Paola antonelli
curating

09.12.20. internet

Paola Antonelli is senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the Department of Architecture & Design, as well as the institution’s founding director of Research and Development.

Over more than 25 years at the museum, she’s curated shows such as: Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, Workspheres, and Design and the Elastic Mind. Most recently, she has been responsible for Broken Nature in Milan’s Triennale in 2019 and Neri Oxman: Material Ecology.

She has lectured and given talks all over the world and picked up a fistful of awards, including 2020’s London Design Medal.

In collaboration with writer Alice Rawsthorn, her latest project, entitled Design Emergency, is a series of interviews on Instagram, which investigate design’s importance during the pandemic.

In this episode we discuss: coping with the crisis at MoMA; why she co-created Design Emergency as the virus took hold; falling into curating; the importance of rejection; creating the museum’s first-ever website; and how computer code is as fragile as ceramics.

Find out more about MoMA

A view from Neri Oxman: Material Ecology