For more than 30 years, Dan Gottlieb led the charge to design and develop 164 acres on the edge of downtown Raleigh into the North Carolina Museum of Art. After stepping down 18 months ago, he began to devote his life to making art, especially with photography. Most recently, he worked with communications consultant Karlie Marlow to rebuild his website, dangottliebphoto.com. It’s an outlet for organizing and sharing his photographic images, design experiences, and thoughts aesthetic. It also includes a page for news, upcoming exhibitions, and residences. A+A interviewed him last week:

Some background on your site?

I put the website together five years ago. With my transition from the museum to making art and investing my time, the more I work on it the clearer it becomes to make it into something cogent. The process of editing makes it a view of my personal and public sides. There’s my public work with the museum, and my more introspective side with picture-making that is so personal. It’s an opportunity to begin writing about it and reveal things about myself. It’s an opportunity to put those thoughts together – to be pragmatic philosophical and theosophical. That’s what it’s about.

Now I’m committed to keeping it up

How is it organized?

The homepage has eight categories, including environmental and figurative work. There’s a short series of black & white images taken during Covid, with shuttered storefronts, bars, and shops in Durham, when I was using a rangefinder camera. There are sketches of Andalusia and Morocco, and a deeper dive into the cultural relationship between Muslims and Jews there, and their migration, and the Spanish conquest and reconquest. It’s the beginning of a deep subject.

The last few are design related sketches of my work with museum design – architecture, art, landscape and performing arts. They’re meant to be seen as completely interconnected.

Your intent for it?

It’s for my own personal thinking and organization and my own satisfaction. And now that I’m devoting my life to making art, part of is sharing it. I exhibit it in galleries and let people know about that, and I do art residencies.

I have never communicated this personal side before. Now I’m committed to it. The initial response to the images and projects has been quite positive wonderful.

It’s quite cathartic from turning the corner and leaving museum, and creating a whole new identity – and getting it up and out there. The back page of website is about that.

For more, go here.