This panel discussion between friends, colleagues, and curators on the legacy of New Museum founding director Marcia Tucker celebrated the publication of Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker (New Museum/Getty Research Institute, 2019). Featuring former New Museum curator Allan Schwartzman, Laundromat Project Executive Director Kemi Ilesanmi, and A Blade of Grass Executive Director Deborah Fisher, and moderated by Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, the conversation reflected on Tucker’s enduring legacy and spirit of experimentation. Taking cues from Tucker’s 1987 lecture “The Ten Most Pressing Issues in the Art World Today, and some Uncommon Solutions,” the panelists considered how questions of institutional ethics, authority, gender, and race are just as urgent today.

Published jointly by the New Museum and the Getty Research Institute, Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker is the first anthology to assemble the writings of the groundbreaking art historian, critic, and curator. These influential, hard-to-obtain texts showcase Tucker’s lifelong commitment to pushing the boundaries of curatorial practice. Her writings and lectures—many of which have never before been published—demonstrate her thinking and rethinking through inherited structures of power within and outside the museum. The volume compiles the only comprehensive bibliography of Tucker’s writing and highlights her critical attention to art’s relationship to culture and politics more broadly.

Out of Bounds: The Collected Writings of Marcia Tucker was edited by Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum; Johanna Burton, current Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts and former Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum; Alicia Ritson, independent curator and former Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow; with Kate Wiener, current Assistant Curator at the Noguchi Museum and former Curatorial Assistant for the Department of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum.

Support for Out of Bounds:

Major support for this publication has been provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Generous support has been provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Support for this publication has been provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.
Support for public programs is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.