A Quote by David Adjaye

The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.
We always have a great time touring Germany, but one of my favourite museums in the world is Museum Ludwig, an incredible contemporary art museum in Cologne. I could spend all day in it.
When I decided to go to art school, it wasn't necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.
People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.
The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design.
This is not a museum of tragedy. It is not the museum of difficult moments. It is the museum that says -here is a balanced history of America that allows us to cry and smile.
The first painting I remember selling was 'Panthera.' I made it while I was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the museum actually purchased it directly from me.
I want to reach out and entertain people. I want people to come to a museum that have never been in a museum before. I want also to have enough art references in it that would satisfy the most sophisticated museum goer.
I did make several trips to the very wonderful [Georgia] O'Keeffe museum. Besides the art (my favorite paintings are from her Pelvis series) my favorite thing about the museum is the architecture. I love how enormously tall the doors are - it is like going into a church. There is also something home-like about the layout of the museum. I wish I could live there!
As hard as I try I cannot get myself to three museums in any one city. The only museum I've ever really enjoyed was the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and I think that's because it's small and you can touch things.
I would like to bring people who have never been to a museum into a museum. And I would like to bring museum goers into libraries. I think there ought to be this cross-fertilization.
My education in the arts began at the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a Cleveland child, I visited the museum's halls and corridors, gallery spaces and shows, over and over. For me, the Cleveland Museum was a school of my very own - the place where my eyes opened, my tastes developed, my ideas about beauty and creativity grew.
Chicago is a wonderful area because it's blessed with a tremendous number of museums of various sorts, not only the Art Institute of Chicago but the Field Museum of Natural History, the Oriental Museum on the south side.
I think about museums often. There are things that I want museums to do that they often don't. For me, I like it when there's a system within the museum that can continuously change - whether it's a museum that is nomadic or one that's designed so the building can shape-shift. I like restless spaces, and I want to be engaged.
What's that Regina Spektor song? Museums are like mausoleums. Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive. Typically your work will end up in a museum after you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead. But while we're alive, I like to see it in places where it's connected to day-to-day life and making a difference.
The moment you introduce difference into a museum, then the privileged space is contested, and under the most ideal circumstances what all artists want is the chance to be competitive. That's what I think the museum is supposed to be.
We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.
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