Interview: Madi Vordenbaum
Photos: Ambre Amari
What does a typical day look like for you now as the director of AEIVA?
The thing that has kept me in this job for as long as it has (I was AEIVA’s first employee, so I’ve been here since day one) is the fact that my day never looks the same.
I’m very ADD. I get bored easily. And the fact that every single day I come here it’s something different is exciting. A lot of it is checking in with our core team; we have a new curator for the first time in several years. She, Hannah Spears, just relocated here from Los Angeles and has been here for 8 months now. But it’s mostly checking in with my team and seeing who needs what.
We’ve done 100 exhibitions in these 10 years, and I’ve personally curated probably 60 – 65 of those. So these are kind of the last AEIVA exhibits I’ve personally curated, doesn’t mean I’ll never do another one but I’m trying to clear some space for Hannah to do her thing, that’s why I hired her, and I want her to take it.
My role now has transitioned to making sure our team has what they need from the university and the community-building part of it all. We plan our exhibitions in advance; we have one show that we are already working on for 2027. It’s a lot of logistics; there are a lot of moving parts that people don’t necessarily think about that part or understand. I’m sure y’all just got a big dose of that with Joe Minter and seeing how complicated something like that can be.
We did. I joined the Create team last year, and when I got there, the conversation was, “OK, so this is what we are working on next October.” I started in November and was asking, “What are we planning next October for?” Then, in January 2024, the conversation shifted to planning our 2025 community art project, and I was like, “Did I sleep through a year?” Then it became clear that if we weren’t planning now, there wouldn’t be a project.
We opened an exhibition last year with an artist from a suburb of Detroit, Michael Dixon, and he and I spent almost five years talking about and planning that exhibition before it actually came to fruition.
So, it can be anything. It can be working on budgets, having an artist Zoom meeting, or a studio visit. The person I interact with more than anyone else who is not part of the core AEIVA team is our Senior Director of Development for UAB Arts. She and I check in daily for about an hour a day.
I’m always curious about what a creative’s days look like because I think so many of us are drawn to these roles because our days don’t look the same. But there are still your hours of meetings.
Half my week is meetings, just sitting in a room listening to people talk or talking myself. The best part of the job is interacting with the artists. When you get to meet the artist and hear how they make work.
The show with Manjari was incredibly special because its not unique but it is less common that I was with Manjari, physically with her in a room when she had the idea for तत् त्वम् असि (Tat Tvam Asi) The Universe is a Mirror. I was with her from day one, and when that gets to happen, it really becomes more of a collaboration. Getting to help her think of a project, what’s in the gallery, is very different from our first idea. Getting to see it from the very beginning, from start to finish, of course, with it being one of the more complicated things we’ve ever done, is so incredibly satisfying.
That transformation is so cool and inspiring when you can feed off each other.
My wife and I have, it’s inactive right now, a radio show on Substrate called “No Bad Art.” We would interview visual artists and local artists from out of town who were doing work in Birmingham. We did 50 episodes in one year and we’re relaunching a podcast in January next year. It was incredible how much we learned from just fifty conversations.
It’s inspiring to see how people make art and what leads them to art. The story behind how they ended up here.
That’s always where we would start the conversation on the podcast because every artist has a completely different career trajectory that brought them to that moment.
Would you like to share yours? What led you to AEIVA and the arts in general?
I started out as a political science major in college and very quickly became frustrated and disillusioned. I changed my major because I wanted to be a filmmaker. Actually, Michele Forman, who was very heavily involved with the beginning of Sidewalk in the film festival’s history, used to work with Spike Lee and is our filmmaker professor here at UAB.
She is amazing, and I was one of her very first students in her second-semester teaching; I was in her filmmaking class. I am a trained documentary filmmaker through her and that’s kind of what I wanted to do. And then I discovered this South African artist named William Kentridge. He is an animator and filmmaker who was making work about apartheid. So it was the politics, it was the filmmaking, it was the art – which I had always been interested in but I was never exposed to growing up. I didn’t even know that was a thing you could do for a living, when I saw how work I was like “This is everything that I love and I didn’t even know that was an option.” A professor brought me a book of his work and I changed my major the next day to arts. I went off to graduate school and have an MFA in painting. I had a career as a painter that was going ok, but I had a very unexpected opportunity pop up in 2010 – 2011 when I took over the old UAB Arts gallery.
