I want to talk to you about your experiences with some of the artists during this process.
FOGLE: I get along with them all. Working with Vija Celmins was a highlight, because she’s such an amazing senior artist — senior in the sense that her career is incredibly established. What makes her senior is the legacy of the work that she’s built up over the last couple of decades, because she’s very young and energetic. That was a real highlight, and that was really amazing — that somebody of that stature would agree to be in a show like this with 39 other artists, and then work with me on choosing the work and installing the work, and really take the time to come out and spend a day here helping me install the paintings. That was a super treat, big treat. And she’s amazing. She’s knows what she likes. She won the [Carnegie Prize], and I had nothing to do with that. I was just so happy that she won the prize.

D. Johnston, Wilhelm SasnalHow about some of the other artists?
FOGLE: Many of them I’ve worked with before and have had long relationships with. Richard Wright is a good friend, somebody I’ve known who, we became friendly with each other after I did a project for the Walker Art Center in 2000. We had worked with Phil Collins before, did a little project show with him in the Forum Gallery. Sharon Lockhart was in my first exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1996. So I had a long relationship with her. But each artist is different and has a different personality and everyone was great to work with. They all have their own different sort of ways of operating, which is fine. Manfred Pernice likes to come and be left alone for overnight, almost. It’s a very beautiful and very poetic way of working. And it’s not like Thomas Hirschhorn, who comes and everything’s set up on a rigorous schedule. He meets the schedule like clockwork. He sweats and then he’s done. They finish exactly the hour they wanted to finish, they finished after a two-week project. With Manfred Pernice, it’s much looser, and bringing together elements, and thinking about things, and needing time to go out and smoke and think and come back in and move things around and have this built. His work looks very haphazard and very ad hoc, but it’s completely and utterly planned and thought out, and poetically — the elements are chosen and positioned in a certain way for a particular reason, often just known to him. But it’s a different way of working. That’s the fun part is that everybody’s got a different way of operating.

So you visited various regions. Is there any particular region that you visited, which you found more intriguing than another? And for what reason?
FOGLE: Not necessarily more intriguing. It’s hard to say that. I loved going to Korea. I’d never been before. That was amazing.

Why was it amazing?
FOGLE: It’s just a really interesting place. It’s, per capita, the most Internet saturated place in the world and the cell phone systems are four generations above ours. There’s a lot of really interesting contemporary art there. I’d never been there before so I found Seoul really interesting. Just the imprint of this new economy from the last 20 years on top of an industrial economy so there’s now a technological economy.

Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Kassie, Sharon LockhartBut I love Brazil. I’ve been to Brazil many times before, but there’s great stuff happening there. The amazing thing is Berlin is such a great city now. There are artists from all over the world that are moving to Berlin. Two of the artists — one from Tokyo, one from Korea — are both living in Berlin now. An artist from Georgia, the former Soviet Republic, is living there. I did so many studio visits with non-German artists in Berlin that it was kind of crazy. I mean it’s really become an interesting, international center for contemporary art. It’s not just a German place. There’s a lot of German artists living there, but there’s so many artists from all over the world living there now. That happens. Places that are affordable like Berlin become centers for real reasons, which is that they’re really art friendly, and they’re affordable and there’s great galleries.

There’s an industrial environment that — probably very much like Pittsburgh had — that affords a lot of space, a lot of vacant industrial buildings.
FOGLE: Yes. I don’t know why so far, but Berlin is still quite affordable compared to other places in Europe. But it’s a great — I mean there’s great museums. There’s great art institutions. They now have the Berlin Biennale. There’s the DAAD program, which brings in international artists from all over the world for one and two year residencies. It’s a model for a city like Pittsburgh, what it could be in terms of the art world. It’s also the capital of Germany and it’s in the absolute middle of Europe– it’s very accessible from other countries of the world.

Are there other curators that have influenced you?
FOGLE: Absolutely. There’s three out of four on my advisory committee — the reason I chose them is because they’ve influenced me. Richard Flood, who’s the Chief Curator of the New Museum, he hired me at the Walker Art Center in 1994, and we worked together for 11 years. He’s my biggest influence, the reason why I’m doing this. Daniel Birnbaum, who just got appointed as the next director of the Venice Biennale is an old friend of mine, and has curated programs all over the world before. He’s a great writer and a philosopher, writes — really, one of the best writers about our contemporary art — living writers, I think, working today. He writes for ArtForum. Eungie Joo, who ran REDCAT, the CalArts Gallery in Los Angeles, open until about a few months ago for about five years. We worked together at the Walker Art Center as well. She did an amazing program at REDCAT, very high quality solo shows and group shows in a very small space on a shoestring. She had a very different take on things and knew a lot of artists in Asia and other places that I didn’t necessarily know. Chus Martinez was the only person I didn’t know very well. She and I met through some friends and she’s the director of the Kunstverein in Frankfurt. She was working in Bilbao for many years, and she knows Latin America super well and I respect all of them. I think Richard Flood’s been my biggest influence. Yes. I would say those four people. That’s why I chose them. Also, I knew they could tell me to take a hike if they thought I was going in the wrong direction, and I wouldn’t be offended.

So you started curating, working on this exhibit, how long ago?
FOGLE: About two years and two months ago, or something like that. Like winter of ‘06. I started in September of ‘05, and I kind of had started thinking about it. But it took a few months to hire my assistant curator and the curatorial assistant to the assistant curator, and sort of get settled here and try to figure out the institution. So it was like really in winter of ‘06 that I started really wholeheartedly working on it.