CURATING An eclectic CAREER IN THE ARTS CLAUDIA GOULD

“I knew I wanted to work with my generation of artists. I wanted to be in the contemporary art world.”

by richard khavkine

Claudia Gould’s career in the art world has spun its own logic.

She’s promoted pioneering downtown New York sound art, conceived a compelling site-specific installation at an abandoned hospital on Roosevelt Island, and curated a celebrated exhibit of solely black and white fashion by internationally known designers.

Following appointments as a curator at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, P.S. 1 on Long Island City and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, Gould served as director at Artists Space, the downtown experimental art gallery, then took a similar post at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

A successful, 12-year tenure at ICA helped catalyze her latest incarnation, and a return to New York, as director of the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, where she has been since November 2011.

Gould, 58, sees that trajectory — from an immersion in the immediacy and dynamism of early 1980s contemporary and progressive art to the directorship of one the world’s preeminent Jewish museums, inside a six-story Renaissance mansion with Gothic features off East 92nd Street — as, if not quite conventional, then certainly unexceptional.

“I made a progression,” Gould said. “It’s another kind of departure but I don’t see it as anything radically different.”

Gould, who grew up in New Haven, Conn., was emboldened toward a career in the arts in 1977, after seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s seminal “Monogram,” a mixed-medium work featuring a taxidermy goat and a rubber tire, then on view at the Whitney.

“I knew I wanted to work with my generation of artists,” she said. “I wanted to be in the contemporary art world.”

Even while she worked upstate, in Ohio and in Philadelphia, Gould has kept a home in the West Village since she started studying at New York University, from where she received a master’s in museum studies.

“I always knew I was coming home,” she said.

Although Gould’s primary task at the Jewish Museum is to lift the institution’s profile, which in large part means raising money, her work is still all about the art. If she’s meeting with a funder, for instance, the talk is still about the exhibits, she said.

“We raise money for our mission, for what we want to get across,” she says. “It’s all intertwined. It’s all about the same thing.”

She’s been successful: Since her arrival, the museum’s annual budget has grown about 25 percent, to just shy of $20 million.

Raising “the cool factor,” in her words, is also on the agenda. A new website launched last year – engaging, informative and also humorous — has galvanized new interest.

“It’s accessible and visually exciting and surprising,” she said. “That was a big turning point.”

Next up for Gould and the museum’s staff of about 140 is giving the permanent collection of Judaica, which hasn’t changed in 20 years, more fluidity, and contemporaneity.

“It’s all one big picture and it’s one big gigantic curation,” she said. “I feel like the possibilities are infinite.”