Strange Fire

Q&A: Tamara Schenkenberg

By Jess T. Dugan | April 7, 2022

Tamara H. Schenkenberg is curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. Since joining the Pulitzer in 2012, she has organized a wide range of exhibitions, including Zarina: Atlas of Her World; Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work; Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form (co-curated with Sharon Hecker); Fred Sandback: 64 Three-Part Pieces; and most recently a retrospective of the artist Hannah Wilke. Her primary focus is on modern and contemporary art, with research interests in identity and displacement, as well feminist practices. Before arriving at the Pulitzer, Schenkenberg held a graduate curatorial fellowship and curatorial assistant positions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she worked on exhibitions of postwar German art. A native of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Schenkenberg was a Fulbright scholar at the Free University of Berlin and earned her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jess T. Dugan: Hello Tamara! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. We have so much to talk about, but before we get into what you’re working on currently, I’d love to hear about your background. What originally drew you to curatorial practice, and what was your path to getting to where you are today?

Tamara Schenkenberg: Hello Jess, and thanks so much for inviting me!

I think there’s a strong connection between my own lived experience and the professional life I’ve led. The earliest formative event for me was the outbreak of war in my homeland of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. I vividly remember, just before the fighting started, the spread of disinformation, which aimed to justify horrific acts of discrimination and persecution. Even as a young adult I recall being keenly aware of these deeply misleading narratives—and images—that were offered up as truths and their power to swiftly normalize terror and violence.

As a result of these experiences, I became interested in the intersection between persecution and persuasion, and the role of the arts within that dynamic. This led me to a PhD in twentieth-century German art, and specifically to artists whose work engaged with grand national narratives. As a curator, my practice has shifted more toward the contemporary, yet I remain deeply invested in work that examines our relationship to power and am drawn to artists who open up spaces for critical thinking, especially on issues we’ve been socialized to take for granted.

JTD: What initially draws you to a particular artist or group of artists?

TS: That’s difficult to put into words. It’s a process that is often visceral. If I feel myself being moved by an object, idea, or story that feels urgent, authentic, and compelling, I know I’m on the right path.

JTD: You’ve been a curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, MO since 2012, where you’ve curated a wide range of exhibitions, including solo presentations by Ruth Asawa, Medardo Rosso, Fred Sandback, Zarina, and, most recently, Hannah Wilke. The Pulitzer is a very specific kind of museum, and because of its focus and resources, allows for in-depth research, expansive exhibitions, and robust publications that play an important role in advancing the scholarship around the artists you work with. Could you expand upon your experience at the Pulitzer over the past decade? What has this particular institution made possible for you, and by extension, for the artists you have worked with?

TS: One of Pulitzer’s values is to act with intention and care in different realms and toward different constituencies, including the artists. We try to operate from a place of deep appreciation for the artists and their work, and express this by not rushing the process of learning, listening, looking, and researching. The Pulitzer has also afforded me the opportunity, along with the artists I work with, to always consider art in terms of its spatial encounter with the museum visitor. I’ve had the great privilege to work in a building designed by Tadao Ando, who creates spaces that encourage careful thinking about how we relate to art and architecture. This context has made me embrace the installation of objects as a rigorous practice. Elements of visual and spatial storytelling are key to my work as a curator and play a role in how I create narratives and meaning. The artists we work with are also always inspired by the opportunity to work in an architecturally rich setting, which is always rewarding.

Working at the Pulitzer has also been fulfilling because the organization takes the work of exhibition-making as one activity within a larger network of inquiry. We think about art’s role in society, and that’s complemented and amplified across departments in programming and public engagement, among others. I’ve learned so much from this creative exchange between colleagues.

As a non-collecting institution, the Pulitzer is unusual in that its focus is not solely on contemporary art—we also occasionally present historical exhibitions. I’ve been grateful for the chance to collaborate and engage with scholars across different areas of expertise, including the study of 19th-century Japanese drawing and printmaking. This has allowed us to reimagine historical objects outside of their customary encyclopedic framework and think critically about how to bridge the past and present.

Finally, working at the Pulitzer has made it possible for me to invite an array of voices into our exhibitions program. I’ve been grateful to be able to develop projects that focus on underrecognized narratives in art history and artists who have been largely overlooked or who are well-known but understudied.