This was the gallery that existed for 40 years at UAB before AEIVA, and I ran that space for two and a half years. I started curating exhibitions when I was in grad school. It was difficult for us to get exhibitions in New Orleans if you were a student, so we started making our own. I grew up in the punk rock scene since I was 13, playing in punk bands my entire life still to this day, and that had always been a “you make your own opportunities” situation for me. So when we couldn’t get what we wanted in school, we started doing it ourselves. Eventually, I was getting asked to do it. Timing has always worked out for me, so when the previous director of the UAB gallery left, I happened to be transitioning back to Birmingham. I happened to have collected all of this experience that I didn’t realize was going to be the thing that made me the only person that could walk in and do that job. I took the job very unexpectedly, didn’t know this was anything I even wanted to do, and throughout those two years, the gallery was very under the radar which gave me a lot of freedom to experiment and try things. I’ve always tried not to be afraid of failing, really just trying it. The last two or three shows, I really started to feel like I’d figured it out. From that, when we opened AEIVA, the former Dean of UAB’s College of Arts and Sciences hired me to be the first curator. I always take unexpected opportunities when they’re presented, even if I don’t know what will come of it. I know it will somehow be beneficial if I do this and have this experience.
I had this moment the first time I worked on an exhibition that I co-curated with a colleague here, Professor Cynthia Ryan, in the English department. We did an exhibition called The Alabama Project: The Civil Rights of Healthcare, where we had a photographer from New York come down and document the cancer treatment journey of cancer patients here at UAB who did not have healthcare. It was an eye-opening experience for me, that first taste of what an art exhibition could be. It was everything I’d hoped or tried to do with my art and painting. I could do more efficiently and reach more people as a curator.
It’s like you are reading my mind; I was about to ask you to tell me about an exhibit that has changed the way you interact with the idea of museums and the institution of museums.
Oh well, even more than that, and this was an exhibition I was involved with, but I didn’t curate. It was from Carolyn Sherer, a photographer here in Birmingham who did an exhibition called Living in Limbo: Lesbian Families in the Deep South. She was doing this exhibition of the family portraits of lesbians in Alabama, many of whom had never in their entire lives had family portraits made. This would’ve been 2012, people think that’s not that long ago but I am telling you that in half the portraits in the exhibition the women have their backs turned to the camera because they don’t want to be outed. These were business people, important people in Birmingham who weren’t out.
What really made this exhibit important was it wasn’t at an art gallery it was at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It was the first public, programmatic acknowledgment by the BCRI that LGBTQ issues were also civil rights issues, it was a monumental moment in the history of Birmingham. If Birmingham’s history is as tied to the civil rights movement as we say it is, this was an important, pivotal moment for both them as an institution and Carolyn as an artist. I was the videographer for this project, using my documentarian training to make a 5-minute film interviewing the participants and summarizing the project.
That was the moment when I knew this isn’t just visual art; this is vital to our culture and understanding who we are. The signature image from this exhibit is in AEIVA’s permanent collection; we ended up acquiring it maybe 10 years later. It’s a woman in her military uniform. She had her back turned, but from her uniform, she was still identifiable, and she got into so much trouble.
That is heinous. Thank you for sharing, it’s incredible that AEIVA can honor that exhibit in the permanent collection.
You should look Carolyn Sherer up anyway, she’s done a lot of great projects since then as well and they’re all sort of socially minded. She and her wife have been together for 40-something years and her wife was the very first woman ever admitted into the Tuscaloosa dental school. She went through some shit as a southern lesbian in 1960s Alabama. She was one of the first female faculty members in the UAB School of Dentistry. Her name is Jean O’ Neal and she is everything I love about Alabama. She is an older lesbian who really went through it and is also the most Alabama person you have ever met. She never misses a football game, she has an apartment she keeps in Tuscaloosa just so she can go to the football games. You cannot put any of these people into a box and that’s the part people who aren’t from here or don’t live here don’t understand. How complicated Alabama is and how much we all share space together in a way that every part of the country doesn’t experience.
That’s so true and this shared space is something AEIVA’s current exhibitions demonstrate how it is possible to explore varied artistic voices and share physical space. I’d love to get more from you on the vision for the current exhibitions, how they complement each other, and how you choose selections like that.
It’s interesting and some of this comes from my background as a visual artist- there’s a lot of trusting the process.
