A few weeks ago, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (which develops artist and curator lectures, workshops and other arts programming) announced the appointment of Kate McNamara as its John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director. McNamara brings with her an impressive resume; many New Yorkers will remember her from her curatorial roles at MoMA PS1 and Participant INC. We caught up with her to hear about this new phase of her career and her thoughts on the Josh Kline essay that has enraptured the art world.
Congratulations on the new gig! You’re stepping into this role following a period in which you performed it in an interim capacity. What have you learned about it since then that’s surprised you?
Having had the opportunity to serve in an interim capacity over the past year, I was able to spend meaningful time both observing and actively engaging the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts as a very specific kind of ecology. What has become increasingly clear to me is that it is not a singular institution, but a constellation of relationships that can be more intentionally activated. Alongside the internal structure of the unique building itself, which brings together the exhibition program, the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies, and the Harvard Film Archive in close proximity, I’ve been interested in how we situate the Carpenter Center within the broader cultural and civic landscape of Cambridge and Boston. Over the past year, I’ve made a concerted effort to build and strengthen relationships with neighboring civic and cultural spaces, including the Cambridge Public Library and the wider Harvard community, including the Harvard Art Museums.
What has emerged is an opportunity to actively build and deepen these relationships, extending initiatives outward and inward in ways that are less about boundaries and more about creating sustained forms of invitation and exchange. It also feels important to acknowledge the broader context of the Cambridge-Boston area, which has, over the past two decades, developed an extraordinary commitment to contemporary art in ways that were not always as visible or interconnected. Within that, there is a real opportunity for the Carpenter Center to both contribute to and help shape a more connected, porous and generative field of practice.
The Carpenter Center sits inside Harvard but serves audiences well beyond it. How do you intend to balance the needs of students and faculty against those of the greater Boston community and the international art world?
What has been important for me in this role is listening closely to faculty and staff within the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies, to students, and also to audiences across the greater Boston area and the international art world. Rather than thinking of these as separate constituencies that need to be “balanced” against one another, I am interested in building responsive and layered modes of programming that meaningfully speak to each of these publics, often simultaneously. This has meant leaning more deeply into what a “center” can be: a place for experimentation, long-form inquiry and research-driven artistic practice. One of the most exciting aspects of the Carpenter Center is the ability to bring artists into sustained proximity with the university, creating the conditions for longer-term engagement with students and faculty, and for work to evolve through dialogue rather than presentation alone.
At the same time, I am very energized by how we can continue to activate Harvard’s extraordinary resources, its collections, archives and intellectual communities. This extends into the galleries as sites of research as much as exhibition. For example, I have been working closely with librarians across campus to develop a reading room initiative, as well as exploring collaborations with independent publishers to activate a more porous relationship to publishing and to imagine how a bookstore might function as part of that ecosystem.
Beyond the university, I am equally committed to deepening relationships with Boston-area communities and organizations, including local schools and cultural partners whose work intersects with the ideas and artists we are engaging. A recent example of this approach was the exhibition with artist Tourmaline, which allowed us to partner with Queer History Boston on public programs that extended the work into a broader civic and historical context. Ultimately, I see this not as a question of balancing competing audiences, but as a genuinely exciting opportunity to build a framework where different forms of engagement can coexist: where students, faculty, local communities and international artists are all part of a shared, evolving field of inquiry.
College campuses have become an unexpected locus of national politics. Is that going to make your job harder?
I don’t experience this moment primarily as making the work harder, but as making it more explicit in its stakes. Academic institutions have always been sites where larger cultural and political questions are being worked through – what feels different now is the level of visibility and intensity around that role. A colleague recently said something that has stayed with me: that in this current moment, academic institutions need to be places that foster free thinking and actively push against systems. I really agree with that framing, and I see the Carpenter Center as a very visible extension of the university where that kind of work can take place in public.
For me, that means understanding the Center not only as an exhibition space, but as a site for critical discourse—one that is able to hold complexity, difference and disagreement productively. The role of the institution is not to resolve those tensions, but to make space for them to be encountered, thought through, and engaged with rigor and care. In that sense, this moment is less a constraint than a reminder of responsibility to support conditions where artists, students, faculty, and publics can think freely, encounter perspectives different from their own, and do so in a way that is sustained rather than reactive.
The announcement of your appointment lays out an ambitious agenda: new residencies, expanded exhibitions, publishing collaborations, partnerships with university and neighboring communities. Could you explain the thinking behind some of these initiatives?
As a curator who has come up through alternative art spaces like MoMA PS1, Cleopatra’s and Participant Inc., I am interested in how the Carpenter Center can operate as a place that cultivates multiple communities, approaches to exhibition-making, and layered forms of engagement. Creating the conditions for sustained exchange, rather than treating exhibitions, residencies, or publications as discrete moments. A core part of this is extending time with artists so that work can develop through multiple visits, ongoing dialogue and a deeper relationship to the campus itself. Programming becomes less about isolated events and more about practice evolving through proximity to students, faculty, research environments and the broader cultural life of the university. These encounters then shape what emerges in the galleries, allowing exhibitions to feel grounded in a longer arc of engagement.
