How a High Line Curator Keeps Up With Art in Multiple Cities

New York Times

26-05-2025

Since joining the High Line as the director and chief curator of High Line Art in 2011, Cecilia Alemani has steered the elevated park's public-art program, commissioning works and performances and helping to foster civic engagement along its 1.45 miles.
But her reach extends beyond the wildly popular greenway. Alemani curated the exhibit 'Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting' at Gagosian's West 24th Street gallery, which is open through June 14. Moving past the New York City limits, she was the artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, is curating the upcoming Site Santa Fe International and is working on a project for a new Paris institution slated to open in the fall of 2026.
Alemani, 48, lives in the East Village with her husband, the New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, and their 9-year-old son, Giacomo. These are edited excerpts from phone interviews over seven days in late April that took her from downtown Manhattan to Chicago and back.
Wednesday: Hitting the Lower East Side
After dropping off my son at school, I went to the gym, then spent the morning at home doing office work. In the late afternoon, I went out to galleries on the Lower East Side, including Participant Inc, Magenta Plains and Bridget Donahue. We ended up at Perrotin for an exhibition by the Colombian artist Iván Argote, who has a major piece on the High Line, this giant pigeon called 'Dinosaur.' His show at Perrotin brings together more kind of guerrilla actions in the public space, including videos of him repairing sidewalks or dressing up existing statues.
Thursday: Art Marathon in Chicago
I woke up very early to catch a plane and go to the art fair Expo Chicago, where I was invited to give a talk. I don't go to Chicago that often, so I went a day earlier to catch a million shows in a very short time.
I started with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where they had an exhibition by a collective from Uganda called Wakaliga Uganda. They produce action movies on incredibly low budgets, like, $200. Then I walked across to the Neubauer Collegium, where there was an exhibition by Betye Saar. It showcased drawings and archival materials and dresses from the 1970s, when she worked as a costume designer.
I then took a cab to the Arts Club of Chicago for a very nice show of a Lebanese artist called Huguette Caland, and after that I went to an exhibition by the filmmaker Arthur Jafa at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. I ended my exhibition day at the Art Institute of Chicago. There was a very lovely exhibition of Frida Kahlo's time in Paris in the late 1930s. It brought together art and also lots of archival materials, documents and photographs. Walking around, I stumbled upon probably de Kooning's masterpiece, a painting called 'Excavation' that brings together abstraction and figuration in a very innovative way.
As I do all this, I basically spend half of my time on the phone, answering emails or text messages and trying to coordinate with my teams. I can never let go, unfortunately, of digital communication. But it's also the exciting part of my job, to actually produce things and see them realized.
Friday: Talking Art
I spent the morning and afternoon just doing emails and working from my hotel room. My job involves very immediate communications, but I also have to write a lot, and review essays and texts.
Then I went to Expo. It was quite refreshing to see many great presentations from Chicago galleries but also international ones. We had our talk, which was myself, Myriam Ben Salah, the chief curator and director of the Renaissance Society, and Julieta González, the head of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. We discussed the role of international curating — I'm Italian, Myriam is from Tunisia, and Julieta is from Venezuela, so thinking about what it means personally for us to work in America, but also what kind of perspective we can bring that is slightly different from other colleagues', or what are the main discrepancies or distinctions between curating in America and in the rest of the world. Afterward I went to the airport.
Saturday: Artless, Almost
The weekend is for time with our son, but unfortunately I had to do some work as well. Maurizio Cattelan, a dear friend, asked me to write a piece for the catalog of a show that he's doing in Portugal.
Sunday: Wizardry on Broadway
My son and I went to 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' on Broadway. It was refreshing to do something that was not a museum! He was eating all those weird Harry Potter jelly beans with flavors like vomit and booger.
Since we were in Times Square, we visited my friends Marco Boggio Sella and Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, who are curating a show, 'R U Still Painting???,' in an abandoned office floor nearby. It's what I love about New York — you can see exhibitions in galleries and museums, but then there are always these pop-up shows, more grass-roots initiatives, often put together by artists.
Monday: Pounding the High Line Pavement
I had a very nice walk with Alvaro Barrington, whom we're going to show next year. We often show the High Line to artists by walking it and seeing how people interact. I checked on two major commissions, Mika Rottenberg and Tai Shani, we're installing at the High Line, then I went to Gagosian, where we had to do shots for the catalog. After that I went to the New Museum gala honoring the gallerist Paula Cooper, at Cipriani South Street.
Tuesday: Inside Voices
In the early afternoon I had a public conversation with Rosana Paulino, a Brazilian artist who made a beautiful mural on the High Line and also has a new show at Mendes Wood. Then I gave a tour of the de Kooning show for participants in the Hill Art Foundation's Teen Curators program. Hill Art is a nonprofit in Chelsea, so they are very much our neighbors. We often collaborate, and I often give them tours. The rest of the day is basically doing a million emails [laughs].