René Paul Barilleaux brings his affinity for diverse and cross-bred mediums to the McNay

This August, René Paul Barilleaux will become Curator of Art After 1945 at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, a position created in 2000 and held by only one other person, Malin Wilson-Powell, who returned to New Mexico in spring 2004. Barilleaux is an artist with fine-arts degrees from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He leaves his current position as Deputy Director for Programs at the Mississippi Museum of Art where he has a track record of diversifying and updating collections, exhibitions, and audiences.

The following is from an e-mail interview the Current conducted with Barilleaux as he was preparing to move to San Antonio.

René Paul Barilleaux is the new McNay Curator of Art After 1945.

You are an artist by training. How does being an artist affect your attraction to certain media?

My interest has always been in the art of our times. As a student, I focused on painting, collage, and assemblage, but did work in other mediums, including film. So my work as a curator has always been affected by wide-ranging interests - not bound by particular disciplines or materials but marked by each artist's individual vision, energy, and commitment.

You have curated exhibitions that revolve around photography, including three-dimensional laser photography, known as holography. How do you see exhibitions like this fitting into the medium's larger discussion?

In some ways, the widespread use and critical acceptance of color photography since the mid-1970s has paralleled my own involvement in the visual arts, since my days as a serious art student began about the same time. Also, my first curatorial position - at the Museum of Holography in New York - and an ongoing involvement with holography have broadened my interests in a range of image-making techniques.

Among my favorite photography projects are those that integrate photographs into exhibitions of painting, sculpture, and works on paper. In 2003, I curated an exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art that juxtaposed works created around 1903 with works created around 2003 - essentially comparing "contemporary" art from periods 100 years apart. Among the early photographs were vintage Lewis Hine prints made in Mississippi, and recent years represented by Ernesto Pujol's large-scale "performance" self-portraits, and Sally Apfelbaum's photograms of everyday objects.

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