Press

The New York Times

Museum Director Laura Raicovich Gets a Second Act: Barkeep

At the Francis Kite Club, a collectively-built space for artists, people debate culture and politics over cocktails. There is something bigger than beer brewing at the Francis Kite Club, a new haunt in the East Village whose artists hold performances, shape its programming and debate politics from their barstools.

Above the patrons, including art stars like Marina Abramovic, is a mural by the painter Nina Nichols that imagines New York City repopulated with native plants and animals. A central panel features Annie Sprinkle, the artist and sexologist, and Naked Bear, a figure of Iroquois mythology, setting fire to the Merchant’s House, a local historic landmark. Cocktails are named after the picture, with the building’s destruction memorialized by vodka, Earl Grey tea, lemon and honey.

“I wanted to build somewhere warm and convivial, with cheap drinks and good people. Somewhere that definitely does not feel exclusive,” said Laura Raicovich, a former museum executive who is entering her second act as a bar impresario. Her business partners include the musician Kyp Malone, the stunt coordinator John McEnerney, the designer Alice McGillicuddy and the artist-activist Laura Hanna.

Italian Vogue

New York Profile #34: Laura Raicovich, writer and curator

Domenica Bucalo incontra Laura Raicovich in un Q&A per Vogue.it

New York Magazine

Curbed: 21 Questions with writer and curator, Laura Raicovich

Laura Raicovich thinks museums should have fewer shows a year, as told to Dana Budda. New York’s 21 Questions is back with an eye on creative New Yorkers. Laura Raicovich was formerly the executive director of the Queens Museum, was the deputy director of Dia Art Foundaton, and led gloval initiatives at Creative Time. Last year, she authored Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest.

Art Review

Power 100

‘Neutrality is a fiction’ when it comes to institutions, says Raicovich; it is a guise, as she makes clear in her forthcoming book Culture Strike (2021), for the defence of white male hegemony. In 2018 she left the directorship of the Queens Museum, New York, specifically objecting to the Israeli government hiring the museum for an event featuring US vice president Mike Pence, and more generally in dispute with a board that wanted to quell her political engagement. She is currently interim director at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, dedicated to queer culture, where she has addressed in the programming (albeit remotely) how queerness intersects with race and class. But her real power lies in her readiness to engage in debate, most recently instigating a series of hot-topic Zoom discussions with curator Helen Molesworth – ‘an experiment in talking and listening’ – that kicked off with a conversation on the Philip Guston controversy and included Coco Fusco, Charles Gaines, Nikki Columbus and any of the over 450 people who signed up and wished to chip in. Read More…

The New York Times

Former Queens Museum Director to Lead Leslie-Lohman Museum

Laura Raicovich may have proved too radical for the Queens Museum, where she was politically outspoken during her three years as president and executive director there before she stepped down in 2018.

But that brazen activism makes her a good fit for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which is devoted to queer art. On Friday, Ms. Raicovich was named its interim director, replacing Gonzalo Casals who next week becomes New York City’s new Cultural Affairs Commissioner.”… Read More

The New York Times

At Queens Museum, the Director Is as Political as the Art

As reports circulated that President Trump intended to end the policy Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, Laura Raicovich, the president and executive director of the Queens Museum, took to Twitter.

“Defending DACA is just the right thing to do,” she wrote. “Prevent its dissolution and pass legislation to make it permanent.”… Read More

ArtNews

The ARTnews Accord: Aruna D’Souza and Laura Raicovich in Conversation

Aruna D’Souza is the author of Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in 3 Acts, a new book from Badlands Unlimited, the publishing house helmed by the artist Paul Chan. The book begins with protests at the 2017 Whitney Biennial against Open Casket, a painting by the white artist Dana Schutz of the murdered black teenager Emmett Till, whose mutilated body figured in a 1955 photograph that helped galvanize the civil rights movement… Read More

The New York Times

Politically Outspoken Director of Queens Museum Steps Down

In the end, the very political activism that defined Laura Raicovich’s tenure as the president and executive director of the Queens Museum drove her out the door. On Friday, after just three years at the helm, Ms. Raicovich announced that she was stepping down… Read More

ArtNet News

Queens Museum Director Laura Raicovich Resigns Amid Political Differences With Board

Scarcely three months after she was profiled in the New York Times under the headline “The Director Is as Political as the Art,” Queens Museum director Laura Raicovich has left the institution. Her departure, after three years at the helm, comes as a result of differences with the institution’s board over her advocacy for progressive causes, reports the Times… Read More

ArtNews

‘A Nautical Traffic Jam’: Mel Chin Imagines an Underwater World in Times Square

Crowds gathered Wednesday under the blazing sun to witness the unveiling of two new works by Mel Chin in New York’s Times Square: Wake and Unmoored. The former is an imposing 60-foot-tall animatronic installation, while the latter is its digitally interactive “mixed reality” counterpart. Judging by the queue of eager viewers and the looks of curious passersby, the pieces—monumental and immersive, respectively—are well-suited for the spectacle of Midtown Manhattan… Read More

Artsy

Rather Than Strike, Museums Open Their Doors Wider on Inauguration Day

As the art world reckoned with the impending presidency of Donald Trump and the growing call for action last Monday, Whitney director Adam Weinberg gave, what was by all accounts, an impassioned speech. Never referencing the President-elect by name, Weinberg took aim at the rhetoric and vision of the country put forward during his campaign.… Read More

American Craft Council

Open Arms: Now more than ever, the Queens Museum welcomes many communities

When Laura Raicovich told her father she’d decided to double-major in art and political science at Swarthmore College, he flung up his hands in despair. What would she ever do with that? More than two decades later, she serves as the Queens Museum’s president and executive director, and in this role, she not only manages a permanent collection and dynamic exhibition schedule but also oversees an innovative and unapologetically activist approach to community engagement…. Read More

Hyperallergic

Best of 2018: Our Top 20 NYC Art Shows

Mel Chin: All Over the Place. This exhibition, curated by Manon Slome and Laura Raicovich, was the kind that really required two visits to see: the first time, one might get a sense of how varied and voluble Chin’s practice is, and then on the second one might come to understand how profound the meanings are that are somewhat belied by the elegance of his making... Read More

Hyperallergic

How the Arts Can Help Immigrant Communities Through Sanctuary

The weekend after Donald Trump was elected President, the Queens Museum held its regular family workshops, which, according to then-executive director and president Laura Raicovich, normally attract between 40 and 50 families. That November weekend, only three families showed up. “People stopped leaving their homes, their lives had been disrupted,” Raicovich told a packed audience Thursday night at “Toward Sanctuary Summits,” a panel discussion convened by the New School’s Vera List Center for Arts and Politics… Read More

Hyperallergic

Queens Museum Director’s Departure Prompts Call for More Politically Engaged Art Institutions

Following Laura Raicovich’s decision to step down as the president and executive director of the Queens Museum on Friday, a coterie of influential curators, artists, and academics has signed an open letter supporting her. The letter, initiated by Vera List Center for Art and Politics Director Carin Kuoni, praises Raicovich for her socially and politically engaged programming at the Queens Museum, which, according to her comments to the New York Times last week, caused a great deal of tension between her and the institution’s board of trustees…. Read More

Next City

How a Museum in Queens Became a Neighborhood Ally

Rarely do art museums have bilingual community organizers on their payroll. The Queens Museum employs two. For cultural institutions wondering how best to support immigrant communities in a hostile political climate, the outer-borough landmark provides some clues…. Read More