Director of National Gallery of Art Visits & my insecure moment…

CareerMilestonesArtist PracticeExistential SnacksCurator Relationships,Museum RelationshipsStudio Visits,
Written By Robbi Firestone

Everybody has ‘em….

The AMAZING Kaywin Feldman enters my studio; Director of the National Gallery of Art. Andrew Saul, Board of Trustees of NGA (and so much more!) follows behind Kaywin, (museum lifetime trustee).

Studio Visit. To preview Existential Snacks and The Infertility Project, ten years old and finally being seen.

Then Kaywin’s question….

“Robbi, tell us what your daily practice looks like?”

Why did I FREEZE? and start blabbering?

Heart raced, throat tightened, thirty years of practice suddenly impossible to name out loud.

I STARTED BLABBERING, DAMN IT.

Truth: I mostly appear composed. And I mostly am.

And then once in a while, in retrospect, I feel like an idiot.

Yup.

Me.

But its ok.

“Pinch-me week” continues, regardless.

Dinner with Andrew and Denise Saul waits in New York. My career is finally finding new footing, thirty years of collectors meeting one new gallery relationship in the same room.

Here's the promise: that fumble happens once.

Practicing the words now, out loud, mirror included, so the next room gets the answer this one deserved.

I will Master this. Practice in the mirror.

Next time someone as amazing and imporant as Kaywin Feldman asks about my daily creative practice, I’ll have my answer NAILED.

(Amen!)

Robbi Firestone

Robbi Firestone is a contemporary American painter and conceptual artist working between New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her practice spans three decades of sustained inquiry into how beauty, urgency, and ethical responsibility coexist in a fragile world.

Her paintings, in oil, acrylic, pastel, and graphite, emerge from sustained observation of landscape and sky, rooted in the high desert of New Mexico. These are not depictions of place but states of being: the land as inner weather, the horizon as meditation on presence and the radical act of sustained attention.

Her conceptual practice, most notably the 2026 series Existential Snacks: Food for Thought, deploys mass-produced consumer materials as a Trojan horse, seductive in their familiarity and disturbing in their implications, addressing ecological collapse, cultural numbness, and the human tendency to consume without thinking.

These are not two separate bodies of work. They are one philosophical position expressed in two registers: feeling as the ground from which thought becomes possible; thought as the ground from which action becomes necessary.

Firestone's work has received formal recognition from leading figures in the contemporary art world.

Louis Grachos, Executive Director of SITE Santa Fe, writes: "Robbi Firestone's Existential Snacks project is a brilliant contemporary extension of the longstanding tradition of Satirical Artworks. Innovative in her use of materials, Firestone's paintings/sculptures reveal a sense of humor, are clever and reveal a substantial insight into her subject matter which makes this series so successful."

Merry Scully, Head of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Contemporary Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art, wrote of The Infertility Project: "You are telling a powerful story...this project may take on a life of its own and take years to unfold," drawing comparison to Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. The National Museum of Women in the Arts described her work as "a testament to the power of transforming personal pain into a benefit for the greater good."

The Infertility Project premiered at the United Nations in parallel with the Commission on the Status of Women. The project became the subject of a documentary film by Betsy Chasse, director of What the Bleep Do We Know, available on Amazon Prime.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Worth Magazine, the Boston Herald, the Huffington Post, and the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Firestone's work is held in distinguished private collections across the United States. She is currently represented by 203 Fine Art, Taos, New Mexico.

Studio visits are by appointment in New York City and Santa Fe.

https://www.FirestoneArt.com
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