NADA x Artnet Galleries: Curator Dominic Molon Picks Six Artworks He’d Love to Stay Home With
The RISD Museum curator also shares his favorite quarantine escapes from a weekly quiz night to a biography of Bob Fosse he's diving into.
Now through June 20, Artnet Galleries is partnering with the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) to showcase exhibitions from 180 of NADA’s members. You can explore all participating galleries and their online exhibitions here.
Every other week, we’ll be bringing you a specially curated selection of highlights picked by an expert. For this edition, we look to Dominic Molon, RISD Museum’s Richard Brown Baker curator of contemporary art. At RISD, Dominic both develops and shepherds the museum’s collection of contemporary art which encompasses paintings, sculptures, and new media.
Prior to his position at the RISD Museum, Dominic acted as the chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, and before that, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Over the past twenty years, he has organized exhibitions for several prominent living artists, including Martin Boyce, Liam Gillick, Sharon Lockhart, and Wolfgang Tillmans
We asked Dominic to select his favorite “six artworks to stay at home with.” See his picks below, and read on to learn more about how he’s passing time in quarantine.
Six Artworks To Stay At Home With:
Q & A:
Can you choose one of your selected artworks and tell us why you would want to live with it?
Providence-based Sheida Soleimani’s Carter Doctrine (2018) is characteristic of her provocative work contemplating the complicated relationship between the Western and Middle Eastern cultures and regimes— it is a difficult image, but one whose complex composition would prompt endlessly fascinating family conversations with both my 6-year-old son and my 74-year-old father-in-law.
What music are you listening to now while at home?
With a rambunctious child in constant performance-mode, I’ve been listening to Harold Budd, Michael Nyman, Colin Newman, Eno-Moebius-Roedelius, Bruce Gilbert, Harmonia, and Brian Eno to help me focus. The fourth movement of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony with its sublime vocal arrangement of Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song” has been especially therapeutic.
What book(s) would you recommend reading during quarantine?
It’s been an interesting exercise reading Sam Wasson’s biography of Bob Fosse (Fosse) in the midst of our current predicament. Its subject’s full-tilt approach to dance, filmmaking, and life provides an odd bit of escapism for a moment defined by necessarily hermetic restraint.
What experience at home has provided you with the most respite or relief from all of the terrible news?
My wife and me joining old Chicago friends to resume a weekly pub quiz that was interrupted by moves to St. Louis in 2010 and then Providence in 2013 has provided silly drunken weeknight fun. So… put 1 in the win column for virtual social access.
What has been the most impactful movie/TV show you’ve watched lately?
Watching HBO’s Chernobyl mini-series and the harrowing 1985 film Come and See was a chastening reminder of even bleaker moments and events in human history. Conversely, catching up on seasons of The Great British Baking Show has been a calming reminder of the virtues of humble creativity and the oddly reassuring power of 12 strangers competing against one another with humor, kindness, and graceful civility.
What are you most excited about doing once the stay at home order has been lifted?
Taking my wife for a proper date at Rhode Island’s Matunuck Oyster Bar.
Explore the full range of NADA member gallery exhibition on Artnet Galleries here.
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