Paul Holdengräber was born in Texas, the son of Austrian immigrants who left their home country for Haiti in 1938. Though he is not a California native, he said he agreed when the curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) contacted him in 1997, asking him to bring a group of Californians together for the museum’s “Made in California” exhibition.
“I’m an expert in not being an expert in anything. I think the curator […] had a feeling that what I liked doing was bringing people together,” Holdengräber said. “So I brought a hundred different people together over many days to talk about what California is.”
Prior to his work at LACMA, Holdengräber said he studied comparative literature at Princeton University. He said he then taught at Princeton and several other colleges and universities, before finally taking a fellowship at the Getty Museum, where he studied the works of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin.
After his work on the “Made in California” exhibition, Holdengräber said he founded the LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures in 1998. He said he interviewed myriad people and artists as the director of the program, and that he founded the institute in order to energize the museum and create a new way for people to engage with art, besides simply looking at it.
“The word ‘institute’ is more of a verb than a noun,” Holdengräber said. “It means to initiate, instigate, irritate, create some fervor and make the museum less of a mausoleum, less of a resting home for old masters.”
Holdengräber said his work at LACMA led to him getting a phone call from the president of the New York Public Library (NYPL), asking him to invigorate the institution. So in 2004, after seven years at LACMA, he said he left LA and began working at the NYPL.
While working at the library and as director of the LIVE cultural series from the NYPL Program, Holdengräber said he did six or seven hundred interviews. Subjects included Patti Smith, Warner Herzog and Jay-Z (the latter driven by Holdengräber’s desire to be a cool dad, he said). The conversations happened in front of live audiences, as well as added to the NYPL’s YouTube channel.
“I tried to create a way for people to have access to the library, maybe people who would naturally not necessarily come to a library, and discover its treasures,” Holdengräber said.
He interviewed Mike Tyson in 2018, and invited 100 boxers from around New York City to watch. While he and Tyson were at the library, he said he showed Tyson the NYPL’s Special Collections section.
“[I showed] him the works of Machiavelli, and the books of Audubon on pigeons and birds and all kinds of different things,” Holdengräber said.
After the interview, he said some of the invited boxers approached him, asking to see the collections as well.
“I said, ‘This is the New York Public Library. This is your library. Please come see it,’” Holdengräber said.
After more than 14 years at the NYPL, Holdengräber said he wanted to start something new. He moved back to LA and founded Onassis Los Angeles, which he said is a center for dialogue. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and he created a daily podcast called The Quarantine Tapes. He said everybody he called wanted to be a part of it, given nobody had anything else to do. According to the podcast’s website, Holdengräber called a guest each day for a discussion of their experience of the pandemic; featured interviewees included the performance artist Ann Magnuson and the novelist and journalist Hari Kunzru.
“I think [the podcast] will gain in traction and importance over the years. I think in 10 years from now, people will want to know what so-and-so did during the pandemic,” Holdengräber said. “It becomes an archive of our time.”
Meldia Yesayan, the director of Oxy Arts, said that she met Holdengräber in 2022 and asked him if he would be interested in working with Oxy Arts on a new program called the Oxy Live! speaker series. In October of last year, Holdengräber interviewed the activist Alok Vaid-Menon for the series’ inaugural event. He went on to interview the sociologist Ruha Benjamin, the writer Rebecca Solnit and visual artist Julie Mehretu. He will interview the artist Laurie Anderson April 10. Yesayan said the program has been going well so far.
“He’s just an incredibly thoughtful conversationalist and he has this ability to draw out insightful responses from his interviewees,” Yesayan said.
Holdengräber said that during his interviews, he encourages people to step outside of the areas they usually specialize in.
“A good conversation for me is when […] the person you speak to says to you, ‘You know what, I said something I haven’t said before,'” Holdengräber said.
Lee Lang (first year), went to the most recent Oxy Live! event, where Holdengräber interviewed Mehretu. Lang said that he was able to get to know Mehretu as a person because of the questions that Holdengräber asked.
“It’s easy to have an event like that feel like a lecture, and it didn’t feel so much like a lecture. The students were engaged,” Lang said.
In the past, Holdengräber has had an original YouTube series with the NYPL called The Paul Holdengräber Show, as well as a podcast called A Phone Call From Paul. He currently maintains a feed on X, formerly known as Twitter, and said he said he is interested in the way the app’s short-form content offers glimpses of articles one might want to read the entirety of.
“I think in your classes here [at Occidental], people are probably very eagerly learning about things,” Holdengräber said. “So I think there are different modes of finding things out, different ways in which we access knowledge.”
Holdengräber said the conversations we have with one another are an important source of learning. He said that when he talks to people, he isn’t trying to find people’s weak spots.
“What always has inhabited me is a kind of an insatiable curiosity,” Holdengräber said. “[I have] a real appetite for knowing what is in people’s minds [and] trying to bring out the best in people.”
Contact Ruby Gower at gower@oxy.edu
