meet Chloe Wayne
the business powerhouse behind MoMA's PopRally program. Discover the creative initiatives that shape the intersection of art and culture.
‘Freshmen Friday’ is an interview series of emerging artists, that explores the mindsets of these millennials on the cusp; where they’ve been, where they’re going and how they see themselves getting there. *Disclaimer: this was originally published in 2015, but has since been brought to Substack for archival purposes.
My name is Chloe Wayne, I am 25 years old and I’m from Los Angeles, California. I currently live in New York and work at MoMA. Five years ago I was in my senior year of college at Penn and studying business, African American studies, and critical theory...I had just started dating Mahfuz, I was really active in the spoken word scene, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do after school. Nothing in particular drew me to studying business - my parents said it was practical, so I did it, and I hated it at first but eventually realized that it's a good tool to have when I went out in the world to do work in service of what I really cared about - the arts and activism. I feel lucky to be at MoMA where I've been able to combine it all - I mainly work in a strategy and finance role, and I’m also the co-chair of MoMA PopRally, a program that works with emerging artists that's meant to be a gateway to the museum, connecting the dots between interesting, experimental stuff happening now and the more canonical artists and practices that MoMA's core curatorial program engages.
MOMA FEELS REALLY STRONGLY THAT CONTEMPORARY ART TAKES PLACE IN SO MANY DIFFERENT PLACES, CONTEXTS, AND COMMUNITIES. THE MUSEUM EMBRACES THE FACT THAT A LOT OF THE ART THAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, IN THIS MOMENT, WITH YOUNG PEOPLE,
with people who aren’t in art history books, with people who aren't traditionally a part of "art history" - that all of that is extremely important.
So the first event I put together for the program was with Hood By Air. Some people have asked why we didn't do it at MoMA PS1 - it felt important to have it at MoMA, more compelling, more transgressive, more subversive for MoMA to collaborate with a group like HBA that does such important work. Having it at PS1 wouldn't have troubled the same boundaries. At my last job, I worked on Wall Street as a research analyst for fashion brands, so I’ve been a fan of HBA for a long time.
WHAT WAS SO INTERESTING TO ME ABOUT SHAYNE OLIVER AND THE ENTIRE COLLECTIVE BEHIND HOOD BY AIR IS HOW INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTIMEDIA WHAT THEY DO IS.
There’s fashion, performance, music, video, photography. But when talked about in a fashion context people didn’t talk about the other stuff as much. And so I thought about how interesting it would be for them to do a live performance based work that captured all these other mediums and because it was in this different context people would look at everything, not just the clothes.
So basically a week after HBA's FW 2014 show, I approached Shayne about doing a performance at MoMA. We didn’t really give any other creative parameters - we let them know what we were most interested about them, but to support them in the best way we could, we wanted to give them free rein. So HBA really conceived the entire thing, and we helped to produce the event and realize a lot of their vision for everything from the video installation to the set design to the sound system.
FF- Could you list three people I should chat to that personally inspire you?
CW- Well besides Shayne, I have to say him *points to her boyfriend* Mahfuz Sultan. He’s an example of someone who knows everything about everything and it’s because he’ll watch 8 movies a day, it’s because he’ll decide at the beginning of the week that he wants to read three books this week and he’ll just read them. Also Anderson Luna and his girlfriend Liz - Anderson is a really brilliant artist. And Sara Hardman, she is quitting her investment banking job to focus on her catering company, Bed Stuy Kitchen. I love that she has the courage to leave the path that people tell us we 'should' do to define her own idea of happiness..I love seeing people do that - particularly women, and more particularly black women.
FF- Do you consider yourself an artist?
CW- I used to do a lot of poetry so I guess at that time being an artist was a part of my identity. Not really anymore, I’ve always been more nerdy and intellectual than artistic. I always wanted to be the one writing or helping to create the narrative around the arts rather than be an artist myself. I'm deeply interested in the life of the mind, reading and writing as a way to experience the world. That’s what moves me the most, that’s how I am able to express myself. My absolute idol is Susan Sontag, she was a master interpreter, had such an encyclopedic knowledge of and deep love for the arts - she used to write about an erotics of knowledge, an erotics of art, and she had such a profound impact on how the world views and remembers so many amazing artists.
THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC THROUGHOUT HISTORY, I THINK THAT'S SUCH AN IMPORTANT ROLE…
So I know that I want to write eventually, and right now I’m thinking a lot about fashion. I think fashion is underrated for its complexity and its richness. If you want to learn art history you can pick up so many books, there’s so many resources available to teach yourself about art in the last 50 years, but in fashion that’s really hard. So right now I’m working on a research project with Mahfuz. Where our goal is to reconstruct the last hundred years of fashion… so we’re starting small, picking 50 of the most influential designers in the last hundred years and we’re interested in connecting the dots, finding how they relate to each other, how does Chanel relate to Yves Saint Laurent, relate to Prada… not just formally and visually in the clothes they make but also their influences, how they relate to art history, how they relate to music, popular culture. There’s so much that goes in to it that designers pull from when they create, but if you as a viewer don’t necessarily know how to 'read' fashion, than you may not know how to look at what you’re looking at. So right now I’m really focused on Japanese designers, particularly Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, who are just incredible and so unique and so influential, but in a way that’s not so obvious at first glance. Fuz right now is focused on Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, who are these incredible showmen from the 90s, super baroque, super interested in European history of costuming and painting and theater. We’re trying to create a framework for how to analyze fashion - structured around silhouette, around construction techniques, around mood, material, and reference. Like Yohji and Rei who would often design solely in black in order to focus on silhouette, volume, and proportion rather than color - but if you trace the history of black through the history of fashion, you would find so many different versions of black, what it means in different contexts. Like the way Chanel would focus on black is totally different from the way Comme does, so we’re thinking about how to trace and understand how the two were similar and different at the same time.
FF- Do you consider yourself a freshman, sophomore or senior in your field?
CW- Freshman. Because I’m still young, I feel I’m still learning so much every single day. And I’m nowhere near being at a point where I feel established or really settled in what I want to do. I want to have written some books, and I want to have immersed myself in the arts, the entire way through. The arts broadly; fashion, contemporary art, music. And just be a polymath at the end.
SOMETIMES, I THINK THAT I’M NOT FOCUSED ENOUGH, YOU KNOW JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF NONE...
But I think if you work hard enough you can have a lot of knowledge about a lot of different things, if you spend enough time on it, if you’re committed enough. So I don’t know what I will have done once I’m 75, all I know is it will entail a lot of writing and a lot of being a part of various creative communities. And maybe use the business side that I have now, because it does come in handy.
you can get more info on the MoMA's PopRally program here, you can check out Chloe's personal blog here, and follow her on instagram.
as told to: Olivia Seally