Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson has a special skill: making you reconsider everything you thought you knew about an artist. After organizing blockbuster shows for Alex Katz and Danh Vo, Brinson took over the New York museum’s rotunda this spring with a survey of sculptor Carol Bove.
What keeps you up at night?
What doesn’t?
What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?
I’ve devoted a large part of my career to making exhibitions with living artists who are shaping culture in real time. I hope that my own contribution has been framing their expansive, nuanced practices for a broad audience in a generous and open-ended way.
What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?
The Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, which I think of as a sculpture as much as a building. I’ve worked at the museum for almost my entire professional life, and the sloping ramps have been the backdrop to so many different challenges and joys. One of my strongest sense memories is the feeling of my hand resting on the curved top of the parapet wall that runs along the interior of the spiral. Like any great work of art, it slips into different guises depending on the moment and my frame of mind, but always retains its own ineffable character.
What would you be doing if you weren’t working in your field?
Plan B has always been retraining as a psychotherapist. And honestly, curating involves a lot of psychology, of one sort or another. You need to listen closely, be sensitive to different perspectives, and draw out the texture of imaginative worlds.
What would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?
I’m conflict-averse, so would avoid the meeting if at all possible. Large sunglasses for inscrutability, if I really couldn’t get out of it?
What are you looking forward to this year?
Carol Bove’s mid-career survey. It’s exhilarating to see it realized after almost a decade of dreaming about the project. An exhibition is a living thing, and I look forward to spending lots of time in the rotunda this spring, giving tours and quietly observing how viewers respond to the work. The whole organization has been galvanized by Carol’s wish to tune our space to a more welcoming pitch. Museums can be magical, transporting places but they can also feel a little formal. This show devotes whole sections of the galleries to comfortable seating where visitors can read, chat, or rest. And we’re planning to serve tea most days as a simple gesture of comfort and invitation.
What’s something people get wrong about you?
That I’m an extrovert. I’m an introvert who’s good at performing extroversion.
To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.
in your life?
