Daria Greene is the Head of Content and Curation for Samsung North America and the Global Curator for Samsung Art Store. In these roles, she has played a leading part in developing Samsung’s ongoing relationship with the arts by curating works for its high-tech Frame TV features. Notably, her guidance has shaped the Art Store‘s online gallery, which features a collection of over 2,000 pieces by renowned and emerging names alike.
Samsung Art Store Brings Art to Life
Through partnerships with brands, museums, and art institutions—like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Keith Haring Foundation, Tate Modern, the Prado Museum, and the Belvedere Museum—Greene sources existing artwork and turns pieces into 4K art for the big screen. Alongside contemporary names like Keith Haring, Jen Stark, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thomas Cole, and Marc Dennis, artworks made by masters are also reimagined in digital format for the first time. Here, Edgar Degas’s The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage,1874, Vincent Van Gogh‘s Sunflowers, 1887, Paul Cézanne‘s Still Life with Apples and Pot of Primroses,1890, and Georges Seurat‘s Circus Sideshow (Parade du Cirque), 1887–88 live a second life in the comfort of homes around the globe.
This summer, Whitewall visited Samsung’s 837 flagship retail space to meet with Greene and discuss the Samsung Art Store, its latest collaborations, and her personal art collection.
Courtesy of Daria Greene.
WHITEWALL: The Samsung digital art frames make the artist’s work really come to life. Right now, we’re seeing Jen Stark’s artwork featured. How long will her art—and works by other artists added—be accessible on the platform?
DARIA GREENE: Indefinitely. Jen will be available in the art store, but we’ll feature her at the top now for about a month. We change that every month. Sometimes it’s a museum that’s in focus for us. And then, for celebrations like pride month, it gives us an opportunity to surface past featured artists again. One of the pieces by Shinique Smith is actually 30 feet long, so the idea that you could take a massive installation from a museum and put it on the frame feels like we’ve created a new body of work.
Samsung Reimagines Artwork on Screen
WW: Is reimagining an artwork something that you think about when you’re curating new artists?
DG: 100 percent. When you can go in and pick out details and moments, I think that’s when you are really reimagining and wanting to be playful, saying, “How are subscribers going to react to textile on their screen? Is that something they’ll actually enjoy, or are they just looking for Van Gogh?” And they love it. They love collage. They love texture. They love textile. They love all the various mediums.
Marimekko was a partner we brought into the Art Store, that’s more edging into the design realm, to create unique colorways. They are a partner, but they are also a brand that works with dozens of artists. And all of these pieces started as paintings or watercolors in the ’60s. I love them. We have a lot of decor junkies that use the art store as a resource for constantly switching up their mood in their living room. So, Marimekko has performed really well. It’s also recognizable everywhere.
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
WW: Is that what might make the most sense for Samsung in terms of a partnership? Brands that work or have worked with artists?
DG: I don’t have a hard line of what’s acceptable or not acceptable. I like to look at things visually and say, “Will our audience love this?” With Marimekko, it was a no-brainer. It was a lot of fun. We also did a line of accessories with them for watches in Europe. And then, of course, we have our basics. We have a master’s row, too. You can find [Pierre-Auguste] Renoir, [Paul] Cézanne, and of course, [Vincent] Van Gogh. He’s a favorite. Keith Haring is an artist that we brought in this year, too. That was fun because we got to work with The Haring Foundation to decide how we were going to present the works. It was a little more of a creative process.
“I like to look at things visually and say, ‘Will our audience love this?'”
—Daria Greene
WW: What went into that collaboration in terms of working with the Foundation and deciding what’s going to be presented?
DG: They said, “Here is Dancing Dogs. You could put him on any of these Pantone backgrounds that we approve of.” So, we got to play around with what colors we were focusing on in the collection. It was a lot different than any of the other partners we’ve worked with before, actually. So this piece, Dancing Dogs, we doubled it and stacked it—and we picked this certain colorway, too. I love it.
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
WW: You also worked with The Met to curate an array of artworks. What was that like?
DG: Yes, we worked with all the curatorial departments. There were some amazing pieces from the Cloisters. This is a pack of playing cards, some gorgeous texture with the Van Gogh pieces… This one looks amazing.
WW: It does. And you can also tell that it’s from a previous time. You can see the wear of time on this piece—the patina on the cards.
DG: I love that. And it’s just unexpected. Then, you can pull in the sunflowers from Van Gogh. You’re able to see all that beautiful texture. And when you have an artwork, you can view it and choose the hardware frame—like this mat border. It’s something that we offer. I like it to float, personally. You can choose the mat color in the background, too. We have a lot of options.
WW: For people who aren’t able to access museums, this is a great resource.
DG: Exactly. It’s like an art tourism, digitally.
© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
WW: You work about six months in advance to curate artwork and get it prepped for the platform, which is similar to how fashion designers and artist work when prepping for a show.
DG: I actually think that way! I think about trends seasonally and color palettes seasonally. Our users have caught on. So they know, “Oh, it’s summer. I’m going to go in. I’m going to get more of a lush palette, and I’ll get more pastels in the spring.” They’ve caught on, and they use the art store as a resource to decorate their home. We were also chatting before about how because it’s non-committal, you don’t have to go and frame something for thousands of dollars and live with it forever, people are more playful with their choices. So we see pink art really performing. People will put it on because they would never go out and buy something 85 inches wide that was pink without really having to think about it. I have three amazing pink art collections.
