A Conversation on Philip Guston

Musa Mayer’s first book about her father, a memoir entitled ‘Night Studio’, was published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf and republished in a new edition in 2016 when Hauser & Wirth took over the representation of the Estate of Philip Guston from the McKee Gallery. Since Musa’s retirement from a twenty-five-year career as an acclaimed research and patient advocate for people living with advanced breast cancer, she has curated two exhibitions of Guston’s satirical Nixon drawings in New York and London, as well as a survey exhibition in Hong Kong, an exhibition of Guston’s work from 1971, and a recent online exhibition entitled ‘What Endures’ during the summer of 2020. ‘Resilience’ is her third book with Hauser & Wirth Publishers. The second, ‘Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings 1971 and 1975,’ coauthored with Debra Bricker Balken, was awarded the FILAF d’Or international prize as the best international art book of 2017. An upcoming small monograph on her father, published by Laurence King, will be released in late 2020 or early 2021. Besides managing the Estate of Philip Guston, Musa is President of The Guston Foundation. The most recent Foundation project is the newly launched website PhilipGuston.org a comprehensive resource built around a Catalogue Raisonné of the paintings that allows users free access to museum collections, exhibitions and bibliography, as well as featuring an extensive chronology, scrapbook, and slideshows of diverse aspects of Guston’s art.

Sally Radic is the Executive Director of the Guston Foundation. Alongside Musa Mayer, she co-curated Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975, exhibited at Hauser & Wirth in New York and London. Prior to joining The Guston Foundation she worked at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid (Spain), the Bancaja Foundation, in Valencia, taught graduate classes at the University if Deusto in Bilbao, the University of Jaume I in Castellon and curated exhibitions on the works of Philip Guston, Eduardo Chillida, Sean Scully, Pablo Picasso, Otto Dix, and Zoran Music.

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1. His recent projects include Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale and at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine. He is a trustee of Studio in a School, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, the Third Rail, the Miami Rail, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul, AICA (2007-2020), and is co-founder of the Monira Foundation, a non-profit which aims to curate ongoing exhibitions and public programming at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City and beyond. Forthcoming projects include the Detroit Rail, the first U.S. retrospective of Jonas Mekas, and Occupy Industry City: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Year 3.