When we are scheduling artists together, we’re not necessarily planning that a lot of the time. The scheduling just works out. We can have Odili here when he is available, and we can have Manjari’s project happen when the plans come together.
You have to trust in the process. The instincts, the decisions I’m making even on a subconscious level that it’s gonna sync up.
Sort of like how Odili’s work was in one of AEIVA’s first exhibits, and his work is here again ten years later when we reconnect for another interview.
Yeah, there are several local collectors here in Birmingham – Birmingham has a very small, sophisticated contemporary art collector base- and some of the people at the front of that, the artists that they collected twenty to thirty years ago, are now some of the most important artists in America. Odili was one of those. So, we had an awesome piece of Odili’s work, and he credits Birmingham collectors for helping jumpstart his career on some level. He felt it was really important to have this show, A Survey of Context, open at AEIVA. It was kind of cosmic that it is the very last show of our tenth anniversary. The show was supposed to happen during COVID and it got delayed, we obviously had to delay a lot of exhibitions due to COVID and this was the last exhibition from that time we hadn’t gotten to.
It’s kismet.
It was serendipity that it ended up being a bookend to our tenth year. Moments like that allow us to trust that if we are honest about what AEIVA is and represents, then there is a way to connect all of the artists.
We are looking for artists at the top of their field who are engaged in national and international communities, have active careers, and are engaged with the big-picture community. They are doing things that are relevant to someone in Birmingham, Alabama. These are the things we always think about first, like, “Yes, this person is famous, and they’re a great artist or whatever, but is this something that anyone in Birmingham will care about at all?” We also show local and regional artists as well, we recognize the brilliant artist in Alabama. Thornton Dial, Joe Minter, Lonnie Hollie. All those Alabama guys from that generation, there are so many of them who have successful careers in other places, and we’ve tried to do our part to course correct some of that and give opportunities to our local artists. We don’t want to make that big a deal about them being from Alabama they are an AEIVA artist like Odili and Manjari. Our summer exhibition will be our second Alabama Tri-Annual which is a show we do every three years where we give the entire museum to just Alabama artists, there are about 15 – 20 artists every year.
It’s interesting. When we first got into the gallery, you asked me which one is my favorite painting. I obviously believe in every artist we bring, but I am not necessarily bringing in my favorite artists if that makes sense. I have a very particular aesthetic, and it’s awesome when I do get to bring an artist to AEIVA that I’m personally really, really excited about. That has happened a few times over the years, but a lot of times, it’s not what I’m thinking about an artist that I like. It’s the artists that I think are important to the context of this moment in time right now.
There’s a level of social and cultural responsibility in this idea that museums are neutral, which is fundamentally a fallacy. They’re run by people, and there’s no way people can be completely unbiased no matter how hard you try, even if it’s subconscious bias.
And access to art is inherently political.
One hundred percent. And being an intuition that deals ninety-nine percent exclusively with contemporary art, the artists are making work about the world around them, so it’s inevitable that you’re going to have art that is tackling big picture difficult political and cultural questions. We are in Birmingham, Alabama. We can and should be a role model for how we talk about this stuff publicly because of where we are and who we are.
Beautifully said. How do you build AEIVA’s programming so that you are engaging the community in the current moment through visual arts?
I learned a lot of hard lessons in those early years before AEIVA doing the visual arts gallery. One of the most important lessons was the idea that if institutions like this are the cultural stewards presenting people’s stories, you can’t do that without including the people these stories are about. You can’t do it without including them, not just including them at the end by inviting them to the thing. Include them on the front end in the development of the project. It was years later I learned that idea has a name and its community curation. It’s something I thought I invented, but it turns out everything has already been invented. I am very proud we took that approach, especially in the early years.
We acknowledge that getting the art up on the wall and having this beautiful exhibition is important but that is only fifty percent of what we do. Then, as y’all very, very, very expertly executed with Joe Minter, the important and real work is what is the conversation that we now have about the artwork. What do we do with this exhibition now that it’s up? We’ve always had that in the back of our minds. So, as we develop, especially our more challenging exhibitions, we’ve been very strategic in having community partners on the front end who help us decide what that narrative is. What is the conversation and story, and what can we do to ensure it’s authentic?
