Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new exhibition of artist Carol Bove's work fills the Guggenheim's quarter-mile-long spiral rotunda. Known for her monumental steel compositions, The New York Times calls Bovet one of the country's most imaginative and esteemed sculptors. The new show moves in a reverse chronological order, reflecting on how Bovet's work has changed through the years. On the lowest level of the rotunda, it features colorful, towering sculptures made in 2026. Then, as you make your way up the spiral all the way to the top, you'll see early-2000s installations. The exhibit will be on display at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through Sunday, August 2nd. Joining me now is artist Carol Bovet. Hi, Carol.

Carol Bove: Hi, Alison.

Alison Stewart: And Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson, who organized the exhibition. It is nice to see you as well.

Katherine Brinson: Nice to see you. Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: Anybody who wants to take a look at some pictures, I took a whole bunch on Sunday, and I put them on our Instagram Stories @AllOfItWNYC. Katherine, it's such a distinct layout at the Guggenheim. What were some of your earliest conversations with Carol about how you would line the walls with her work?

Katherine Brinson: We've been working on this for a long time, for many, many, many years. Of course, it always takes some years to put together a major exhibition at the museum, but this one really has been a long labor of love and an ongoing conversation between us. Early on, there were different manifestations. At one point, I remember we work in models. We have a series of round models, where each of the ramps is laid out on a giant tabletop. We play with miniature versions of the work. I remember there was one version in the models that was completely achronological with these very intuitive pairings of the work.

Ultimately, we felt like the unwinding through time was really effective, so you step into the current creative moment for the artist, and then you trace back the origins of how she got to the current moment. There was also an element of necessity, in that the very recent works that you mentioned are large and very heavy, so it was great to have those at the bottom of the spiral. Then you have this natural feeling of ascension as the work's materiality lightens as you rise through the spiral up towards the light that's coming in from the skylight.

[crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Oh, please.

Carol Bove: Sorry. I was just going to say that it's the intention and the meaning of the building that there's a spiritual ascension. The story of my work backwards, getting lighter, just seemed to sift things in this chronological direction. We have actually been working on the show for about 10 years, but not full-time. There were some periods where it was more in the back of the refrigerator. There was COVID in the last 10 years, of course, but we've had a lot of time to really think about it. I suspected that you were wanted reverse chronological all along and that, as a curator, I just want to say you're just so great, just such a genius, and really let me play in the sandbox for eight years.

[laughter]

Carol Bove: Then applied a little bit of gentle pressure, firm pressure [laughs] to direct in your very authoritative and sensitive way.

Katherine Brinson: Well, it has been a joy to be in that sandbox, just pure joy. Carol's generosity of spirit has shone through every moment of our work together over the course of that decade. No, I do think it really helps to have some element of structure that the really broad audience that we have at the Guggenheim can orient themselves through. This was the one that had a sense of, as Carol said, revelation. Even this ecstatic ascension, which does go back to this founding idea from Hilla Rebay, our first director, and Frank Lloyd Wright, that the Guggenheim spiral should be a temple of spirit where you have this really luminous communion with art and architecture and your own imagination, and have that really transcended encounter.

Alison Stewart: How did you decide what work you would pick to be part of this exhibition, Carol?

Carol Bove: Because it was such a long period of development, a lot of the work was made for the show. The most recent work at the bottom is new, and it was built for the building. One of the features in the building is this two-story-high room. I wanted something that was really tall. It was the right scale for that room.

Alison Stewart: When you look at that piece and that first gallery, it has two different perspectives because you can be in it, and then you go up a little bit, and you can look over the side at it down. Did you think about the perspectives from people who would be looking at it from the top versus people looking at it from the bottom?

Carol Bove: Yes, I work in models, but I work in one-to-one models. I built that room in my studio so that I could get on-- In some ways, it was very lightly inscribed. I didn't have to build the entire room, but I knew where the walls were. Then there was a platform where I could stand and see what the perspective was from the higher level. The architecture is modeled, but the objects are improvised in relation to that negative space.

