Adam D. Weinberg has been the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art since October 2003. From 1981, Mr. Weinberg was at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he served as Director of Education and Assistant Curator until 1989, when Weinberg initially joined the Whitney as Director of the Whitney at Equitable Center. Weinberg subsequently assumed the post of Artistic and Program Director of the American Center in Paris in 1991. He returned to the Whitney as Curator of the Permanent Collection in 1993 and was made Senior Curator in 1998. Previously, Weinberg was the Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, from 1999 to 2003.
What began your interest in art?
Did you ever pursue it?
I grew up going to museums with my family and that was initially how my interest started. In high school I studied photography, which led me to other areas such as art and the history of photography. After my freshman year of college I had a summer internship at Guggenheim New York. My first day on the job at the Guggenheim, I got there earlier than all of the other interns and a lot earlier than the director, when I walked into the rotunda, somehow it just hit me that moment and I thought, “I want to work in a museum.” I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why, but that was part of the moment.
No, I started taking photography fairly seriously. I studied with a photographer named Norman White but I found no interest in looking, marketing, and writing about pictures.
Did you ever do any art making yourself? Photography, I considered art making.
How did your concentration on photography benefit your career? I don’t really think about it benefitting my career. I began studying art through the history of photography at a time when it was just becoming popular in the 1970’s. I began to notice what contemporary art had to do with photography directly and indirectly, whether it’s printmaking or interdisciplinary work. So much of it connects to photography, so I guess it made me a bit more literate in terms of understanding contemporary art and what it has to do with cameras or image making in general.