JTD: Let’s talk about your most recent exhibition, “Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake,” which was on view from June 4, 2021 through January 16, 2022. You write that her work “embraces the vitality and vulnerability of the human body as essential to experiencing life and connecting with each other.” As a full disclaimer, I had the privilege of walking through this exhibition with you twice, and each time I was blown away by the depth of your knowledge, the extent to which you were deeply engaged with her work both emotionally and intellectually, and your generosity of both time and spirit—so, thank you for that. Could you talk about this exhibition, including how it came to be, the ideas around which it is organized, and your experience putting together the first major presentation of her work in over a decade?

TS: It’s always a thrill to see an exhibition with an artist—I learned so much from your observations and questions, so thank you in return.

I’ve known of Wilke’s groundbreaking feminist practice since graduate school, primarily in photography and video. But the project really started once I came across her work in sculpture—primarily in clay, but also latex, kneaded erasers, and chewing gum. There were also fascinating works on paper, and with paper, that brought into view a practice that was formally inventive and conceptually rigorous. Together, these aspects led to new questions and made me realize that although Wilke is in many ways a well-known and influential artist, her practice had been understudied.

The key idea that guided the project was that Wilke made art to affirm life. And that she did this by focusing on the body—both reveling in its vitality and vulnerability and calling on us to see it as a source of pleasure and a vehicle for personal and political liberation, rather than as a source of shame, as we’ve been socialized to believe.

It was a thrill and an honor to develop a comprehensive presentation of Wilke’s groundbreaking work and also to have the opportunity to publish a catalogue with remarkable contributions by artists, curators, and art historians who have opened up her practice to new interpretations.  

JTD: Many of the themes present in Wilke’s work—gender inequality, sexuality, authentic discussions around the female body, and pleasure as a fundamental and life-affirming aspect of being human, as you mentioned—are issues that are still being grappled with today by both artists and society at large. What was it like to curate this exhibition now? In what ways did you have to re-contextualize this work for the current moment?

TS: To begin with, it was important for me to communicate that feminism is not a monolith—it continues to evolve in many directions amid ongoing struggles for equity.

It was also important to make clear that Wilke advocated for a frank attitude toward all parts of the body. And that in particular the references to the vagina in her work—which had long been taboo—are a vital part of her legacy of innovation as an artist and feminist. Wilke took what society had declared shameful, tasteless, and inferior and reclaimed it as something positive and empowering—all while giving it a beautiful form. One of her motivations was to be more inclusive and to open the art world up to more people on the basis of gender.

Along with many of her peers in the 1960s and 70s, Wilke directly linked the vagina to her experience of being a cisgender woman. Foregrounding that historical context was key, as was an acknowledgment that the intervening decades have brought an understanding of a much broader spectrum of relationships between anatomy, gender, and sexed embodiment.

The experience of the exhibition was also informed by the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, which powerfully reminded us of the vulnerability of our bodies. With that as the backdrop, Wilke’s Intra-Venus photographs and drawings, in which she lays bare the physical changes caused by cancer, gained renewed potency and poignancy. Her unique blend of unflinching honesty and wit, and persistent, life-affirming vitality—even in the light of cancer—prompted meaningful reflection and conversations with our visitors.

JTD: When we were walking through the show together, you shared with me how your work as a curator allows you to ask questions and pursue ideas that are deeply connected to your own life and experiences. As an artist, I’m very familiar with this connection, but I’m curious to hear more about it from the curatorial side. Could you expand upon the ways in which your own life and experiences influence your curatorial work, and vice versa?

TS: As I mentioned at the outset, my earlier life has definitely informed my work as a curator. And the artists I’ve been engaged with—the ideas that are revealed through the study of their work—continue to profoundly shape my own perspective.

Every project I work on leaves an imprint on how I view the world. Working on the Ruth Asawa exhibition, for example, caused me to reflect on what it means to be an engaged citizen. Studying Mona Hatoum and Zarina added new layers of how I think about displacement and exile. Spending several years exploring Wilke’s practice made me appreciate the importance of beauty and pleasure. I’m now working on an exhibition with the artist Faye HeavyShield, whose practice is rooted in her cultural context as a Blackfoot woman from the Kainai territory. I’m inspired by her embrace of simple materials and means to create highly poetic experiences that reflect her relationship to land, family, and community.

I have learned so much from each of these artists. It’s a privilege to think deeply about their work and bring it to the lives of our visitors.

JTD: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tamara!