Conversation with Sharon Lockhart and Kitty Scott

Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964, Norwood, Massachusetts, US) creates installations, photography, film, painting and sculpture centered on the compelling and complex interactions between the various media and forms she employs, histories she encounters, and the communities and people with whom she collaborates.

In 2017, Lockhart represented Poland at the 57th Venice Biennale with her multidisciplinary project, Little Review. Solo exhibitions include: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Augarten, Vienna; The Jewish Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fonzadione Fotografia Modena, Italy; Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal; and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. Lockhart’s films have been presented in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, FID Marseille, Berlin Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival. Lockhart has been awarded the Herb Alpert Award, Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, D.A.A.D. Artist in Residence Fellowship, Berlin, Mike Kelly Foundation Artist Project Grant, and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, among others. Lockhart lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kitty Scott is a curator, writer and senior arts administrator. She is currently Strategic Director at Shorefast and Fogo Island Arts. Former Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, she has also served as the Carol and Morton Rapp Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Director of Visual Arts at The Banff Centre, Chief Curator at Serpentine Galleries, and curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada.

She has curated exhibitions of artists such as Francis Alÿs, Janet Cardiff, Paul Chan, Peter Doig, Geoffrey Farmer, Theaster Gates, Brian Jungen, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ken Lum, Gordon Matta-Clark, Scott McFarland, Silke Otto-Knapp, Ron Terada, and Jin-me Yoon. She co-curated the Liverpool Biennial (with Sally Tallant) (2018), presented Geoffrey Farmer’s project at the Canada Pavilion for the Venice Biennale (2017) and was an agent for dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Kassel, Germany.

She has written extensively on contemporary art for catalogues and journals including Parachute, Parkett, and Canadian Art. Scott has contributed to numerous books on curatorial studies and written texts for monographic publications on the work of Matthew Barney, Peter Doig, Brian Jungen, Adam Pendleton, and Daniel Richter; and for the publication Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture (Phaidon, London, New York, 2010). As an independent curator, she has worked on numerous exhibitions including Gordon Matta-Clark: Line of Flight (2020), Bankside Browser (2000) for Tate Modern, London, and Universal Pictures (1999) at the Melbourne International Biennial.

Scott organized the curatorial symposium “Are Curators Unprofessional?” (2010) at The Banff Centre and edited the publication Raising Frankenstein: Curatorial Education and Its Discontents (Koenig Books, Cologne, 2010). She was the Canadian coordinator for the Seventh International Istanbul Biennial (2001) and also worked on the inaugural SITE Santa Fe Biennial (1995). Scott has taught at numerous institutions including the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.