“I now find myself on the other side of the curtain.”

Installation view Jacqueline Humphries, Sterling Ruby,  Dona Nelson, Pam Lins and Amy Sillman and Pam Lins. Whitney Biennial 2014, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 7- May 25, 2014. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins

An Interview with Michelle Grabner 

Michelle Grabner is the first artist to curate the Whitney Biennial. A painter, she also teaches and writes. Her first mid-career retrospective, “I Work From Home,” opened in November at MoCA Cleveland, and she doesn’t live (or work) in New York but in Oak Park, Illinois, where she appropriates the language of the middle: middle class, Midwest, the mid-sized car, even middle age. In her official portrait for the Whitney, she wears a gray sweatshirt. Her screensaver is the Green Bay Packers, and she says “fine” like fawn, with those flattened accents of her native territories. There in the middle, she and her husband, painter Brad Killam, also run two art spaces. One is in their garage, The Suburban, and the other, The Poor Farm, on a former poor farm in rural Wisconsin, where they’ve shown Matthew Higgs, Andrew Zittel and Luc Tuymans. We talk here about putting together the Biennial. This year’s has three curators, none from New York City (though one recently moved there), and they each got one floor. I wanted to know how you approach something as mythic as the Biennial, particularly with the added meaning of this being the last installment in the old Breuer building before the museum moves downtown next year.

—Jennifer Kabat

THE BELIEVER: Can we start at the beginning? A biennial takes ages to plan, right?

MICHELLE GRABNER: I received a long, detailed email from Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders in August of 2012.

BLVR: What did they say? And were you surprised?

MG: Yeah, we’d had a Suburban opening, and I was dropping an artist off downtown. Going home at a stoplight, I looked at my phone. It was a Sunday—getting this on a Sunday was also weird—and yeah, one shouldn’t check mail while driving. I kept glancing down at the email and “Whitney Biennial” and “curating” kept popping out. At home I said to my husband, “Brad, read this to me. I can’t understand what they’re asking.” As an artist I’ve had visits by Whitney curators over the years but never made it into the show, and here they’re asking me to consider curating it? I never saw that coming. Being included in the exhibition was something I always hoped for, but curating it was something I never considered.

BLVR: That’s almost funny, you’ve never been included in the show you end up curating.

MG: It’s a bit like being department chair at a...