Over the past year, we established a new Intermedia Gallery within the Carpenter Center, expanding our exhibition platforms at the intersection of curating and pedagogy. It creates space for curatorial research assistants, PhD students in the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies, to develop and test ideas in direct dialogue with artists, while also opening new connections with neighboring institutions, including the Harvard Art Museums. I am also interested in developing more sustained ways for the Center to operate in relation to time and memory—how we mark presence and artistic production beyond a single exhibition. An edition program feels particularly exciting in this regard, bringing together archival thinking, artistic production and accessibility. It is a model I have worked with in other contexts, and one that can support both visibility and longevity, while also serving as a fundraising initiative that helps sustain the ambitions of the Center. At the same time, it offers artists another way to extend their practice beyond the exhibition frame.
Finally, I see a real opportunity to recognize and amplify the extraordinary community of artists who have chosen to make the Cambridge-Boston area their home. Alongside our broader exhibition program, we are developing an initiative focused on regional artists that will provide a sustained platform for their work and ongoing engagement with the Carpenter Center.
The release also mentions a host of exhibitions you’ve worked on with great artists like Polly Apfelbaum, Anna Craycroft, Kenzi Shiokava, Leidy Churchman, Vlatka Horvat and the collective Destroy All Monsters. Do any of these, or any past collaborations, give a sense of the ethos you’d like to bring to the Carpenter Center?
What connects many of these projects for me is less a shared aesthetic than a shared way of working—a commitment to long-term relationships with artists and in allowing exhibitions to emerge through dialogue rather than pre-determined form. With artists like Polly Apfelbaum, Leidy Churchman, Vlatka Horvat, Kenzi Shiokava, Anna Craycroft and the collective Destroy All Monsters, I’ve often been interested in how an exhibition can function as an extension of practice rather than a framing device around it. These are artists who are deeply invested in process and in working through relation, something I really value, and that might mean working across multiple iterations of a project, or creating conditions where collaboration, research and experimentation remain active within the exhibition itself. Across these collaborations, I’ve also been drawn to artists who think expansively about systems, material, social and institutional, and who are open to testing how their work shifts in relation to different contexts and publics. That ethos feels very aligned with what I am building at the Carpenter Center.
At its core, it’s about trust, time and openness: building structures that allow artists to take risks, and allowing the institution itself to be shaped through those encounters. That, for me, is the throughline. I’m really looking forward to sharing a number of programs we’ve been developing over the past year, which will unfold across the next few years and begin to more fully articulate this approach in practice.
As executive and creative director of My HomeCourt, your work involved bringing contemporary art into city parks—basketball courts, open-air, no wall labels, audiences who didn’t come looking for art. How does programming for that kind of public encounter shape thinking about what happens inside an institutional building?
Working on My HomeCourt was incredibly formative for me because it asked me to think about art in a context where audiences were not arriving through institutional framing—they were already there. In city parks, on basketball courts, you are not preparing an audience for “art viewing” in any traditional sense; you are instead designing for encounter, interruption, curiosity, and sometimes even indifference.
We worked with incredible artists including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Joiri Minaya, Lois Harada and Sanford Biggers, and each collaboration reinforced how differently work can function when it is embedded in public space and everyday life. That experience has stayed with me, because it sharpens your understanding of how meaning is produced in relation to context, access, and expectation. It also makes you very attentive to how people move through space, how they gather and how they choose (or don’t choose) to engage.
In the context of an institution like the Carpenter Center, that thinking translates into a deeper awareness of how we frame entry points. It pushes me to ask how exhibitions, programs and publications can remain open and legible beyond an assumed audience, while still being rigorous and intellectually grounded. I’m interested in how we create different registers of invitation—some that are highly structured and research-driven, and others that are more open-ended, porous and unexpected.
In that sense, I don’t see these as separate worlds. My HomeCourt and institutional practice are both about shaping conditions for encounter, just in very different spatial and social registers. And bringing those lessons into the Carpenter Center feels essential to how I think about publicness, access and form.
You’re a co-founder of the influential alternative art space Cleopatra’s in Greenpoint, and have also worked with Participant INC. What did you make of Josh Kline’s recent essay in October about the necessity of such spaces in New York?
I thought Josh Kline’s essay raised an important set of questions about infrastructure, scale and the conditions that allow artists to take real risks outside of market or institutional pressures. It’s a conversation that tends to resurface every decade or so, often in response to specific economic and institutional pressures of the moment, and it’s always interesting to see how it’s reframed through the circumstances of the writer’s own experience. Having worked with Josh Kline early on at Cleopatra’s, and having co-founded that space as well as worked with organizations like Participant Inc., I’ve seen firsthand how essential these kinds of environments can be, not only as platforms for showing work, but as places where ideas are formed over time, often in informal and collaborative ways. What tends to matter most in those contexts is not just the exhibitions themselves, but the relationships and conversations that accumulate around them.
I also appreciated Aruna D’Souza’s counterpoint, which shifts the frame slightly to consider artists who are not leaving NYC and instead building different forms of continuity, solidarity and support in response to widening economic inequities. It made me think about the role of foundations and other partners who are willing to think alongside artists in more sustained ways. For example, the Boston-based Wagner Foundation recently launched a fellowship developed in partnership with United States Artists to support mid-career artists with an annual grant equivalent to a living wage. Initiatives like that feel important in reframing what meaningful support can look like right now.
At its core, this is really a question of how we continue to think alongside one another across different scales of practice and support, especially at a moment when those inequities feel so stark. Whether through alternative spaces, institutions, or foundations, the challenge is how to sustain ecosystems that allow for risk, continuity and care, not in opposition to one another, but in relation. I would say I read Kline’s essay less as a prescription than as a reminder of how fragile and how necessary these ecosystems are, and how important it is that they continue to be imagined, supported and reinvented in different contexts.
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