Anne Hromadka Greenwald
It was pretty clear Anne Hromadka Greenwald was destined to be a curator from her first day in preschool. “My mom tells the story that my first time in preschool she was hoping for that archetypal moment where she drops you off and the kid is wailing,” Greenwald laughs. “She made it halfway down the hall to leave, and she hears this ‘mom!’ And she turned around and I had my little hand on my hip and I said, ‘Mommy, kids have worked very hard on the art. Watch where you step.’ Because all along the hallway was all of this art drying.”
Growing up in Jewish in Texas, Greenwald found herself in a blend of two storytelling cultures with deep roots in community. She had the intrinsic toolset for a justice-minded curator before she ever began her art studies. Today, Greenwald is a Los Angeles-based curator and art advisor heading AMH Art Advisory, curating for events like the Jerusalem Biennale For Contemporary Jewish Art and working with artists including Ruth Weisberg, Bill Aron and Carol Es, among many others.
“ Social Justice, Judaism, community storytelling… all planted the seeds for creative work that I would be doing later, which is I think the heart of curation. It's about education, it's about advocacy and it's about telling a really good story.”
The projects and artists Anne Hromodka Greenwald is drawn to carry some combination of advocacy, storytelling, Judaism and community focus. “Oftentimes when I'm considering taking on a new client artist or new project, I weigh it against those things,” she says. “So if the project is secular and isn't Jewish in nature, does it have the social justice and advocacy component? If it is Jewish, is it aligning with what our interests are and beliefs are within the larger Jewish sphere, because those also could be very broad.”
Exhibits she curates for Hebrew Union College explore what it means to be Jewish from a multitude of fascinating perspectives. Abracadabra: Myth, Magic and Monsters delved into a healthy tension with the occult in Judaism, while the current show, Eshet Hayil: A Woman of Valor offers artists and writers the opportunity to reinterpret in a contemporary light the poem based on Proverbs 31 that praises women.
“[Eshet Hayil is] traditionally said every Friday night as part of the Jewish Shabbat ritual. The husband typically says it to the wife,” Greenwald explains. “Every week the husband was being told — in a time when that is not typically normal — that you should turn to your wife and say, ‘You are amazing for all of these reasons, and I'm going to give you praise and I'm going to acknowledge you.’”
To a contemporary reader, the piece quickly becomes problematic, as it uses marriage and childbirth as prime reasons for praise, and only takes cisgender women into account.
“One of the amazing things about Judaism is that we are taught that dissect and to deconstruct and that is actually a deep, deep important value in our tradition, and that you shouldn't just take things because that's what they are, but you should look for the meaning underneath,” Greenwald says. “This was an opportunity for artists and writers to get together and to reimagine those words to think about it in 2019 and 2020. How do we honor our women?”
This drive to explore “the meaning underneath” defines Greewald’s body of work. From Windows on Death Row: Art From Inside and Outside the Prison Walls, to 7,567mi for the Jerusalem Biennale, Greenwald curates art moments brimming with textured human stories and a restless energy to spark change.
Greenwald brings this perspective to bear when she examines the art world we have inherited, particularly Western art and its ideas of what is “good.” “People are really trying to take stock of the systematic racism that's pervasive throughout everything in the United States, and the museum field is definitely not immune at all,” she says. Museums originate in ideas of Eurocentric superiority and of casting other cultures in the light of being “primitive” and “exotic.”
“Museums come out of this roughly Victorian — but it actually goes back to Renaissance era — concept of creating … a cabinet of curiosity,” she explains. “Especially coming out of Europe, they are purchasing things that they think are oddities and exotic, and we know that those are code words now for racist acts where you were taking things that deeply matter to an indigenous person of wherever those items are rooted and you are taking them away from those individuals, and then putting them on your wall like they’re trophies literally of your conquest.”
Similarly, the disciplines of art history and art theory are deeply rooted in white European ideals and have been marked from the beginning with antisemitic, racist ideas of what is good and what artists have the capacity to create good art. “At some point in my schooling, a professor mentioned one of the key things for them when they walked through a museum was to notice where artwork or objects created by indigenous people were displayed and kept,” Greenwald says. “Were they isolated into small galleries like side galleries? Were they placed in the basement? … And so, it's one of the markers that I've always thought of as I've walked through museum spaces, and I'm often shocked.”
As we look toward a post-COVID art world and what it might bring, Greenwald takes a cue from the recent past, specifically the 2008 economic crisis. “There was an interesting shift online that happened at that moment for the arts where a lot of artists realized, ‘I need to be supporting myself and not reliant on galleries,’ because as galleries closed,” she says. “They couldn't necessarily be confined in that same commercial relationship, and something needed to shift. And so there was an expansion of artists selling their own works online … the more artists that could sell online through these portals, they start challenging auction houses. So all of these institutional money streams start to get challenged in a really interesting way online, and it starts to democratize it in a different way. I think we're poised for sort of a similar shift where some of this virtual expansion of space … a little bit of that power is going to shift away from those physical locations, and be placed back into the hands of individuals.”
As she continues to explore digital realms and the future of curation, she holds true to the throughline of her life and career that was born from her Texas childhood — a search for social justice, community and story.
“It's going to be about telling a good story that's interesting and captivating, recognizing that all stories are inherently political,” she says. “By posing a story you're taking a stand. The best I can do is make sure that the stories I'm going to tell and the stance that I want to hold will feel good to me today, tomorrow, in years to come. Especially when my child becomes more aware of the stories her mom is telling the world.”
