In 2018, Cortney Lane Stell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Denver-based arts nonprofit Black Cube, found herself in Zumba classes and piñata-making workshops at a former bracero processing facility at the U.S. border with Mexico; not the typical museum work one would expect, and that’s exactly the point. Black Cube follows artists’ ideas anywhere – from rural Texas to Nevada’s atomic-testing sites – spending months or years in dialogue with communities before a single public artwork takes shape.
The Overview spoke to Stell about what it takes to run a restless institution that reinvents itself with every project and why curiosity matters most in her curatorial practice.
You describe Black Cube as an artist-forward organization. What does that mean in practice?
Cortney Lane Stell: One very concrete way is compensation. We're W.A.G.E. certified, which stands for Working Artists and the Greater Economy. It’s a nonprofit based in New York certifying organizations that provide fair artist compensation. So we use their compensation structure to guide how much we pay the artists we commission for projects. It's similar to Canada's CARFAC fee schedule.
Another way we stay artist-forward is that everything starts with the artist’s idea. As a cultural organization without walls, we push back against that traditional notion of a museum building, and work more like a wandering, curious institution that follows artists' ideas and thinks rigorously about context: where a project takes place, the time in which it’s produced, and how it relates to the communities we are working with.
And then, the last way that reflects how we are artist-forward is that we produce ambitious projects that help artists’ practices grow. This could mean expanding an artist’s research and development process, as well as supporting artists as they work at a new monumental scale, in a new medium, or in relation to new sites or communities.
In which way can this be challenging?
Mid-career artists have already proven themselves, but there are always many unknowns when working site-specifically—like logistical challenges, for example. The artists need to adapt and leave their comfort zones because they might work at a new scale or with a new technology, which they first have to get familiar with.
We always start in the idea stage and help artists develop a concept, thinking about the best location, audience and context, materials, fundraising options, and budget needed for each project. As a curator, I’m especially interested in discovering artists who don’t typically work site-specifically but have enough experience, curiosity, and contextual awareness to grow their practice through such a project. At Black Cube we always consider the growth of the artist’s practice.
And where do you find the artists?
I travel to see many biennials and art fairs, although that's often not where I find them. Instead, I like to immerse myself in artist communities. For example, we have worked with creatives in Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. I visit a lot of artists' studios, or listen to recommendations, and try to get a sense of whose ideas could shake things up. Once I’ve found a potential match, I assess where the artist is in their career and I try to understand how they deal with stress and uncertainty. From experience I know that some artists create better work when they have a defined space instead of a “world-is-your-oyster” model. So for me it’s important how they ideate and approach projects, the timelines they follow and the conditions under which they’ve created their best work.
What does your process look like at the beginning of a project?
We always start our research from two perspectives. The first is the artist's perspective: we ask ourselves, what does the artist need to best understand people and place? If the focus is history, then we’ll connect them with historians. Or maybe, when working on a land art project, they need to understand soil composition. So we'll connect them with agronomists. The other perspective is how to engage with a community as outsiders coming into the place. Depending on the context, that can require a lot of sensitivity.
Can you name an example?
In 2018 we started a project, Unearthed: Desenterrado, with artist Adriana Corral at the Rio Vista Farm in Socorro, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border, during the height of Trump’s build-a-wall campaign. Rio Vista Farm was a human processing facility during the 1930s until the 1950s and part of the Bracero program that brought millions of Mexican workers into the U.S to help build railroads and work on the surrounding cotton farms. They were processed in that facility in a very inhumane way and sprayed with chemicals like DDT and Zyklon B. Originally developed by the U.S. government, the chemical Zyklon B was later adopted by the Nazis for use in extermination camps.
Given the build-a-wall-rhetoric popular across the U.S. during Trump’s first presidency in 2018, I was hesitant to start the project because I feared that drawing attention to the site might open up the community to hate. However, after our first conversations, the residents widely supported the project and saw a great importance in it.
They wanted us to help spread the word. In the beginning, we participated in their everyday life, attending Zumba classes and hosting piñata-making workshops with the elderly. Through our intimate and casual conversations, we learned that many braceros, due to exposure to DDT and other toxic pesticides, had either already died of cancer or were dying right before our eyes. We lost several of our Bracero contacts in between these initial interviews and opening Adriana’s project.
How did the place’s dark history inform the idea of the artwork?
Adriana developed the concept of an installation in the form of a white flag embroidered with the talons of a golden eagle and a bald eagle, representing the national symbols of Mexico and the United States. The talons looked as if they were just about to touch, as if in either embrace or attack. The flag was made of cotton, a direct reference to the cotton fields that surround the facility. Cotton flags at this scale are rare now, as they are not as durable as vinyl. Using a cotton material that intentionally unravelled in the wind over time was a metaphor for the fragility of the human bodies and the Braceros that laboured in the nearby fields and across the U.S. The artist’s choice in material connected very directly to the artwork’s surrounding landscape and history.
And you always involve the community very early in the process?
Yes, exactly, and sometimes that’s not easy, because when presenting a public art project, people are used to seeing a proposal first, instead of an artwork being incubated as we're engaging with the community. After Unearthed: Desenterrado ended, we were invited to contribute a recipe to the local community’s cookbook which, to me, was one of the greatest markers of success because it meant we had formed a meaningful relationship with the residents. It meant that we hadn’t just imposed our project on them. Especially when working in rural areas, where people may have less access to cultural institutions, we also have to be aware of our own belief systems and the prevalent ideologies in the cultural sector.
What kind of ideologies are you referring to?
