I’ve long admired the work of Lauren Hirshfield, especially through her role as co-founder of PARADICE PALASE, a platform emphasizing resources and connectivity for emerging and early-career artists. She’s an independent curator and arts producer based in Brooklyn whose practice highlights emerging and under-represented artists, with her curation often drawing inspiration from speculative fiction, fantasy, queerness, and radical joy. Currently she is interested in transmutation of materials, technologies, and clichés on themes of aspiration, collectivism, and eco-futurism.
Hirshfield co-founded PARADICE PALASE in 2017 with Kat Ryals (with whom the next Q+A will be arriving in your inbox within the next couple of weeks), conceiving of a digital membership network for artist professional development. She also started the project @temp.img (2020) which curated and sold emerging art under $500 directly on Instagram. Hirshfield’s curatorial work has been featured in Artnet, Forbes, Cool Hunting, ArtNews, Juxtapoz, Cult Bytes, and The Observer, among others.
Since 2016 Hirshfield has curated more than 40 exhibitions presented with organizations like NADA, Future Fair, Spring/Break Art Show, Uprise Art, House of Yes, and Save Art Space. She has been a Visiting Critic at SUNY Purchase, SVA, Brooklyn College, NARS Foundation, ChaNorth, and Residency Unlimited; in 2019 she was invited as a Curator-in-Residence with Wassaic Project.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! See you again a little later this week.
—Kate
Q+A: Lauren Hirshfield
Lauren, it’s so nice to chat! I'd love to know how you landed where you are now—what was your route into the art world, co-founding PARADICE PALASE, and curating?
Thank you for inviting me for this interview! I’m always honored to share about my practice.
I entered the art world as a painter actually—I have a BFA from SUNY Purchase. For the record, I love painting and drawing. There’s a calmness about the process, it quiets my thoughts for a little while, which is rare with ADHD. In my final semester of college, I had an internship at a long-standing Chelsea gallery. I respect their program to this day but something about those few months, that pocket of the art world… it wasn’t what I expected or hoped for. And then moving to NYC right after college and falling head-first into the intoxicating sparkle of city life at 22 —wow! It captivated me in a way I had never experienced before.
I totally lost interest in painting. It was almost by chance that I fell into freelancing with an independent curator, and then with the art fair 4Heads helping emerging artists build DIY installations in abandoned houses on Governor’s Island. I owe my career to the work I did with that fair. Witnessing the vision of those artists, it gave me permission to build the art world I wanted for myself.
4Heads is where I met the artist Kat Ryals, who is the co-founder of PARADICE PALASE (a.k.a. “PP”) and now one of my very best friends. We met August 2016. [Editor’s note: keep an eye out for an interview with Kat coming soon.] In October, I curated my first show, including with Kat's artwork. By December we had decided to start PP together, and we opened a basement project space in June 2017. It is a whirlwind tale of friendship and business-ship that dove me headfirst into life as a curator, and I don’t regret a single day of it.
Have you always curated independently of PARADICE PALASE, or did it emerge organically as you facilitated within that network?
Yes, I have been re-focusing on my independent practice over the past few months, after a couple years off! But I’ve been curating steadily since Kat and I started PARADICE PALASE in 2017. My independent projects have mostly been world-building-type solo booths at SPRING/BREAK Art Show. So, absolutely, my career as a curator is largely shaped by the many years spent co-running PP.
We founded the business as a curatorial project; it’s much of the reason I decided to do it! I discovered curating outside of formal education, so I didn’t have any resources yet around how to advance my career. PARADICE PALASE gave me a platform to explore a medium of creating that was new and exciting to me! So, I’d say it organically evolved over the 7+ years since.
What kind of research or ideas are you considering a lot right now? Is there a thing—a question, a challenge—that you just can't get out of your mind?
The last six months of research and development has definitely netted a lot of swirling in my brain. I’ve been researching the history of salon gatherings, thinking about the intersection of infrastructure and value of third spaces, and on the anthropology of domestic spaces. I’m also getting really into materiality, especially obsessed with artists who are essentially doing science experiments in their studios. I was gifted a copy of Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown that I’ve been reading, and then pondering on, and then reading some more. I’m thinking a lot about collectivism and the incredible power of the natural world. So I guess the question is: what could the future look like if we re-aligned ourselves with that power?
In a down-to-fundamentals kind of way, how would you describe what you do as a curator? What is your approach like?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately—“What do you do?” I’ve often described my approach as world-building, but lately I see it as a form of storytelling. I applied for a fellowship recently and there was a similar question. I went pretty pie-in-the-sky with the answer: artists translate the universe into their own dialects, and curators wield their polyglot pens to draft stories that contextualize the lived experience in all its multitudes. Heady, I know. I’m a romantic, what can I say!
From a practical standpoint, being a curator is being a superb project manager. Unpopular opinion, but it’s true! I spend a lot of my time on the computer planning and coordinating. I love researching and daydreaming. I adore studio visits. But especially as an independent curator, I’ve had to wear a lot of hats. I write press releases, manage consignments, design renderings, construct installations, hang artwork, and so much more. I love it though. An exhibition concept isn’t complete until I’ve worked through how it will be installed and how someone will move through the space and experience it. It ends up being a pretty iterative process, but the show’s theme or thesis does always come first for me. When everything connects back to the thesis, that’s when the concept is complete.
As you've co-organized with artists over the past several years, what's one surprise or challenge that has really stuck with you or prompted you to evaluate your curatorial practice?
Collaboration is key to bringing an exhibition to life. Working with an individual artist to present their work alone is a very different curatorial experience than with a group show, even just with three to four artists. I consider curating my art form, so I think for many years I was often quite precious about the process of conceptualizing and creating a show. Even when working with another curator or with one artist on their solo, I admittedly felt protective about the presentation—I was holding onto it too dearly, I think.
The “surprise” was actually a slow realization that suddenly hit me as the “aha!” moment, that curating should not happen in a vacuum. My presentations are as much a part of the artists as they are a part of me, and acknowledging this symbiosis has already helped to re-frame my work and fuel this next chapter of my career.
What is your favorite thing about working with emerging artists?
STUDIO VISITS! You can really get into the mind of an artist in studio visits; it scratches a good itch, ya know? Being near an artist’s process and learning how to decipher their work—you become fluent in another language and it’s absolutely thrilling. Also getting to shepherd an artist’s story, especially emerging artists, and contextualize their artwork through my practice—and help the public better understand the world around them through that process—wow, it feels something like a spiritual experience.
Tell me about what you're working on now! Are you involved with any exciting projects coming up?
There are a few exhibitions lined up this year already, for which I am very grateful and excited. I’ve had the immense pleasure of working with artists Leah Schrager and Margaret Murphy (a long-time best friend!) since December, on an exhibition of AI-generated photo prints that will be presented at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show this weekend during NY Art Week. I have a group show opening in August with All Street Gallery about speculative fiction and human confluence with our environments. And I’ll be curating Kat Ryals’ solo show in September with a new batch of textile prints— gallery to be announced soon! I’ve also been researching in the background for a larger project that I’m hoping to launch in the spring of 2026, but I’m too superstitious to share about it… yet. Stay tuned!
Is there anything else about your work—or just thoughts! opinions!—that you'd like people to know?
I am a great gallery buddy and will happily visit galleries or go to openings with folks, even if we don’t know each other that well. So if you live in NYC, invite me to your next gallery day! Also I would be remiss if I didn’t plug my new mailing list. Especially career curators, please connect! I’m manifesting new curator friends this year.
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