Carlos Basualdo visited Dallas for the first time in October with interest in seeing the Nasher Sculpture Center, a prized small museum. It mingles 20th-century European sculpture by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti with contemporary works by American artists like Arlene Shechet and Carol Bove.
“I fell in love with the building and the garden,” said Basualdo, a veteran curator who has spent most of his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
He will be returning to the Nasher on May 12 with the title of director, his first time overseeing an institution.
The Nasher is relatively intimate, with a collection of about 500 works and an annual operating budget of about $13 million, but it has long commanded an outsize reputation for its holdings. It is housed in a jewel of a building: a light-flooded, travertine-and-glass structure by Renzo Piano. From the museum’s entrance you can see, in a nearly seamless glance, through the interior and across the length of the sculpture garden out back.
“When I walked into the place, coming out of the street, it was super-powerful,” Basualdo said. “It’s open, it’s very present, it’s not ostentatious, it’s generous, it’s full of light.
“That is what culture should be. It’s very unique in today’s world, where there is so much noise and chitchat.”
Born in Rosario, Argentina, Basualdo is a slender, bearded man of 60 who commutes to work on a bicycle. He studied literature with the intent of being a poet and never took an art history course.
His interest in museums and curating, he said, was fostered by Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian curator who gave a new stature to non-Western art history, and died in 2019. They worked together on the Documenta 11 art show, in Kassel, Germany, in 2002.
Basualdo is known for his exhibitions of Bruce Nauman, the American sculptor, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, a pioneer of the Italian movement Arte Povera. He also organized the show “Dancing Around the Bride” (2012), which explored the influence of Marcel Duchamp on four American artists — Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham — who rejected the expressionism of the 1950s and pushed art to new philosophical heights.
In 2021, Mr. Basualdo co-curated the lauded Johns retrospective “Mind/Mirror,” which opened simultaneously in Philadelphia and at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Carlos weaves tales of great complexity and contradiction into seductive narratives,” said Elizabeth Easton, the director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, where Basualdo was awarded a fellowship in 2013.
The Nasher opened in October 2003 in a sun-baked, concrete stretch of downtown that soon became known as the Dallas Arts District. Since then, the city has become more diverse. Basualdo said one of his challenges would be making sure that Latino, South Asian and African American communities feel like they have a home at the museum.
He borrowed a line from Anne d’Harnoncourt, the former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to express his vision: “The job of a museum is not to bring art down, but to lift people up.”
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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