Join Musa Mayer, author and president of the Guston Foundation, in conversation with Anders Bergstrom, Director at Hauser & Wirth, New York. These two have been close collaborators for over a decade. Together, Mayer and Bergstrom have conceived several major exhibitions of Philip Guston’s work.

Mayer, Guston's daughter, will share an overview of her father’s influential practice. From early acclaim as a figurative painter through his turn to abstraction and, in the last decade of his life, return to figuration, Mayer will narrate us through his best-known works. Bergstrom will reflect on his long-standing relationship with the late Canadian collector, Phil Lind, and his ongoing work with the Guston Estate. Together, they will share their efforts to promote Guston’s legacy.

This talk coincides with the Light Years: The Phil Lind Gift in the Signy Eaton Gallery, Level 2, 224.

Background

Not long after Musa Mayer published Night Studio, A Memoir of Philip Guston in 1988, her cancer diagnosis led to a twenty-five-year career as a patient and research advocate devoted to helping people living with advanced breast cancer. In 2015, Musa retired from advocacy to focus full-time on her father’s legacy. In the years since, she has curated Guston exhibitions in New York, London, Hong Kong, Zurich, and Los Angeles. Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings 1971 and 1975, her second Guston book, coauthored with Debra Bricker Balken, earned the Filaf d’Or prize as the best international art book of 2017. Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 accompanied an exhibition of the same name in 2019. Laurence King published her introduction to her father’s life and work in 2021. Besides managing the Guston estate, Musa is President of The Guston Foundation, whose legacy projects include the website PhilipGuston.org, built around a 50-year chronology of Guston’s career and the Catalogues Raisonné of his paintings, drawings, and archives, detailing all exhibitions, bibliography, and holdings in museum collections around the world.

Anders Bergstrom is a Director at Hauser & Wirth in New York City. Bergstrom has worked closely with the Estate of Philip Guston since 2001, first at McKee Gallery from 2001–15, and with Hauser & Wirth since 2016. Working with Zoe Leonard, he publishes new editions and works with prints by the gallery’s stable of artists and estates. Bergstrom also organizes exhibitions at the gallery’s 18th Street location in New York City.