Photos + Q&A by Domenica Bucalo
1) How old are you?
33
2) What did you want to be when you were a child?
My favorite game was make-believe jobs — doctor, lawyer, President of the Republic of Italy. I think I cycled through about fifty possible careers before I turned ten.
3) What has been an influential experience in your life?
My first trip to Paris was when I was about nine. I realised that the world was bigger than I thought.
4) The Frick Collection has recently reopened, following the renovation of its historic building and garden. Can you take us through the highlights of the enhancement?
The reopening has strangely allowed us to make the building feel more like itself. The renovation refined circulation, improved lighting, restored sightlines long obscured and original settings, and—most importantly— with the opening of the second floor (where the family lived), returned the collection to its domestic scale, which is the essence of the Frick. Visitors can move through galleries which project you back in time, while the infrastructure quietly does what twenty-first-century infrastructure must do. In short, everything looks wonderfully unchanged, because an enormous amount has changed. Like in The Leopard, “If we want everything to remain as it is, then everything has to change.” But we also have a new cafe, new auditorium, new conservation space, new entrance hall…
5) A single artwork, Diana The Huntress, by Jean-Antoine Houdon has continued to stay in place at the museum’s Portico Gallery, crated through the renovation. The Goddess of the Hunt holds a commanding position over the Fifth Avenue Garden and Central Park. Her making involves a boldly technical balance and material, terracotta. Can you unveil the laboriousness of preserving the sculpture?
Terracotta is a fabulous material—until you have to move it. Diana is a complex object: hollow, delicately modeled over an iron armature, perfectly balanced, and positioned in a narrow portico overlooking Fifth Avenue. She is fearfully fragile. Keeping her in place was, paradoxically, the safest option. Our conservation and operations teams essentially built a trench around her with sandbags—one that allowed work to proceed while ensuring she did not experience so much as a tremor. Just to be sure, she also had a vibration monitor on her head and we kept checking in on her.
6) How would you describe the anew visitor experience?
The experience is at once more spacious and more intimate.
7) One of the main revelations to the visitor is the opening of the second floor as galleries. How was the reorganization and layout of the artworks approached?
The challenge was making sure upstairs and downstairs didn’t feel like two different worlds. We had to balance scale and negotiate between the (lost) flair upstairs designed by Elsie de Wolfe and Sir Charles Allom’s grandeur downstairs—allowing each to keep its character while maintaining a unified experience. At the same time, we aimed to keep the downstairs as unchanged as prudence allowed, and we had to ask ourselves how to recreate that unmistakable Frick atmosphere upstairs, a century later.
8) Helen Clay Frick, daughter of the museum’s founder, was unconventional for her times. Her vision as an art collector and a philanthropist substantially influenced the collection. Would you consider her a trailblazer in her approach to traveling and researching on art?
Absolutely. Helen traveled widely, researched voraciously, and formed her own opinions—usually several of them at once—in an era when women were not exactly encouraged to do so. “Trailblazer” feels almost too mild; she was a force. Most importantly, her vision for the Frick Art Reference Library—and its pioneering photographic collections— changed the course of art-historical research in the United States, not to mention the evolution of the museum itself. Just to give a measure of its importance: Allied forces regularly consulted it during World War II to avoid bombing major European monuments.
9) In what way she played a critical role in shaping the institution?
She protected the integrity of her father’s collection, expanded it with her own discerning eye, and set the scholarly standards that still define the Frick, giving it its intellectual backbone.
10) How do you approach the mission-driven curatorial aspect? And what do you wish for institutions like yours in order to continue to connect with communities and thrive?
Mission-driven curating begins with the object—curate means to take care—and that care naturally fosters curiosity. When objects stay at the center, they show their remarkable ability to accommodate meaning rather than have it imposed on them, inviting new voices and fresh perspectives, even on the most familiar works.
Looking ahead, I hope institutions continue to balance rigorous scholarship with genuine openness. When the object remains at the center and the doors stay open, museums don’t just connect with their communities—they grow with them.
11) Can you tell us about your next project?
I’m working on an exhibition devoted to Sienese fifteenth-century bronzes—the first time many of these objects will be seen in the United States. They span the full range of sculptural possibility: from jewel-like, impeccably finished works, to bronzes so atmospheric they’ve been mistaken for works by Leonardo, but even Medardo Rosso. Yet we almost always encounter them through the domineering lens of Florence. In that sense, the project is also about forging—pun fully intended—a history of art for the so-called peripheries, and allowing Siena’s voice to emerge on its own terms.
12) Your favorite place in New York?
Of course I’m not gonna tell you. It’s already way too crowded for my taste.
13) Would you agree that a dance floor is never simply a dance floor?
I was born the son of a psychoanalyst. Of course to me it may look like parquet, but it behaves like intrigue. But lately I’ve come to appreciate that sometimes things really are just what they are. There’s that wonderful story of Hal Prince hearing the early score of Cats and asking Andrew Lloyd Webber, with mounting concern, “Is there something I’m missing? Queen Victoria is the main cat, Disraeli and Gladstone are other cats, and then there are the poor cats—is this an allegory?” Lloyd Webber apparently took a long, painful pause before saying, “Hal… it’s just cats.” And they never discussed it again.
14) Will you ever leave NY? And if yes, where would you go?
I threaten it regularly, but the city never takes me seriously.
Giulio Dalvit and Domenica Bucalo in conversation, November 2025 New York.