For example, we embrace many different beliefs from different origins, and diversity is very important. However, smaller towns may have more of an interconnected identity that is less diverse and expansive than in larger cities; as such, they might take offense to outside artists or institutions coming in. We want to avoid being viewed as the city slickers with all the ideas swooping in and knowing everything. We have to meet people where they are at, with a balance of humility and confidence in the artwork development process.
Did that happen once?
In 2023, we realized a very ambitious 160 acre earth artwork in an unfarmable plot of land in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Many locals, including some farmers, were not really open to contemporary art. To get involved with the community we attended town hall meetings, worked with the local food coalition, visited the local swimming pool, and much more.
We also partnered on a fundraiser for the local food coalition and offered our graphic design services to help the event. The area, despite having a lot of agricultural land, suffered from food scarcity. All this was one year before we actually started the project.
For me it was important to make the people who were skeptical about the project feel heard because it’s okay if they don’t like the project. To me, failure is when people are uninterested. So we made sure that we could receive their feedback and comments with just as much interest as we would from someone who was completely excited about it. And there were certainly both camps.
Beside building relationships with the community, what else was challenging about the project?
The scale—160 acres translates to about 120 American football fields. We had to think about the artwork’s impact on the ecosystem, how to get visitors out to the land and experience the work in a safe and respectful way, and decide if we should develop roads or pathways through the exhibition. It was also hard to solve the problem of producing at this scale and not spending millions of dollars. For context, we typically work within a budget of between $10,000 and $300,000. Fundraising was also a huge challenge in a rural community where the nearest major city is a five-hour drive away.
What project are you currently working on? Is it similarly ambitious?
Right now we're producing Atomic Open House together with artist Whitney Lynn. It will be located in the desert north of Las Vegas, a place with atomic testing history. The idea is to make it part roadside attraction, stylized film prop, and architectural sculpture. The artist designed it as a flat, two-story, colonial-style building facade inspired by a mock house constructed to test nuclear explosions in 1955. It’s currently in production at an art fabrication studio owned by a magician. Hiring locally is a big part of our ethics working with communities.
How long do site-specific public art projects like these normally take from start to finish?
In general, a quick project might be realized in 6 to 8 months, and the longest that we've done took three to four years. We started Atomic Open House about 1.5 years ago and it will open to the public in March or November 2026. Due to the recent government shutdown, there is still a lot of delay as we are working with the Bureau of Land Management to get all the approvals in order. The context of the artwork is also rapidly changing with plans of the Trump administration raising the possibility of restarting nuclear testing again.
I can imagine it’s challenging to navigate all these circumstances that are outside of your control. Has that also led to fundraising issues?
For the project in Nevada, we received a generous $85,000 grant from VIA Art Fund with the requirement to have land secured by the end of August 2025. But due to the bureaucratic processes and the government shutdown we weren’t able to meet the deadline, so we needed to pivot and develop a plan B to fulfill the funder’s criteria. For example, we were thinking about buying inexpensive private land or partnering with different cultural organizations to host the project on their property instead.
In general, if you do this kind of work, you have to improvise quickly and be inventive when it comes to funding. For example, for another project called Pipelines, which used industrial water pipes for an installation, I "cold called" JM Eagle, a major pipe manufacturer. The company was generous in partnering with Black Cube, donating $45,000 in materials and inviting the artists—Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster—to their facilities to see the manufacturing process. JM Eagle even picked up the pipes at the close of the project to recycle the materials.
Every museum now tries to engage new audiences to stay relevant. Do you think, to a certain extent, classical cultural institutions could implement some of the strategies Black Cube is using?
I started working in museums in the early 2000s in the United States when education and programming for children and adults were rising in importance to curatorial roles in the institution. Museums have, in the past few decades, been trying to engage communities more and tried to function a little bit like a community centre. But I have to say, I produced a project at a central library and they do that sort of community activation in a way that museums are not excelling at.
How exactly?
Libraries in the United States provide this catchall space for a diverse public. For example, they offer access to the internet for people who otherwise can’t afford it. Institutions have tried to be broad and accessible for a while, but there are still a lot of barriers to entry. And I wonder if they can overcome these obstacles or if it‘s just part of their institutional nature. And maybe that’s okay. I think it's a common corporate idea that everything is a problem to solve but with some things, it's just not possible or needed.
Excellence doesn't happen when you spread yourself thin and you try to be everything to everyone. What we need are more diverse cultural ecosystems. There is room for the slow, big cruise ship of a museum that looks at history and how the present relates to the past and then there are these more agile, artist-run speedboats—spaces that are highly experimental.
You have been running the nomadic art museum for ten years now. Looking back, from the first project until today, how have you also grown with the organization on a personal and professional level? What were your biggest learnings along the way?
This organization is not for the faint of heart. It’s not comparable with a white-cube space and a clear exhibition calendar. I've become addicted to producing this kind of work and there are so many different directions that this organization has helped me grow. Probably the biggest takeaway is that curiosity is the most important aspect to me as a curator, as a disposition in working with artists and as something I try to nurture in people who view the projects I produce. That has become the chief goal, above and beyond producing excellent artwork. A decade ago, it was to produce groundbreaking site-specific work, but now what's most important is encouraging curiosity in artists and audiences.
Can you explain that a little further?
Curiosity is a sort of openness. We live in such an information-inundated environment that people are not open and wondrous about the world around them anymore. But curiosity isn't just openness, it's also being interested in what you may not know. It's humbling in a way because you acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers.
No matter, if it's someone who holds a completely different belief system than you, or whether it's an artist going into a community and figuring out how to resonate with its audience. It’s always about being interested in understanding each other.
The other thing I've learned is that every idea or project has its right time. So juggling the perseverance of executing an idea with, at the same time, understanding when you need to pivot is a balance you're always navigating.