Over the last several years, Dr. Greenblatt has worked within and between arts and cultural institutions to facilitate the kind of public discourse that allows us to recognize complexity and possibility in our contemporary world. Most often performed in the role of consultant or advisor to boards, this work has required delicate acts of translation between the needs and goals of one institution and those of another. Major traveling exhibitions now link institutions to one another and require understanding between them. Likewise, in a challenging economy, more and more institutions are sharing ownership of individual works of art. Universities have begun to commission major art and performance works, often taking up the margin left by declining arts funders. This proximity and interdependence among institutions creates a community of discourse about culture between cities and in some cases across national borders. This new world of increasing cultural travel requires that institutions be agile and responsive and that they renew themselves internally, with respect to their own programs, and externally, with respect to their place in the world and to other institutions.

The outcomes of such projects have included lecture and discussion series, traveling exhibitions curated in tandem with panels and public performances, visiting artists programs paired with academic institutions, galleries, and museums. The thread that runs through these projects has been the primacy of interpretive and critical discourse, an unmistakable accent upon analytical reflection as a way to understand the changing cultural conditions of our world. In the New York Times recently, the Undersecretary General for Communications at the United Nations wrote an Op-Ed piece defending what she called “gabfests”. Shashi Tandoor writes, “Talk lays down markers, articulates aspirations, identifies common approaches, reveals gaps and helps bridge them. Without talk, there would never be agreement; without agreement, there would be no action.” (“In Defense of Gabfests”,The New York Times, July 29, 2002.)

A lively series of public lectures and discussions, The BookTalk Series gathered artists, professors, public intellectuals, writers, and curators to consider a topic of contemporary interest. Dr. Greenblatt curated the series and moderated the discussions from 1996 until 2000. Sometimes the topics coincided with an exhibition at the museum and at other times the topics arose from salient issues in literary or scientific culture. The topics of BookTalk included public memory and the construction of memorials, gender and surrealism, orientalism, visual forms of ethnography and cultural encounter, technoscience and the images generated by biotechnology. The series was later retitled “LookTalk: Interruptions in Visual Culture” in 2000, when it was co-curated by Natasha Boas, cosponsored by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The programs were refocused to include aspects of design, material culture, and popular culture. At the same time, Dr. Greenblatt was a member of Yerba Buena Center’s curatorial advisory committee and met both with the Center’s staff and with members of its board. The integration of administrative advisement and hands-on cultural programming proved useful to the Center as it embarked upon a period of self-assessment.

Greenblatt has served several institutions in this advisory role, while at the same time she has contributed to the cultural life of those very institutions. Jon Sims Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Horizons Foundation have all benefited from this nuanced perspective, in which Dr. Greenblatt consulted with these institutions in matters of program development and assessment; strategic planning and future thinking; grant allocations and analysis of resources; and consideration of mission.

Working with institutions is a central aspect to Greenblatt’s professional life, and it is equally important to strike out in independent directions, with original collaborative projects that lie outside specific institutional affiliation. A series of traveling exhibitions, public lectures and performances, symposia and publications, Work/Space was a multi-sited exploration of corporate culture and its visual orientations, from cubicle culture to architecture. Conceived with the visual artist Stephanie Ellis, the exhibitions traveled from the financial district of San Francisco to Southern Exposure Gallery and from the Bay Area to the University of California at Irvine and the University of Rochester in New York. The British cultural studies journal parallax published a special issue devoted to the project in 1997.

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