Michelle Grabner on Unromantic Truth and the Art School Crisis

Host Hugh Leeman sits down with Michelle Grabner — artist, curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, longtime professor and former chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — for one of the most candid conversations you'll hear about the current state of American art education.Grabner traces her path from a high school utility closet in Appleton, Wisconsin, where her teacher Mr. Perez had her paint an electrical switchboard hard-edge, to decades of building a practice inside what she calls the joyful constraints of raising three children. She talks about the strange, almost pathological freedom that arrived when her youngest left for college, and why she's begun thinking of her own relentless overproduction as a deliberate assault on the art world's fetish for rarity.She opens up about curating the last Whitney Biennial in the Breuer Building — the "layer cake" structure, why she asked every artist to interview someone else instead of accepting a curator's essay, and the one regret that still bothers her. She discusses her Artforum piece on FRONT and why regional triennials keep buckling. And she speaks with unusual frankness about the Trump administration's federal loan changes, the visa denials emptying her classrooms, the layoffs that are coming, and her frustration that her own institution is negotiating compliance rather than imagining an alternative.