Katherine Brinson: I would also add that Carol really works with space as much as she works with objects. I've never known an artist be so sensitive to sight lines and the optical experience of being in a body, in an unraveling spiral. The way her decisions really surface the weirdness of the building. It's a really unusual experience.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Carol Bove: It's true. I think that people don't talk about the space that much. If we could ensure it or something, if it had some kind of commercial comprehensibility, it would be a different story. Because it is nothing and it resists language, then it doesn't really get talked about. Thank you because it's so important. Yes, the space and also our body in space, and then some of the other building blocks, aside from wanting to make something for this particular room, was to welcome the viewer and have some resting points on the ramp. I'm a sitting-down in museum zealot. It's like, this is my cause.

Alison Stewart: Right. [chuckles]

Carol Bove: I think that it can be part of the transformation of the world. Because when you're physically welcomed into a space, when you're accommodated as a human being who has a body, that means you're right. You exist, that we recognize each other, that we can then have sympathy for ourselves and sympathy for each other, right? It's a really basic but also just incredibly important accommodation.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's funny to see the couches. I was like, "That wasn't here last time I was here."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with artist Carol Bove alongside Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson. They're talking about a new exhibition that includes everything from assemblages of paperback books on wooden shelves to paper collages to towering steel sculptures, all belonging to the artist Carol Bove. I want to talk about the steel images a little bit, Katherine. They have a sense of movement. They're all draped over one another, but they're obviously static. What's interesting to you about this juxtaposition?

Katherine Brinson: Yes, I think something I got really hung up on when we were writing the wall text was the word "monumental" because, as you say, they're 14-foot high, towering totemic forms. They are made from this immensely rigid, heavy, intractable material, and yet they are so playful and kinetic. They do appear to be dancing in space. Their colors are gorgeous and glorious, but they're also slightly clashing and slightly unsettling. It's not this austere monumentality that stands on its dignity.

To go back to what Carol was saying in terms of the larger spirit of the show, it does invite you into that space. There is an interesting play with the idea of impressive or awe-inspiring scale because they're crowded into that fairly constricted space, even though there are these two partial viewpoints from the bottom, where you can see the dancing feet and the half-moon overlook, where you can see the "heads" of the sculptures. I think that's an interesting discussion we had about your play with scale.

Carol Bove: Well, in general, you can't. With monumental sculpture, it's dominating. With these or the things that I'm interested in, they tend to be more something that you empathize with, I think. I think empathy is an important entry point for them. With these large-scale works in the high gallery, you can never really get a handle on the whole. You're always seeing part of it or being part of it. I think this is a non-dominating mode, but I think this scale is monumental.

Katherine Brinson: Undoubtedly.

Carol Bove: [laughs]

Katherine Brinson: We did use it in the context as a factual statement, but they play with monumentality and anti-monumentality at the same time.

Alison Stewart: Something I thought was interesting, and I would love to get your take on it, Carol, is there were a lot of children at the exhibition.

Carol Bove: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell me what you think of that. There are children all over the Guggenheim. [laughs]

Carol Bove: Children are the best audience because they're the smartest.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What makes you say that?

Carol Bove: I don't know. They just haven't been hypnotized into some of our maladaptive ideas. They're really curious, right? I just think that if you could feel welcome in a museum-- I'm a zealot, right? I think art can change the world. I think sitting down in a museum would also add to that. Kids, of course, need to sit down. If you're a mom or a caregiver and you have little kids with you, it would help if there could be a tumbling zone that would make it easier for you to go as well. If you're a kid and then you feel welcome in a museum, then you feel welcome forever. I think there's a lot of invisible barriers with museums. There are so many people I know who have so much education, but not in art, who feel dumb in a museum. This is a problem.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you shouldn't feel dumb in a museum.

Carol Bove: Right, and people do. I think a lot of people have secondary education won't even go in a museum because it just seems too intimidating.

Alison Stewart: Where are they? Let's go get them.

Carol Bove: I know. Come. Welcome. There's plants, and there's tea. Everybody's going to be really friendly to you at the museum, at this museum.