This is a mass audience—everyone from art experts who know everything, like fair directors, and people who know nothing and want something beautiful on their wall. We want to make it accessible to everyone—so it’s about hitting that high level with a bit of a balance.
Daria Greene’s Collection Includes Jen Stark, Friends with You, and More
WW: How do you use this as your resource at home?
DG: What do I have up now? I have Jen Stark on the TV in one room, and I have [Jean-Michel] Basquiat on a TV in another. Next to Stark, I have a FriendswithYou lenticular piece, so it looks trippy and wild in my living room today.
WW: What’s your largest market right now?
DG: The United States.
WW: Earlier when we were scrolling through the storefront, I saw a number of U.S. museums as partners, but also ones like the Tokyo Museum. Are there other global any institutions or partners you haven’t worked with yet that you hope to tap into?
DG: I want to have all the different regions of the world represented in the art stores. We do have the Te Papa Museum from New Zealand in there, and we’ll have the Tokyo National Museum and Singapore. We brought in a National Palace from Taiwan last year, too. That was cool. But surprisingly, our first American Museum was the Met, and that was last September when we launched them. We are adding more American museums this year.
Samsung Frame is a Point of Art Discovery
WW: How do you feel about a frame being an entry point, multigenerational, in the home? For those who don’t grow up surrounded by museums or cultural institutions, this very well could be the first way they consume art from a young age.
DG: I do think about that. I’m in a different situation, personally, because I’ve been dragging my child to Art Basel since he was in the stroller. So he’s not impressed by stuff. He’s like,” Oh, that again?” Yesterday, he drew that Basquait dinosaur at school. He recognizes a Basquiat, sure, so he’s a little different—and the way he consumes art is different. But I think that children are naturally drawn to this. There are so many beautiful, brightly-colored options, and it’s not just Jen Stark. We have a lot of family-friendly things, too.
When we do something for the holidays or World Wildlife Day, for instance, what child wouldn’t be fascinated by that? And it’s about the fact that you could be a kid and enjoy behind a child. With a work like this…
WW: Oh, Marc Dennis! The bugs are so detailed and vibrant, but it’s playful.
DG: Is he not the coolest guy ever? Great work—named Revolution. See, if you were a child… I chose this because I like horses, but you’re also at the same time not even realizing you’re consuming Mark Dennis, who’s relevant, who’s working today, who’s in galleries today. I think it’s an interesting prospect for education.
“I think it’s an interesting prospect for education.”
—Daria Greene
WW: In addition to static images, are videos are also available?
DG: Yes. Some of them are more documentary style, where we go into an artist’s studio. And we got to play around with Basquiat and animate some of the works. We did one for Keith Haring, too. We have this massive billboard in Times Square, and we optimize these videos for that billboard, too—and those play in a rotation.
© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
WW: Do you consider exhibitions that are on view or big ones that are coming to certain cities and how you might approach them?
DG: That is something we would like to do with our approach. I think it depends on what the content is. If there’s a Basquiat exhibition and we work directly with the Foundation to be able to have the rights and permissions to show the exhibition, that’s one thing. But if it’s like the Met, those pieces and the archival photography of them belong to multiple institutions. It becomes more challenging, but not impossible.
WW: Interesting. Or if there’s a biennial happening in a city?
DG: I would love that, too.
WW: Do you collect?
DG: Oh, yes, I collect.
WW: Do you collect an artist in-depth? More broadly? Do you just collect what you like? What do you have in your home?
DG: I have a lot. I have over 120 pieces in my collection at home, and about 118 of them were thank you presents. It’s like luck of the draw, almost. I feel that a lot of my collection is how the artist decided I was going to live with their work, and less my choice. However, they’re all artists that I’ve worked with before, and they’ve said, “Oh, thank you for your help with this,” or, “That was an awesome project. Here you go” I read into that as, “This is how you see me. This is what you think I’d like.” So it’s very personal. All of it’s very personal.
“I feel that a lot of my collection is how the artist decided I was going to live with their work, and less my choice,”
–Daria Greene
WW: Because it’s representative of your relationships with them?
DG: Yes, relationships. Going back 25 years. A lot of artists give me work as a “thank you.”
WW: What’s your favorite thank you?
DG: I worked on a project with Saya Wolfalk a couple of years ago, where we built three public monuments to women—one for Coretta Scott King on the grounds of the King Center in Atlanta, one for Ruth Bader-Ginsberg in Los Angeles, and one for Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Miami. We were lobbying City Hall together, and we got pretty close, and she gave me two gorgeous prints. She gifted me them for my living room, and they’re the focus of my house now. They are so beautiful. I love her work so much. That one was really important to me because she and I had worked so hard on this women’s initiative together, so I really enjoyed that.
And from my first job in a gallery—at Caren Golden as her director in the early 2000s, right after September 11th—I have an early William Cordova piece when we were showing him while he was still at Yale. That is one of my favorites because I then curated William into three or four different shows when I was an independent curator.
