Nora Atkinson

Right.

So Burning Man had been an aspect of art that had been pushed off to the sidelines, and I just started to draw the lines between what was going on in the craft world and what was going on out there and seeing the value in something that wasn't valued.

And that's, I think, the most fun that I have in my job is just trying to see something from a different perspective and then bring it full circle and bring other people along, which is probably very similar to what you have the opportunity to do.

I think there's one thing, though, that I find interesting as well, which is that we're in this moment when everything is about now and we're progressing so fast towards the future.

And then the sort of subversive act sometimes is that looking backwards, actually embracing lessons that we had from the past or amazing people.

One of my favorite exhibitions that I ever curated was a show called Murder is Her Hobby, Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

She was a woman who was creating miniature dioramas that trained forensic investigators how to approach a scene of the crime in the 19th century breaking barriers.

So it's those opportunities as well to bring these sort of little known things from the past up

and have those conversations.

Do you have the opportunity to kind of blend old and new in those kinds of ways?

So it's a really interesting question because at this moment, I always think that the most interesting design and innovation comes from the constraints.

And at this moment, we feel very unconstrained.

AI is not maybe all the way there yet, but you can just do pretty much anything.

So how do you create the necessary constraint to make something really interesting and meaningful?

That consistency.

Yeah.

I mean, I've been very fortunate at Smithsonian to work with some really wonderful exhibit designers, but always it has to be something conceptualized in your head from start to finish and really crafted room by room to make sure that people enter into the feeling of the space as well as just appreciating the object.

I think it's important to have it in the museums.

And I'd like to see more of it, frankly, in museums, because the faster that we can bring some of those aspects into museums and allow all of the breadth of what's going on in that, the more we can document it, but also the more you really get a sense for what's possible.

Yeah, I think just by and large, there hasn't been enough AI art that has made it into the museum yet.