Katherine Brinson: Carol and I are both in the trenches of parenting. We're both moms. On a practical level, we're used to being with kids in those spaces, which sometimes have an institutional formality. We were interested in breaking that down a little bit. I'd also say, in a more philosophical sense, I think a lot of our greatest artists manage to retain access to that more open-ended and flexible way of thinking that a child has, which you alluded to, that capacity for wild imagination and wonder. I think, in some ways, great work takes us back to that state.

Carol Bove: Don't you think that the kids mentor the adults-

Katherine Brinson: Totally.

Carol Bove: -in the exhibition?

Katherine Brinson: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking to artist Carol Bove and Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm in studio with artist Carol Bove and Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson. We're talking about Carol's exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum titled Carol Bove. A lot of New Yorkers, Carol, will know you from your glyph on the High Line. First of all, explain what a glyph is.

Carol Bove: Right, so glyph is the smallest unit of a language, written language. I was looking at Plaza Art. When was this? Around 2012, 2011. For some reason, got the idea that I wanted to make a letter in this Alphabet. I perceived it as an Alphabet because you know how artists will have a signature style. When you're a Plaza Art artist, you have a glyph. It's so succinct that your style needs to be legible as this one unit.

Calder has such a great glyph. There's different ways that you express your Calderness, but it's very legible. I wanted to make one of those. It had certain rules, my glyph. [chuckles] This glyph turned out that the rules are that it is a tube, round tube. Steel has a certain turning radius and can be a circle or a half circle or a quarter circle, and make a bit of a tangle out of this material painted white and very glossy. No hand. That's part of the rule. It just looks glossy. It's Photoshopped into the landscape.

Alison Stewart: We see glyphs in this exhibit. I'm curious. Lots of different colors are used. How do you decide when a color is to be used on your steel work?

Carol Bove: Well, with the glyphs, they have to be white.

Alison Stewart: Those are white.

Carol Bove: [laughs] Then the colorworks came out of this idea of, like, "Well, I'm not going to make a new letter for this Alphabet." It didn't really go that way, but that was where they came from, was trying to make the second type of glyph. The colors come from, I think-- I really couldn't say.

Alison Stewart: They just come to you?

Carol Bove: They don't just come to me. It's as if I have the feeling that there's a set of colors that I can use, but I have to discern them, that it exists, that I'm not inventing it. I have to discover them, but they already exist somewhere.

Alison Stewart: Katherine, in an interview with Vogue magazine, you said, traditionally, steel sculpture was thought as a very masculine endeavor. How does Carol disrupt that?

Katherine Brinson: I want to be careful to not be too simplistic about a kind of gender-based binary. I think something we've talked about a lot is this idea of effortlessness in Carol's work. Again, this need to not impress upon the viewer how difficult the process was, how immense the material is. Instead, that is almost deliberately erased. It's made, as you said, much more human.

People often respond to the collage sculptures, which are these manipulated steel forms, as having something of the body about them. Perhaps a draped fabric. Some people perceive them to be made of paper or a crumpled piece of paper. You're really not inviting that tradition of, as you said, domination or a demand for attention. It's more of entangling you imaginatively in that moment, which I think is a very different effect.

Alison Stewart: Carol, how do you know when a sculpture is finished?

Carol Bove: I have a voice in my stomach that says it's finished. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You just know.

Carol Bove: I hear the voice. [laughs]

Katherine Brinson: Intuition.

Carol Bove: Yes. Do you mind if I tag something on-

Alison Stewart: Of course.

Carol Bove: -hook something onto this idea that a lot of the sculptures are illusionistic? They look soft, but they're hard. People want to verify the material by touching them, [laughs] which I am so flattered by, because that means it's working. It's like that you're drawn to it. You want to touch it. Again, as I've already stated, I believe in people being whole and being an embodied awareness. If people touch the sculptures, then they're going to get damaged. This is why we have a tactile gallery-

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask about that.

Carol Bove: -in the museum so you can go touch. You can verify what the surface would be like and explore with your hands and manipulate the materials and feel what they would be.