It’s not just me or AEIVA’s curator; it’s the voice of multiple people in the community who have a vested interest in the community, and those people help us develop the narrative and programming. Almost all our programming has at least one, sometimes as many as six or seven community partners that help us develop the program and the content, and that part is so important. I like to think our team is really good at knowing when we are not the expert or not the right person to be the voice. It is a tremendous benefit that we work at UAB, and the chances are if you need an expert in something, there will be one here. Even when we are writing our text panels we will invite other people to develop and write those text panels for us. I got ready to write Manjri’s text panels, and I didn’t even write the first one before I realized it was absurd for me to even pretend I was the person to write this story about her mother’s journey through the afterlife through the lens of a religion I know nothing about. So we actually had her write them. That’s why you hear her voice and not mine.
Were there any challenges or surprising moments during the curation of exhibitions?
It is always harder than you think it’s gonna be. It’s challenging doing this type of work in a place like Birmingham, Alabama that’s always the constant challenge. Especially now with what’s happening politically – I’m not even trying to talk about it, but you can’t not. It’s there looming over us all, and who knows what a place like this looks like in that reality. Those are the types of things I think about all the time.
How do you operate with that understanding of who you may be serving and who you may have to work around without impacting the intent of the art?
It’s interesting because the first several years we were doing this I used to think people weren’t paying attention. It turns out that’s not really the case. As I’ve really gotten to know AEIVA’s audience and see the people that come to these exhibitions I don’t think you can really put any of them in a political or ideological box. I think our secret is we are really good at anticipating, predicting problems, and minimizing those on the front end as best we can. At least understanding we’re gonna do this challenging thing, here’s where it could go wrong, and here’s our plan if it does. There’s a lot of trust that the university places in our team that we’re doing it the right way. I mentioned that there’s no way to be unbiased but we are trying to present things in a way that there is an entry point to the work no matter what your background is. So, we do acknowledge that the way a person interprets a work of art will one hundred percent depend on that individual’s entire life experience. We try to recognize that, and we’re not trying to tell you there’s only one way to think about this work. We like to think that no matter who you are, there is an entry point. If we can get anyone to think about the world in a slightly different way for a second, that’s the win.
What would you say to someone who is new to contemporary art and walks in here?
That is such a huge barrier. There is so much of contemporary art that references what came before, and if you haven’t been paying attention to the last 60 years of history, some of it can feel really inaccessible. That is one of the things we really do try to avoid. We want this place to function and serve someone who is a very sophisticated contemporary art connoisseur and someone who is walking into an art museum for the first time.
I talk a lot about the architectural barrier of the building itself, often the building looks like you’re not allowed to be in it. We think about that every day. If you feel like you don’t like or get contemporary art that is a failure of the institution, a failure to contextualize what you are seeing to relate it to something real. There are definitely artists who make art for art’s sake, and I’m a lot less interested in that. I have this unofficial AEIVA slogan which is “The value of a work of art is only as good as the conversation it facilitates.” That’s what I’m thinking about when we’re picking the artists. Is this going to provoke a productive or at least interesting conversation? So you should just come, everything we do is free. You can show up in shorts and a T-shirt. We want to destroy – Destroy with a capital “D” art elitism.
Finally, what would you tell young artists in Birmingham hoping to make an impact in their community and beyond?
If you can think of anything you would even remotely be okay with doing as a living- do that instead. Because this is a really hard place to be, even the most successful artists I know still grind every day to make it work. If you can’t, never stop; just keep doing it. The artists I do know who have some version of a career are the ones who never stopped doing it when people like me told them they should. That’s the secret. The ones who say, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about; I’m gonna do it anyway,” are the ones who are supposed to be doing it.
Sometimes we forget that we are just one part of a bigger thing, this is a community. People forget how important that community is; it is easy to slide into that competitive thing. We must resist that at all costs and understand that if something good happens to one of us, it benefits all of us. Be invested in each other’s work and genuinely want each other to succeed even if you don’t like them because their success still benefits all of us. It’s big-picture thinking that it’s easy for artists when we’re sensitive, and we get in our own heads. It can be an isolating existence in your studio. Try not to fall into that. Be active in your community.
AEIVA is open to the public, Tuesday through Saturday, from 12 to 5 PM, so you have plenty of opportunities to explore their fantastic exhibitions.
Right now, you can catch Outside Lines: Selections from AEIVA’s Permanent Collection and Odili Donald Odita, both running through December 7th.
The Manjari Sharma: तत् त्वम् असि (Tat Tvam Asi) The Universe is a Mirror has been extended through January 2025.
Come experience world class art exhibits for free.
