Monsieur Ambassador

Art Center to direct a new art center in his native France. In December 2004, he was planning the Walker’s reopening exhibitions and a retrospective of a Chinese artist for the fall when he was invited to curatethe 2006 Whitney Biennial—the foremost survey of American contemporary art. In spring, his Paris plans fell through, so he decided to move to New York. That summer, he and Whitney Biennial cocurator Chrissie Iles crisscrossed the country, visiting artists’ studios. By late summer, Vergne had been rehired by the Walker, this time as deputy director and chief curator. Then the Huang Yong Ping exhibition opened. Then the London-based magazine, ArtReview, named Vergne to its annual Power 100 list. And this month, the Whitney Biennial opens in New York.

Given Vergne’s eventual career choice, recent rise to eminence, and engagement in his work—“I wake up every morning thinking how lucky I am to be doing what I’m passionate about”—it’s strange to think he grew up wanting to be a truck driver and hating museums. He attributes some of that to adolescent insolence. Early on, Vergne, now forty, became—and still is—enthralled with ancient Egyptian culture, but otherwise he wasn’t interested in the historical art of ages past, which is what he believed museums had to offer. Art galleries, however, opened to him the world and work of living artists. “Going to a gallery and seeing art that had just been made was fascinating,” he says, with a French accent. “To see how an artist responded to a recent moment was fascinating. Most of the time, I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but learning something new was exciting.”

One of Vergne’s first encounters with contemporary art was as a university student, when he saw a video of a performance work by Joseph Beuys. “I was so struck by it, because I had no idea what I was looking at,” he says. The experience inspired him to buy a book about body art and read it cover to cover.

Vergne’s inborn curiosity and need for knowledge has transferred to his curatorial approach. “Philippe needs to think about things from his own perspective,” says Walker director Kathy Halbreich, “which is an all-too-rare quality in curators. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that Philippe is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. You’re as apt to find Philippe talking about a movie or a performance as you are a visual artist whose studio he visited in Mexico City.”

Before Vergne moved to Minneapolis in 1997 to be the Walker’s visual arts curator, Halbreich recalls that he told her not to worry, that he didn’t have much furniture. Halbreich, who figured the Walker could save a little money with his move, says, “We ended up moving the largest library I’ve ever had to pay the freight on. I’m sure he slept on those books and ate off them for years.”

Vergne first became aware of the Walker in the early 1990s when he was an art history student at the University of Paris. When researching artists, he often referred to exhibition catalogs and realized that the Walker had been showing artists, including Marcel Duchamp, before it was obvious to do so. “I had no idea what Minneapolis was,” says Vergne, “but I knew of all of these exhibitions coming out of there. ‘What is going on there?’ I wondered.” After viewing two Walker touring shows in Paris—a retrospective of Hélio Oiticica and Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est”—and coordinating In the Spirit of Fluxus with the Walker and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, where he was director, Vergne understood all the more why the art world held up the Walker as a model for contemporary art institutions.