralph, I came to understand why that moment stayed with me. He had disbanded his modern dance company and was beginning to shift his practice. What we were witnessing was a deeply trained body undoing modernist choreography in front of the audience. That act of dismantling marked a turning point, and it has stayed with me ever since.

P How has your thinking around performance shifted over time?

AE I think of it as far more expansive. I often find performance in places where it isn’t expected. I fundamentally believe that everything is performing.

P Can you elaborate on that?

AE At its core, performance is about animatedness. It involves the body, its relation to space, and our experience of time. All of this is performative.

Thinking this way draws attention to presence and awareness, including sensual experience and how we register ourselves alongside others. When you enter a museum, you step into a performative space. Walking through New York carries the same charge. I’m interested in stretching our sense of what constitutes performance because it sharpens the awareness when we arrive at a theater and take our seats. Artists such as Tino Sehgal and David Hammons work with this idea in complex ways. Hammons might be performing late at night, unseen, yet the event still takes place. That openness keeps me attentive to my surroundings and to my place within them.

P In terms of institutional structure, and from your experience, what shapes how live or time-based projects appear and how museums make room for them?

AE Museums have always been capacious spaces. Performance has been present in museums since at least the 1960s and 1970s. What shifts over time are the conditions, resources, and visibility that shape how it appears.

At times, performance occupies entire floors and requires substantial institutional support. At other moments, it emerges through informal programming. These choices reflect how institutions understand artists and artistic practices.

In the early 2000s, there was a renewed investment in performance. Many artists working across disciplines had reached a point where their work could be seen in its full scope. Joan Jonas’s recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was a clear example. It arrived at the right moment. Time matters, both historically and within an artist’s career.

P And thinking about audiences, what do their responses reveal, and how does that shape the way you design the experience?

AE I often visit exhibitions I’ve organized incognito, spending time watching how people move through them. One of the most moving experiences was during “Edges of Ailey.” Some people danced in the galleries. Others lingered quietly. Some stood before the AIDS Memorial Quilt panels honoring dancers lost to HIV/AIDS and cried. The emotional range was striking.

I don’t begin exhibitions by thinking about scale or attendance. I start with an artist or an idea that feels urgent. With Ailey, the question was how to tell the story of an ephemeral form differently, in a way that allows people to feel proximity, not simply receive information. I always return to how I want people to feel in space; exhibitions are like stages. When they work, viewers are not outside the scene; they are inside it.

P At what moments does a project become meaningful for you?

AE That is impossible to define. I once collaborated with Pope.L on a 25-hour performance reading John Cage’s Silence. Different people read in 20 minute shifts, day and night.

At two in the morning, it might be just the reader, the artist, and me. What became clear was that the readers themselves were the audience. They were participants and witnesses to their own experience. It changed how I understood live art.

P When an exhibition comes together, what do you hope it might make possible for those who encounter it?

AE I hesitate to overdetermine what a work of art should do. Each audience arrives with their own experience. Institutions, artists, and viewers all shift in different ways. If anything, I hope people are moved. A museum might expand its capacity for experimentation. An artist’s practice might shift. Someone might leave with a changed understanding of the world. That is enough.

Shape of Influence is a special feature in Issue 10 highlighting four figures shaping New York’s contemporary art landscape.