Alison Stewart: Kath, I was going to ask about the touching library. Describe the touching library to me, which is part of this exhibit. Exactly.

Katherine Brinson: It absolutely is a very core part of the exhibit. If anyone's visited the Guggenheim before, you might remember that halfway through the second ramp, there's a little keyhole-shaped door. It's very Alice in Wonderland. It's always this very cozy, little library room, a reading room, where we have supplemental material to help you understand the shows and take a breath. Carol has really transformed it into this wholly interactive space.

Not only can you touch a peacock feather or a piece of driftwood or the painted surface of the manipulated steel elements, you can also create some of the beadwork that's featured. There's a little mini-hydraulic press that both adults and kids have been very delighted by so far. You can read the books that are featured in Carol's early bookshelf sculptures because it is very tempting to interact with that material, although they very much become sculptural elements in those early assemblages.

Carol and I have talked a lot about how, while, as mentioned, it is very necessary that we keep our work safe and don't encourage touching just because the surfaces are really, really fragile. To achieve that illusion of a suede skin finish in the paint takes an enormous amount of effort. They can feel this sense of subtle loss or frustration that you can't fully bodily interact with things. We hope to redirect that desire to the tactile library, as we're calling it. I have to say, the response has been surprisingly glowing.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Katherine Brinson: Just the sheer novelty of being able to have that insight into what it feels like to work with materials in the studio. Carol's really generously provided all of this material from her studio. Even your colleague, as we were waiting to join you, was speaking so eloquently about the experience of the tactile library. We were very happy to hear it.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you about one of your older pieces before we run out of time. From 2011, you have The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, and you use all kinds of different medium in a piece like that. A seashell. What drew you to those objects at that time?

Carol Bove: I think I was working with ambivalence about-- Well, I could enter it in so many different ways, but one of the things is ambivalence about work that I had struggled with as a younger person that I thought, I don't know, that I disavowed in the Bay Area where I grew up. There was this junk assemblage artwork that I knew about. When I came to New York in the early '90s, then I disavowed it.

Then, after having been here for a while, I'm always very drawn to the thing that I'm embarrassed about that seems like a taboo. It was partly being drawn towards a taboo. At the time, it's always hard to remember how trends unfold and how certain things look good now, but they didn't look good at the time. At the time, surrealism was pretty taboo. Now, it seems like people don't have that same inhibition about it. At the time, surrealism seemed off-limits. That made it very sexy to me.

Alison Stewart: It was really interesting because you see these things at the top of the rotunda of driftwood and peacock feathers. Then you remember six floors down, I was looking at these huge steel sculptures. When you look at it as a whole, I'm just curious, like, what do you feel about your work when you see it as a whole 25 years?

Carol Bove: I was scared to look at the early work.

[laughter]

Carol Bove: Of course, as an artist, we want to look at the latest thing. This was part of Katherine's wise counsel, where she was like, "Okay, so you've been playing for a while. Now, why don't we do this chronology?" Also, she really advocated for the storytelling of demonstrating how one thing folds into or--

Katherine Brinson: Unravels back.

Carol Bove: Yes, yes, one thing leads to the next, or unravels, depending on which way you're going. She told me, I hadn't really thought about it because I don't think about myself from the outside, but that people-- I don't know. Some people that she knows think that there was a radical pivot in my work. She wanted to demonstrate that there actually wasn't, that, actually, one thing just follows from the next.

Alison Stewart: I've been speaking--

Carol Bove: Is that right?

Katherine Brinson: Yes, absolutely. No, I think just because things look very different on a superficial level doesn't mean that the way they're functioning as artworks is that different.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibit is Carol Bove. I've been speaking with artist Carol Bove and curator Katherine Brinson about the new exhibition at the Guggenheim. It's on display through Sunday, August 2nd. Thank you so much for being with us.

Carol Bove: It's been a pleasure.

Katherine Brinson: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: On the way, Sibyl is a duo consisting of sisters Chloe and Lily Holgate. We'll hear them perform live in WNYC Studio 5. That's right after the news.